Warp Wraith, page 7
“—buse!” a voice crackled from the ruby pip at her shoulder. An image struggled to form in the air before it. “Report! Are you still there!”
“Still,” she replied hoarsely as Vondrak’s face rematerialized. She cleared her throat, focus returning to her mind—and fright. “Starfighter attack! They’ve hit the First!”
“How bad?”
Looking out across fire and wreckage, Mabuse hardly had the heart to tell him. But vehicles were moving amongst the chaos, pulling free of wreckage and still intact as crews rushed to service them. There was still something to the First.
Thunder passed overhead and Mabuse flinched instinctively. It passed onward, heading south. She twitched. South. “My Lord!” she squawked. “Starfighters on their way! Heading for Aleister! For you!!!”
“GOT ‘EM!” CALLISTO cheered as he tore over the exploding hover tank park. The Theocracy had lined them up like toys for his Slayers, looked like they must’ve been mustering them for some sort of campaign. But he didn’t have time to ponder the significance of that as his fighter ripped southbound for the suburbs of Aleister.
A blat from the early warning computer at his elbow drew his attention. Its tiny hologram illustrated a dome materializing from a point somewhere to south of Aleister—a heavy generator station—and spreading its umbrella north to overlay the city.
“Heads up!” he called into his helmet mic. “Bloodsuckers are getting their act together! Overhead shields coming online!”
“Gonna be a tight fit, DC!” Kreeve called back, his Slayer hugging in at Callisto’s right flank as they swept south over rolling hills and increasingly dense farms.
“Just keep your head down, One-Two,” Callisto replied. “That goes for everyone! Break low after you hit your targets.”
Flecks of eye-piercing light cut across the sky towards them as a low spur of foothills rose up ahead. One of these thundered by close off Callisto’s port wing, sending a cherry ripple across his shields as it passed. Then a storm of them followed, slashing the sky to lightning ribbons.
“Like a stick in a nest of Skaedian Hornets!” Kreeve yelped over the tactical network.
Callisto had no idea what that meant—didn’t really even know much of Kreeve’s background, truth be told. But the fierce nature of the analogy couldn’t be denied as blaster bolts smacked off shields and he dipped his nose low to stay beneath the torrent of fire. A bulge of low, grassy ridge rose up ahead of him and he yanked back on the stick, was rewarded by a flutter of energy strikes in star patterns across his forward shields before he could drop low into the following dip.
A wedge of fire bit the edge of his vision. A glance over his shoulder showed him one of his squadron mates hadn’t fared so well, struck several direct hits that blew out shields and left the Slayer trailing fire as it strained to keep altitude. A scream sounded in Callisto’s ear as the pilot struggled and failed to get the fighter’s nose up. A moment later, the starfighter was lost behind a hilltop, silhouetting it with a white fire-dome.
“Lost Canter!” Kreeve hollered over the tactical network.
“Stay low, gang!” Callisto shouted over him. “At least we don’t have fighters on us!”
But the flak ripping out from the edges of Aleister was becoming bad enough. A near-miss bucked Kreeve’s Slayer almost into Callisto’s over the next rise, the howl of both their engines shaking his hull. Holograms plastered across his heads-up display, showing a map of the capital in one corner, winking with icons. A hologram popped out next to one of these, showed a schematic of a stubby, boxy turret with twin blaster cannon.
“We’ll be over those towers in thirty seconds!” Callisto called into his mic. “Lock on to your targets!”
At a touch of Callisto’s fingertip to the holographic map, the icons dropped away, save one. A pulsing red halo circled this one, up into the mountain spur to the northeast of the city. A line drew itself between the point and the city and the halo moved along this to point atop a low peak just outside it. A fresh icon winked there and a schematic of a power station materialized.
But Callisto’s eyes remained a heartbeat longer on the original icon and the schematic popped out beside it, displaying a spired fortress, ringed by blastcannon turrets. Dark Science Citadel, he knew. And all the Revenants knew the horror stories of such places, and of the shadowy order that ran them: thaumaturgy, demonology, torture, and outlandish experimentation.
The Wraith had given him the assignment of killing the Citadel’s primary power source, personally, but never explained the reason.
Maybe its existence is reason enough.
An energy bolt splashed across Callisto’s starboard shield. Rather than fight his stick, he let the impact carry him into his bank to port. The Slayers were cresting a long chain of low hills and dipping down over a low plain that ran straight towards the discolored smear of pollution over Aleister. Blaster fire slashed across the open skies and now Callisto’s people had no place to hide.
“Stay on it!” he ordered through gritting teeth, fingers of his right hand clenched so tightly that when he peeled his thumb free to switch the weapons selector to plasma torpedo, he could barely feel it. “Lock your targets! There are civilians down there!”
Another hit on his starboard shield took it down and jolted the Slayer hard enough to shake something loose. With an alarm warbling in his ear and burnt-plastic-stinking smoke graying the inside of his cockpit, he suddenly didn’t want to give a damn about civilians or innocents or anyone downrange. He just wanted out of here.
Could be kids, another part of him countered as his senses cooled and the torpedo targeting reticle fluttered over a cluster of low spires atop a low cliff face—tried to solidify with lock. Could be families just trying to live through this. Could be someone working for the resistance.
Could be that night on Lydiria again...
That was why he was here. That was why he was leading; because they couldn’t win with wanton slaughter. That was Theocracy way.
They had to be different.
The reticle solidified and warbled with target lock. Callisto squeezed the trigger and felt the chug as the plasma torpedo left its underbelly tube. He didn’t wait to watch the shaft of cyan streak into the target; he wrenched hard to port, veering away as blaster fire from the city perimeter chased him.
The shockwave that bucked his Slayer confirmed his success, as did the fireball mushrooming skyward from the cliff in his wake. Similar winks of hellfire walked along the outskirts of the city as lesser power stations, utilities plants, manufactories, and Theocracy garrison posts took hits. Lights that had shined out from the city, through its pollution fog, blinked out. The anti-air blaster fire suddenly went scattered and uncertain.
“Kreeve?” Callisto called as he pulled the Slayer out of its straining turn, back to the north.
“Still with you!”
“Slayer Wing,” Callisto ordered as the g-forces on him eased slightly, “all fighters break off!”
A Slayer off his left wingtip took a blast across its tail. Shields must have been gone because the fighter bucked, shedding fiery splinters. Energy bolts hammered through the air after its stricken form and it juked desperately to avoid them, struggling to keep speed with fluttering engines. With a violent jerk, the pilot nosed the Slayer up to avoid further damage—
—and struck an invisible barrier that sudden became very visible as its energetic medium absorbed the impact, turning the Slayer into a splash of fire.
“Stay low!” Callisto barked, banking to starboard to avoid debris showering from the fighter’s demise. “We’re still under the shield! Stay low, dammit!”
“That was One-Six,” Kreeve called grimly. “Spatz. Canter’s wing mate.”
“I saw it,” Callisto snapped, willing himself not to heed the pang of hurt in his chest.
Canter, he thought. Spatz. Halder during the space fight. Wu in the infirmary on Vengeful with her fighter in repair dock. And the other squadrons had taken similar losses. A fifth of our strength already gone, and we’ve still got a whole campaign to win.
He forced it all from his mind as he poured power into the Slayer’s thrusters and led his people out over the Circe countryside.
The Wraith had a plan. He’d had a plan for Dee Callisto when he plucked him from the wreckage of his downed Orlok. He had a plan for them all. And his plans always worked. But that the Revenants had never tried anything as massive as this haunted Callisto.
Forcing it once again from his thoughts, he called into his helm mic, “North Slayers! Let’s get north of the Magvar Mountains and out of here!”
Chapter 6
EDIE STRODE TO THE southern edge of Reyes and paused to shoulder her blaster rifle and put a foot up on the low, crumbling wall at its southern edge. Dawn was fully up now, painting the valley below and the woods beyond it in stark yellows. Her eye followed the path of the Kraggar Road, down out of the gap.
When the bloodsuckers come, she knew, they’ll come straight this way.
Thunder growled over the horizon from the south, then subsided for a moment, then lilted again from another angle. With the day clear and the skies flawless, she knew none of it to be of natural sources. And all of Circe seemed to quake with it, as though fearful of the arrival of the Revenants—and the vengeance of its long-oppressed peoples.
This is happening, she marveled. After everything, after all the years, all the setbacks, all the dead. This Warp Wraith and his rebellion—it’s real.
“Hell of a view.”
Edie glance over her shoulder as the source of the words joined her. Vasilache was a stocky-built brute of hardened Circe peasant stock. Tanned flesh seemed perpetually dirty and his whisker-darkened jowls added to it, as did the general disrepute of his fatigues. But his weapons and gear had the glint of careful maintenance.
“It is for now,” Edie agreed with her senior cadre leader and pointed into the gap. “Pasturage leaves the ground open from those woods down there all the way up to the high point” she scuffed the wall with her hell “right here.”
“Even Shock Troopers won’t want to cross that,” Vasilache grunted.
“Nope.” Edie turned her pointed finger to their right. “That band of woods, there, will be a problem. Mine them.”
“We don’t have a lot.”
“Whatever we’ve got.” She turned left, eyed a low rise and the cluster of what looked like had been a prosperous farm, hastily abandoned—probably a local Theocracy-collaborator to have been doing so well. “Ambush team there.”
“That’ll get lonely, really quick,” the filthy cadre leader pointed out. “And as soon as they open up, the bloodsuckers will level it.”
“Which means they won’t be using it themselves.” Edie paused. Damn, she thought, thinking of the harsh sound of her own voice. When did I turn into this? But she shook her head, knowing the answer to that, and pointed to the craggy, wooded heights looking down from either side of the pass. “I want remote blaster droids up there and there.”
“We really don’t have a lot of those.” Vasilache stiffened. “And they were damned hard to come by.”
“And what the hell else are we saving them for?” Edie countered. “If it’s Shock Troopers coming, they’ll send sensor drones ahead first. Blaster droids can clear those before they get a good look.”
“And the Shockers will take ‘em out with their heavy weapons when they show themselves.”
“Better a droid than one of us.”
Vasilache grunted and nodded at that.
Edie turned to ponder Reyes. The Kraggar Road ran straight through to its heart, to the square and the cathedral. It then left it, slanting northwest to follow the curve of the pass. The village’s buildings crowded in to either side, mostly one- and two-story structures, narrowly-spaced and provided a truly treacherous labyrinth for anyone trying to force an entry. The Hardcases would have had a much bloodier time of it, had they not taken advantage of surprise.
“The cathedral’s obvious and visible over the rise,” Edie said, pointing at its spire. “Stay clear of it. Heavy weapon teams on those roofs, there.” She shifted her gesture to the buildings near the south edge of town. “Be a good angle as an attack starts to come up the slope. Automortars on the south side of town, out of sight. Anti-artillery blasters there, too. Ready the hover-bikes on the north side of town as a mobile reserve.”
“And the rest of us?”
She scuffed the wall with her heel. “Dug in, right along here.”
Vasilache smiled through bristles and dirt. “You’ve got it all figured out, Sundown.”
“Except the part where we hold off hovertanks with small arms,” she snorted. A jet of anxiety pierced her guts and she forced it down. “Any word from our esteemed liberators?”
“Hutch says she’s getting a signal now,” the cadre leader said. “It’s what I was coming to tell you.”
“Start getting things set, here,” Edie replied and turned to follow the road into the village. “I’ll be back.”
A pall of powdered stucco and smoke hazed the morning air as she strode down the streetside, carrying with it the plasticky stink of overheated blasters and death. Hardcases were trotting up the lane, likely summoned via commlink by Vasilache. Most acknowledged her with raised fists of encouragement—which she returned—or calls of triumph—which she did not. Nothing was won yet. Nothing.
She reached the square and a frown crinkled her face as she noticed a crowd forming at the cathedral front. Villagers had stirred the rubble there into a chalky fume with their agitation and raised voices were being joined by raised fists. A few Hardcases brandished blasters before them and seemed to be trying to keep them from the temple.
Moff noticed her and broke off from the group, scurried across the square to her side. “Hey, Sundown!” He raised his voice when she didn’t slow her stride. “Captain!”
“Just a minute, Moff,” she snapped, waving him off as she stepped past parked hoverbikes to the blaster-pocked entrance to what appeared to have been inn. At three stories, it was the one of the highest structures, after the cathedral. More importantly, Edie’s eye noted the silvery transmitter dish now set up on its roof.
Stepping into the inn’s great room, she found the makeshift command post she’d left to be set up was complete. Technicians had holographic displays erected and computers powered-up. A few stood at her entrance, but she ignored them, plowing through to the, near what had been a bar, and where a woman sat at a stool, listening to a headset.
As Edie stepped to her side, the woman looked up. Burnt honey of complexion and richly green-eyed, she was no Circe native. Hutch had slipped on-planet almost a year before, one of the Revenants’ troublemakers, a communications specialist and the earliest real proof the Hardcases had had that the Warp Wraith really meant his promises.
The hard-muscled young woman pulled off her headset and held it out to Edie, who took it and said crisply, “This is Hardcase One at the Kraggar Pass.”
“It’s secured?” a gravelly voice she knew well asked.
“For now, General,” she replied. “But we’re probably going to need friends down here, before long.”
“We’re working on that,” Esli Vier, self-appointed General of the Freedom Brigades told her. “That’s all the main Magvar passes in our hands, now” he paused and she could hear the smile in his words “and the Malvik station is under Revenant control.”
Excitement crackled along Edie’s nerves. “So, they’re here.”
“He’s here.”
Excitement became almost a painful pinch her chest, became something more like dread. She gave herself a shake. “Still going to need that help, soon, sir.”
“I hear you,” Vier replied and laughed bitterly. “We didn’t actually plan for everything to go according to plan. The Brigades are still coming together. And the Revenants are landing transports on the plains and distributing all sorts of tech.” Edie could hear someone arguing in the background on his side. “It’s a real mess.”
She stiffened her spine, as though he stood before her, giving the order. “We’ll hold until you get to us, General.”
“I know you will, Edie.” There was another pause, as though he wanted to add more. The General had always seemed to have a bit of a soft spot for her, perhaps even fatherly. He still stuck her Hardcases with the worst assignments, though—so, if one, not the kindest. “Vier, out.”
Edie handed Hutch the headset back.
“Captain...?”
“Damn, Moff!” She turned to the little Hardcase. “What is it?”
“Got a real problem at the cathedral.” He was fidgeting with his blaster and beads of sweat on his brow had begun to cut tracks through the dirt on his face. “Come take a look. Seriously.”
Cursing under her breath, she followed him out of the inn.
The shouting she’d heard before had turned to a dull roar, filling the square. The mob of villagers had swelled, drawing not only more town folk, but Hardcases, come to support the detachment at the cathedral entrance. Edie hurried her pace with Moff scrambling to keep up.
One of her partisans saw her coming with a smile of relief and pushed a shouting matron back to open a part for her to step through. A clump of about a dozen villagers cowered on or around the steps to the wrecked cathedral entrance as the mob seethed in close, pressing the guards. A dirty clot sailed through the air to strike one of the cornered people in the face. The smear of brown it left suggested feces. The air reeked of unwashed bodies and squalor, churned by agitation into a fresh funk.
“Collaborators, most of ‘em,” Moff hollered into her ear to be heard over the din. “They were hiding in a back chamber when we stormed it. We found them later.”
Edie noted the hints of finery to the collaborators’ attire. They looked well-fed and haughty, even with death gnashing its teeth all around them. They would’ve formed something of an upper-middle-class in the settlement, lording over their neighbors—informing on them. She knew the type and her lips peeled back from her teeth instinctively.
“Still,” she replied hoarsely as Vondrak’s face rematerialized. She cleared her throat, focus returning to her mind—and fright. “Starfighter attack! They’ve hit the First!”
“How bad?”
Looking out across fire and wreckage, Mabuse hardly had the heart to tell him. But vehicles were moving amongst the chaos, pulling free of wreckage and still intact as crews rushed to service them. There was still something to the First.
Thunder passed overhead and Mabuse flinched instinctively. It passed onward, heading south. She twitched. South. “My Lord!” she squawked. “Starfighters on their way! Heading for Aleister! For you!!!”
“GOT ‘EM!” CALLISTO cheered as he tore over the exploding hover tank park. The Theocracy had lined them up like toys for his Slayers, looked like they must’ve been mustering them for some sort of campaign. But he didn’t have time to ponder the significance of that as his fighter ripped southbound for the suburbs of Aleister.
A blat from the early warning computer at his elbow drew his attention. Its tiny hologram illustrated a dome materializing from a point somewhere to south of Aleister—a heavy generator station—and spreading its umbrella north to overlay the city.
“Heads up!” he called into his helmet mic. “Bloodsuckers are getting their act together! Overhead shields coming online!”
“Gonna be a tight fit, DC!” Kreeve called back, his Slayer hugging in at Callisto’s right flank as they swept south over rolling hills and increasingly dense farms.
“Just keep your head down, One-Two,” Callisto replied. “That goes for everyone! Break low after you hit your targets.”
Flecks of eye-piercing light cut across the sky towards them as a low spur of foothills rose up ahead. One of these thundered by close off Callisto’s port wing, sending a cherry ripple across his shields as it passed. Then a storm of them followed, slashing the sky to lightning ribbons.
“Like a stick in a nest of Skaedian Hornets!” Kreeve yelped over the tactical network.
Callisto had no idea what that meant—didn’t really even know much of Kreeve’s background, truth be told. But the fierce nature of the analogy couldn’t be denied as blaster bolts smacked off shields and he dipped his nose low to stay beneath the torrent of fire. A bulge of low, grassy ridge rose up ahead of him and he yanked back on the stick, was rewarded by a flutter of energy strikes in star patterns across his forward shields before he could drop low into the following dip.
A wedge of fire bit the edge of his vision. A glance over his shoulder showed him one of his squadron mates hadn’t fared so well, struck several direct hits that blew out shields and left the Slayer trailing fire as it strained to keep altitude. A scream sounded in Callisto’s ear as the pilot struggled and failed to get the fighter’s nose up. A moment later, the starfighter was lost behind a hilltop, silhouetting it with a white fire-dome.
“Lost Canter!” Kreeve hollered over the tactical network.
“Stay low, gang!” Callisto shouted over him. “At least we don’t have fighters on us!”
But the flak ripping out from the edges of Aleister was becoming bad enough. A near-miss bucked Kreeve’s Slayer almost into Callisto’s over the next rise, the howl of both their engines shaking his hull. Holograms plastered across his heads-up display, showing a map of the capital in one corner, winking with icons. A hologram popped out next to one of these, showed a schematic of a stubby, boxy turret with twin blaster cannon.
“We’ll be over those towers in thirty seconds!” Callisto called into his mic. “Lock on to your targets!”
At a touch of Callisto’s fingertip to the holographic map, the icons dropped away, save one. A pulsing red halo circled this one, up into the mountain spur to the northeast of the city. A line drew itself between the point and the city and the halo moved along this to point atop a low peak just outside it. A fresh icon winked there and a schematic of a power station materialized.
But Callisto’s eyes remained a heartbeat longer on the original icon and the schematic popped out beside it, displaying a spired fortress, ringed by blastcannon turrets. Dark Science Citadel, he knew. And all the Revenants knew the horror stories of such places, and of the shadowy order that ran them: thaumaturgy, demonology, torture, and outlandish experimentation.
The Wraith had given him the assignment of killing the Citadel’s primary power source, personally, but never explained the reason.
Maybe its existence is reason enough.
An energy bolt splashed across Callisto’s starboard shield. Rather than fight his stick, he let the impact carry him into his bank to port. The Slayers were cresting a long chain of low hills and dipping down over a low plain that ran straight towards the discolored smear of pollution over Aleister. Blaster fire slashed across the open skies and now Callisto’s people had no place to hide.
“Stay on it!” he ordered through gritting teeth, fingers of his right hand clenched so tightly that when he peeled his thumb free to switch the weapons selector to plasma torpedo, he could barely feel it. “Lock your targets! There are civilians down there!”
Another hit on his starboard shield took it down and jolted the Slayer hard enough to shake something loose. With an alarm warbling in his ear and burnt-plastic-stinking smoke graying the inside of his cockpit, he suddenly didn’t want to give a damn about civilians or innocents or anyone downrange. He just wanted out of here.
Could be kids, another part of him countered as his senses cooled and the torpedo targeting reticle fluttered over a cluster of low spires atop a low cliff face—tried to solidify with lock. Could be families just trying to live through this. Could be someone working for the resistance.
Could be that night on Lydiria again...
That was why he was here. That was why he was leading; because they couldn’t win with wanton slaughter. That was Theocracy way.
They had to be different.
The reticle solidified and warbled with target lock. Callisto squeezed the trigger and felt the chug as the plasma torpedo left its underbelly tube. He didn’t wait to watch the shaft of cyan streak into the target; he wrenched hard to port, veering away as blaster fire from the city perimeter chased him.
The shockwave that bucked his Slayer confirmed his success, as did the fireball mushrooming skyward from the cliff in his wake. Similar winks of hellfire walked along the outskirts of the city as lesser power stations, utilities plants, manufactories, and Theocracy garrison posts took hits. Lights that had shined out from the city, through its pollution fog, blinked out. The anti-air blaster fire suddenly went scattered and uncertain.
“Kreeve?” Callisto called as he pulled the Slayer out of its straining turn, back to the north.
“Still with you!”
“Slayer Wing,” Callisto ordered as the g-forces on him eased slightly, “all fighters break off!”
A Slayer off his left wingtip took a blast across its tail. Shields must have been gone because the fighter bucked, shedding fiery splinters. Energy bolts hammered through the air after its stricken form and it juked desperately to avoid them, struggling to keep speed with fluttering engines. With a violent jerk, the pilot nosed the Slayer up to avoid further damage—
—and struck an invisible barrier that sudden became very visible as its energetic medium absorbed the impact, turning the Slayer into a splash of fire.
“Stay low!” Callisto barked, banking to starboard to avoid debris showering from the fighter’s demise. “We’re still under the shield! Stay low, dammit!”
“That was One-Six,” Kreeve called grimly. “Spatz. Canter’s wing mate.”
“I saw it,” Callisto snapped, willing himself not to heed the pang of hurt in his chest.
Canter, he thought. Spatz. Halder during the space fight. Wu in the infirmary on Vengeful with her fighter in repair dock. And the other squadrons had taken similar losses. A fifth of our strength already gone, and we’ve still got a whole campaign to win.
He forced it all from his mind as he poured power into the Slayer’s thrusters and led his people out over the Circe countryside.
The Wraith had a plan. He’d had a plan for Dee Callisto when he plucked him from the wreckage of his downed Orlok. He had a plan for them all. And his plans always worked. But that the Revenants had never tried anything as massive as this haunted Callisto.
Forcing it once again from his thoughts, he called into his helm mic, “North Slayers! Let’s get north of the Magvar Mountains and out of here!”
Chapter 6
EDIE STRODE TO THE southern edge of Reyes and paused to shoulder her blaster rifle and put a foot up on the low, crumbling wall at its southern edge. Dawn was fully up now, painting the valley below and the woods beyond it in stark yellows. Her eye followed the path of the Kraggar Road, down out of the gap.
When the bloodsuckers come, she knew, they’ll come straight this way.
Thunder growled over the horizon from the south, then subsided for a moment, then lilted again from another angle. With the day clear and the skies flawless, she knew none of it to be of natural sources. And all of Circe seemed to quake with it, as though fearful of the arrival of the Revenants—and the vengeance of its long-oppressed peoples.
This is happening, she marveled. After everything, after all the years, all the setbacks, all the dead. This Warp Wraith and his rebellion—it’s real.
“Hell of a view.”
Edie glance over her shoulder as the source of the words joined her. Vasilache was a stocky-built brute of hardened Circe peasant stock. Tanned flesh seemed perpetually dirty and his whisker-darkened jowls added to it, as did the general disrepute of his fatigues. But his weapons and gear had the glint of careful maintenance.
“It is for now,” Edie agreed with her senior cadre leader and pointed into the gap. “Pasturage leaves the ground open from those woods down there all the way up to the high point” she scuffed the wall with her hell “right here.”
“Even Shock Troopers won’t want to cross that,” Vasilache grunted.
“Nope.” Edie turned her pointed finger to their right. “That band of woods, there, will be a problem. Mine them.”
“We don’t have a lot.”
“Whatever we’ve got.” She turned left, eyed a low rise and the cluster of what looked like had been a prosperous farm, hastily abandoned—probably a local Theocracy-collaborator to have been doing so well. “Ambush team there.”
“That’ll get lonely, really quick,” the filthy cadre leader pointed out. “And as soon as they open up, the bloodsuckers will level it.”
“Which means they won’t be using it themselves.” Edie paused. Damn, she thought, thinking of the harsh sound of her own voice. When did I turn into this? But she shook her head, knowing the answer to that, and pointed to the craggy, wooded heights looking down from either side of the pass. “I want remote blaster droids up there and there.”
“We really don’t have a lot of those.” Vasilache stiffened. “And they were damned hard to come by.”
“And what the hell else are we saving them for?” Edie countered. “If it’s Shock Troopers coming, they’ll send sensor drones ahead first. Blaster droids can clear those before they get a good look.”
“And the Shockers will take ‘em out with their heavy weapons when they show themselves.”
“Better a droid than one of us.”
Vasilache grunted and nodded at that.
Edie turned to ponder Reyes. The Kraggar Road ran straight through to its heart, to the square and the cathedral. It then left it, slanting northwest to follow the curve of the pass. The village’s buildings crowded in to either side, mostly one- and two-story structures, narrowly-spaced and provided a truly treacherous labyrinth for anyone trying to force an entry. The Hardcases would have had a much bloodier time of it, had they not taken advantage of surprise.
“The cathedral’s obvious and visible over the rise,” Edie said, pointing at its spire. “Stay clear of it. Heavy weapon teams on those roofs, there.” She shifted her gesture to the buildings near the south edge of town. “Be a good angle as an attack starts to come up the slope. Automortars on the south side of town, out of sight. Anti-artillery blasters there, too. Ready the hover-bikes on the north side of town as a mobile reserve.”
“And the rest of us?”
She scuffed the wall with her heel. “Dug in, right along here.”
Vasilache smiled through bristles and dirt. “You’ve got it all figured out, Sundown.”
“Except the part where we hold off hovertanks with small arms,” she snorted. A jet of anxiety pierced her guts and she forced it down. “Any word from our esteemed liberators?”
“Hutch says she’s getting a signal now,” the cadre leader said. “It’s what I was coming to tell you.”
“Start getting things set, here,” Edie replied and turned to follow the road into the village. “I’ll be back.”
A pall of powdered stucco and smoke hazed the morning air as she strode down the streetside, carrying with it the plasticky stink of overheated blasters and death. Hardcases were trotting up the lane, likely summoned via commlink by Vasilache. Most acknowledged her with raised fists of encouragement—which she returned—or calls of triumph—which she did not. Nothing was won yet. Nothing.
She reached the square and a frown crinkled her face as she noticed a crowd forming at the cathedral front. Villagers had stirred the rubble there into a chalky fume with their agitation and raised voices were being joined by raised fists. A few Hardcases brandished blasters before them and seemed to be trying to keep them from the temple.
Moff noticed her and broke off from the group, scurried across the square to her side. “Hey, Sundown!” He raised his voice when she didn’t slow her stride. “Captain!”
“Just a minute, Moff,” she snapped, waving him off as she stepped past parked hoverbikes to the blaster-pocked entrance to what appeared to have been inn. At three stories, it was the one of the highest structures, after the cathedral. More importantly, Edie’s eye noted the silvery transmitter dish now set up on its roof.
Stepping into the inn’s great room, she found the makeshift command post she’d left to be set up was complete. Technicians had holographic displays erected and computers powered-up. A few stood at her entrance, but she ignored them, plowing through to the, near what had been a bar, and where a woman sat at a stool, listening to a headset.
As Edie stepped to her side, the woman looked up. Burnt honey of complexion and richly green-eyed, she was no Circe native. Hutch had slipped on-planet almost a year before, one of the Revenants’ troublemakers, a communications specialist and the earliest real proof the Hardcases had had that the Warp Wraith really meant his promises.
The hard-muscled young woman pulled off her headset and held it out to Edie, who took it and said crisply, “This is Hardcase One at the Kraggar Pass.”
“It’s secured?” a gravelly voice she knew well asked.
“For now, General,” she replied. “But we’re probably going to need friends down here, before long.”
“We’re working on that,” Esli Vier, self-appointed General of the Freedom Brigades told her. “That’s all the main Magvar passes in our hands, now” he paused and she could hear the smile in his words “and the Malvik station is under Revenant control.”
Excitement crackled along Edie’s nerves. “So, they’re here.”
“He’s here.”
Excitement became almost a painful pinch her chest, became something more like dread. She gave herself a shake. “Still going to need that help, soon, sir.”
“I hear you,” Vier replied and laughed bitterly. “We didn’t actually plan for everything to go according to plan. The Brigades are still coming together. And the Revenants are landing transports on the plains and distributing all sorts of tech.” Edie could hear someone arguing in the background on his side. “It’s a real mess.”
She stiffened her spine, as though he stood before her, giving the order. “We’ll hold until you get to us, General.”
“I know you will, Edie.” There was another pause, as though he wanted to add more. The General had always seemed to have a bit of a soft spot for her, perhaps even fatherly. He still stuck her Hardcases with the worst assignments, though—so, if one, not the kindest. “Vier, out.”
Edie handed Hutch the headset back.
“Captain...?”
“Damn, Moff!” She turned to the little Hardcase. “What is it?”
“Got a real problem at the cathedral.” He was fidgeting with his blaster and beads of sweat on his brow had begun to cut tracks through the dirt on his face. “Come take a look. Seriously.”
Cursing under her breath, she followed him out of the inn.
The shouting she’d heard before had turned to a dull roar, filling the square. The mob of villagers had swelled, drawing not only more town folk, but Hardcases, come to support the detachment at the cathedral entrance. Edie hurried her pace with Moff scrambling to keep up.
One of her partisans saw her coming with a smile of relief and pushed a shouting matron back to open a part for her to step through. A clump of about a dozen villagers cowered on or around the steps to the wrecked cathedral entrance as the mob seethed in close, pressing the guards. A dirty clot sailed through the air to strike one of the cornered people in the face. The smear of brown it left suggested feces. The air reeked of unwashed bodies and squalor, churned by agitation into a fresh funk.
“Collaborators, most of ‘em,” Moff hollered into her ear to be heard over the din. “They were hiding in a back chamber when we stormed it. We found them later.”
Edie noted the hints of finery to the collaborators’ attire. They looked well-fed and haughty, even with death gnashing its teeth all around them. They would’ve formed something of an upper-middle-class in the settlement, lording over their neighbors—informing on them. She knew the type and her lips peeled back from her teeth instinctively.
