Tech World (Undying Mercenaries Series) (18 page)

“The mid-decks are residential,” he said without any inflection. “We’re fighting in the streets there, block-by-block. The fighting is heavy at times, but quiet right now. Tonight’s mission involves
residential-6, an affluent neighborhood directly below the financial district. Intel estimates this region is a key target for the enemy.”

I had to suppress a snort of disbelief. I wondered what kind of genius adjunct had figured that one out. These Tau thought of nothing but money most of the time. I wasn’t at all surprised they were trying to take over the banks. Hell, that might be the whole point of the uprising in the first place.

Graves made an erasing gesture, and the three dimensional image of the station vanished. He brought up camera feeds from the streets.

My interest immediately rose. Here were the faces of the enemy. I could see them, and they looked grimly determined.

There were more of them in the streets now. Throngs. They were suited up in dull maroon and shimmering silver. I again wondered at the significance of those colors.

I figured they must be the working class proles from the planet’s surface. Only one in ten of them were armed with anything other than a makeshift weapon. Of those officially armed, a few carried lightning-rod devices. Others carried—my eyes widened in shock.

“Excuse me? Sir?” I called.

Graves looked at me for a moment before waving for me to speak.

“Sir, are they carrying legion regulation weapons?”

“Yes, yes, very observant,” Graves said. I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not. “They have snap-rifles for the most part. They took down two full cohorts of our light troops last night and distributed the weapons. Notice also that most of them are unarmed. Entire squads follow one leader with a real weapon. When he goes down, they pick it up and keep fighting.”

I shook my head in disbelief. Snap-rifles weren’t much—but they were better than regular gunpowder-based ballistic weaponry. They accelerated tiny needles of mass to great speeds and operated with a high rate of fire. I didn’t want to have to face a mob armed with the same weapons we had. To be shot to death by our own weapons—that would be a tough way to go down.

What was surprising was that they’d managed to get so many weapons from our troops. They must have killed the light troops pretty fast to keep their grip on them. Our legion recovery teams put a priority on weapons retrieval. They were much more important than bodies or uniforms.

“Perhaps I should recap what we’ve learned of this conflict for those of you who’ve been out of the picture for a while,” Graves said, pointedly looking at me. “The unrest on the surface has been growing for years. Tau is a world of contrasts. A few have great wealth, but due to their unrestricted population growth, most are poor. Only the wealthy few make it up here into space to seek their fortunes. All of that background information was available on the legion website, and you should have read it on the flight out here.

“What’s different today,” he continued, “comes down to two key elements. One, they managed to get a large shipment of powerful alien weapons. Two, the population of this world has learned of Imperial weakness. It was bound to get out, and the first world to hear about it was this one, a merchant hub of local trade. They know that the local Battle Fleet has been called to the Core Systems. We’ve been left in charge. How does that look to them? Well, they’ve seen a scrim of fancy troops courtesy of Germanica for years. The rebels on the planet surface weren’t impressed. They decided to make their move before the Empire ships come back.”

Carlos, of all people, raised his hand. Graves ignored him and pointed to Natasha.

“Sir,” she asked, “why were they holding back? I mean, the Empire doesn’t care about the purely internal affairs of any system. They could have a civil war and a blood bath without a threat from the Imperial Fleets.”

“That’s not true in this case,” Graves said. “Remember that Gelt Station is the hub of interstellar commerce. Aliens are here on legitimate Imperial business. If they destroy an alien trade ship without good cause, they risk sanction by the fleets if they come back. The
ultimate
sanction.”

Natasha frowned. “Did you say ‘if’ the Imperial fleets come back?”

“I should have said ‘when.’ In any case, their return might take a long time.”

The entire subject of warfare among the Core Systems was the topic of countless whispered conversations among the troops, but our officers rarely brought it up. I was alarmed at the idea that Imperial ships might never return. How could the Empire hold together in its current form if they didn’t? At some point, an alien civilization would grow bold and attack another. At that moment, the galaxy would change forever. I hoped someone back on Earth was thinking about these things and working up some kind of plan to deal with the situation.

“A long time, sir?” Carlos blurted out of turn. “The fleet might not return for…what? Are we talking years, here…or centuries?”

“A trip to the Core Systems takes over a year each way,” Graves said. “Beyond that, we have no way of judging the situation. If anything, the Galactic Net is more closely policed than it was before. We’re not getting any formal news from the Nairbs or anyone else.”

I found it remarkable that Graves was freely passing on this information. I wasn’t sure why he was doing it. Maybe it was part of the same disease that had infected the local Tau. They’d figured the cat was gone and may be dead, and they were partying harder every day, celebrating the absence.

How long would it be, I asked myself again, before more worlds went wild?

-18-

Graves slammed his hands together, ending the briefing and dismissing us with one gesture. We hustled for the armory and loaded up. I decided to go with a heavy kit today. I was done fooling around. I asked the quartermaster for a light artillery emplacement, a floater cart to carry it, plus another cart for ammo.

“You know this 88 has a kick?
” the quartermaster asked, as if I was some kind of rookie. “You can’t just put it up to your shoulder.”

“Yeah?” I responded. “Do you think that’s why it has a tripod base?”

He looked at me with twisted-up lips for a few seconds, then sighed and contacted Leeson for approval.

Adjunct Leeson backed me up without a moment’s hesitation. I was gratified that I had a favor to pull in from him, and I hoped that state of affairs would continue. To my mind, it was best to immediately
turn gratitude from a superior officer into something tangible. They tended to forget who they owed very quickly.

I had Carlos assigned to drag my ammo cart around for me. You would have thought I’d put a dog collar on him and sent him into the snow under a heavy lash.

“This isn’t cool,” he said, dragging the tether line.

The floating cart barely weighed anything from the point of view of the soldier guiding it. The cart even had enough automated brains to follow a man on its own if you let it. But none of that stopped Carlos from complaining.

“I’ve got a cart of my own,” I told him, tugging on my tether. My burden was, if anything, bigger and more unwieldy than his was. The entire gun emplacement rode on it. It looked squatty and had a bulbous nose on the front projector. The tripod of legs had a distinctly insectile appearance. Alien 88s always reminded me of beetles with nozzles, but they were deadly at mid-range against large formations.

“I’m supposed to be your friend, not your slave,” Carlos continued. “I don’t get this at all. Do you hate me, McGill?”

“I just wanted to team up with someone I could talk to,” I said. “I guess I was wrong. I’ll contact Adjunct Leeson and get you reassigned on point with Kivi.”

“Fine, fine, I’ll pull your damned cart. No need to get pissy about it.”

Carlos was an acquired taste. For some reason I liked the man. We were still friends despite all the trouble between us. I think it was the fact we’d faced death together so many times. Serious combat welds men together. In our case, it gave us the fortitude to overlook one another’s faults.

“We pulled the lucky card on this deployment,” Adjunct Leeson’s voice crackled in my headset. “We’ve been assigned the high ground. The best part is we’re not going anywhere near the financial district.”

This was news to me and Carlos. We exchanged glances and continued to listen.

“We’re going to the high end of the station,” Leeson said, “covering the government buildings. No one expects a serious attack there as the rentable Tau police force is huddled in those structures. All aboard the skimmer—and remember to hold on, these turtles are crazy pilots.”

There were muttered groans and curses as we loaded our gear onto the skimmer. This model had been modified for combat. It still had a low railing, but its underbelly was armored by interlocking plates that looked like fish scales to me.

The turtle did his best to make us throw up breakfast, but I think the added weight dampened his efforts. We slewed and wallowed at every banking turn. It was frightening, but not as violent and death-defying as usual.

When we at last cruised into the government district, I was happy to see the streets were empty and quiet. Maybe this mission would be the cakewalk we’d been promised.

As we landed on a flat section of a pyramid-like structure and leapt off the deck, a second skimmer came roaring down near us. Graves himself got off with another platoon. Several more skimmers were following as three units had been a
ssigned to cover this centrally placed building in the district.

The original briefing map had displayed this district as yellow, meaning there was no current combat, but we were bordering enemy forces and had to look sharp. When we touched down, we spread out and moved to cover all the elevators and stairways that led down into the building. Harris took care of that, placing his troops with care.

The Veteran didn’t mess with Carlos and me. We were on our own. Leeson walked over, hands on his hips, and surveyed the roof.

“Over there,” he said, “west side. Set up your 88 with the best field of fire you can.”

His order was extraneous, but I didn’t mind. As long as an officer didn’t order me to do something stupid, I was happy. I dragged my artillery piece to the edge of the roof and set it up on a corner. I had a great field of fire down two slanting sides of the building.

“Don’t you think we’re kind of exposed out here on the corner?” Carlos asked me as he towed the ammo after me.

“Yeah,” I said, “but you can’t do much if you can’t see anything. This is a line-of-sight weapon. We have to have a clear field of fire.”

“What if they have snipers?”

“We’re going to build a bunker up here. I thought you’d be happy out here on this roof. The heavy fighting is kilometers away.”

Carlos shaded his eyes and looked out toward the financial district to the west. Smoke trails swirled up toward the big exhaust fans and lurid glowing flames could be seen here and there dotting the streets. Something was going on out there, we could see that much.

“After they take the banks, where do you think they’ll come next?” Carlos asked me.

I looked at him in surprise. “Take the banks? Do you think they will?”

Carlos laughed. “I forgot. All you got was Graves’ little pep-talk today. That’s not the whole story.”

His statement concerned me. Carlos was always cynical, but I’d felt that Graves had been holding back. I was also worried that Carlos was referring to Graves’ speech as a pep-talk. To my mind, the briefing had laid out a grim scenario.

Carlos knelt and pulled out a portable puff-crete dispenser. It looked like a big caulk gun and worked the same way. You had to be careful though, because if you didn’t get the material out cleanly in one go it would harden up and jam the gun. Once it did that, it was almost impossible to reuse.

I got down on my knees and joined him. Soon we were squirting out an instant fortification around the 88. It began to take shape, looking like pink-white paste until it hardened. I kept building it up farther out with a large aperture for firing. It was going to feel weird being perched on the corner of the building and hanging out over thousands of meters of air like I was sitting in a bug’s cocoon.

“Listen,” Carlos said. “We’ve lost about half the city over the last three days. I got lucky and was revived early—well, maybe lucky is the wrong word. Anyway, I was ahead of you in line. I got to watch the enemy spread and advance.”

For once, I felt no urge to tell Carlos to shut up. He was more serious than usual in his tone as well. I added a reinforced support under the floor of the bunker, attaching it with strands and beads of thick puff-crete and slathering it into place with disposable trowels.

“Just think of what that means,” Carlos continued. “This hab is
huge
. Just to march as far as they have without fighting would take days. We haven’t been holding them back or forming a front. We’ve been overrun and pressed back at every engagement. They’re advancing like a flood and talk of this being a ‘battle’ is just wishful thinking.”

Carlos had never been one to look at the bright side of a situation, but I had to admit he was right. They couldn’t have spread so far, so fast, if we’d been doing much of anything to slow them down.

“They have sheer numbers,” I said. “I understand that, but what about the city population? How can a few thousand—even a hundred thousand—control millions of civvies?”

“That’s just it,” Carlos said, “I think they’re joining up. I think every neighborhood
full of losers they take over is a recruiting ground. The city is rising up. Their ideology—or whatever they’re using to get people to fight—is spreading.”

I thought about how selfish the Tau
were in this place. These aliens only cared about gaining a credit for themselves. I wasn’t sure what had gotten them into a fighting spirit—maybe it was a culmination of hopelessness among the countless poor.

“I bet they aren’t all joining up,” I said. “
Most are probably huddling in their houses content to let others fight it out. That sounds like your average Tau. They don’t have much community spirit.”

Carlos laughed. “Try none at all. The threat of Galactic intervention has always kept this place under control—but that’s gone now.”

“We don’t know that. It’s very risky to assume the Battle Fleet won’t come back and exact revenge.”

Carlos shrugged. “Tell
them
about it.”

I looked out of my completed bunker and stared to the west. The smoke clouds seemed a trifle bigger and blacker than they’d been when we’d started. Could the battle be coming closer?

“Break out the goggles,” I said. “I want to get a range-reading on the riots.”

Carlos dug around in our equipment bags and pulled out the goggles, but he didn’t hand them over. Instead, he pulled the strap over his own head and stared through the telescoping lenses, making adjustments.

“Come on, hand them over,” I said.

“I’m your spotter, and I’m spotting something right now.”

Rather than standing around, I got into my gunner’s harness and tried out the swivel controls on the 88. They felt good. I’d trained some with light artillery pieces like this one over the last six months but had yet to use them in combat.

I liked the way the 88 felt. The handholds on the back were like vertical bicycle handlebars. With my gauntlets off they were cool to the touch, and the swivel motion was very smooth. A lot of alien tech was awkward to use. Even the systems they built for use by humanoids. There was always something extra or something missing that made it hard for a human to operate. For example, most seats had a hole for a tail to hang out the back. That was fine if you needed it, but when a human sat in such a chair it felt like your butt was being squeezed into the tail-hole after a while.

The 88 didn’t have a tail-hole or a gripping system that was built to be operated by three or four hands at once. It was easy to control and bi-manipulative by design. I could swing the muzzle either up, down, or sideways almost effortlessly. The sights were good, too. I could zoom in and doing so automatically narrowed the projector aperture for longer range precision fire. Zooming out widened the cone of impact, but it was still a pretty tight beam compared to the old shoulder-mounted belcher units I was most accustomed to.

“I think you’re going to get to fire that thing after all,” Carlos said.

I glanced up at him. He was crouching at my side, intently staring into the goggles and trying not to move at all. I could tell by the way the goggles had telescoped out to nearly a foot in length that whatever he was looking at was pretty far away.

“You checking out the banks?”

“Yes I am—and it looks bad. There are Tau everywhere. I think—I think they just took over the banking buildings. The streets are overrun.”

“Crazy,” I said, staring at the horizon. Without
a visual aid system, all I could see was a pall of smoke. “Why are so many joining in? What’s the payoff for them?”

“They must think this is their chance. Only one Tau in a thousand has any real money, you know. They all lust for more. I think they’re willing to burn their whole city down for the chance to get it.”

“But they have to know that we’re going to burn
them
down when they get here. I mean, they might win in the end, but they’re going to take horrid losses. What would make them so willing to sacrifice themselves?”

Carlos shook his head and took off the goggles. He looked troubled, and that was unusual for him. In fact, this entire conversation wasn’t how discussions normally went with Carlos. He was usually as self-centered as the Tau themselves.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Did I tell you I fought them in the streets the second day—after you were killed at the umbilical transport hub?”

“No—but it looks like you survived.”

“I did. Let me tell you, it wasn’t pretty. They came at us near the shopping malls that surround the city’s green area—you know, what passes for a park. They swarmed us like lemmings. We burned
so
many down. They might have won except most of them didn’t have good weapons. Women, even a few of their young—they were all fighting and dying like animals. But only the Tau. Did you notice that? None of the foreign population has joined in with them. Only the Tau are fighting.”

Frowning, I put on the goggles and studied the throngs that marched slowly closer like ants. Carlos was right. There were only Tau in the horde. I noticed another thing. They were all wearing the same colors: maroon and silver. What the hell did that mean?

“Stay on station,” I told Carlos. “I’m going to go talk to Natasha.”

Carlos grinned and the moment I got out of the
gunner’s harness he slipped into it and began slewing the gun mount around.