Fire Base (Drop Trooper Book 6), page 19
“Launching a drone,” I announced. “Watch my back for a second.”
After all the military gear that had been stripped from the Vigilantes before Fleet Ordnance had allowed them to be sold off to the Corporate Council, I had been shocked to find out they’d left the spy drones. The things weren’t offensive weapons, of course—the military didn’t use armed drones, either remote-controlled or autonomous, for various reasons, some technical, some purportedly moral and ethical. And they hadn’t always been useful against the Tahni due to their impressive jamming technology, which he’d read they had developed between the wars after getting sodomized by Commonwealth electronic warfare technology. But when they’d been able to use the drones, they’d been invaluable, and since the cartels didn’t have either the access to or the need for that sort of ECM, they were especially useful now.
The disc ejected from a cassette in the shoulder of my Vigilante and spun upward on a tiny, ducted fan, the feed from the camera popping up in the corner of my HUD, distracting me enough that I paused, taking a risk that the wall guards who I’d allowed to live would raise the alarm because it was more important that we know where we were going…and where Luz Vazquez was.
The view from the drone skewed back and forth as the little ducted-fan hovercraft bobbed on the air currents, and I was grateful I wasn’t prone to motion sickness because it did its best. I was controlling it with my eye movements and apparently, my eye-movement discipline was nothing to write home about, because the thing fluttered back and forth, dipping meters toward the ground before zooming back up beyond the rooftops. I wondered if I should have let Vicky handle the surveillance. I finally got the drone level somewhere past the guest quarters and managed to get a good look at Bindy’s house.
Armed men and women were still streaming out of it, heading for the front gate, but some stayed in the central courtyard, setting up a defensive perimeter against the attack. Bindy was there, and Isabella, each cradling a Gyroc carbine, ignoring the cajoling of their underlings, urging them to get back inside. And one of the underlings, looking more confused and agitated than the others, was Luz Vazquez. Even from the unsteady, distant image the drone produced, I could never have mistaken the man for someone else.
“Do you see him?” Vicky asked, and the sound of her voice triggered a memory, her falling out of the sky, me watching, desperate to do something.
I’d been so busy trying to save her life that I hadn’t given myself the luxury of thinking about the possibility of her dying, hadn’t let myself feel the panic. I felt it now. It burned inside my chest, but the source of the terror was gone, the moment passed, and the fear transformed into rage, fiery and uncontrollable. I hit the jets.
“Cam, what the hell are you doing?”
Vicky was pounding after me, ground-bound, unable to keep up, and Wade was still standing there for a long moment, probably wondering if he should take to the air and follow me, or stay on the ground and look out for Vicky. I understood these things on an intellectual level, in the part of my mind that was standing back and analyzing what was happening, watching from the outside, a half-second behind the decisions my unconscious had already made.
I flew as if in a dream, coming down hard enough to crack the pavement, breaking into a run. Someone was shooting at me but the Gyroc rounds were nothing, an annoyance, buzzing insects with no sting, and I ignored them, ignored the shouting and screaming, and the men and women throwing themselves between me and Bindy and Isabella. I ignored everyone else and headed straight for Luz.
The man was running, not screaming, not panicking, but running just the same, trying to get away from me as if his life depended on it. Because it did.
He stumbled, tripped, and barely kept from going down, and that was all the opening I needed to catch up. He fired off a full magazine from his Gyroc pistol and I only noticed because of the tiny spark of the rocket engines igniting, couldn’t even hear the rounds spanging off my armor. I swatted at him with my left arm and he lurched away from me, just out of reach, flat on his back, the gun flying from his hand.
“You tried to kill my wife, you piece of shit!” I bellowed the words and didn’t realize I’d keyed the external speakers until I heard the echo, saw Luz shrink back from the wall of sound. “You sold us out to the Tahni!”
I raised a foot and pressed a spiked sole down on the man’s chest, gently, slowly, just enough to hold him down without killing him, and in the moment, I wasn’t sure if I was holding back because I wasn’t ready to kill him in cold blood, or if I just wanted him to suffer. Either way, I took too long.
“Cameron Alvarez!”
Bindy Kamara stood only twenty meters away, feet planted wide, a fat, silver cylinder balanced precariously on her shoulder, almost as long as she was tall. I recognized it from the war, though even then I had only seen it in training, never in the field. It was a single-shot plasma projector, an anti-armor weapon designed for Force Recon but rarely issued because it weighed over twenty kilos and could only be used once. It couldn’t even be reloaded unless you shipped it back to the factory, which put it very close to useless, but the military had still bought thousands of them and they’d sat unused in warehouses because no field commander in their right mind wanted any part of them.
How Mama Bindy had wound up with one here on Bathala, I had no idea. I did know one thing, though. Just one blast from the thing could burn a hole through my chest plate…and through me.
The little woman’s face was hard and fearless, her arms unwavering beneath the weight as she glared at me.
“Get the fuck off him or I’ll burn you down where you stand.”
20
“Mama.” Isabella was calm, her gait graceful and steady, as if she were striding into a dinner party. “The force at the gate has been turned away.” She shrugged. “There were no bodies left behind and none of our people were killed.” She cocked an eyebrow toward me. “It was almost as if it was nothing but a distraction.”
“I told you to let him go,” Bindy repeated, motioning with the muzzle of the plasma projector. It wavered, muzzle-heavy. “And I see you two back there. I’m old but I’m not blind. If you take a step closer, I kill your man.”
Wade and Vicky were right at the verge of the shadows, twenty meters away, edging toward us, but they stopped at her words.
“He sold us out,” I told her, not moving my foot. “The whole op was a setup. There were no cartel troops there, it was an ambush by his Tahni friends who were paying him off to double-cross you and us. He sabotaged Vicky’s jump-jets and left us to die.”
Bindy’s eyes narrowed, but she kept the anti-armor weapon pointed at me.
“Bullshit. Why should I believe anything you say? You’re outsiders. Luz has been my man for twenty years. Where is your evidence?”
Her words were insistent, harsh, but I could sense the doubt laying beneath them.
“The evidence,” Vicky broke in, “is on its way here. And if we’re right, it’s going to kill every man, woman, and child on this planet. And the Tahni are the ones who set it loose.”
“What are you gabbling on about, girl?” Bindy snapped at her.
“The Tahni,” I told her, “came to this planet because they needed a safe place to test one of their weapons, something they found out in the new colonies past Tahni space. A weapon from the time of the Predecessors.”
“The Predecessors? What sort of fairy tales are you trying to peddle, boy?”
“Mama! Mama!” The cries began far away and grew louder as the running boy grew closer. He was a teenager, wearing clothes too big for him, carrying a Gyroc carbine that seemed ridiculously outsized. His face was pale, glossy with sweat, his eyes wide. “Mama Bindy! Mama Bindy!”
The older woman scowled at him and the muzzle of the weapon dipped slightly, the first sign I’d seen that the weight was getting to her.
“Stop screeching and tell me what the problem is, child!”
“My cousin is on a fishing boat offshore,” the boy said, gasping as he stumbled to a halt beside her. “He called us just now on his ‘link! There’s something coming from Pinatubo!”
Bindy Kamara’s gaze sharpened on the kid, and the muzzle dropped another half-meter.
“What did he see? What’s coming from Pinatubo?”
“Something big!” The boy let his carbine hang on its sling and used his outspread hands to show the bigness of the thing. “And fast! Faster than any boat we have! He says it looks like a hydrofoil, but he’s never seen a hydrofoil that big!”
“Can he see who is on the boat?” Isabella interrupted, putting a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Is it the Tahni?”
“He tried to send me a video of it,” the boy said, fishing out his ‘link from his pocket. “It’s dark and far away, but there’s something weird on the deck of the boat. Here, look!”
He held up the screen and I zoomed in on it using the optics of my helmet, then remembered to stream the images to Vicky and Wade. The video was shaky and dark, the light enhancement on the cheap, locally-fabricated ‘link not even up to the level of the shit they gave away in public terminals in the Trans-Angeles Underground, but the foils on the ship were visible immediately, as was the gap between the hull and the water. I didn’t know what they were using for propulsion, but the water jets it was throwing out were at least five meters high if I was judging the scale correctly. And I was judging it from the chimera, shuffling around on the deck like insects in a hive, dozens of them.
“Holy shit,” Wade breathed. “How fast can it churn those things out? Is this everything it has or just the first wave?”
“I think it’s all they can produce right now,” Vicky said. “That’s probably why they’re coming here. For more raw materials.”
“Jesus wept,” Bindy said, letting the plasma gun fall, the muzzle scraping against the pavement. She crossed herself, looking scared for the first time since I’d met her. “What the hell are those things?”
“They’re what killed off the Predecessors,” I said, though I was making a lot of assumptions based on what Zan-Thint had told me. “Whoever built them left pods of them, seeds, factories, whatever you want to call it, scattered across the worlds on the other side of the Imperium. If we let them get the raw materials, there’ll be even more of them.”
“We have to get to the shuttle,” Wade declared, taking a step forward. Gyroc carbines swung around to cover him, as if the cartel gun thugs thought they could do anything against the armor. “We need ammo and we need to call in the cutter for fire support.”
I looked down at Luz Vazquez. He was sweating heavily, his breath labored, but didn’t look to be badly injured.
“Where’s the shuttle?” I demanded. “Where did you land it?”
“Fuck you,” he said, spitting on the leg of my Vigilante. He was, if not a good man, then at least a ballsy one.
I pressed down just slightly, a slight shifting of the suit’s weight, and Luz screamed, warbling and high-pitched, his arms flailing, fists pounding in utter futility against the BiPhase Carbide armor on my leg.
“Let me repeat the question,” I said.
“It’s on the other side of the spaceport!” he shrieked. “In slip number forty! It’s still there! Everything is there!”
“What about Gardeck?” I asked. “The pilot?”
“He’s with the ship! A couple of my guys are keeping him there!”
“I’ll go,” Wade volunteered. “I’ll bring the shuttle back here so we can re-arm, and we can send the signal in flight.”
I let my weight off Luz a little, still keeping him pinned, and faced Mama Bindy, her stone face against my metal.
“Can he go?” I asked her. “Do you believe us?”
She gestured at Luz.
“Let him up.”
She wasn’t aiming the plasma weapon at me anymore, but I obeyed this time, if reluctantly. I wanted to smash the bastard into a thin, fine paste across the pavement, but instead, I stepped carefully off him and he rolled onto his side, coughing and clutching at his chest.
“Why did you do it, Luz?” she asked, a deep sadness in her expression and her voice. “I trusted you.”
“I’m sorry, Mama,” he said, unable to meet her eyes. “The Tahni…I took their money, but it was more than that. You didn’t see, but they had suits like these.” He waved a hand at me. “Lots of them. And if we didn’t let them use the island willingly, they were going to attack us.” He held his hands up as if in prayer. “I did it to save us, Mama, you have to believe me!”
The man was terrified, but he was also genuinely contrite, I thought. Bindy leaned over him, caressing his face with the fingers of her left hand.
“I don’t care about the skim, Luz. The skim is just how it’s done. But you lied to me. You let the Tahni play me for a fool. And where are they now? Where is your friend Zan-Thint now that his mess is heading for our home? Do you know?”
“He…his shuttle left orbit an hour ago. I think he had a ship out in the asteroid belt.” His last words came out as a whisper. “He’s probably out of the system by now.”
“Oh, Luz, if you were anyone else, I would simply exile you, tell you to be on the next freighter heading out of this system. But I know you, and the first thing you’d do is go straight to La Sombra or the Rif. And you just know too damned much about us for me to let you do that.”
She nodded to Isabella and the younger woman levelled her Gyroc carbine at Luz and pulled the trigger. I flinched at the crack of the discharge and the armor flinched with me, enough movement that Isabella tracked the barrel of her weapon upward, pointing it at me for a moment before her mother pushed it down.
“You are Commonwealth military?” she asked me.
I tried to meet her eyes, but I couldn’t look away from Luz Vazquez’s corpse. He’d been on his knees and had fallen backward, his lower legs trapped beneath him. I would have said it looked uncomfortable, but he clearly wasn’t feeling any pain. Isabella had shot him through the forehead and there was the back of his skull was in pieces on the pavement. His eyes had bulged out and his face didn’t even look like something that had once been human.
“No,” I answered the question, finally. “We’re with the Corporate Council.”
Her eyebrow shot up.
“Why?”
“Why we’re with them? Because Zan-Thint, the Tahni commander, paid a visit to the colony where my wife and I had settled after the war, looking for one of the artifacts just like the one he has here. And, in the process, he managed to kill many of our friends and neighbors. We joined up with the Corporate Security Force because they were the ones going after Zan-Thint.” I wanted to shrug, but I knew better than to do it in the suit. “As for why the Corporate Council is here, well…the Tahni have gotten ahold of a weapon designed by aliens so advanced they might as well be gods. Why do you think the Corporates would want that?”
Her snort told me she didn’t need it explained.
“We didn’t come here to hurt you,” I promised. “We came for the Tahni. I guess we didn’t get here in time.”
Her glare bored into me and I remembered she’d just had Luz killed for lying to her. But she nodded slowly.
“Send your man to get the shuttle. I don’t care much for the Corporates, but God knows, we need all the help we can get.”
I stared at the darkness of the ocean and it stared back, refusing to reveal any secrets even to the enhanced optics of the Vigilante. The Skrela were out there, but I still couldn’t see them. It had taken us hours to cross the ocean on the barge, but in that video, they looked like they’d been going a lot faster than we had.
“You took quite a risk.”
Vicky stood beside me on the harbor wall, her Vigilante a broad-shouldered Golem, bristling with weapons we couldn’t use because we were both out of ammunition. The coil-gun turrets were back up, their crews perhaps a bit upset at us. At least I assumed the sidelong glances they kept giving us were resentment for our previous abuse, though they might have been raw fear.
“Telling her the truth, you mean?” I asked. It was a stalling tactic—I knew what she meant. “Yeah, I guess I did. But she would have seen through a lie at this point.”
“You seem to always know how to read people. Can you do that with me?” Her tone was teasing rather than accusatory and I raised an eyebrow in the privacy of my helmet.
“You’re always looser, more laid back when we’re about to go into combat. You didn’t used to be that way when I first met you. I remember you being keyed up when we were both just enlisted Marines, about to drop on one of the Tahni outposts.”
“And I remember you being totally fearless back then,” she countered. “Not caring if you lived or died. What changed for you?”
“You did. And Scotty, and the Skipper, and Top. It’s easy not to be afraid when you’ve got nothing to lose.”
“Well, having you made me less afraid, somehow. I couldn’t tell you why. Maybe you could tell me.”
“Because you were used to having people.” It wasn’t a guess. She’d asked if I could read her, and this was my way of answering the question. “You had your friends and family in your life before the war, and having someone who loved you made you feel more at home. With me, it was just the opposite. I wasn’t used to having people. I didn’t know how to react to it.”
She said nothing for a moment, and even though I couldn’t see her face, I knew the pause was from consternation.
