Merkiaari Wars: 02 - What Price Honour (20 page)

Merkiaari were bipedal like humans, but they were much bigger and stronger. They averaged over eight feet in height, and had powerful clawed hands and feet. The females were even bigger than the males. Both sexes had large tusk-like fangs, and shaggy hair covered faces and bodies. They all wore the same thing—grey one piece uniforms, and armour that was proof against most small arms fire, but not the heavy stuff or plasma. The Alliance didn’t have anything better even now. Armour that was proof against plasma was too heavy to be man portable.

A targeting diamond appeared on her display, briefly hovered over her chosen target, and began rotating. Flicking her attention to the top right of her display, she selected max power and fired one shot for effect. The pistol bucked in her hand; the recoil was surprising, but her viper reflexes were ready. The trooper went down with a hole the size of her fist blasted through its chest.

“Ha! Got the bastard.”

The pistol packed a hell of a punch and she was glad of it. She ducked back out of sight and ran to find a new firing position. Inside the hangar, she sprinted for the far wall and nearly killed herself as her viper body accelerated to almost forty klicks an hour. She aborted her sudden dash just in time and made it to the wall safely. She wasn’t even breathing hard, but a fraction later on the brakes and she would have smeared herself over the cinder block wall.

Her display warned her of targets approaching. She quickly moved to find an observation point. A window overlooking the wreckage of the Alliance fighter proved to be the best vantage. She reduced magnification to X1.5 and targeted a big Merki female through the window. She didn’t break the glass like an amateur. She allowed the super hot plasma to burn through.

“I love this gun,” Kate howled in glee when the huge monster fell.

The Merki platoon swung toward her position in one precise move and opened fire. Plascrete exploded and rained down on her, but her dive saved her from serious injury. Her display brought up a wire frame silhouette of her body. It was flashing yellow battle damage to her right knee. The percentage indicated the wound was superficial.

“How the hell do I get rid of this damn display?” she growled irritably.

As quick as thought, the outline of her body receded and parked on the lower left of her display. It had minimised itself like a window on a computer terminal. It was still active but out of the way.

Kate crawled through the rubble ignoring the blood she left behind, and climbed the stairs to the ground crew’s locker area before the Merki troopers saw her. It was close, but she ducked through the door as the first bug ugly male stepped through the hole in the hangar’s wall. The locker room was a tactically unsound location—the partition wall was flimsy as hell, and the door was the same. Defence however was not why she had chosen to come up here, the window at the back of the room was. She opened it outward as far as it would go and looked outside. Scanning the open space between her hangar and the next one along, she found no hostiles. Her range finder said the ground was 19.14 metres from her present location. She had no idea if she could jump such a distance, but the grunting guttural language of the Merkiaari approaching said she had to go now.

She holstered her pistol and jumped.

* * *

“Good girl,” Stone said in approval of Richmond’s courage.

He watched her fall and strike the ground with enough force to kill an unenhanced human. As a viper, he had survived it, but he hadn’t enjoyed the experience.

“She’s hurt,” Hymas noted. “The knee is weakening.”

“Yeah I know. I set it up that way.”

“You did? Why?”

He shrugged. “Because I want her to have the experience of my fight on Bethany as close to real as I can make it. Her decisions are her own, but I can stack the deck enough to limit her options. That way I can make her do what I did that day, while still leaving the actual choice to her.”

“That’s hard, Ken,” Hymas said sounding as if she sympathized with Richmond.

“Of course it is. I’m a hard charging fighting machine. Emphasis on the machine there.” He waggled his eyebrows to make his friend grin. “The decision was a hard one to make, but I made it. If she can bring herself to do the same thing for the same or similar reasons, I think we might have a winner.”

Hymas grunted noncommittally. She watched the girl limp around the hangar in pursuit of heavier firepower. “Will she find what she’s looking for?”

He grinned. “That would be telling.”

* * *

The pain in Kate’s knee was indescribable. Sweat was beading on her brow and she couldn’t hold back a grunt as she put weight on it. She limped around the side of the building and pushed her self into a mild trot. Agony flared with every footfall, and her damage indicator insisted on telling her the obvious. Yellow was flashing around her right knee, but it had darkened toward orange. When it reached red it would indicate critical damage, but she was sure to be well aware of that by then.

She had thought viper units were tougher than this. She grunted as the pain flared higher. Her nanobots should take care of the damage in time she supposed, already the blood had stopped flowing, but she couldn’t stop to rest it for the time it would take to heal completely. She managed to put several buildings between herself and the enemy in short order, but she kept her sensors on maximum and swept a full three-hundred and sixty degrees around her position. Luckily, her viper sensors displayed information in a fashion she was familiar with. Anyone who had piloted mech armour would have recognised their output instantly.

Kate watched the red icons representing individual Merki troopers leave the hangar. They separated into teams of three to cover more area in their search for vermin. That’s how they thought of humans. Non-Merkiaari were vermin to be exterminated, or some said, enslaved. No one knew for sure. Those listed as missing had never been found, but that didn’t mean anything. Billions had died in the war, and many of the bodies were never identified.

Kate reached her objective and without hesitation blew the door off its hinges. She quickly ducked inside before the Merkiaari could locate her. Limping hurriedly down the empty corridor, she turned right at the second junction and keyed open the hatch she found there. She breathed easier when she stepped into the dimly lit storage facility nicknamed the morgue. Lights flickered on as she entered and revealed hundreds of mechs standing in neat rows waiting for their masters, the rangers, to come for them. No rangers would be coming, she knew. Those few who had died on the runway had been left to delay pursuit of the base personnel as they evacuated toward the city. Millions of people in that city would die later today, or had already died two hundred years ago.

“I’m here
now
, that’s all that matters,” she growled and quickly activated the crane.

To suit up, she had to remove the torso of the armour. She chose the first unit and a moment later she was clambering inside. She activated the controls and brought the armour’s computer online. Keying in the close and capture sequence, she raised her arms to accept the torso section and arms. Fully encased in the mech, she activated the motor systems and stepped out of the cradle to turn deeper into the morgue.

Walking passed the dead sentinels of mech armour she came to the vault. As she keyed in her serial number, she had time to wonder if Stone had screwed up. Would her code work in a simulation that was constructed from a two hundred year old download? The vault door sighed as the compression seals let go and the huge door swung open. She stepped inside.

“Now this is what
I’m
talking about.”

On the rack in front of her was an H3B-AC, or Heavy Tri-Barrel Auto Cannon. It was a thing of beauty. She reached forward into the H3B’s docking port and turned her left fist clockwise. The weapon icons in the mech’s HUD had been dark, but now one blinked to life and flashed red as the armour ran a diagnostic. She watched it turn from a blinking red to a pure and solid green.

“Oooh yeah, gonna pay motherfuckers.” She frowned, and wondered why she was talking retro. “Stone, must be.”

Thoughts of Stone’s sense of humour made her smile, but then she sobered a moment later when she remembered he was a cyborg. He was a machine, not a real person. He had no soul; she had to remember that. She reached out with her right hand for an AAR and locked her fist into it. She didn’t strictly need the rail gun. The Merkiaari hadn’t brought armoured vehicles with them in the first wave of attacks on Bethany, but she didn’t worry about that. A rail gun was a handy thing to have against any target. The AAR turned green in her display and she decided it was time to take care of business.

Back outside the armoury, her sensors detected two Merki fire teams at three o’clock, another two at six with a further three passing seven and probably heading for nine. It was obvious they had detected her and were moving to encircle her. Deciding to take care of those at three first, she moved out toward the maintenance sheds using as much cover as she could find.

The heavy thudding of a gauss rifle staggered her. She took a step back, and then three more, as a Merki fire team found her and hammered her torso. She glanced at her mech’s damage control sensors, but they were still dark. That was at it should be. Ranger armour should sneer at slugs from a mere gauss rifle. She would have been splattered to hell and gone without the armour.

“Lucky I chose the morgue and not the barracks then wasn’t it?”

Kate doubted it was luck. The entire sim was a set up. Stone had used an illegal download to drop her in at the deep end—unless his superiors had ordered this? Surely not, but…

Yes, there was that wasn’t there?

As those thoughts went through her mind, her body was reacting. She turned toward the maintenance sheds and activated the H3B. The whine of its motor spinning up was nothing compared to the ripping sound of hyper velocity rounds sawing the sheds in half at knee level. She contented herself with a single sweep, she was husbanding her ammo, but she was more than satisfied when something in the now collapsing sheds exploded with a thunderous roar.

CRUMP, CRUMP, CRUMP!

The sheds disappeared in a ball of fire a hundred metres high at least. She must have taken out the spare fuel pods for the fighters.

Oops!

Her sensors indicated more troopers coming at the double. She swung to her right and hosed the barracks with the AAR. Thin plascrete walls blew apart and the roof collapsed with a crash that shook the ground. The opening was only partially blocked, but again that didn’t matter. The temporary barricade was enough to slow the group at six o’clock, and give her time with those at three.

She throttled the mech to a lumbering run, and slammed into the Merkiaari as they appeared from around the officer’s mess. A single burst from the AAR took out the first one, but the second was a female. She was enormous and towered over the mech. The monster grappled with the AAR and tried to tear it loose. Kate tried to lift the creature, and the mech’s servos whined in protest. Her own viper strength made the difference, and the Merki trooper was lifted off her feet.

The warnings on her mech’s display spoke of a second Merki trooper attacking the emergency hatch in her back. The steady beeping of overload warnings decided the matter. She swung her H3B toward the female, which was busy trying to gnaw through her armour. Kate rammed the barrels in the Merki’s mouth and fired. She heard the clanking rattle of the barrels gouging soft flesh and shattering fangs even inside the mech, but once the motor finally reached thirty thousand rpm, the auto cannon fired a burst through the shrieking creature’s head.

No more problem, Kate thought happily, and dropped the twitching carcass to the ground.

The last one was a male and he was not co-operating. When she turned, he turned with her and continued attacking her back. Her sensors said the others were coming into range now, but the pest on her back wasn’t letting go. She turned and located the troopers running toward her. She fired the H3B, but the attack on her rear hatch caused her to stagger. She killed the officer’s mess, but that was all.

* * *

“Dammit girl,” Stone swore. “You know what you have to do.
Do
it already.”

“She’s thinking like a ranger. It’s the armour.”

“I know,” he said with a sigh. He had really thought Richmond would come through, but now…

He sighed again and watched the show.

 * * *

In desperation, Kate kicked backward and shattered the Merki’s leg at the knee. Her own knee screamed at the impact, but she didn’t care. She was frothing mad. She pointed the AAR at the writhing figure on the ground and fired. The trooper blew apart and so did the plascrete below it and the soil below that. She released the stud and stepped back from the smoking crater.

The proximity alarm heralding the approach of more hostiles, snapped her back to reality. She activated the H3B even as she turned. A hundred rounds a second spat from the whirring barrels destroying everything in their path. Walls were shredded, windows shattered, plascrete was pockmarked, roofs collapsed, fires took hold… and Merkiaari were sliced in two. Silence descended as the H3B ran dry. The only sound was the crackle of the flames and the whirring of the auto cannon’s motor as it spat nonexistent ammunition.