Shadow on the Sun (4 page)

 

Chapter √-1

The Gulag

Terminal: MUSEcommand — bash — 122x36

Last login: 239.x.xx.xx:xx 12:12:09 on ttys0067

 

>...

 

AdjutantNod04:~ user_MUSE$

SCREEN CRAWL: [root@mmiminode ~]

SCREEN CRAWL: WARNING! VIRUS DETECTED! Node1666; kernal compromised (quarantine subroutine (log=32)....FAILED!

 

SCREEN CRAWL: External host access...GRANTED

 

::new host$

 

AdjutantNod13:~ user_MIMT$

 

SCREEN CRAWL: run subroutine “Nap Time”

SCREEN CRAWL: press Y for yes, N for no, A for abort

 

$input: A

 

Sorry, cowboy, I am not sleepy.

Mimi wants to play.

CHAPTER 5

Port of Kazah

Kontis Marine Base Camp

ANNOS MARTIS
239. 2. 12. 13:33

 

 

“Pilot One.” Dolly's face appears on the multinet screen inside our velocicopter. “You are cleared to engage. Mission orders transmitted. Coordinates are locked into your onboard guidance systems.”

Pilot One, who is flying the lead Hellbender, responds, “Roger that, Dolly. Thanos directive is in effect.” Pilot One switches to the onboard PA. “You heard the order, girls and boys. Time to let the big dog eat.”

A cheer erupts from the soldiers, and I see the pilot grin. The copter rushes over the ocean. Our flight path has taken us from Olympus Mons across the shallow waters of Amazonia Bay to the Saxa Sea. As the gunship swings south toward land, our target, the port of Kazah, comes in sight. The visor of my helmet is up, showing a face painted so that two black fangs seem to rip through my eyes. My jaws work, the ligature popping as if I'm grinding my own teeth to dust. Other than me, the copter is carrying four members of Alpha Team, a pilot, and the two gunners. Hellbender Two, which is flying in tandem with us, carries Alpha Two—call sign Sarge—and the rest of our team.

“Grab your shorts!” the pilot shouts. “Coming in hot!”

On the ground below, a series of air-raid sirens sounds. Our gunners open up with Seneca guns, sending a squad of MahindraCorp soldiers scurrying. Each shell blows chunks of concrete, pavement, and dirt into the air and leaves craters deep enough to bury a man standing up.

“The target is below us. Time to say bye-bye,” the pilot yells over the PA. “Ready jump position!”

“Affirmative!” I shout back. “Driver One, are you with me?”

I blink and a distorted video feed fills my visual field. At the bottom of the feed, a screen crawl reads:

Satellite lock confirmed> Connection acquired> Comlink established> Dolly onboard> Confirm symbiotic connection

“Confirmed,” I say. “Alpha Dog is online. Driver, identify yourself.”

“Howdy, Alpha Dog.” A voice echoes across my audio nerve. “This is Hernandez, Driver Numero Uno. I'll be your eyes, ears, nose, and throat on this mission. Your hands, heart, or sphincter, if need be. So just sit back and let me do the driving,
capiche
?”

“Confirmed,” I say. “You are Driver One.”

“All right, then,” Driver One says. “Ready when you are.”

“Drop zone in fifteen seconds!” the pilot calls above the gunfire. “On my mark, in—”

“Belay that!” I drop my visor. “I am getting off right here!”

I take a running leap and plummet toward a lush garden filled with tall trees and innumerable flowering bushes, while antiaircraft fire whistles past my head.

Whoosh!

I rip through the foliage. My feet slam into the surface, blowing sandy dirt into the air. For a few seconds I'm frozen, bent to one knee, fist on the ground. Then I shrug, and a white-hot crackle of static electricity dances out of my body.

Swinging my rifle around to firing position, I tap my right temple. “Command, this is Alpha Dog. I am on the ground and moving toward the target.”

“Alpha Dog, this is Command,” Driver One says. “Begin mission procedures for attacking the primary target. The rest of Alpha Team will rendezvous at the attack point.”

Across my visual field, the green crawl reads:

Hive link established > Command line access for Driver One confirmed

“Roger that,” I say as something lands in the underbrush fifteen meters north.

I jog ahead and haul a spitting mad Alpha Two out of a ban-soot bush, infamous for its barbed, poisonous leaves.

“Command,” I say, “Alpha Two has executed successful entry.”

As Sarge plucks the barbs protruding from his backside, he snarls, “You call that successful? Next time, speak for yourself.”

“This soldier
was
speaking for himself,” I say. “ Our mission objective is to locate the transport truck, neutralize the driver, and retrieve the high-value target. We have six minutes, seventeen seconds to complete that objective. Alpha Team will join us at the point of attack.”

“Then why jump so soon?” he asks.

“I like to be first on the ground,” I say. “To cover the landing zone.”

Sarge grunts an affirmative. “What about these thorns sticking out of my buttocks?”

“It's a reminder not to be a pain in mine,” I say. “Target is on this heading, and we're burning daylight.”

Sarge snarls but follows my lead. We double-time it parallel to the rendezvous point half a click to the east. There we take cover behind a pile of discarded shipping containers and provide eyes on the ground. Seconds later, Hellbenders One and Two swoop in, hovering above us as the rest of Alpha Team jumps.

“Alpha Team is deployed,” Pilot One says over the comlink. “Let us know when you need a ride home.”

“Affirmative,” I respond, then signal my team to take positions.

Heat ripples across the rust-stained concrete docks of the port of Kazah, the largest shipyard in the Saxa Sea. We're hundreds of kilometers from the war fronts, in the last place that the enemy would expect a black ops team to land. The port is clogged with dozens of transport ships. An army of dockworkers and sailors swarm the wharf, and a network of boom cranes swings shipping containers from dock to ship, from ship to dock, in a choreographed dance.

From the deck of a dreadnought-class battleship, a Dragonfly velocicopter rises out of the mists like a griffin, its dual rotors blending the air and sea together. For a second, it hovers above the fleet of tankers and transport ships. I follow the Dragonfly as it sweeps past the security walls and over a no-man's-land of concrete barricades, minefields, and gunners' nests that surround the dockyard on all sides and protect the road leaving the port.

“Sit tight,” I tell Alpha Team.

I climb the stack of shipping containers until I'm forty meters above the ground. From here, I have clear line of sight on a certain boom crane, which is lifting massive boxes from a transport ship. As I chamber a special round into my armalite, the crane lowers a bright blue container to the dock, the side of which is marked with graffiti.

“Target confirmed,” I say, and lift my armalite, then fire a sonic tracer into the metal skin of the container. “Target marked.”

Tracking engaged>

And voila! I can hear everything, just as if I'm sitting on the wharf. I hear dockworkers shout instructions in profane Finnish and Cantonese to the crane operator as the container drops into the back of a transport truck.

“It don't hardly weigh nothing,” I hear a trucker call to the foreman. “What's in that thing?”

“Your
cojones
,” the foreman tells him, “if you don't quit sticking your nose where it don't belong.”

“Forget I asked!” The trucker climbs into the cab of the semi. Engine starts. Gears grind. The clutch pops, and the tires turn slowly as the truck lumbers down the dock to the access road, then through the shipyard gate.

I flip my visor up, scan the perimeter, and spot the truck in the distance. It is still moving slowly. “Target confirmed. Driver One, do we have permission to advance?”

“Roger that,” Driver One says. “Permission to engage granted. Go get 'em, tiger.”

“I am not a tiger,” I tell him. “Tigers have never existed on Mars.”

“Just a figure of speech. Don't go getting your panties in a bunch.”

“I don't wear panties, either.”

“Geez, how literal can you be?” he says.

As literal as I need to be. “Alpha Team! Let's go!” I signal the team to follow me. “We're going in hot! Hit it!”

Covering my six, my team moves up single file. We stop short of a concrete barricade pocked with mortar craters and topped with concertina wire.

“Alpha Team! Switch to enhanced optics.”

I watch their faces as they pop an amber filter over their visors. Through my own filter, the other soldiers look like orange ghosts. On my signal, they move to the end of a barricade. Ahead lies an open field littered with small chunks of debris. I can make out several dozen hot spots, all white on the feed.

““Minefield,” I tell Driver One. “Ten meters ahead.”

“The telemetry functions in your suit picked it up before you did,” he says.

“Stay put, Alpha Team,” I say. “I've got this one.”

I snake my way through the minefield, where collateral damage litters the ground. For an instant I stop, my gut twisting again. I've seen this before somewhere, and I swear I can hear someone screaming my name. Then I shake my head and spray a line of paint to mark the path. “On my six!”

Alpha Team squat-runs after me to the high wall of a barricade. It's weakened from multiple blasts, but it has enough structural integrity to support my weight.

“What are you planning, Dog?” Driver One says.

I pull a mini grappling hook and climbing wire from my gear belt. I swing it in a circle and throw it over the wall. A firm tug, and the hook digs into the concrete. A boot on the wall, and I'm climbing.

A few seconds later, I drop to the ground and find myself facing a gunners' nest, which is manned by two hostiles with a Seneca gun.

“Hurensohn!”
I curse.

“Say again?” my driver says.

But my attention is focused on the barrel of the Seneca gun and the almost imperceptible puff of bluish smoke that precedes by milliseconds the exit of the shell from the steel barrel.

Phoom!

I set my legs to absorb the impact, watching the counterclockwise spin of the metal jacket from the barrel rifling. I feel my abdominal muscles tense as the shell catches me in the gut and slams me against the wall, which promptly crumbles like wet cardboard.

Comlink broken > Transmission failure

CHAPTER 6

Port of Kazah

Kontis Marine Base Camp

ANNOS MARTIS
239. 2. 12. 14:46

 

 

For a nanosecond, I see only static—the Leash is broken. Then my vision clears, and I finish the job.

“Alpha Two,” Driver One says over my comlink, acting as though I can't hear him. “We've lost contact with Alpha Dog. Dolly can't detect his signal. She needs eyes on him now.”

“Roger that,” Sarge replies. “Move it! Dog is under fire.”

I watch Sarge vault the wall. He lands with a front roll. Comes up weapons ready, his line of sight on the gunners' nest, which is empty. I read his eyes as he looks around, bewildered. Gun? Gone. Hostiles? Down. But where is Alpha Dog?

Then Sarge spots me, alive and well, holding the Seneca gun on my hip.

Driver One's voice cracks. “I don't believe what I'm seeing.”

The rest of Alpha Team lands on the ground. I toss the Seneca gun to a private, who staggers beneath its weight. I yank off my helmet and shake the cobwebs out until my head is clear.

“Next time, don't take so long,” I say.

“Alpha Dog, this is Driver One.” His voice is suddenly irritating. “Dolly is reporting unexpected readings from your symbiarmor's telemetry. Looks like some sort of code anomalies. Run a scan—”

“Belay that suggestion,” I say, then I yell at the team, “What're you standing around for, you carking tourists? Move!”

The team fans out.

“Driver One is right,” Sarge says. “You sound different.”

“Stow it,” I say, pushing past him. “Worry about yourself, not me.”

Sarge growls, and I turn to face him. We lock eyes, Sarge's war painted face constricting with the words he'd like to say. He's a few centimeters taller than me. Beefier, too. But I've handled bigger and meaner. Like the Draeu we fought in the mines. It was Vie—

“Alpha Dog!” Driver One cuts in. “Eyes in the sky confirm that your target is moving. Repeat: Target has changed course and is bearing down on your position!”

With a nod to Sarge, I turn to see:

The road.

The truck.

The bright blue container.

The truck slams through a barricade.

“Private! Hand me that Seneca gun.” I grab the weapon and fire. The shell hits the road behind the truck, and in slow motion, the vehicle flips on its side. With the shriek of grinding metal, the container rolls from the bed of the truck and hits the ground with a cacophony of sound and dust.

I toss the empty weapon aside. “Don't stand there gawking, you fossikers. There's a prize waiting inside.”

With a whoop, Alpha Team descends upon the wreckage.

“Command,” I say. “Display the video feed from the container on my aural screen.”

“Negative, Dog,” my driver replies. “You didn't say please.”

“How about I kick your carking butt instead?”

“Uh, Alpha Dog, that's not an approved response,” Driver One says. “Sit tight while I confer with Dolly.”

“Sit tight yourself.” I tap my temple, killing the comlink. “And stop yapping into my
verdomme
eardrum.”

The darkness inside the container is interrupted by a sliver of light. The door swings open, and I can see my shadow looming on the back wall. I pause and stare at it.

After a few seconds, I step aside. “Locate the target!”

The team begins searching the container, tossing boxes of food aside.

Sarge steps up to me. “You are violating mission protocols.”

“Do you hear that?” I ask.

“I hear nothing.”

“That buzzing sound, it's like. Like what? Bees.” I shake my head and clap one ear, as if I'm trying to knock something out of a bottle. “Bees? Have I met bees before?”

A private holds up a box. “Sir, all of these food boxes are just full of . . . food.”

“It's not here.” I trudge out of the container, kicking boxes out of my way. I run to the cab, yank open the door, and haul the trucker out. “Where is it?”

The truck driver whimpers and raises his hands. “Don't shoot! I'm not getting paid enough for this!”

“I repeat, where is it?” I yell. The trucker's face is panic-stricken, a look that says this is a game gone bad, and somebody's eye is about to get poked with a sharp stick. I wave my armalite. “Don't make me ask you again.”

“It's in the fuel tank!” he squeaks.

I point at the underside of the cab, where a new tank sticks out like a sore thumb compared to the rusted one next to it. “This one?”

He nods, and I punch a hole through the thin metal. I find a cylinder of some sort, and my fingers close around it.

I pull out a metal case as long and thick as my arm, with three locks on the front. “What is this?”

“I don't know! Please, sir,” the trucker says. “I got two little ones at home. This was supposed to be a side job. I just drive the truck, you know? Please don't kill me.”

“You're . . . you're a civilian?” I look around at the truck, the docks, the sky. Something is wrong with the sky. I hold the case up to block the sun. My aural feed flickers.

Dolly's face appears on the screen.

“Dolly?” I ask. “Where is Driver One?”

“Alpha Dog,” she says calmly. “Thanos directive is in place. Your orders are to eliminate all hostiles and then return to base with the HVT. Fire at will.”

“Confirmed, Dolly.” I pivot and press the barrel of my armalite against the trucker's quivering neck. But then, I freeze. I am a Regulator, and Regulators don't shoot civilians.

I pull the gun away, and he faints.

“Negative. I will not kill an innocent.”

“Alpha Dog,” Dolly says. “Obey your directive.”

But my eyes are locked on Sarge, who is bringing his armalite to bear on the trucker. I see his finger squeezing the trigger, and I step into the line of fire, taking a three-burst round to my gut. This time the bullets sting, and I double up from the force of the rounds.

“Get out of the way!” Sarge snarls.

I swing the case and knock his rifle aside. “Lay one finger on a noncombatant, and I'll wrap this high-value target around your
shén j
i˘n
g bìng
skull.”

Sarge pops a new clip into his weapon. “I'd like to see you try.”

A high-pitched whistle rips through the comlink. We both grab our ears as Dolly pipes in.

“Mission directive has changed,” she says. “Thanos directive canceled. Priority One is now the return of the high-value target. Extraction has been ordered. Transport the HVT to the pickup zone. Alpha One, you are relieved of command. Alpha Two, you have the ball.”

“What?” I ask.

“You heard the lady,” Sarge snaps. “I'm the big dog now! Let's haul it to the zone.” He holds out his hand as the others start double-timing it. “I'll be taking the HVT.”

“What if I refuse?” I say. “You're going to shoot me?”

“No,” Sarge says, and points at the civilian. “I will shoot
him
. Your choice.”

It's not much of a choice. A Regulator never puts an innocent in danger just to save himself. I hand over the case and go after Sarge, making sure he doesn't take a potshot at the trucker.

“Get it in gear, Alpha
Dog
,” he says, mocking me.

But I don't care if he mocks me. “My name isn't Alpha Dog, and I am nobody's trained pet.”

That is when the jolt of static electricity freezes my suit. A second later, Sarge slaps a thick rubber hood over my helmet, and I smell almonds and burned cheese.

Then my heart stops beating.