The Bad Company Page 15

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Fleeter had to duck as well as bend her knees severely to fit in the passageway. She figured out quickly that these were maintenance shafts and that The Beast was never intended to carry personnel, even those as tiny as the Crenellians.

  “Come on, you little bitch, tell me your secrets,” she pleaded with the mechanical monster. She traversed the tank from one side to the other and then decided that she would head aft. In an unmanned system, she figured there would be as much armor as possible between a potential enemy and the brains of the weapon.

  She expected to find a computer terminal. If it didn’t look like what they had on the War Axe, then she didn’t know what to look for. She hoped it was obvious. The more she crawled through The Beast, the more worried she became.

  Two grenades and a knife, she thought. How can this suck more?

  ***

  Slugs pinged from the tank’s armor as the Podder army maintained a steady volume of fire despite their staggering losses.

  The tank’s energy beams were wiping out wide swaths of Podders. Kae and his team were attacking the weapons as they fired, creating some spectacular explosions. Not all of the weapons died easily.

  The tank was an armored behemoth, and it wasn’t going quietly. The Beast jerked and bucked in an attempt to throw its riders from its back.

  The magnetic boot locks kept the mechs steady, but the wild gyrations slowed their movement to better firing positions. Kae was surprised that such an immense vehicle could move as it did.

  And the Podders kept coming. Wave upon wave, throwing their bodies into the line of fire.

  I really need you to shut this thing down, Kae told Fleeter.

  Working on it, she replied.

  Work faster.

  The mechs’ railguns barked and spit. Molten shrapnel flew in wide arcs from weapon mounts that refused to give way. Duncan’s suit was the first to redline. He saw the warning almost too late. He took two steps and ducked. Then the suit powered down. He stayed inside the suit, praying that the sun would brighten.

  Praeter was next and then Cantor. Each locked up and remained where they were. The tank couldn’t fire at them, but they couldn’t fire either.

  Kaeden hadn’t been engaged as they had, but his red light was flashing. On the ground in the distance, he could see the power supply they had to dump when The Beast attacked them.

  It wasn’t a question of who, but when. They needed it now, so Kaeden ran for the edge of the tank and jumped off, staying low to the ground to avoid the largest of the energy weapons. He zigzagged anew, accelerating toward the power supply, swinging wide as he ran past and picked it up with one hand, but it threw his balance off.

  Kae stumbled and stopped for only a moment to get his feet under him.

  The kinetic round hit him in the chest, throwing him through the air as the power supply tumbled from his armored hand. The light on his HUD burned a solid red for a moment before the suit powered down. Kaeden gasped for air as he lay on his back, trapped within the suit.

  ***

  Kimber used her small comm device to summon three of the drop ships. They had secreted themselves away from the action. Armored, but unarmed, they were strictly for transporting the company. If the War Axe had been able to remain in orbit, the drop ships could have ferried equipment and resupply back and forth from the planet’s surface.

  The shuttles were boxy, about fifteen meters long, five meters wide, with stubby, high-mounted wings. They were flown by an Entity Intelligence, but had a manual mode, too. They had a rear ramp instead of a door because of their cargo purpose in addition to ferrying personnel.

  With a fourteen-hundred-kilometer jaunt, there was no reason to walk.

  The small shuttles approached quickly, flying low to the ground, the EI controlling them using tactical procedures to minimize the effectiveness of ground fire. Even though the enemy wasn’t active, the entire area had been declared a combat zone.

  The drop ships slowed, flared, and two of them landed softly. The third turned and raced in the direction that Terry and Char had gone.

  “Load up!” Kimber called. Timmons and his people held their ground within the cavern, firing randomly into the tunnels as the platoon scrambled up the wall and outside. “First and second squads!”

  Kimber pointed to the first shuttle. The third squad leader waved his people to the second shuttle.

  Kim cupped her hands around her mouth. “Timmons, Joseph, let’s go!” she yelled into the hole in the ground. The canister had been emptied, packs were stuffed to overflowing, and the vehicle had been buttoned up, just in case they’d be able to recover it later.

  Waste not, want not, but if they had to leave it behind, they’d bill the client for the cost. Kimber didn’t worry about it in either case because they hadn’t finished the war, yet.

  Joseph, Petricia, and the Podder climbed up the steep slope. For having stumpy legs and a wide shell, the alien was surprisingly agile, looking to have no problem at all getting itself out of the hole.

  Next up, Timmons, Sue, Shonna, and Merrit fired a final volley before racing toward the slope and out of the hole. Kimber pointed toward the second shuttle where the Podder was climbing aboard.

  She frowned as she watched because the Podder made for a tight squeeze. Timmons and Sue ran up the shuttle’s rear deck and jumped, landing on Bundin’s shell. He reached out his tentacle arms so they could grab on.

  Shonna and Merrit followed suit and the four rode on the Podder. The rear deck closed as Kimber continued to watch.

  “Did we adopt that guy?” she asked. A slug hit her in the back. Shocked out of her reverie, she bolted for the first shuttle.

  ***

  “Get on!” Terry demanded. The Were had changed back into human form and had already boarded the drop ship. Terry could see the other two shuttles approaching. The fourth shuttle remained concealed in a valley far away and would pick up Kaeden and his people when they were ready.

  The Crenellians had different ideas. They understood the concept of mobile combat, but never accepted the premise that it meant they had to move.

  “Get the fuck in there!” Terry screamed at the bald alien. Tik’Po’Rout stood there without changing his facial expression. Eight other Crenellians were equally stoic. Terry loomed and waved a fist in the leader’s face.

  Char was losing patience. Christina’s was already gone. She clenched and unclenched her fists, waiting for the word to beat one of the Crenellians senseless.

  Marcie walked casually into the group of aliens and picked two up, one under each arm, and boarded the shuttle. Char grabbed two, Christina wrapped two up, and Terry swept up the last three.

  He dumped his three in the shuttle and stood at the edge of the ramp after he ordered it to close, in case one of the Crenellians ran for it.

  But they didn’t. “What’s with you guys? You act fearless but then when it comes to any kind of physical engagement, you’re useless.”

  “We don’t fight,” the first alien replied.

  “I gathered that. What’s your name?”

  “I am Ankh’Po’Turn,” he replied.

  “Well, Ankh, we’re going to see your buddies and then we’re going to have a conversation, and then we’re going to destroy every Crenellian computer on this planet if your boys don’t stop the war.”

  “My name is Ankh’Po’Turn. We told you that the failsafe is to keep fighting. If you destroy the computers, then the war machines will continue until there is no life left on this planet,” the Crenellian said.

  “Why would anyone build such a thing, Ankh? Back on Earth, we used to have a concept called mutually assured destruction, and you know what we found out? MAD was valid. When the nukes started flying, everyone lost. It was bad. Out here in the universe, a gazillion miles from home, we find the same stupid shit. SMEDLEY!”

  “Yes, Colonel Walton,” the EI answered through the ship’s speakers.

  “Any progress with the Crenel
lian database?”

  “Yes.” Smedley did not expound.

  Terry rolled his eyes. “Maybe there’s something you could share with me, make me feel like our efforts have had some value?”

  “The schematics are incomplete, but we have enough to send to Team BMW for further analysis.”

  “That’s not very motivating,” Terry said, frowning. He held Char’s hand as they flew, something he’d been doing for nearly as long as they’d been together. They held hands like teenagers, two parts of one whole.

  “I guess we’ll just have to get you more data,” Char added. “I’m sure the headquarters will have details that the outpost was lacking.”

  Terry nodded. The Crenellians remained impassive, standing where they’d been deposited within the shuttle. They shifted as the ship flew close to the ground, maintaining an irregular flight profile to foil air defense systems.

  “Marcie, get a hold of Kae and find out what’s going on,” Terry ordered.

  TH closed his eyes and rested his head on Char’s shoulder. She leaned into him and both soon fell asleep.

  ***

  “You SUCK!” Fleeter screamed her frustration within the bowels of The Beast. She had been from front to back and side to side, crawling as fast as she could, and had not found a single thing that looked like it was important.

  Large sections of the tank were solid and blocked her access. She assumed what she was looking for was somewhere in those sealed areas.

  You don’t need to get in there. You only need to get the grenade in there, she told herself as she skirted the section in the middle of the tank. It was where she would have put anything important.

  The air was stale without ventilation. The greater she exerted herself, the more tiring it became. The noise of battle dulled. Ammunition racks cycled, power generators buzzed and crackled, the tank’s drive motors whined as they pushed the massive vehicle across the Poddern landscape.

  Fleeter sat in the small corridor and sighed heavily. Only close my eyes for a moment, she negotiated with herself, but the volume of fire continued. Her delay was costing lives.

  If she didn’t use the grenades, then she guaranteed the assault would continue. The Beast continued to sow wanton death.

  She yelled her anger, trying to summon the adrenaline to give her energy. She looked high and low, finally finding a gap near the low ceiling. Fleeter tried to look into it, but couldn’t tell how far it went. She had no better option.

  She pulled the pin and thrust the grenade through. She heard it clank against something and rattle on its way downward. She scooted down the passageway, around the corner, and as far in the other direction as she could go.

  The explosion came as a low rumble that soon died away.

  “Fuck,” she complained, sitting down.

  And then the tank heaved as secondary explosions rattled the vehicle. Fleeter pulled the hood of her ship suit over her head as the fireball billowed around the corner, filling the corridor in both directions.

  Somewhere in the vast Federation

  “Mister President,” Nathan said with a big smile. “I’m so pleased that you took my call.”

  The Crenellian president looked at the screen, but didn’t move. Nathan wondered if the image had frozen until someone walked past in the background.

  “I’ll get to the point because clearly, you are a busy man. It has been brought to my attention that there are planetary defensive systems getting used against the Bad Company and that they are of Crenellian manufacture. We will need the codes to disable them to continue our operations.”

  “No,” the president replied. “We need you to destroy those systems utterly, so the Tiskers lose their access to them.”

  Nathan rubbed his jaw. “You sold weaponry to Tissikinnon Four, and now you need us to destroy that weaponry. That was not in the contract, Mister President. Our mission is to end the war, not conduct a hardware purge.”

  “Destroying that hardware will help you achieve your goal. Honestly, if I had known that I was hiring amateurs, then there would have been no contract at all,” the president answered.

  Nathan leaned closer to the monitor. “Mister President, once our people take care of business on Tissikinnon Four, they’ll be coming to visit you, so you can personally explain your duplicity. I doubt they’ll accept your flippant answers and your arrogance. If you want to be the galaxy’s arms dealer, that’s your business, but when we go up against your equipment, that becomes our business. What if we shared samples of all your hardware and the codes to crack them with everyone in the Federation? How well do you think your business would do then?”

  “You wouldn’t. You don’t have the codes,” the president responded, still looking down his nose at the monitor.

  “Our people are very resourceful. When they leave the planet, I expect they’ll be carrying a full ship of your hardware, including all your computers.” Nathan leaned back, took a drink of water, and then crossed his arms.

  “They can take whatever they want from the Tiskers.”

  “That’s not how this is going to work. They’ll take it from the Crenellians because only their computers will have all the codes. You can disable the systems, or we’ll take everything you own.”

  “I won’t pay!” the president replied in a slightly elevated tone.

  “I think you will. Once we have the equipment and the codes, you’ll pay anything we ask to keep that from becoming public knowledge.”

  “That’s blackmail. You’re not a military for hire; you’re a pack of criminals!”

  “You hold onto that thought and see how it serves you when we put your entire dealings on full display before the bulk of the Federation. No one will be looking at us. All eyes will be on you and your shady dealings.” Nathan stopped for a moment before continuing. “You know what I like about you, Mister President? Not a goddamn thing. Have a nice day.”

  Nathan signed off. He had expected intransigence from the Crenellian president and didn’t let it upset him.

  He knew that Terry would take things differently, and Nathan decided that if the War Axe wanted to pay a visit to the Crenellian home world, no one would stop them.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Kaeden? Why aren’t you answering? Marcie became more worried and frustrated with each attempt to contact her husband.

  Praeter, Duncan, Cantor, can any of you hear me? she asked, using her comm chip, targeting the members of Kaeden’s team.

  Cantor here, ma’am. Me, Duncan, and Praeter are out of power. Gomez and Kelly are still fighting the tank. Capples took a hit and is down. Fleeter is out of her suit and inside the tank. There was a series of explosions just a few seconds ago. I hope they do the trick. This tank is a mother. Kaeden left the tank to get the power source. He’s out there and down. We’ve moved where I can’t see him any longer. I’m sorry. We’re safe on the tank, but off of it, we’re subject to the full firepower at its command.

  Marcie didn’t answer. She jumped up and worked her way to where Terry and Char were sitting. She shook them vigorously before yelling in their faces. “We have to go back!”

  “What?” Terry mumbled. He’d fallen sound asleep in mere seconds and was struggling to come back to life.

  “Kae is down. The others are out of power. There are only two out of the eight left fighting. We can’t leave them like that.”

  Terry leaned forward, putting his head between his knees. “FUCK!” he yelled at the floor of the ship. He stood up, took a step toward the ramp, and pounded on it with his bare fist.

  “You know that we can’t go back,” he whispered.

  “Why the fuck not?” Marcie demanded.

  “A tank. With air defenses, with anti-personnel weapon systems. If six of the eight mechs were put out of action by that thing, what would we be able to do?”

  Marcie gritted her teeth and glared at her father-in-law. “That’s my husband and the father of my children.”

  “He’s my son, and they are all ou
r people,” Terry replied, grabbing her shoulder to hold it and look into her eyes. Marcie tried to shrug off his hand, but he held on tightly. “Our best option is to get those fuckers in their headquarters to shut the damn thing down.”

  Terry let go, and Marcie worked her way back to her seat, her head hung low.

  Kaeden? Son? Terry tried his comm chip. He figured they would soon be out of range.

  “Smedley, pick up the pace. I want to be at that headquarter ten minutes ago,” Terry demanded. Smedley didn’t bother answering. A small piece of the EI flew the ship, communicating with Smedley on the War Axe as needed. Despite the seeming dichotomy, Smedley had been following the conversation within the drop ship and understood exactly what Terry Henry Walton was asking.

  ***

  Fleeter waited for the smoke to clear, but it didn’t. The corridors were filled with a dense black that boiled from the hole in the tank’s mid-section. She listened and the machinery running The Beast seemed to slow, fewer engines were running. One weapon system continued to rage.

  One of the energy weapons was drawing everything that the tank had to offer. The Beast had never planned on living forever, only sowing as much death and destruction as its power and stores could provide.

  It was hurt, but it wasn’t finished.

  Fleeter crawled toward the sound, going by feel as she worked her way through.

  She stopped and waved at the air, willing the smoke to clear, but it refused to go away. Her suit provided fresh air and for that, she was thankful. But like the powered, armored suits, supply was limited.

  She checked the status meter on her forearm. Over an hour of air left. Plenty of time to figure out where to put the last grenade, but the longer she delayed, the more Podders that would die.

  Fleeter fumbled her way forward, found the hum of the engine behind a panel that she couldn’t move. She put the grenade next to it and then stopped.