Riding the Red Horse (24 page)

Fire led the way. The door was closed, but instead of blowing it off its hinges or burning through it, Fire simply kicked it open. There, sitting in a chair facing them with a pair of large screens behind him, was the first posthuman Tower had ever seen in person.

He appeared to be unarmed, although it was hard to tell considering the amount of silver metal that encased the left side of his head, his shoulders, and the outsides of his legs. His eyes had been replaced with multi-faceted orbs, and four sensors were implanted in his forehead. Tower couldn't tell if his hands were synthetic or if he was simply wearing gloves, and while his forearms were sheathed in some sort of black rubber, they did not look thick enough to contain any obvious weapons.

He held up both hands. “Good evening. You must be the Duke's Marines of whom there has been so much chatter. If you are amenable, I should like to request the opportunity to surrender.”

Fire glanced at Tower. Tower shrugged. It was no skin of his nose if the cyberfreak wanted to play it cool.

“Stand up, turn around, and place your hands behind you.”

The posthuman complied readily enough, so Tower didn't bother to rough him up as he zip-tied the strange metallic hands in the plasteel bindings they all carried. And when they urged him to precede them up the stairs, he climbed them without hesitation, two steps at a time. He was tall, standing nearly as tall as the Marines in their battle armor, Tower observed when they brought him to the sergeant. The Pandorians were similarly bound, hands behind their backs, seated along one wall.

“What do we do with him, Sarge?”

“The lieutenant is on his way. We're to hold him until he gets here. And don't let him near your interfaces. Word is they've got viral codes that can screw with your suits if they get inside.”

Both Fire and Tower took an inadvertent step back from the prisoner. There were no less than seven physical interfaces of various kinds in the battlesuit he was wearing, and Tower had no desire to eat his own plasma if he could help it, especially not when there were four lifeless testimonies to its capacity for independent mayhem lying on the floor nearby.

It wasn't long before Lieutenant Bosson arrived, in the company of two more squads. His coming was regarded by the squad with some relief, as they knew he was trained to deal with the cyborgs.

“Nice work, men,” the lieutenant complimented them. “We found five or six of them in a barracks facility to the north, but didn't manage to take any of them prisoner. Captain Rijkaard will be pleased about this.”

“Sir,” the sergeant acknowledged curtly. But Tower knew he was chuffed at the lieutenant's praise. They all were.

The Unity man seemed to recognize the lieutenant's status even though there were no outwards signs of rank on his armor. He nodded slightly to acknowledge the Marine officer, then surprised everyone, even the captured Pandorians, by demanding their surrender.

“We are authorized to offer you a safe return to your ships presently in orbit around the planet. You may keep your arms; all we require is the return of the bodies of all members of the Transcognitive Unity, the release of all prisoners taken, and a promise that no member of the Duke of Rhysalan's armed forces will return to the Zaccagnin system for the period of three standard annums.”

The Marines looked at each other, confused.

“Does he think we're surrendering to him?” Baudet asked on the team channel. “Maybe he's got a bug in his programming.”

“Shut up,” Sarge barked.

“Thank you for the offer, but we will respectfully decline.” Lieutenant Bosson placed his hands on his armored hips. “All right. Who are you, why do you claim to possess such an authorization, and how many more Unity soldiers are there on the planet and in Pandoria? You may address me as 'Lieutenant'.”

The posthuman responded with a stream of unintelligible high-pitched electronic gibberish.

“How about you try that again, in a language we understand. You should be aware that if you will not divulge your name, rank, and identification, I have the right under the Treaty of Alzakhar to have you shot as a spy, your various accoutrements notwithstanding.”

One of the men accompanying the lieutenant, Sergeant Daniels, Tower thought, pressed his fist to the back of the prisoner's skull. There was an audible click as projectile rifle in his right forearm auto-loaded.

“His what?”

“All the machine whatnot.”

“Oh, right.”

“Will you two shut it?”

“Sorry Sarge.”

“Our apologies, Lieutenant. Our name is Anzine Y849-34H2-2B77-848K. Our rank is the equivalent of a captain in the Rhysalani Armed Forces. Our identification is identical to our name; we do not differentiate between name and identity as you do.”

“Of course you don't. How many are there in your cadre operation?”

“We are not required to tell you that, Lieutenant.”

“That's true, you're not. But this is one of your comm centers, and I expect there is a good bit of information on those machines I'm informed you've got in the basement. So, we're going to get the information anyhow, and if you simply tell me how many of you there are and where you are located, you'll save me the trouble of killing large quantities of Pandorians hunting them down.”

“We are afraid we do not share your concern for your fellow semi-evolved, Lieutenant.”

The lieutenant stared silently at the posthuman for a long moment. It seemed as if a full kilosec passed before he spoke again, although it wasn't nearly that long by Tower's running mission clock. “I've ordered an orbital strike on one of our tertiary targets. It is going to kill a large quantity of Pandorians, many of them non-combatants, as well as however many of your kind are present in that location. It will take place in thirty seconds. And after it takes place, I will issue a no-quarter order for all non-Pandorian military personnel, yourself excluded, as you have already been taken prisoner. Unless you start talking now.”

Metal eyes met mirrored shield. Neither blinked. There were perhaps ten seconds remaining when the prisoner nodded and lifted his bound hands behind his back.

“You win, lieutenant. Call off the orbital strike. Free our hands and we will give you the information you seek concerning the current locations and status of all Unity personnel on the planet.”

The lieutenant nodded at the sergeant, who slashed through the plasmetal zips with a laserblade. The cyborg held out one finger, and peeled both glove and pseudoflesh back to reveal what looked like a standard XSB interface. He held it up and waggled it, daringly.

“Where would you like us to insert it, Lieutenant?”

Tower couldn't help it. He laughed. The lieutenant did not.

“What about the viral codes?” Fire asked on the team channel.

“He'll scan it first, officers have AIs equipped to handle that sort of stuff,” Sarge answered. And indeed, the lieutenant produced a device that was unattached to his suit, inserted the prisoner's finger-interface into it, then examined the readout. He nodded, satisfied, then extruded an interface cord from the device that he plugged into his own suit.

Fire looked at Tower, and they both shook their heads in unison. Maybe their AIs were smart enough to quarantine any electronic attacks, but what if they weren't? On the other hand, if the information was good, it would help them get the mission done faster, and at less risk. Tower shrugged. Either way, it wasn't his call. And it seemed as if the lieutenant had made the right one, because in a matter of seconds, Tower saw his mission parameters updated as the strat-AIs in the orbital op center reassessed the situation and revised their objectives.

Certainly the lieutenant seemed pleased.

“Sidran, Marshall, escort the prisoners to the designated area, then rejoin your team here. Howe, Carpenter, while they're doing that, I want every piece of information on those machines in the comm center uploaded to orbit for analysis. Quarantine it. Everyone else, you know what to do. Let's move out!”

Tower followed Sarge and Ready out the gaping hole that had once been a door. He glanced back at the Unity officer, and saw the cyborg was coolly staring at them, its secret thoughts safely ensconced behind inhuman metal eyes.

The Pandorians fell back before their advance, but the Marines met stiffer resistance as they approached the spaceport that was their new objective. The Pandorians had brought up their mobile artillery and were augmenting it with a pair of low-flying armored hovercraft. Tower wasted two of his remaining eleven missiles trying to bring them down before he realized they were being protected from laser-lock by some sort of sophisticated jamming equipment. Unity, no doubt. They were just a minor annoyance, however, as their armor was too light to permit them to come within range of the twin flechette cannons of Fire and the other gunners. The real problem was the mobile artillery, which were Cobras armed with large-bore fusion cannons. Between their agility and their firepower, they were able to keep the Marines pinned down and unable to advance towards the complex in which the Unity had set up its command center.

“Hit the dirt and shade your screens,” Sarge warned as two bright blue explosions detonated two hundred meters to their left. “The lieutenant is calling in the orbital. And turn off your sonics!”

They hastened to obey. An orbital bombardment was the closest thing to an Act of God that Interstellar Man had produced since the sunbuster turned out to be nothing more than a ruse. A full FFE by an assault cruiser made being caught outside with a savage thunderstorm directly overhead seem like an afternoon at the beach by comparison.

When it hit, the ground underneath them didn't so much shake as recoil. The noise wasn't something that Tower heard, it was something he felt resonating violently through him to his very core. It was as if a giant hammer of the gods was being driven deep into the crust of the planet again, and again, and again. And when it ended, Tower felt as if he'd been beaten, literally and physically beaten, and was left with a strange sense of his perceptions being permanently altered.

Sarge rose to his knees, and then swore.

“What's the matter, Sarge?”

“Damned artillery is still there. So where did it land?”

Tower undimmed his screen and cautiously looked over the ridge. Sarge was right. The three port-o-cannons that had been in view before were still there.

“Oh, dammit, that can't be right!”

“What can't be right?”

But before Ready answered, Tower realized what he was about to say. Calling up the platoon summary showed an entire squad had gone dark. Offline, which under the circumstances almost surely meant KIA.

“Shit!” It was bad, Tower realized. Sarge never swore on the platoon channel, he usually reserved his more colorful language for the team net. “Lieutenant, we've got a Code Blue. Repeat, Code Blue, dammit!”

Tower could hear the other men swearing. Somehow, someone had screwed up along the way. Badly screwed up. The orbital strike for which the Lieutenant called had gone awry and taken out twelve Marines. Not even battle armor could withstand the fearsome main guns of a star cruiser. They would have been smashed like bugs beneath a hard-soled boot.

“The coordinates were correct! I checked them twice, sergeant!” The lieutenant sounded uncharacteristically rattled. “I'm checking them again…look, they were right!”

“It's not your fault, sir.” Sarge was quick to reassure him. “Someone up there is probably getting an Alpha Charlie about now. Damn squids!”

“Dammit, what do I do? We can't move in until we clear out those fusion cannons!”

“Call it in again, sir. Navy can hardly kill them twice.”

There was a moment of comm silence, broken only by the strange zap-barking of the fusion cannon and the subsequent detonations.

“All right, men. Incoming in twenty.”

Again, they hit the deck. Again, the wrath of a thousand angry gods smote the earth in a hellish series of gargantuan detonations that left Tower feeling detached, almost dreamy, as if he was having an out-of-body experience. But no sooner had the orbital barrage ended than the Pandorians began firing again.

“The hell?” Sarge swore. Tower looked over the ridge and was appalled to see scores of Pandorians pouring out of the spaceport buildings, counterattacking under the suppressing fire of the mobile artillery. “Lieutenant? Billy? Daniels? Dammit, where are you all at?”

They were dead, Tower realized. About four hundred meters off to their left was a smaller hill overlooking the spaceport. Lieutenant Bosson, the platoon HQ, and Alpha Squad had taken up positions on the slope, behind the crest. Now the hill simply wasn't there anymore; great gouts of glowing, overheated smoke were rising from where it had been. He called up the platoon summary. Thirteen more Marines were now offline.

Tower was bewildered. He knew blue-on-blue events could happen, but how had the lieutenant somehow managed to call for the orbital right on top of his own head? Lieutenant Bosson was right sharp, even the buck sergeants respected him.

“The bastards knew!” Ready exclaimed, even as he crawled over the crest and commenced firing. One Pandorian dropped, then a second, followed by a third. At this range, he was one shot, one kill-lethal. “Sarge, they had to know!”

“Who knew, the Pandorians? How could they know the bloody Navy bolos would drop their loads on us?”

“They must have compromised our comm links somehow!”

“That's impossible!”

But Tower had the terrible feeling he might have an idea about how they might have done it.

“Fall back, Charlie!” Tower recognized the voice of the company CO ordering the other squad to retreat. A new objective flashed in green some 10 kilometers behind. “Sergeant Nichols, sitrep! Can you hold long enough to permit an extraction?”

“Negative, Captain! We got a major clusterfugazi developing here. Code Blue! They're counterattacking, they've got eight, no, nine Cobras, my effectives count is well over 100 and climbing, and I've got fuck-all to stop them! Arrow, bogey at three-thirty!”

Tower stopped firing his plasma and looked up to see a hovercraft swooping down in their direction, lasers blazing. He still couldn't achieve a proper lock, so he lined up the crosshairs manually and dumb-fired four missiles in quick succession, figuring there was no point in saving them for when he was dead. Three of them missed, but one struck home, and the hovercraft suddenly spun into a twisting dive as it ceased to defy gravity. A second hovercraft he hadn't seen abruptly pulled up and turned away before he could even take aim at it. Score one for the old school, he thought to himself.