Leviathan (Asher in Ordered Space Book 2) Page 6

  “I’ve never been to Sidereus,” said Asher, “but I did once go to Hei Mao, an En-Bae system. That was a pretty rough place.”

  “And that’s the big corps,” said May Roca. “They got safety plans and retirement plans and all that stuff. You can imagine what it’s like working in the small ones. TreCasCo would chew a body up and spit ‘em out in a few years. Others was worse. Ore-Indie was the worst. No safety at all, just work you ‘til you died in the mine, then go back to Sidereus or out to French Lick for another batch of desperate folks looking for a way to scrape by.”

  “Why not head to the core?” asked Asher. “The megacorps need good people. There’s always plenty of smaller corps on the core worlds too, to provide services, healthcare, entertainment, and whatever. They’re nice and civilized.”

  “Lot’s of reasons. For some, like my folks, it were just the money. Trip to the core costs a lot of credits, you know. Or maybe you don’t, way Hokozana moves you and your people around the systems like it was nothing.”

  There as truth to that. Asher was so used to catching rides on Hokozana Fleet ships that he never really thought about the costs involved for those who weren’t already in the corporate economy. He tended to forget just how much of an investment something like this mission to Lutetia represented. The initial contract between Meridian and Hokozana wasn’t just for the science team, after all. Someone had to pay for the three ships in orbit and their crews, too. No wonder the Cythrans were out of credits and had been forced to subcontract to Hokozana to keep the mission going.

  “There’s others,” May Roca went on, “who just aren’t civilized-type folks. Take me. Ain’t never been off-world. I talk about Mekong and Peshawar and French Lick and the core worlds like I know what I’m saying, but I got no idea. Some of us is just cut out for the frontier life, I guess. Some of us, it’s all we know.”

  ***

  Asher also tried to talk to Chuck, in those days, but after the attack, she had fallen back into her shell. They had had the discussion about the Cythrans the night before the bandits came, and she seemed to have been getting over her communication problem a bit during the fight itself, but now she was retreating into her old ways.

  She had done well, though. Sergeant Gary confirmed that she had moved the science team into the large conference room they had seen the day before. Once there, she’d commissioned his man Growl and another Coin-Op and between them they’d used the tables and plasteel torn from the walls to build a hardpoint. In the end, it hadn’t been needed because the non-corps had never gotten past the rampart, but it did sound to Asher as though Chuck had been decisive and had shown that she was capable of independent thought in a crisis, which boded well for her future, if she was indeed to become one of Marcolis’ fixers.

  He took her and Sergeant Gary out one morning to find the breach in the defenses that the bandits had used to get into the mine. The Coin-Ops had built a motion-sensitive cordon of laser alarms around the pit. Outside of this, they had lain mine fields in the three possible entryways into the mine, which was in a shallow bowl surrounded by steep crags with sheer faces that couldn’t be scaled without assistance. To prevent aircraft or other vehicles from crossing the crags unnoticed and unopposed, they had put up a system of air-defense sensors connected to three auton turrets, which should be enough to take down any attacker. All in all, the system was well-planned and well-built. It was Chuck who noticed the breach.

  They were inspecting the laser cordon in one of the three passes leading into the mine, when Chuck called out. When Asher and Gary joined her, she indicated one of the emitters that were set up to ensure the laser beams formed a continuous barrier. “What’s wrong with it?” asked Asher. The device seemed to be working normally, and the laser was registering as up, even though he couldn’t see the invisible beam.

  “Shit,” said Sergeant Gary. “That’s a new emitter.”

  “So?” Asher still didn’t see the problem.

  “We placed these all in one go. No way one should be newer than the others.”

  “Could the non-corps do that without setting it off?” asked Chuck.

  “Only from our side, with the codes,” said Gary. “We’ve got a rat, I’d say.”

  They turned off the beam and inspected the ground beyond the invisible fence. Chuck spotted the clues this time, as well. “There, see that stick, and those things—leaves, I guess?” She indicated what at first looked like random detritus. “Someone put them there.”

  She was right, Asher realized. The pass was clear of debris except for a stick, a line of purple needles or leaves, and a scatter of things that looked a bit like mushrooms, except that they were bright orange and very shiny. None of those things grew naturally in the pass which was actually full of thorny, black growths that looked something like thick spider webs with spines.

  “Those are markers someone’s put along our route through the minefield,” said Sergeant Gary. “We left it in case we need to get out there quickly. I didn’t think anyone knew about that but me and my people.”

  “We definitely have a rat,” said Asher.

  “A rat?” asked Chuck.

  Asher sighed. “A traitor, a mole, an inside agent. Someone in Archon let those bandits in.”

  “Oh. I already figured that out. I just have no idea what it has to do with rats.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  On an early morning five days after their exploration of the pass—a full week after the bandits came—the first band of mercs attacked. Asher, Chuck, and the Coin-Ops were still in the tunnel when a loud explosion came from the direction of the settlement. By the time they got out to the ramp, a mushroom cloud was billowing up over the hill on the opposite side of the pit. Sergeant Gary detailed May Roca, Keller, and two other Coin-Ops to watch Faraneeta, who was alone in the lab. “Wheres’ Qwadie? And Garueeria?” he asked.

  Asher shrugged. Chuck pointed toward the mushroom cloud, “They went into the settlement this morning. Growl went with them.”

  “Damn,” said Asher and Gary together.

  Asher turned to look at Chuck. “Stay here,” he said. “Gary and I will go get them.”

  Chuck nodded her agreement, and Asher glanced at Sergeant Gary, who indicated he was ready to go. As they headed up the ramp toward the rim of the pit, Asher called back to Chuck—who was still standing outside the tunnel—over his subnet link. “Keep an eye on the Coin-Ops,” he said. “We know we’ve got a traitor, and they’re the most likely ones to know how to disarm the security cordon. Stay in the lab and keep Faraneeta, the device, and the Shamblers under your control, as best you can.”

  “Copy that,” said Chuck. She turned and ran back into the tunnel.

  ***

  Asher and Sergeant Gary jogged at a quick but sustainable pace up the ramp and along the railway that led to Archon settlement. As they went, the mushroom cloud billowed and dispersed, leaving a wispy smear that marked the mining community. Asher heard confused chatter over his subnet link. It was the new Hokozana Security team, and it sounded as though they were trying to set up a defensive line along the rampart. Hold the breach, he heard, which suggested that the concrete barrier had been broken. He passed that on to Gary.

  To Asher’s surprise, the Sergeant laughed. “Yeah, we knew they’d bring that down eventually. Man, I hope they make a run for their breach.” As he spoke, a series of loud detonations shattered the odd stillness that had settled on the area since the original blast. “That’ll be the mine field. Growl’s got his head together and remembered to activate it.”

  “Mine field?” Asher asked.

  “Little surprise we kept in our back pockets. We’ve had a tactical field there for two months. It’s designed to fix any advance on the rampart and leave them open to fire from the wall and the settlement. Your destroyers will help on that count, too. No one but my folks knew about that field—not even the Meridian people.”

  As if on cue, two hardbeams lanced down from the sky, dispersing the r
emnants of the mushroom cloud with their heat. Where they struck, a bright glow lit the horizon, which was still gray with the last vestiges of the dull Archibald dawn.

  ***

  Archon settlement, when they reached it, was oddly silent, considering the explosions that had wracked the morning calm. The whole complex was overlain by a pall of fine dust. Asher pulled the hood of his skinsuit up and let the rebreather filter the air. At first, he didn’t see anyone at all. Then, he made out three men and a woman wearing the same blue and gray uniform he was clad in. They were arrayed in a semi-circle behind a rough wall made from boulders and debris. In front of them, the rampart loomed out of the dust. There was a large, ragged hole right in the center of the wall, running from its top to within a few centimeters of the base. The Hokozana Security operatives repositioned to cover the gap, and had weapons trained, but they weren’t firing. Asher saw that they hadn’t realized he and Gary were approaching, so he sent a standardized friendlies incoming from your six signal with Hokozana encryption out over the subnet. The two nearest operatives turned, glanced at him, and gave a quick thumbs up of acknowledgment. “That you, Asher?” one asked through the link. It was the second in command of the Memnon away team, a man named Banerjee.

  “Me and Sergeant Gary. What the situation?”

  “They breached fast—almost before we knew what was happening—and ran a vehicle with three bandits in.” He indicated a burning hulk that looked like it had been some kind of all-terrain vehicle. “We took that out, but I think we lost a couple in the process. One or two of yours as well,” the man said, pointing at Gary. “Then the mines started going off and the hardbeams came down. Took out their whole second wave. Now we’re waiting to see what happens. We see a lot of shimmers out there, so we think the third wave is mostly scrambled. They’re not making their move yet, though. That mine field surprised them. Nice trick, that.”

  Sergeant Gary grunted in reply.

  “They got any orbital backup?” Asher asked.

  “Nothing the destroyers have detected. Still, they had to get here somehow, right?”

  As if on cue, the subnet broke into chatter again. A single voice quickly overrode the noise. “This is Captain Zhao of the destroyer Memnon. We have incoming hostiles up here, and are redeploying to counter. Afraid you’re on your own down there until further notice.”

  “Damn,” said Banerjee. “You know the bastards out there just got the same word from their ships. The third wave will be on its way.”

  Asher looked out through the breach. There was still a lot of dust in the air, so he couldn’t make out the tell-tale shimmers that would indicate the positions of the enemy mercs. “Where do you want us?” he asked. He figured there was no point trying to find Qwadaleemia and Garueeria until the attack had been repelled, so he might as well make himself useful.

  “Check in with One-Star Pieters. Top of the rampart in the old OP.”

  Asher gave a quick thumbs up and ran for the Coin-Op observation post on the top of the rampart. He glanced back to see Sergeant Gary at his heels. “You gonna find your people?” he yelled.

  “Let’s get to the OP. I need to see what’s going on, first,” Gary shouted back.

  They sprinted up the debris-covered steps that climbed the concrete rampart. At the top, they found a squad’s worth of mixed Hokozana and Coin-Op operatives gathered in the old guard post. The Hokozana Security commander, One-Star Sergeant First Class Maria Pieters was there, along with two of her juniors and three Coin-Op mercs, including the formidable Growl. “One-Star Pieters?” said Asher. “Where do you want me?” Gary joined his operatives, who were clearly communicating on a different wave.

  “Asher.” Pieters barely spared him a glance. She was scanning the desert about a kilometer out from the rampart. Asher followed her gaze and quickly spotted a knot of shimmering air. It looked like heat distortion, but the day was still chilly and Asher knew it was the enemy, well-hidden by their scramblers. Pieters glanced at him a second time. “Since you’re here, might as well help out at the breach,” she said. She pointed along the wall to her right, where a pair of Hokozana operatives were crouched behind the parapet on the edge of the hole that had split the rampart. Asher signaled his understanding and ran down the wall to join in the defense of the breach. As he went, he readied his pulse rifle and double-checked the semi-auto pistol on his hip. It seemed like pretty feeble armament to repel a wave of scrambled mercs in whatever armored vehicles they had brought to Lutetia, but it was the best he could do.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Asher had barely checked in with the other two operatives on the rampart when the distant knot of shimmering started to ripple and break apart into smaller blobs. “They’re coming,” said the female operative to his left. Her name was Morris, and she was a woman in her thirties who had never been in combat before, having mainly been a guard on board various Fleet vessels. To Asher’s right was a man named Bojorquez, a young One-Bar not long out of the Academy on Saint Albans.

  Asher shouldered his weapon and grinned, but of course they couldn’t see that because they were all hooded. “No problem, guys. Just wait for the mines to disrupt their advance, then pick your targets. Focus on what you’re shooting at, breathe, and don’t worry about the rest.” He tried to imbue his voice with a lot more confidence than he felt. He wished he knew exactly what they were up against, but all the fast moving shimmering blobs told him was that there were at least five vehicles on the way. Under the scrambling, they could be anything from one-man ATVs to main battle tanks. “I’ve got center right,” he said.

  “Right for me,” said Bojorquez, who carried what looked like a particle rifle. “Check.”

  “Check,” said Morris, in turn. “Doubling up on center right.”

  That made sense to Asher, and he signaled his approval to both. Banerjee’s squad down at ground level would be looking straight out through the breach, and would probably focus their fire on the central shimmer. Pieters and her squad were off to his left, and would naturally focus on the left side of the enemy line. The right side would fall mainly to Asher and his companions, at least at first. Experience told him that things would soon become too chaotic for luxuries like calling your targets.

  For a moment, everything was silent. Then the world exploded. All of the Hokozana and Coin-Op operatives along the rampart began firing at their chosen targets. That included a railgun somewhere off to Asher’s left that kicked up a huge cloud of dust at the edge of his vision. It raked the left flank of the enemy line, making an earsplitting noise like constant lightning strikes a few hundred yards away. At the same time, projectiles thrown up by the enemy vehicles began to rain down on Archon settlement, causing several large explosions off to Asher’s right and rear. One fell right in the breach, temporarily curtailing fire from Banerjee’s position and throwing up so much smoke and dust that Asher was firing blind for several seconds.

  Once his field of vision had cleared, he saw that the rightmost enemy vehicle was disabled. Its shimmer had collapsed and he could see that it was a tracked armored personnel carrier, now languishing far behind the rest of the advancing line. The central shimmer had broken into two, though, so there were still five targets to deal with. He trained his pulse rifle on one of the central targets and fired, and was pleased to see the scrambler field flicker twice and vanish. The collapse of the shimmer revealed a light tank with a long-barreled projectile weapon mounted on its turret. Assuming this was the source of some of the high explosive rounds that had detonated around him, Asher concentrated his fire on the turret area. Unfortunately, his pulse rifle wasn’t really the ideal weapon against a heavily-armored target.

  The exposure of that one light tank from its protective shimmer seemed to draw the fire of several of the defenders, though. A particle stream from the rail gun and a line of heavy tracer rounds mauled the vehicle, which shuddered, then erupted into flames. Asher turned his attention to another target, hoping that his pulse rifle could at leas
t disrupt another scrambler or two, even if he wasn’t able to do much damage to the enemy vehicles.

  He had just seen another of the attacking vehicles explode in a fireball when a high explosive round landed to the left of his position. Asher felt himself lifted into the air, twisted, and thrown forward over the parapet. He tumbled down the face of the rampart, striking the sloping wall twice before landing in a cloud of dust. For several seconds, he stared straight up at the bluish-gray sky and forgot where he was. Then the nerves in his right leg and lower back began to scream at him. His skinsuit had hardened automatically and absorbed a lot of the impact, but he was pretty sure he had broken his leg just below the knee. He hoped the pain in his back wasn’t caused by spinal damage. Since there wasn’t anything he could do about it at the moment, he tried to ignore the pain and roll himself over to get a look at the battle. His back and leg protested, but his skinsuit’s built-in medipac started to flood him with painkillers, freeing his movement and helping him drag his mind away from the pain and refocus on the fight. He couldn’t walk, but he could crawl, and by some miracle he still had both of his weapons.

  ***

  Asher couldn’t have been out of the action for more than thirty seconds or so, but that was enough for the attacking vehicles to close the gap. As he rolled over, it was to see a light tank, scrambler deactivated, rolling through the breach in the rampart. Behind it were an armored personnel carrier and a light vehicle that looked like a cross between a truck and a dune buggy. He had no idea if there were any other enemy vehicles left. All around him was a cloud of dust.

  He tried to shoulder his pulse rifle, but he couldn’t move his left arm. Dropping the rifle, he fumbled around with his right hand until he got a hold of his semi-auto pistol and was able to draw it from its hip holster. He crawled toward the breach in the rampart, dragging himself toward the rapidly disappearing dune truck.