Merkiaari Wars: 02 - What Price Honour (6 page)

“
Fuck you!
” the wild-eyed man spat.

“Fuck me?” Eric said mildly. He reached out and crushed the man’s stump viciously. “I don’t think so.”

“
AEiii!
” the rebel screamed and jerked trying to free himself, but Eric wouldn’t allow it.

Gina swallowed but didn’t look away. Westfield glanced over his shoulder at her, but she waved him back to his survey of the compound. They didn’t need to be taken by surprise twice in one night. Looked at one way, the mission was a success. Her single squad had destroyed the rebel’s entire base. Looked at another way, the mission was a bust. Destroying the base without killing the rebels was pointless; they would just set up somewhere else. Eric must be sick at the thought of all his work wasted. He had lived here undercover for weeks to learn what he needed to finish the rebels, but now all his work was threatened. No wonder he was pissed at being bad mouthed by this scum of a rebel.

The rebel screamed again. “God don’t! No more… I’ll talk!”

“Are you sure?” Eric said with another twist of the bloody stump. “I don’t like lies.”

“No lies I swear! They’re hitting the parliament building!”

“When?”

“
Noon!
The President reconvenes parliament at noon!”

“Good boy.”

Gina turned away and opened a channel. “Gold One, Eagle One.”

“Eagle One, Red One. Gold One is out of contact.”

“Copy, Red One. I have the target, Lieutenant. The rebels are hitting the parliament building at noon today.”

“Copy noon today,” Lieutenant Strong said. “Stein guessed the target, but we didn’t know exactly when. Well done.”

“Thanks, Lieutenant. Eagle One clear.”

“Red One clear.”

“They’re sending the transport,” Gina said over the all units channel. “Stein guessed the target would be the parliament building. If I know him, he’ll be laying on a reception for them.”

“We’ll know soon enough,” Eric said, turning to the west and watching the sky.

Gina tried to find what had caught his attention, but she couldn’t see anything until she used her sensors at max range. A small blip appeared on her HUD marked with the regiment’s IFF signalling its identity. It was a C-120—a Marine armoured transport and probably the same one that had brought them here.

“As soon as the transport lands, I want you all on board,” she said to her squad.

“What about the prisoner?” Westfield asked.

Before Gina had a chance to answer, Eric did it for her with his pulser. One shot, and they no longer had a prisoner. She stared at the smoking hole where the prisoner’s face had been, and then at Eric who was just then flicking the safety back on his weapon.

“What prisoner?” Eric said ignoring all the pulsers now aimed at him.

Over the noise of the transport’s landing, Gina ordered her squad to lower their weapons. She glared at Eric, furious with his actions, but she didn’t want to start an argument in front of her squad. She marched a short distance into the darkness knowing Eric would follow and then rounded on him.

“Don’t ever do that again.
Not ever!
Marines don’t work that way.”

“No?” Eric said coldly. “Lucky I’m not a Marine then.”

Gina stared at him for a long moment, and then turned away to order her people aboard the transport. Minutes later, they were speeding over the jungle toward the city and another fight.

“He’s a spook,” Westfield said privately to Gina. “What do you expect?”

Gina shrugged. She knew Eric wasn’t a spook, and that made his actions worse to her mind. Vipers were special. In her opinion, Eric had just dishonoured his unit.

* * *

The Parliament Building, Planet Thurston

“I’m no hero,” Eric said to Gina later that day while waiting for the order to open fire. “Get those notions out of your head. I do my duty to the Alliance with every breath I take. My decision was to execute a terrorist last night, and that too was my duty.”

“Duty? Who decides when duty becomes murder?”

“I do as a captain in the 501
^st
.”

Gina shifted position just a little. She wanted to keep an eye on the elevator doors behind her. Lieutenant Strong was with Stein, and had been for almost an hour. She wished he would hurry back from the briefing. If he didn’t show up soon, she would have to start without him.

She glanced at Eric and then back outside at the plaza. “You must report
to
somebody, be held accountable
by
somebody.”

“I report to my superiors as you do. General Burgton reports directly to the President.” Eric took a breath and went on in a milder tone. “Don’t judge me, Gina. You know nothing of what it takes to be a viper. We aren’t robots that kill to order. We were designed to kill Merkiaari, and we do it well. That frightens people. These days I spend all my time pissing on fires—trying to stop those wilful children we spoke of burning the Alliance down. We have discretion, perhaps too much, but without it the Alliance couldn’t have survived as long as it has. Besides, you have less right to judge me than others I could name.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Aren’t you the one who nearly allowed the torture of a prisoner because he killed some of your people?”

“That was different,” she said hotly.

“I don’t see how. I’m nearly two hundred and thirty years old, Gina. You can’t know what it’s like seeing the Alliance stumbling from one avoidable bush war to another over and over again. I have penetrated terrorist cells so many times that the number blurs in my memory. No matter what I do, the same types of people go on repeating the same types of mistakes. I chose to stop that man permanently. If I hadn’t, he would have been setting bombs and killing the innocent again in a year. They just never learn. So don’t judge me until you have lived as long as I have and seen what I have.”

Two hundred years of fighting terrorists? God, she’d had no idea. What must it be like seeing mistakes happen over and over, knowing they were going to happen, yet being unable to prevent them? It must be appalling.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Forget about it. I would have reacted exactly the same way at your age, except I was fighting Merkiaari then.”

“You fought in the war?”

“Of course,” Eric said in surprise. “We were constructed for that purpose.”

“I thought you might have… you know, been built after.”

Eric shook his head. “No. We fought and there were eighty-nine of us left at the end. The Council allowed eleven more units to be constructed to bring our numbers up to a nice round politically correct one hundred, but those eleven were already part way into the construction process. It was a mercy they were allowed to be completed.”

“Surely the Council wouldn’t have left them half finished,” Gina said, shocked at the thought. Surely no one would have denied those soldiers a normal life.

Eric’s face twisted into a snarl. “You have more trust in the Council than I then. The councillor for Bethany’s World campaigned hard to have us all scrapped, but public opinion was on our side. For a time, we really were heroes, but then fear replaced gratitude and here we are two hundred years later.”

Eric had a bitter streak a klick wide, but it was hard to blame him. His regiment decimated and everyone afraid the vipers would turn on them; it was enough to make anyone sour. Gina wished she didn’t know all this. She had been far happier in her ignorance.

“Look alive people,” Major Stein’s voice said over the comm and everyone stopped to listen. “The rebels are making their move. I have ten APCs approaching the plaza from the north with many civ vehicles as escort. Approximately a thousand rebels inbound. Satellite feeds indicate assorted pulsers and small arms as well as AA pulsers on the APCs.

“Alpha Company will concentrate on the APCs. I want them burning before they turn those pulsers on us. Bravo Company will concentrate its fire on the civ vehicles. Charlie Company will take targets of opportunity and defend the parliament building from any incursion. Good luck.”

Gina selected squad wide on her comm. “All Eagles, Eagle One—you heard the Major—we take out the APCs, and that doesn’t mean giving up our cover. Let them come to us. Frankowski, you hose them with the AAR. Try to bottle them up as they approach the fountain.”

“Never liked that thing anyway,” Frankowski said with glee.

Gina ignored that to sight into the plaza. She and her squad were just inside the main doors and should see some action. Other squads were with them, but the bulk of Alpha Company was on the first floor. It looked as if she would have to start without Strong after all. Boy, was he going to be pissed.

“Wait… wait…” she said as the vehicles entered the plaza. “Now! Let them have it!”

Gina added her fire to that of her squad, but it was a mere sideshow to the heavy thudding of the AAR. Frankowski targeted an MPV near the rear of the rebel formation and it blew up spectacularly well. The burning vehicle crashed back to earth blocking the route out of the plaza. She nodded with approval at his choice of target.

The rebels were taken by surprise by the first explosion, but as the APCs blew up one after another, they went to ground. They had lost a considerable edge with the destruction of the heavy pulsers in the APCs, but each of the surviving rebels took it upon himself to open up on the parliament building with an awesome barrage of pulser fire and grenades. Rocket propelled grenades struck the building launched from every side of the plaza. So many, that Gina feared her squad would be buried in the debris raining from the upper floors. Glass and chunks of plascrete crashed down on the street outside. She tried not to notice when uniformed corpses added themselves to the growing piles with meaty sounding thuds.

The result of the rebel’s initial attack was inconclusive with regard to the Alliance forces on the ground floor, but Charlie Company on the second floor took heavy casualties. Gina’s squad was mostly unhurt. Frankowski and Hollings both had minor cuts and bruises caused by chips of plascrete, but the rest of her people were fine. Other squads were not so lucky. Marines were screaming for medics while others screamed in pain still firing their rifles wildly into the plaza. Sergeants and corporals shouted curses and orders to their squads, trying to restore order and discipline in a situation that threatened to get out of control. Dust and smoke hung thickly in the air. More windows blew in as pulser fire ripped the building’s facade to shreds.

Gina’s squad hunkered down as the rebels pumped overwhelming fire into the building in an effort to suppress the storm that had destroyed their vehicles, and was in the process of killing them. Fire from the Marines was reduced to a trickle, as plascrete walls and columns were pocked and hammered by slug throwers and plasma from the rebel pulsers. Frankowski killed the fountain he disliked so much, and in so doing deprived the rebels its use as cover. He left off when it was reduced to a smoking crater, but then he turned the AAR on the shop fronts where most of the enemy were attempting to hide.

“Hand me the launcher would you?” Gina said in a conversational tone of voice.

Eric handed her the shoulder rig and slid a box of ammunition closer before opening up with his pulser again. He was using single shot and making every round count. Bodies were piling up as he methodically moved along the line of rebels.

Outgoing fire from the Marines increased again until it was a hurricane compared to the rebels light drizzle. No word had been heard from the Major since Charlie Company was hit at the start of the action, but no one needed orders to kill the killers of Marines.

“You should have been a Marine sniper,” Gina said absently as she loaded the launcher with a high explosive contact fused rocket.

“Been one,” Eric murmured as he tracked and fired at his targets without pause. “Not a Marine, a sniper I mean.”

“Oh?”

Eric fired again. “That’s how I was recruited. The Colonel liked my moves and the next thing I knew I was going into surgery. When I came out I was no longer a man.”

That was a strange way to put it. Many people said similar things, but she hadn’t expected to hear it from him.

“You’re still human, Eric,” she said and adjusted the launcher’s targeting display.

“Sometimes,” he agreed and killed another pair of men trying to set up a tripod mounted AAR behind the cover of a low wall.

Gina found what she was looking for—a group of rebels that seemed to be directing the fighting. They were doing a passable job, and she didn’t like that. The rebels were amateurs, yet they had succeeded in keeping her head down and were advancing to a point where they would be ready to storm the building.

“Time to take care of business,” she said and pressed the commit button on her display.

A high-pitched beeping told her the rocket was locked on. She depressed the trigger. The rocket flew straight on target and detonated in the centre of the command group. A crater was blasted into the plaza and a nearby building collapsed with a thunderous roar. Collateral damage was extremely heavy, she noted with approval. Rebels were dead on all sides, and those not wounded were attempting to retreat.