Outside, the monsoonal rain had lightened off to drizzle, and the sky was glowing crimson in the sunset. It made for a striking image, the vibrant green of the grass, the white halogens of the lamps, the black of Espa’s sky-rises. Vasco ignored all of it. There was no time to waste. He needed to come up with a workable plan, prepare for it, and leave for the space port in epsilon sector in a few hours.
He came across Burnett first, lying on the grass next to a SPHINX autosentry turret. His long-barrelled railgun was trained on the towers of Espa ahead. One hand rested on the stock next to his helmet; the other held the pistol grip loosely. Vasco’s IHD informed him that the sniper had loaded the railgun with API-85 incendiary airburst rounds, a low-velocity munition that, with a good headwind and a lot of luck, could slip through naval-grade shielding maybe two times out of ten.
‘See anything, Range?’ Vasco asked.
‘Zilch,’ Burnett replied. ‘Few civs watching the fireworks. No cobs. Must be further north.’
Vasco nodded. ‘Come on. Briefing time.’
‘Sir.’
It took five minutes to rally the team and shepherd them into an empty tent. Vasco grabbed an ammunition crate and sat on it; the team formed a semicircle around him. He pulled a coin-sized holoprojector from his webbing and activated it, and a real-time UNAF net map of Espa flickered into existence.
‘Let me guess: they’re going in at dawn,’ Kgosi said angrily.
‘Goddamn it Kgosi, would you shut the fuck up and let the Captain speak? Jarle growled, smacking the corporal on the back of his helmet.
‘Enough,’ Vasco said wearily. ‘Lids off.’
The team obliged and removed their helmets, revealing a perfect representation of the UN’s pan-cultural mix. Both Kgosi and Jarle were black, the former from Bospen, the latter from Irene’s World; Akiya was Kansubashi, and a woman, and bald; Sev, perennially deprived of good sunlight, had the pale, angular features of a Vargonroth native, while Burnett was a thin, low-grav mutant—or so they liked to tease him. Vasco himself had the caramel-coloured skin of a Beta Thanian, along with the innate calm that that violent world instilled. Beta Thani was one of the most inhospitable colonies in the UN, after all; its citizens made calm, collected commanders.
‘I’ve spoken with OC Theatre and the other actuals. Holbourn isn’t actually that bad,’ he added mildly, ‘but his priority is retaking the city and freeing up the civs inside. He won’t stop us, but he’s not going to change his plans either.’
‘Of course not,’ Kgosi muttered. Jarle glowered, while Vasco tactfully ignored him. He picked his battles with Kgosi.
‘That doesn’t leave us with very many options, I’m afraid,’ Vasco said. The holoprojector updated with planned timings and movements of the main UN force, indicated by blue arrows. ‘They’re going in at first light. There’s a shield generator in sector gamma which 6 Battalion is going to neutralise. The second that shield is down, our gun line is going to saturate all northern sectors with high-yield ordnance. Tank-busters.’
‘What are the cobs packing?’ Sev asked.
‘ALR-50s,’ Vasco replied. ‘Spiders.’ There was a collective hiss. With their Hailstorm anti-personnel cannons, the robotic tanks were infamous throughout UNAF.
‘The space port is in epsilon,’ Jarle said, pointing to the holomap. ‘They’ll kill our target.’
‘Probably,’ Vasco said. ‘Which means we have two options: one, we go in ahead of the main force, full refrac, and snatch Almeida before the arty hits; or two, we go in with the main force, after the bombing run, and hope that neither our guys nor the cobs kill him before we get there.’
The team contemplated this for a moment. Eventually, Akiya said, ‘That’s a shitty set of options, Chief.’
‘I’m all ears for a third,’ Vasco replied.
Another silence.
‘We’ll have to go in ahead,’ Sev said. ‘Take a transport to the shield, use the drones for deadzoning. We can cover the ground more quickly.’
‘OCT won’t give us drone cover, they’re trying to penetrate the cob deadzones before dawn,’ Vasco said. ‘All electronic warfare resources are tied up.’
‘Our air has its own drone cover,’ Sev replied. ‘The Manticore can drop us east, here, low’n’slow. We’ll make our way in by foot. Stay east of the North 5 Traverse. Could reach epsilon, what…’ he checked the time on his IHD, ‘by midnight?’
Vasco shook his head slowly. ‘We’re on foot from here on in. I don’t want the cobs seeing a black hole appearing on their sensors flying on a straight blueline vector for twenty klicks up their ass. They’ll blow us out the sky.’
Sev paused, unfazed by the rejection. ‘If we hoof it—’
‘We aren’t gonna have enough time,’ Kgosi said. ‘Shit, Cap; we’re on the clock as it is.’
Vasco shrugged. ‘That’s the plan Kgosi.’
‘We’re only going to have a few hours,’ Sev said. ‘Maybe less.’
‘Where did JIC say Almeida was being held?’ Akiya asked quietly.
Vasco enhanced the picture so that they were looking at a full-fidelity, three-dimensional model of the space port and surrounding environs. ‘Here,’ he said, highlighting a cluster of buildings to the south east. ‘The maintenance sublevels of the south east terminal. That’s the latest. We won’t know until we’re closer.’
Jarle sucked his teeth. ‘It’s not a lot to go on, sir.’
‘It’s not,’ Vasco agreed. ‘Sev, show me the North 5 Traverse again.’ Sev obliged, manipulating the holo. Vasco studied it for a few seconds. ‘All right. We’ll take the 5b, here. If it’s too hot, we’ll cut east. We’ll put Range in one of these towers, they look like civ blocks. What’s this one?’
‘Connery Tower. Habs,’ Range replied. ‘Good arcs.’
‘Fine. You’ll be on overwatch. I don’t want to stick a drone in the air, not that deep into cob country.’
‘Sounds good to me, Chief.’
‘I bet,’ Jarle muttered. Burnett shot him an irritated look.
‘The rest of us will go in here, down this maintenance hatch. It’s designed for bots, but it has an accessway for redundancy. We’ll take it all the way into maintenance sublevel three and reassess once we’re in. Are there any questions?’
‘If we fuck this up, are they pulling the plug on us?’ Kgosi asked.
Vasco clenched his fists. Their first mission had been a failure. It still stung. If they failed their second operation too, JIC might well pull the plug on VIPER entirely. He was keenly aware of how much hung on the success of recovering Almeida. In fact he was worried how far he might go to ensure the mission succeeded.
‘Focus, K, stop worrying about that now. Almeida is all that matters. He’s counting on us. He’s got a family, goddamn it, and he’s a senior goddamn official, and he’s a fucking human! That’s what counts, all right? We look after our own. Understood?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Kgosi replied.
‘All of you?’
‘Yes, sir!’ the rest of the team shouted.
‘All right. Let’s move out. Kgosi, a word.’
They had been moving for fifteen minutes before the monsoon started again in earnest. Above, thick black clouds boomed with thunder and raindrops the size of grapes lashed down and saturated the already boggy earth. Without their night vision and tactical overlays, they would have been hard-pressed to see anything in the deep, ink-black darkness. With the power down in Espa, the city loomed in the distant night like a cyclopean graveyard.
They pressed north east out of the UNAF base in the same configuration as before, eschewing roads and trackways for fear they were being monitored and instead heading over open country. They used their Mantix exoskeletons to increase their running speed, but it was still slow going. The earth was as soft and penetrable as a sponge cake, and was frequently broken up by long tracts of water. Although they were technically still well within the UN exclusion zone, they were very much in provar-contro
lled territory, which forced them to make frequent stops for electronic warfare sweeps.
By the time they passed through the easternmost edge of the shield dome—an odd, unsettling feeling that left a coppery taste in their mouths—it was well past midnight.
‘Range,’ Vasco said, checking the time on his IHD. ‘Scout west to the N5T and see how busy it is. No drones.’
‘I don’t like it,’ Jarle said immediately over a private channel. ‘They’ll be using the arterials for cob armour.’
Vasco wrinkled his nose. He knew that, of course, but it had taken them much longer to reach the city than he’d anticipated. Now Sev’s idea of using the Manticore didn’t seem so ridiculous. ‘For God’s sake, be careful,’ he added to Burnett.
‘You got it, Chief,’ the sniper murmured, and peeled off.
The city rose above them like canyon walls, huge blocky edifices of matte black and grey, once luminescent with twenty-four hour advertising holos and now conspicuously blank. Municipal transport tracks, hyperloops and elevated walkways threaded through the towers hundreds of metres above street level, still and silent. Ahead of them stretched the wide, uncluttered streets of a predesigned and purpose-built UN colony, fronted with hab lobbies and cafes. Beneath, drains gurgled with the excess rainwater.
They moved north through a series of back streets. Vasco desperately wanted to get a drone airborne to map the streets ahead, but with the provar saturating the city with LRIS, he was afraid they would be detected. Instead he used an orbital map provided by the UNS Phoenix, and marked the route using IHD markers.
‘We’ve got three hours before first light,’ Jarle said over the wideband. He spoke quietly, but it was out of habit rather than necessity. Their Mantix suits, as well as being refraction shielded, were also projecting audio-damper fields to erase the sounds of their footsteps and—heaven forbid—their railguns.
‘Where is everyone? This place is a ghost town,’ Kgosi said over the wideband.
‘Look up,’ Akiya said simply. Vasco did, and saw, high above them, hands and arms hanging silently out of hab windows, clutching all manner of containers.
‘They’re collecting rainwater,’ Sev said. ‘Hundreds of them.’
‘Thousands,’ Akiya replied.
‘Eyes front,’ Jarle growled.
They pressed on through the eerily silent streets. There were more signs of conflict here; corpses in the gutters, skeletonised by the elements, and rusty, burned-out cruiser hulks. The walls were pockmarked, too, from railgun fire, alongside black streaks of phase burn.
‘Talk to me Range,’ Vasco said over the link. He pulled up the feed from Burnett’s helmet camera on his HUD, but provar electronic warfare pods were jamming up the signal. The picture was so fuzzed with static that he cancelled it in disgust.
‘I’m on the NT5 now,’ the sniper replied quietly. It was funny; despite the near-infallibility of the audio-damper field—not to mention the hermetic seal of the Mantix helmet—no-one in UNAF could quite bring themselves to talk at normal volume.
‘Cobs?’
‘This whole area is DZ’d. Could be clear, could be refrac’d out the ass. I’m not picking out any reds, but that doesn’t mean anything.’
‘Shit,’ Vasco muttered to himself.
‘I don’t like it, Cap,’ Jarle said again over a private link.
‘I heard you the first time,’ Vasco said. ‘We are way behind schedule. If—’
‘Wait,’ Burnett said.
‘Hold it, K,’ Vasco said, adrenaline coursing through his guts. The team came to a stop and took a knee. Vasco could see the faint green outlines of Kgosi, Jarle and Sev ahead, crouched low in the roadside gutter, weapons up. He would have given anything to task one of the hundred UN drones circling overhead to give them a warm-body scan of the surrounding streets.
‘Range,’ Vasco said. Now he was practically whispering, too.
There was no reply.
‘Motherfucker, come on,’ Kgosi hissed.
‘Get off comms!’ Jarle snapped.
They waited. Rain guttered down around them, providing a constant blanket of white noise. Vasco looked upwards, to see the hands still there, like a tangle of overhead tree branches, silently gathering rainwater and totally oblivious to the invisible troopers below them.
‘VIPER One-Six, come in,’ Vasco said after another twenty seconds, as if somehow using Burnett’s official callsign would make a difference.
There was another painful silence. Above the roar of the rain, Vasco’s pulse thumped in his ears. Thunder boomed overhead. His hand subconsciously drifted to the small drone clipped about his waist.
‘Ah shit, he’s got me,’ Burnett’s voice suddenly cut over the comlink. Seconds later, a skull-splittingly loud shriek emanated from the next street, echoing off the walls of the surrounding habs. Above, the water-gathering hands withdrew so quickly that a few containers were dropped. They shattered wetly against the street.
‘Shit!’ several people said at once.
‘Range, sitrep!’ Vasco shouted.
‘Spider!’ Burnett roared in reply.
Vasco’s blood turned to ice. One of the provari ALR-50s had been sitting on the NT5. The noise had been its Hailstorm antipersonnel cannon. With a full suite of slaved targetfinders, enhanced, full-spectrum optics, DB5 LRIS-saturator electronic warfare pods and twin-linked RRGs firing a million liquid-core tungsten slugs a minute, Burnett was living on borrowed time.
‘Stop moving!’ Jarle shouted.
‘Goddamn it,’ Vasco breathed, grabbing his personal drone from his belt. They had tens of seconds before the Spider drew a bead on Range. The heavy rain would be disrupting its air pressure sensors, and their Mantix refraction would keep him shielded from the electromagnetic spectrum for a short while. Burnett’s best bet, though it seemed terrifyingly counter-intuitive, was to stay very, very still.
‘Oh fuck,’ Range moaned. ‘Help me, Cap.’
‘We’re coming, Range, shut the fuck up and let us think,’ Jarle growled. ‘Captain, we can use drones to DZ the area. Get the magma pulse on the Spider at close range.’
Vasco’s gauntlet was already gripping his drone, ready to throw it into the air. They had five between them, one each, which together could provide a decent level of disruption to the Spider’s sensors. But it would also bring the whole Ascendancy army on top of them.
‘Cap,’ Range whispered.
‘Where is it, Range?’ Akiya asked. ‘Send us a marker.’
A few seconds later their HUDs populated with a solitary red chevron. The Spider was a hundred metres south of the junction of the North 5 Traverse and the east-west expressway.
‘He’s running out of time, Chief,’ Kgosi said.
A high-pitched warbling cut across their comlink bandwidth—residue signals from the ALR-50’s scanners. It was hunting foreign bandwidths, trying to hijack their own network to see where Burnett was hiding. For the moment their countermeasures were masking their signals, passing them off as background chatter.
For the moment.
‘It’s flushing him out,’ Akiya said.
‘Goddamn it,’ Vasco said, off-channel. He could picture the tank in his head, its electronic warfare pods searching for Burnett like giant robotic eyes.
‘I’m bugging out,’ Burnett said, his voice taut like a guitar string about to snap.
‘Range, stay the fuck where you are!’ Jarle snapped. ‘Captain, what are your orders?’
Vasco’s other hand clenched around the pistol grip of his railgun. If they helped Range they could scupper the mission—and he couldn’t take another mission failure. But he wasn’t about to abandon the man either. Almeida might have been a high-value target, but Range was part of VIPER.
‘Goddamn it,’ he sighed angrily, and threw the drone into the air.
The Hailstorm cannon started up again, unleashing another long shriek of rounds—then another, and another. The long, echoing repor
t of the guns was accompanied by the sound of smashed glass and masonry cascading to the ground.
‘Range? Range! Respond!’ Vasco shouted.
‘I’m cutting west,’ Kgosi said.
‘Stay where the fuck you are until the Chief orders you otherwise, Corporal!’ Jarle snapped.
‘Damn it Range, on comms, now!’ Vasco shouted.
‘The civs! Its firing warning shots at the civs! They’re throwing things at it from the windows!’ Burnett replied.
‘All right, stay put, we’re coming to you,’ Vasco said.
‘We are?’ Sev asked.
‘Need that pulser, Sev,’ Vasco said. ‘Everyone, drones in the air. I want a thirty second DZ teed up. Range, when I tell you, you lay down some fire, understand?’
‘Are you crazy?’ Range shouted.
‘Shut up!’ Vasco snapped. Another burst of fire from the Hailstorm scythed into the air. The street around them flashed stroboscopically. ‘K, move north, read marker!’ he shouted, and sent the team a HUD marker. It took them to the junction of the expressway just north of the Spider, keeping one street between them. Above, their drones, co-ordinating via the Hypervect defence grid, prepared to provide deadzone cover.
The team broke cover and sprinted north. At every junction they passed, the sounds of jeering from the local civilians and of improvised missiles hitting the ground reached Vasco’s ears. They were putting themselves in tremendous danger; the provar did not draw a distinction between civilians and soldiers like the UN did, and the Spider would happily massacre its impromptu assailants.
‘Come on,’ Vasco said, his boots splashing against the pavement. The municipal drain pumps had failed along with the power, and the street had a three-centimetre skin of rainwater.
They reached the junction of the expressway. In the next street, the Hailstorm groaned into action three more times, showering the street with glass.
‘Oh shit, civ casualties!’ Range shouted.
‘Motherfucker,’ Kgosi hissed.
‘I’ve got bodies in the road, shit,’ Range babbled.
‘Can it! We’re coming!’ Jarle said.
Vasco ignored all of them, slapping Sev on the shoulder to let him know he was right behind him. The team had bunched up at the edge of one of the towering black hab blocks. The glass wall to their right revealed a broad, unlit and unmanned lobby.
‘Sev, close the gap fast,’ Vasco said, gripping the man by the shoulder pad. ‘Trigger the DZ only when you have to, but your refrac won’t last against its saturators so don’t hold back. We’ll use Range to draw it off and a few micromortars if we have to. Hit the EWPs first with the pulser. Once it’s blind, hit the Hailstorms. Akiya, ready with that APR. Plasmastats are priority one. Understood?’
‘Sir,’ came the unquestioning replies.
‘Go, now.’
Sev broke cover, cutting west under the guttering overhead expressway, then jinking south and sprinting straight for the Spider down the North 5 Traverse. Vasco moved behind him as far as the junction and leaned out to watch. Kgosi moved in front of him, unhesitatingly taking over Sev’s role as close protection, and put a hand on Vasco’s chest, ready to shove him backwards into cover if the tank clocked them. To his right, Akiya crawled into the road and rested her assault plasma rifle on its bipod, lining it up on the Spider’s rear plasmastats.
Vasco’s heart leapt as he set eyes on the Spider for the first time, a two-metre tall, six-legged tank bristling with two huge RRGs and a host of electronic warfare pods. Its armour panels were currently set to urban grey, and without his tactical overlay and enhanced optics, the thing would have been invisible in the dark street in spite of its size. A dozen corpses, badly mangled by the Hailstorm cannon and the fall, lay on the floor around its feet among piles of masonry and shattered glass.
Sev had less than twenty metres to go before the Spider’s LRIS saturators broke through his refraction shielding. The drones’ Hypervect defence grid picked up the slack within microseconds, creating a sensor deadzone thirty metres wide around him, but that didn’t stop the Spider’s chassis whirling around and spraying the road with its Hailstorm cannons anyway. Two parallel, metre-deep trenches immediately appeared in the asphalt, cutting through the road and into the pipes and cabling beneath and spraying the rainy air with powdered bedrock.
‘Range, now!’ Vasco shouted as Sev leapt with all his exo-powered might to the left, avoiding the Spider’s starboard cannon by a hair’s breadth. At the far end of the traverse, Range lit up with his railgun, battering the Spider’s rear armour with hypervelocity tungsten slugs. The Spider paused, seemingly unsure what to do, before it rotated on its axis and prepared to blow Burnett to pieces.
‘Range, get out!’ Sev roared as he leapt on to the Spider and pulled himself up on to the roof. The Hailstorm cannon thundered into life again, tracking the faint green outline of Burnett two hundred metres down the road; then there was a blinding flash, and a thousand globules of superheated liquid metal fired from a cyclical containment field of electromagnets and blasted a metre-wide crater into the Spider’s primary electronic warfare pod.
The tank shrieked. The wideband suddenly filled with demented data chatter as different EWP circuits in the Spider shorted. There was another blast from Sev’s magma pulse, and one of the tank’s Hailstorm cannons clattered to the street, hissing where the rain touched the twisted, incandescent metal.
‘Firing,’ Akiya said calmly. She squeezed the trigger of her assault plasma rifle just as Sev was jumping clear of the tank, and a stream of phosphorescent blue bolts fizzed and zapped through the air and penetrated the Spider’s rear armour where its primary plasmastat was. The tank emitted another series of tortured shrieks, before its legs buckled anticlimactically and the body sank to the floor with an earth-trembling thud. A thick, foul-smelling plume of black smoke emitted from the engine cowling.
Silence descended. Vasco’s heart was pounding. He watched, waiting for the Spider to roar back into action. Then there was another flash from Sev’s magma pulse, and the tank’s second Hailstorm cannon span free of the chassis and clattered to the street, smoking and glowing. Full spectrum chatter screamed across the wideband as the Spider’s electronic warfare pods died and sent a high-powered flash of information to any nearby friendly forces. The message was clear enough: I’ve been killed! Enemy nearby!
‘Sev, get Range,’ Vasco said, slumping to the floor and resting his back against the corner of the building. Their drones were returning, a flock of weaponised insects burning hot from their efforts to intercept the Spider’s calls for help. Vasco snatched his out the air, and clipped it back against his webbing.
He scanned the orbital map on his HUD. It would take them another hour of careful scouting to reach sector epsilon, where the spaceport was. He cursed himself and his haste. Jarle had been right; all the arterial accessways would be being watched by Ascendancy armour. In trying to cut corners, he had only added to the mission timer—and vastly increased the odds of Almeida being prematurely executed
‘Range?’ he asked over the wideband. He looked up as Sev returned.
He was carrying Burnett’s long railgun.
‘He’s dead,’ Sev said.
‘What?’ Vasco asked, along with everyone else on the team.
‘He’s dead. Fully. Spider greased him.’
Vasco stared ahead. How could this have happened? The plan had worked—they’d taken out a fucking ALR-50 for God’s sake!
‘He can’t be,’ Vasco said. ‘I saw him running.’
‘Cap; he’s dead,’ Sev repeated firmly. He dropped the long railgun on the floor next to Vasco. Burnett’s hand was still on the pistol grip, finger on trigger. Just below the wrist, his arm had been raggedly severed by the Spider’s Hailstorm. The gun itself bore a few twisted holes from where the liquid-core slugs had perforated it.
‘Motherfucking Range,’ Jarle growled. ‘That Spider wasn’t even refrac’d. He should h
ave seen it a klick off.’
‘Never mind motherfucking Range, what about the motherfucking cob fuckers that killed him!’ Kgosi snarled. He threw a punch at the hab window, his exo-powered arm easily passing straight through the thick, heat-treated pane. Glass shattered against the wet ground. Even Jarle didn’t stop him.
Vasco didn’t take his eyes off the severed hand. He’d sent Range to his death. He’d ordered him to scout out a main accessway, despite Jarle warning him that cob armour would be watching the arterials. Just to save some time.
‘We need to move, Cap,’ Sev said. ‘They’ll be on us like flies on shit.’
Vasco looked up. ‘Shit,’ he muttered. He could see boards of enquiry stretching away ahead of him, all the way up to Fiona Tavistock, head of EFFECT. He could see himself standing on Burnett’s parents’ doorstep, explaining to them what had happened. He could see his captaincy being used as an example of what not to do, taught to new VIPER teams by drawn-faced gunnery sergeant majors. They’d all exchange glances, wondering why this “Vasco” character ever ordered his squad marksman, unaided, ahead on a major arterial accessway deep inside enemy-controlled territory.
He accessed his IHD and selected Granite, a SPECWAR-developed program that suppressed emotional reflexes and heightened operational awareness. Immediately his guilt melted away like ice under a flamethrower. There would be time for a debrief later, time to go over what they could have done differently. But they still had Almeida to save—only now the entire Ascendancy army in Espa would be looking out for them.
‘DGR later,’ Jarle said on the wideband. Debrief, Grief and Relief. Despite the fact the sergeant had said it on the team channel, it had clearly been aimed at Vasco.
‘All right. K, take point,’ Vasco said, standing up. Sev, who had spent years in SPECWAR and logged thousands of hours on black ops, slapped him on the shoulder. He understood.
‘Fucking Range,’ Kgosi muttered, jogging ahead, back to the expressway overhang. The rain was lightening off and the orbital pylons of the spaceport could be seen in the distance, stretching into the night sky like the power cables of heaven. Jarle fell in behind Kgosi, then Sev, and finally Vasco brought up the rear with Akiya.
He looked back briefly, to see UN civilians moving into the road like sprites, silently recovering their dead.