The Drift Wars (3 page)

“Christ-all-fucking-mighty,
Garvey,” Mickelson barked, and Peter knew he had missed.

—   —   —

Peter
whipped his gun around, searching for the Gyrine, but it was gone.
The rock face disappeared behind a cloud of dust, pounded by the
giant impulsor cannons carried by heavy weaponry. He shrunk down
behind the rock; all he could do was wait for further orders.

Distant
machine guns cracked and rockets whistled in close, pounding into
the ground and tossing up columns of dirt. Peter listened to the
bullets rattle against the rock; then they stopped. The ferns around
him vaporized and a nearby tree blackened like a match. The Riel
were sweeping the area with lasers.

Lasers
weren’t a direct threat. Even if Peter weren’t shielded by the
boulder, his suit’s ceramic coating would easily disperse the
heat. But the beams would burn away his cover, and once they could
see him, the Riel had plenty of other ways to kill him. Peter grew
anxious just sitting there; he queried the battle computer.

“Negative
targets,” it replied.

We’re
in the middle of a battle
, Peter thought.
How can there be
nothing to shoot at?

He
stood up and aimed his gun at the towering rock, searching. On the
very edge of the left face, he saw the top of a Gyrine’s head
sticking out over a crystal shield. It wasn’t much—not enough
for a kill—but it was something.

The
Gyrine worked a thick-barreled, turret-mounted gun that recoiled
heavily with each shot. It fired in the opposite direction, which
Peter found reassuring, since it meant there was at least one other
platoon involved in this assault. Peter centered his crosshairs just
over the Gyrine’s head, thinking perhaps to first draw its
attention by shattering the rock.

His
chest was warm. Not just warm, hot. Searing. He pulled back from the
scope; the boulder he was leaning against was glowing red. Peter
suddenly remembered why he wasn’t supposed to use rocks as cover.

While
his combat suit was immune to lasers, rocks were not. They would
become superheated and explode. A melon-size rock had the
destructive power of a fragmentary grenade. This boulder was a
hundred times that.

Peter
felt the rock tremble and crack, expanding from the heat. He might
have even heard the explosion before everything went black.

A white light clicked on—bright, painful. Peter blinked, his eyelids
scratching over the crust that coated his eyeballs. His head was
fuzzy, and the room’s silence pressed against his ears. He heard
footsteps—soft and light-footed—padding toward him. A pink blur
slid into the light. Peter blinked again and saw a woman in a green
surgical mask. She was leaning over him; he was lying down.

“There
you are,” she said. Peter couldn’t place her accent. She wore a
white smock with short sleeves that jutted off her shoulders like
little wings, leaving her arms bare. The uniform was cut slim, but
not as slim as she was. It dangled loosely over her body. Her dark
brown hair was pulled tight, and a ponytail hung in a net behind her
head. Gunmetal eyes inspected him from over the mask, faint wrinkles
radiating from their corners.

The
nurse settled onto a stool and raised a long finger, its nail
trimmed short, with a dark stain under the tip that looked like
dried blood. “Can you see this?” she asked. Peter nodded.
“Follow it, please.”

Peter
followed the finger up and down, left and right. The woman ignored
him, watching the video monitor that hung over his head.

“How
many letters in the alphabet?” she asked.

“Twenty-six,”
Peter said.

“Recite
them, please.”

Peter
did, feeling silly.

“What’s
the last thing you remember?” she asked.

“What?”
Peter asked, confused.

“What’s
the last thing you remember?” the woman repeated impatiently.

Peter
thought back. First he was crawling through the mud on his elbows.
Then he was being thrown from a ship into the black nothing of
space. And then he was free-falling through a white cloud, his
stomach tight and sore. And finally, he stood at attention with the
rest of his platoon. They wore full dress, and a general spoke on a
distant stage.

“Basic
Training,” Peter said. “Graduation.”

“Good,”
the woman said. She tapped around her monitor. “Anything else?”

There
was something else, the memory of a memory. It felt important, but
his efforts to remember it only pushed it farther away. His head
ached from the effort, and he felt a sharp pain, like a hundred
needles pricking his skull.

“No,”
he said. He tried to rub his head but found he was strapped to the
bed.

“Easy,
kid,” the woman said, taking his wrist. “Don’t rush.” Her
hand was searing hot; it burned his skin.

She
flicked a finger at the crook of his arm, then dug her thumb in. A
vein swelled with blood. The woman smiled warmly, raising a long
syringe of oily liquid.

She
slipped it in with practiced ease.

The
ship was so minimal that it didn’t even rate a pilot, much less a
name. It was designed to be cheap and disposable, and it served but
one purpose: to transport marines to and from extra-planetary
combat.

It
had no hull, just an open frame made from thick bars that curved
like a down-facing rib cage. Where there should have been a bridge,
there was only a small metal box for the remote control. Marines
were packed to the frame on all sides, crowded ass-to-knee. It was a
full regiment: twenty-four hundred men, plus their colonel. Far in
the back, at the tip of one rib, Peter craned his neck and watched
the tapered flame of a relay module. It fired its rocket as it left
the ship, then flipped around and fired again to fix its position.
Next it fell still, disappearing against the black background. Space
was unnaturally dark inside the Drift, which had a scant few
thousand stars.

The
relays had been dropped at regular intervals, leaving a trail
between them and the commandship far behind. They allowed the
transport to be guided by tight beam, thereby protecting the
location of both ships. The transport was fed its route one
coordinate at a time to keep its destination from falling into Riel
hands.

“Is
that sixteen?” Saul asked over a closed channel. He was seated
opposite Peter, his face hidden behind his mirrored visor. But you
didn’t need to see Saul’s face to recognize him; his suit was
twice as wide as—and a full head higher than—any other in the
regiment.

One
small benefit of Saul’s size was that he was seated at the very
tip of a rib, since he would otherwise fill two seats. And Peter, by
virtue of being his best friend, got the next seat in.

“Nineteen,”
Peter said.

“I
thought it was sixteen?” Saul asked disingenuously.

“Nineteen,”
Peter repeated.

“And
they launch every four hours?” Saul mumbled, making like he was
calculating. “So this is our fourth day. And you lost the bet.”

Neither
man had any real idea of how long they had been in transit. The
computer in their suits had been disabled before they left the base,
leaving them without a clock or access to movies, music, or anything
that might give a sense of time. If they knew how long they had been
traveling, they could guess how far they had come. And if they were
captured, the Riel could use this information to locate their base.
The United Forces had only one base, so losing it would be
tantamount to losing the war. Protecting the base’s location was a
top priority, certainly more so than entertaining a few divisions of
marines.

“I
didn’t say we were betting,” Peter replied.

“You
didn’t say we weren’t.”

Peter
shook his head, but the gesture was lost inside his helmet—their
artificial muscles were locked to keep their movements from
affecting the transport’s course.

“You
haven’t won yet,” Peter said, deciding to play along.

“I
don’t see any Riel creeping around,” Saul replied. “So I
figure we’ve still got a long way to go.”

“So
you hope,” Peter said, but he did as well. The journey might be
boring, but it was far better than the destination. This was his
first combat mission, and even after five months of Basic Training,
he still felt completely unprepared.

—   —   —

Two
hours later a half dozen relays shot off all at once—a redundancy
that anticipated enemy fire. More relays lit up the sky around them.
It was jarring to suddenly be in the middle of so many ships; they
had been alone since they left the base. Every ship in the fleet had
taken a different route to reduce their energy signature and thereby
avoid detection. That they had converged could mean only one thing.

Incoming
rockets exploded on all sides. The transport banked hard, pulling at
Peter’s guts. A dozen rockets lanced through the ship, which
twisted to let them pass harmlessly out the other side. One shot
past Peter’s head so close that he felt the heat of its exhaust.

His
suit sparked to life and his visor flooded with information. There
was a click as his suit separated from the ship’s umbilicus,
followed by the hiss of oxygen flowing from his own tank. Sergeant
Mickelson shouted instructions over the open channel, but Peter
didn’t catch a word of it. Another rocket raced by, exploding
right in the ship’s belly. It was terrible and silent, and the
orange flame reflected on the visors of a thousand marines. Then the
shock wave slammed against Peter, knocking the air from his chest.

The
ship bucked, then recovered, rolling one hundred and eighty degrees
and whipping straight up. Peter had been through these maneuvers in
simulation, but there was no comparison.

He
jerked his head around, trying to see where the ship was going.
Mickelson cursed sharply as more rockets shot past. And then it was
over. With a blaze of engines, the ship wrenched to a stop and lay
still.

They
had ducked behind a wall of rock that floated in empty space. The
rock flickered in the light of a nearby transport, which smoldered
like the coals of a campfire. The ship was dead, rolling slowly as
if capsizing. It twinkled as the air tanks of the attached marines
exploded.

Another
rocket plowed into the burning ship. Peter shielded his eyes with
his hand as the explosion lit up giant rocks floating all around
them.

The
Teisserenc Asteroid Belt. They had arrived.

—   —   —

Muscle
relaxant tingled through Peter’s body, delivered automatically by
his Life Control System to ease the stiffness of the long journey.
The motors in his combat suit whirred as he flexed his arms and
legs, stretching, working in fresh blood. There was a heavy clunk as
the ship unclipped him, its rib sliding up and away. The ship drew
out from the jumble of men and then shot off to safety.

Peter
pressed a hand to his chest, where, beneath the combat suit’s hard
shell, hung a locket of soft, brown hair.
My dearest Amber
,
he thought.
If you ever pray for me, pray for me tonight.

Saul
floated over and took Peter’s arm. The platoon locked together,
hands grabbing elbows, forming a ring. All were quiet. Each man
soberly watched his visor and waited for the order to move out.

—   —   —

Somewhere
deep inside the Teisserenc Asteroid Belt was a Riel base. Where
exactly, or even how large, nobody knew, but the mission was to find
and neutralize it. Even if everything went according to plan, Peter
would never lay eyes on that base. His regiment, along with a
half-dozen others, was running a diversion far from the core
assault.

There
would still be plenty of action. Several outposts had been scouted
in this area, each protected on all approaches by missile turrets.
Peter’s platoon would either take out the turrets, allowing for a
naval assault, or they would attack the outposts directly. They had
trained for both, but would only now find out which. Either way,
there were a lot more Riel in this area than they could hope to
handle. Their orders were simply to fight until called off. Or, the
unspoken alternative: until they were all dead.

Back
on the base, Colonel Chiang San had called this battle “risky.”
“Don’t think of yourself as men or marines,” he had said, “but
as the last line of defense for the Livable Territories. Any man who
gives his life today does so to secure the freedom of his
homeworld.”

Peter
wasn’t impressed. He had no desire to die for his homeworld or for
the entire Livable Territories. But if he had to, he’d do it for
her. For Amber.

—   —   —

A
fleet of missiles trailed far behind the marine invasion force. It
had followed them here from the base and had taken up position just
beyond the reach of the Riel sensors. Most were armed with warheads
to strike as critical targets were identified, but a few—like the
one approaching—carried a more specialized payload.

It
wasn’t visible until it passed overhead in a great gray shadow.
And then it was gone, the blazing ring of its impulsor engine
shrinking away. The engine flared out, replaced by twelve smaller
ones as the missile broke into sections, each heading in a different
direction. Those sections divided again, spreading like intricate
fireworks, and the smallest ones exploded, scattering silvered
marbles. These were sensor pods. They flooded the area with
frequency-coded radar waves, indicating time and place of origin,
which allowed the marine’s combat suits to interpret their signals
directly. While the suits had their own sensors, using them would be
like wearing a neon target.

The
battle computer merged the gathered information into a single
picture, and a green-mesh diagram of the asteroids drew out on
Peter’s visor. This overlay, called his scope, blended with what
little he could see and, when he focused on something, gave him
information about its size, distance, and composition. Peter zoomed
his scope all the way out to get a view of the battlefield.