Hardcore - 03

This one's for Sonia, and she alone.

For inspiring the hardcore... but definitely not the nurses.

First published 2009 by Solaris, an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX1 0ES, UK

www.solarisbooks.com

ISBN(.epub): 978-1-84997-238-3

ISBN(.mobi): 978-1-84997-237-6

Copyright © Andy Remic 2009

The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the

British Library.

Designed & typeset by Rebellion Publishing

A COMBAT-K NOVEL

HARDCORE

ANDY REMIC

PROLOGUE

Junked

They called her Kotinevitch. Vitch... Vitch the Bitch. She didn't mind. She kind of agreed. She certainly lived up to the image of fucked-up aggravated psycho with hardcore in-your-face kick-ass violence. She was First General of Quad-Gal Military's Prime Fleet.

General Kotinevitch stood on the bridge of the FRAG Bulk Fighter,
The Indestructible,
as around her marble lights glittered, laser-traces humming hydrogen songs in secondary ears, and her staff rushed about urgent business. She stared into space; deep space, velvet, endless, uninviting, her face bleak as she listened to the bustle of battle
coordination
.

This is it
, she thought. The moment she'd been waiting for all her life. The battle she knew, from inception into the military, had to come. The utmost test of all military minds. Galaxy-wide
War
.

It is a deterrent. But if we must go to war, then we will go to war. If there must be bloodshed, then it will be terrible.
She remembered all too clearly her naive words. It seemed millennia since she uttered those childlike sentiments; now, she appreciated the irony. Threat of war was no longer a deterrent. It was real. Big. Bloody. Fucked-up. Violent. And very, very real.

Vitch's War Machine must
live
.

Around her, space seemed to
glow
black. The System of Xylag was small, and sparsely populated. Googan, its singular star, was old. No,
old.
Fat, bloated, a sickly crimson casting eerie glows of wrinkled patronage across spinning wards. The four planets under Googan's watchful gaze were Tuton, a black and red veined dwarf planet with a thin crust and consisting of almost permanent seismic and volcanic upheaval; Jekyll, a Jovian planet, mammoth, green, a gas giant with twin rings of heavy-metal infused silicates and selenium; YYK, a small warm terrestrial which would have been perfect for human life if its atmosphere didn't entirely consist of cyanide and nitrogen; and the fourth, Outermost, was a minor, consisting of a body of gas, purple and orange, with twin ruby moons.

Kotinevitch had moored her FRAG Fighter close to Jekyll, aware that magnetic interference would be greatest here and thus potentially disrupt the enemy scanners and communication. She was also aware of the
need
she felt within. As if Jekyll protected her WarFleet with its huge bulge, its glowing rings; its sheer bloody mass.

She had picked the perfect ambush spot. The junks were coming. It was pivotal Vitch hit them hard.

" Permission for de-LS."

" Permission granted. Begin the relay."

Kotinevitch watched the scanners with a practised eye. The blackness of space seemed to
distort,
and the arriving machines decelerated at an incredible rate. First BULK Attack Crafts, fifty of them, slamming from nowhere to hang suspended in the crimson glow of the bloated Googan star. These vehicles were mammoth, and stocked from port to aft with military-grade weapons. Their single purpose was to destroy. Using Halo Missiles, they had been known to take out entire
planets
.

Watching the fifty vessels stabilise on purple jets, and despite herself, Kotinevitch allowed a cold, brittle smile to crease her face. Then her features hardened like frozen hydrogen. She had awesome firepower at her fingertips.
Terrible
power.

This time, Quad-Gal outnumbered the enemy, eight-to-one.

As a politician, Vitch knew they needed a swift end to this expanding, accelerating upstart Empire. The junks were invading, decimating, polluting worlds in their escalating path across the Sinax Cluster. Now it was time for payback...

Engines howled in silent agony as three thousand Piranha Fighters in a protective D7 Transport shield shimmered from 0.9LS, and banked like a shoal of glittering fish around the manoeuvring, shifting BULKs. In comparison, they were lithe, swift and piloted with consummate skill. Vitch felt pride swell in her breast. She stemmed it harshly. Now was not the time for such matters. The junks would be there in less than an hour. Her preparations had to be
perfect.
Her
ambush
had to be precise.

"I need the magnetic resonance shields online, Kade."

"Charging now, Lady. Detonation in five, four, three, two..." a huge rumbling emanated from the gas giant Jekyll as Kotinevitch hijacked magnetic resonance from the planet's rings in order to mask her fleet.

A pulse of serenity surged through the fleet...

"We are invisible to the enemy," said Kade, voice steady, eyes locked on scanners. "When the junks arrive, they won't know what hit them." He eyed General Kotinevitch squarely. "They'll be canon fodder. Easy-meat spaghetti for our High-Tensile Slayers."

"Good. They asked for it." Vitch's voice betrayed no emotion.

She watched as more of her WarFleet arrived, Alligator Mobile Dead-Guns, D5 Transports, the new D9 Transports with Land-Stellar dropLines, swarms of K5 Lancasters, B2 Spitfires and G7 Hurricanes howling through the harsh no-go zones of DeadSpace, to emerge...

Here.

Like an artist, Kotinevitch sculpted her craft. Like a writer, she arranged every letter, every word, every perfect stroke of punctuation. Like a musician, she composed; her ships were her notes and she directed them with infinitesimal care in a broad, sweeping arc, with three layers of reserves, one of which nestled on the opposite shores of Jekyll.

There would be no mistakes.

They would crush the enemy.

"Ten minutes. Incoming," said Kade.

Vitch nodded, nerves starting to nag her psyche. What had she missed? What strategy was overlooked? There had to be
something.
But there wasn't. The junks were ambling like a fat pig into a trap of spears. Thirty thousand ships. Fifteen million
workers
of the junk army. It would have been messy, if not for the pure-fire detonation.

"They're like ants," Vitch told herself. "They feel nothing. Have no emotions. We are cleansing the Quad-Galaxies of an aggressive pollutant. A toxic scourge. It's that simple."

Fifteen million lives...

"Game on," said Kade, glancing over to Kotinevitch. She could sense his tension, but knew he would not crack. Kade was a professional, and she'd seen him rise through the ranks with consummate ease. He wouldn't crumble.

Like processed code, perfect to the binary digit, the junks were cruising across the Xylag System, their armada laid out in a classic spearhead. Kotinevitch found her mouth had gone... dry. She blinked. Felt a tick twitch the corner of her eye.

The enemy force was
big.
"I hope to all that's holy we're still invisible," she whispered.

"We are." Kade's voice was confident, smooth, slick. "Shit," he said. "This is gonna be one huge fucking fry-up. We'll pop up on their visuals in three minutes. General, shall I give the order to attack?"

Vitch nodded. "Yes. I want twin-layer twenty-five round Krater-Bursts from arrayed FRAGs, with fifteen hundred Piranhas in streamer-formation down both flanks to mop up anything not decimated therein. We'll keep the Lancasters in reserve, I don't trust these bastards as far as I can..."

"Lady." It was something about the tone of Kade's voice that froze Kotinevitch mid-speech and sent her mind spinning through a billion spirals of uncertainty as she analysed stratagems perfected hour after hour after hour, not just by her, but by all the great strategists of QGM, including the legendary General Steinhauer.

"What is it?" Her voice was cold. But she needed no answer. She could see for herself, on scanners and through
real
space. The junks had slammed into a sudden halt, huge wings of fighters arcing out like horns from the central core of troop transporters.

They know we're here
, hissed an internal voice.
Now we'll have a real fight on our hands
...

"They see us," snapped Kade.

"Deploy the FRAGs." Her mouth was a desert. They were still out of range. The ambush relied on their magnetic invisibility thanks to Jekyll's generous rings of heavy-metal infused silicates and selenium. Their fleet was supposed to magnetically blend...

Vitch watched the mammoth FRAGs lurch forward, with twin arcs of supporting Piranha Fighters swaying to either side in formation. But she realised immediately something was wrong -

The junks had halted. They seemed to be waiting... for something. But what?

"Are we still clear system-wide?" snapped Vitch.

"All clear," said Kade.

"Something's wrong."

"What are they waiting for?"

"Fire when in range."

"Four, three, two, one..."

Kotinevitch could not hear the build-up of energy, but knew inside the FRAGs their ears would be bleeding. She watched the external coils
glow
and waited for the
thump
of awesome firepower - which never came.

"What the hell is
that?"
hissed Kade.

Kotinevitch's head snapped right. Her eyes narrowed. Then her mouth dropped open in total, awe-struck horror.

In a blur, Jekyll's titanic rings, each 150,000 miles across and five miles thick, spun on their axes and
streamed
towards Kotinevitch and her vast, encamped War Machine... A trillion trillion tonnes of rock and metal flowed from the gas giant's twisting, eye-beguiling rings as they flowed and powered and sheared and slammed towards the Quad-Gal WarFleet -

"Sound the retreat!" screamed Kotinevitch but it was too late and it happened so fast Kade didn't even have time to smack the signal. Jekyll's vast rings flowed and
consumed
the FRAG Bulk Fighters in an instant and sudden flares of fire and detonation signified their immediate destruction, their total annihilation. Vitch turned, to the left, catching a glimpse of the waiting, watching junk ships and felt sour bitterness, and hatred, and cold, cold fury fill her brain and body and soul as she realised with brittle clarity that the junks hadn't wandered into her trap; she had wandered into theirs.