Warrior Chronicles 3: Warrior's Realm (21 page)

The sergeant sighed and said, “My name is Santa Claus.”

“Very good, Santa Claus.” Aksby poured a container of water and placed it in front of Green. “Why are you here?”

“I’ve brought you something for being good,” Green said as he raised the glass to his lips.

“What do you mean?”

Green dropped the glass and reached for the back of his neck, where he pressed three buttons on the collar of his FALCON. “I’ve brought you death.”

--

As Sorano got the last of his men and women out of the gates, Cort’s team of Marines began the process of turning their fallen friends into bombs. The ground began to rumble and Cort looked up at the center of the base, just in time to see a building collapse in a cloud of dust. The ground heaved and then settled to form a shallow crater.

“Bravo stand down!” Cort ordered as he looked down to see it was too late to shut down the suit he had armed. He threw the overcharged bomb toward the middle of the base and dove behind a pile of bodies. Whether it was a fused circuit or because Cort keyed the destruct sequence improperly, the result was that the CONDOR exploded less than twenty meters away from where he dove for cover. three of the other suits were also too far overloaded to be shut down. In the end, when Sorano led his people back in, they wouldn’t find a single living being in the compound.

AFS
Taurus

“Captain, it is going to hell down there. I just picked up four overloads and I am only reading twenty-one Marines. I have also lost contact with General Addison.”

“Helm, how soon can we get back to the planet?” Platt asked.

“Twelve minutes.”

“Do we have communications yet?”

“No sir, the transition system is still down.”

“Goddammit people! We have humans down there dying and you are telling me I can’t do a damned thing about it. Get me something.
Anything
!”

Solitude

Heroc and Kimberly were walking around the perimeter of Bergh Station when the message from Cort came through. Kimberly opened her flexpad and keyed in a code, which opened the message. Cort’s sweating face was staring back at her.

“Hey, baby. It’s pretty ugly here. I’ve lost thirty or so Marines. Tell JJ I said to send someone to get the third team. She will know what to do. I don’t have much time, Kimberly. I just wanted to say that I love you. Thank you for bringing me back from the edge, Kimberly. I know you will take good care of our child.” Kim saw Cort’s eyes begin to water. “You are my savior, Kim, and I was wrong. It wasn’t a bad idea at all. I left something in the safe for you.”

Kim dropped the flexpad and began to fall. Heroc caught her and said, “What is wrong, Kimberly?”

Kim remembered that day back on Mars when they had first made love. She remembered the sound of his voice when he told her she would have to do all the work. The smell of his freshly showered skin. His touch. She wouldn’t feel it again. That knowledge was driven home when she felt the different touch of Heroc’s lower arm. As Heroc tried to help the human woman who had befriended her, Kim looked up and said, “Your people are finally fighting back.”

Ten minutes later, Kim closed the connection to Admiral Jones and lay back on the bed she shared with Cort. All three wolves were arrayed around her, and Heroc sat beside the bed, with two arms petting Coke, while a third held Kimberly’s hand. Kim opened the flexpad again and began playing Cort’s message. She fell asleep with the message looping over and over, playing against her swollen abdomen.

Planet 322-3

The base was gone. Only its outer wall remained reasonably intact. But even great chunks of it were missing where the overloaded suits had detonated. The explosions served their purpose, however. Not a single Cuplan was alive within the perimeter. Sorano’s people were sifting through the debris and bodies when the Marine sentries reported more incoming enemy. Sorano ordered everyone inside and the humans began to seal the breaches in the wall with anything available, including the remains of both friend and foe.

“Here they come, Captain!” someone to his left yelled.

“Who’s got eyes?” Sorano yelled. “Send us an image.” A moment later one corner of his HUD showed the incoming horde.
Fuck
. Two more sections of the screen lit up from other angles. There were over ten thousand enemy fighters approaching, with armor scattered among the ground troops. Sorano had twenty-one Marines left.

“Alamo! Alamo! Alamo!” Sorano ordered.

Eight Marines and Sorano began firing into the oncoming army while the other twelve used manual connections to link their power packs to those of their fallen comrades.

AFS
Taurus

“Sir, we are approaching atmosphere.”

“Point weapons, begin targeting the enemy. Fire at will.”

The communications officer said, “Sir, Captain Sorano has ordered
Alamo
.”

“Alamo? What is
Alamo
?” Platt asked, looking at the only Marine on the bridge.

The sergeant in command of the Marine reserve squad was somber when he said, “They are linking and overloading their CONDOR packs, sir.”

“Oh, fuck. Get me some sort of communications!” Platt screamed.

Planet 322-3

One by one, the perimeter Marines fell back to make their own connections to the overload chain. Additional fallen Marines had been pulled from the destruction to be linked in as well. The last three humans on the wall used their remaining ammunition to wreak havoc on the ground around the base, and created a crater-ridden obstacle course that slowed the Cuplans down just enough to give the humans time to make the final connections to the group of living bombs.

Sorano said, “It has been my honor, ladies and gentlemen.”

Twenty men and women shouted, “Oorah!” as one, and Sorano looked up to his god as he entered the final command code for detonation. The last thing he saw was the
Taurus
entering the atmosphere directly above him.
No! Gods, no!

After the invasion of Mars by the Atlantic Alliance, weapons teams in the Ares Federation developed the Alamo protocol. The system required a manual connection between multiple CONDORs, and provided an exponentially larger destructive capability than a single overload was capable of delivering. The energy from the first explosion was absorbed by the carbon nanotube network of the next CONDOR and applied to that suit’s explosion. The process repeated for every unit, timing the explosions to feed one another.

On the Cuplan planet, that process happened thirty times in less than one tenth of a second. The resulting explosion ignited the atmosphere, and even the outer hull of the
Taurus,
as it fell to the surface of the planet. The great ship came to rest on top of the fallen humans as if it were a flaming monument to their failed attempt to rescue their lost companions.

--

From the bridge of the AFS
Mare’s Leg
, Lex Sike watched as the fleet transitioned into the enemy system. The Jonah drives were spun up and accelerating the moment the system’s defensive network disrupted the transition drives. Using the Cuplan comm system, Admiral Jones ordered her gunships to seek out the reason for the transition system’s failure. The rest of the ships sped toward the third planet to find their people.

“Sir,” the sensor and comms officer said, “There was an explosion on the planet just as we jumped in. The signature shows it to be an Alamo detonation.”

“Gods! Get me to that planet, now.” Turning to Lex she said, “Get your people ready. I want to know what happened.”
Please forgive me, Kimberly.  I was too late.

“Yes, sir,” Lex said as he left the bridge.

--

On the surface minutes later, Lex and his CONDOR-clad company spread out to canvass the area of the ruined base. Techs were already sifting through the carnage inside the
Taurus
, but as yet, they didn’t have the answers that Jones sought.

As the Admiral scrolled through the various video feeds available to her, the gunships reported finding gravity generators within the system, which appeared to be responsible for the failure of the transition system. “Disable them all, and capture a few of them for study,” she ordered.
I have to call Kim.

--

Speral’s ship landed on the planet the next day. JJ and Lex were waiting for Kimberly when she stepped down from the craft with the three wolves. Lex was now in his FALCON and took her arm as he walked beside her.

“Have you found him?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Will you, Lex?”

“I don’t know. But I have a thousand Marines looking for anything.”

“Is he under the ship?” Kim asked.

“No. We have the sensor logs from the ship now. He was lost twenty minutes before the
Taurus
went down.” There was a preternatural silence all around them, because the search had stopped for Kimberly’s arrival, and only the sound of the small party’s footfalls could be heard.

The strange sound each step made caused Kim look down to see the smooth glassy surface of the planet crack under her feet as if she was walking on thin ice. “Is this from the explosion?”

“Yes,” JJ said. “I wish you would have waited until we had more information, Kimberly.”

“I need this, Jade. I have to know where he fell.”

Not knowing how to respond, Jones said, “Take as much time as you need. My people have the area secured.”

“Thank you.”

When it came time to leave, Kimberly began to walk up the ramp to Speral’s ship as JJ promised to keep her updated. “Bane, come!”

The great dire wolf wouldn’t follow her, though, so Kim went back down the ramp and said, “I know, boy. I feel him too. Let’s go.”

Bane whined and looked back and forth between Kimberly and a spot in the distance.
Come with me, Alpha.

No matter how she tried to coax him, Bane wouldn’t move. Finally Lex picked the wolf up, only to feel its powerful jaws close on his protected neck. But the shock of the attack by the wolf he knew so well caused him to drop the animal and rub his neck as it ran into the distance. Zandra followed her companion, leaving only Coke beside Kimberly and the stunned humans.

On a hunch, Kimberly ordered a squad of Marines to follow the wolves and began walking in the same direction. It took all her self-control and worry about her unborn baby to keep from running after them herself. Two hundred meters away from Speral’s ship, almost three hundred meters from where Cort’s explosion took place, she found the Marines and wolves pulling debris and Cuplan bodies from a depression in the planet’s surface.
Oh gods. Please. Let me at least take him home. Please!

“I’ve got a heartbeat!” a Marine yelled. She began pointing at an area near Bane and more CONDORs started digging beside the wolf. Eventually, a great section of the base wall began to take shape. Additional Marines arrived and began clearing more remnants of the base and its defenders. The woman who first heard the heartbeat was pointing at one spot in the carnage. Bane and Zandra were now joined by Coke in their excitement. Even their whines and yelps seemed to push the Marines harder. No one had any question about what they would find when eight warriors finally lifted the broken barrier from General Addison’s body.

As soon as the wall was out of the way, two more men helped the woman who had first heard the General’s heartbeat, lift his broken, CONDOR armored body from the pile. She grabbed a cable from her kit and joined her suit to the General’s and began feeding him power. A moment later, she said, “He is unconscious. The suit’s power is gone and he’s on emergency air. Stand by.”