Chimera Company: Rho-Torkis. Issue 1.: A sci-fi adventure serial Page 2

  “Understood. Out.”

  “Told you so, boys,” said De Ketele on the squad channel when Osu reached the aft compartment. A dozen legionaries in combat armor sat waiting to deploy. “We’re about to stretch our legs.”

  The noise of cracking ice had been a constant accompaniment since driving onto the frozen lake. It suddenly grew into an ear-splitting sound, as if the fury of an ice god was being vented upon the wagons of the 27th.

  The deck fell away like a plunging dropship, sending Osu tumbling across the compartment until he grabbed onto the base of the turret cage and clung there. The aft compartment was bobbing up and down, and the deck was now a steep incline up to the joint with the midsection. Metal ground in protest against metal.

  “Hey!” called De Ketele. “Who ordered the ice bath?”

  “No offense, Corporal,” Krynox told the exfil master over the bulkhead intercom. The wagon throbbed with power as Krynox made the engine rear up like a struck horse. “But I thought assault section could do with a wash.”

  The heavy wagon lurched forward and came to a halt, all compartments on the ice. For now.

  “Gonzalez,” said Osu. “Let me see.”

  The rear gunner jumped out of his turret and Osu took his place, using the twin joysticks to swing the armored bubble around, thankful that they’d been upgraded to Mark 3 Beetles with expanded turrets big enough to be used by legionaries in armor.

  Fog still hung in the air, but it had dispersed enough to see the jagged gap cut around the wagons. At no point was it less than five meters across. They were on an ice floe in the middle of the lake. Trapped. Just where the RILs wanted them.

  He called down into the compartment, “Assault section will deploy.”

  The exit ramp crashed down onto the ice, raising a fringe of hissing steam from its heated edge. While his team rapidly deployed onto the ice, Osu adjusted his helm to get a closer look at the shoreline, but the only movement was the black smoke curling up from the burning branches.

  With both wagons stationary, even the sound of cracking ice had vanished, leaving the legionaries in an eerie silence.

  He shook his head. “This is too easy,” he muttered, but the lieutenant still wanted him playing the part of vulnerable prey – a role he suspected was no longer an act – and so he remote-activated one of the smokers he’d mounted himself under the mid-section.

  “Grymz,” he said over the radio, “standby to deploy an ice management team on my signal.”

  “Sculptors ready,” the sapper replied, raising a laugh from Osu.

  The Corps of Legion Engineers worked with the landscape whenever they could, and on a world such as Rho-Torkis, that meant using the ice. Ice berms, ice causeways, ice buildings, ice breastwork, ice roads: they were mostly built using diggers, dozers, and graders, but the finishing touches were often added by ice manipulators.

  Legionaries being legionaries, training on this vital equipment usually produced humanoid figures with unfeasibly exaggerated body parts, but a few of the sappers had the talent to create impressive ice sculptures.

  Marc Yergin in particular. Last week, he’d sculptured an eight-foot-high screaming guinshrike in intricate detail.

  Grymz had told Osu that there was something profoundly poetic in creating an object of such beauty, knowing it would inevitably melt into oblivion.

  Osu didn’t know about that. There was no time for poetry in his soul. Not when he had his work cut out keeping his SOTLs out of mischief.

  Through the scratched transparent armor of his turret bubble, Osu could see sooty smoke belching from the device he’d activated beneath the vehicle. “Come get us,” he muttered as he took a last look at their surroundings. “We’re wounded. Vulnerable. And I haven’t got all day.”

  The RILs weren’t playing ball. They’d vanished. But they were still around... somewhere.

  He jumped down to the deck, slapped the waiting Gonzalez on his back, and jogged off to join the legionaries on the ice.

  Despite the seemingly chaotic skidding of the wagons, there had been method to the drivers’ mayhem. Each three-section beetle had been parked in a curve. The wagons had been circled.

  Using the vehicles as cover, the assault section legionaries outside had their PA-71 railguns ready for action, scanning for threats. Front and rear turrets rotated as their gunners searched for RIL targets, praying that the officer would show mercy and allow them to unleash destruction upon the newts. Mid-section turrets watched the skies.

  Come on... They’re not even flinging bombs. Why not?

  “Stay alert,” he warned the sappers. “If the RILs are going to move, this is when they’ll do it.”

  Osu waved at Grymz’s team and they came down the exit ramp, dragging two ice manipulators on hover frames. To the uninitiated, the devices looked like man-sized metal cylinders sprouting several articulated hoses, but to Osu they were something much simpler: a route to safety.

  Taking four legionaries of the assault section with him, Osu escorted Grymz’s ice sculptors to the edge of the ice floe where they set to work. Beneath the white spray of ice splinters and steam they were kicking up, they were creating ice out of moist air and lake water. Within a few minutes, they would have sealed the gap and the beetles could drive away.

  Unless the RILs stopped them, of course.

  And yet, still, there was no sign of attack.

  He thought he’d heard them move – a sigh, like wind whistling through the trees. But it couldn’t be. The sound was coming from beneath the ice.

  From the water.

  “Get back from the edge!” he screamed.

  The Littoranes leapt out of the water, lifted by powerful flicks from their muscular tails, firing their dripping blaster rifles before they’d even landed on the ice.

  Osu saw sappers go down before the wild onslaught of blaster bolts, but whether dead or going to ground, he couldn’t tell.

  He sighted a Littorane – range, ten meters – who’d reared up on its hind legs and was about to hurl a grenade with one rubbery front limb while the other sprayed blaster fire at Beetle-2. Three rounds spat from Osu’s railgun, severing the gray amphibian’s arm at the shoulder, causing it to ululate in horror as its severed limb fell to the ice, still clutching the grenade.

  Littorane screams announced legionary railgun flechettes finding their mark, which was very convenient of the newts because against the brightness of the turret fire, he could barely see what was happening.

  Osu panned his weapon left and put three rounds through the center mass of another attacker.

  He glanced across at the unarmored workforce. They were firing back with sidearms. Some had definitely been hit, but getting the wounded out and treated was De Ketele’s role. For the moment, Osu’s job was to shoot Littoranes.

  The grenade in the lifeless alien hand went off, making Osu tense, but it was a smoker, throwing inky blackness into the air over the newts, although the device fell back into the water, nullifying most of its effect. More grenades went off behind him. He chanced a look and saw the roofs of both beetles enveloped in artificial darkness.

  Unable to see, the turret gunners ceased fire.

  Meanwhile, Osu was searching for targets to service among the tangle of dripping tails and gray limbs. He realized with a shudder that the Littoranes had worn what looked like heated wetsuit jerkins over their trunks, but heads, limbs, and tails were protected against the deep freeze conditions by nothing more than the circular metallic tattoos they favored.

  “Gives us something to aim for,” Osu told himself, but in truth he was troubled by the way the newts had adapted so readily to the conditions on this ice world. It meant they could exploit the terrain in ways that wouldn’t even occur to the Legion.

  But they hadn’t won this time. They were all dead or dying.

  “Sierra 1-5-6, Sierra 4-1-0, do you need support?”

  Lieutenant Stuart’s words were calling him over the general broadcast channel. Why wasn’t he
using direct comms?

  He noticed his helm’s alert overlay was flashing a warning message at the bottom of his HUD: suit comm system damaged.

  The RILs had shot him and he hadn’t felt anything. It was a common problem with blaster bolts which killed their targets by warping the air into plasma, not through kinetic impact. His comms were on the fritz, but he’d still come out of it better than the big aliens heaped on the edge of the ice, with sightless eyes, seared flesh, and gills flapping feebly.

  “Sierra 1-5-6, Sierra 4-1-0...”

  Osu assessed that this attack had been neutralized. He knew that was what he was supposed to tell the lieutenant, but he was tired of holding back their true strength. The Legion wasn’t designed to fight insurgents. This wasn’t the kind of war he’d trained for.

  “…do you need support?”

  But the officer’s orders had been clear.

  “Sierra 4-1-0, this is Sierra 1-5-6 I do not require support. Beetle-2 call signs, keep alert for RILs playing dead. They look retired, but we can’t risk what looks like newt blood turning out to be exploded packs of fish sauce.”

  “That would have to be a fuck-ton of fish sauce,” said a nearby legionary.

  One of the newts moved!

  Osu put a round into it.

  The newt shook away the bodies of its comrades and charged. At Osu.

  What the hell just happened?

  He let out half a breath, expelling the question of how the newt was unhurt along with his spent air. He steadied the red dot of his helm’s sighting reticle on the flat Littorane head and eased back the trigger.

  The charged rails of his PA-71 spun a flechette tipped with NG-enriched supermetals, propelling it out the muzzle at two klicks per second in a plume of ionized air. His combat armor absorbed the bulk of the recoil kick that could shatter the shoulder of an unprotected shooter. Even so, the distraction of the recoil slap was enough that he couldn’t tell where his dart had gone. Not at the target, that was for sure.

  Osu couldn’t miss at this range. The reticle had lied to him. Or the galaxy had gone insane. Either way, this was not good.

  The Littorane hissed in defiance and kept coming.

  It didn’t seem injured at all. How had it survived the fire the legionaries had poured into it?

  Switching to iron sights, Osu was about to fire a burst at point-blank range when he realized that he hadn’t missed at all. Other railgun rounds assailed the RIL and sparked fire as they deflected off an invisible barrier surrounding the alien.

  Force shield!

  Flicking on its safety catch, Osu dropped his rifle and prepared to meet the threat, suddenly very conscious of how massive Littoranes were.

  By the Five Hells! How did it get a force shield?

  The newt dug all six limbs into the ice and stopped, just four feet from Osu.

  “Knives out,” he shouted, drawing his own foot-long blade and advancing warily on the Littorane, who watched him through enormous dark eyes. The fat, fish-like lips that stretched the full width of its mouth parted and lifted. The damned newt even raised a fleshy eye ridge.

  Is that thing laughing at me?

  PA-71s couldn’t defeat this ancient and rare military tech. But this had to be the porous type of shield – it had to be or else it would have punched a hemisphere down into the ice. And with the porous type, the training manual said you could ooze through the barrier and gut the enemy inside. Could be a few bruises by the time he got home tonight, though. He grinned. Didn’t matter. He knew just the right person to rub them better.

  “Come on,” he taunted the RIL as they began to circle each other. “Let me show you how I fillet fish.”

  “Odd Beetle-2 call signs, overwatch,” ordered De Ketele. “Even Beetle-2 call signs, knives out and close on hostile.”

  Why was De Ketele repeating...?

  The warning message in Osu’s helm switched to: suit comm system total failure.

  A plume of spray erupted from the water a short distance away, stirring the smoke where the grenade had fallen in. Under cover of this distraction, Osu seized his chance and lunged at his opponent, but he’d come in too fast and bounced off the force wall, rolling back along the ice, and coming up to rest on one knee with blade out.

  But the bulky amphibian wasn’t interested in him. It was using its tail to swat away circling legionaries like flies.

  Meanwhile, the distraction had firmed into the form of a curved tunnel carving its way through the smoke on the water’s edge. Inside that bubble was another Littorane. This one had a spiked club attached to the tip of its tail.

  It barreled through the line of armored legionaries who fired on it to no effect, and carried on to the work party of ice sculptors who ran for safety. But it didn’t chase them. As it flicked back its tail while still on the canter, it was obvious this newt had come to smash the ice manipulator machines.

  But one SOTL hadn’t abandoned his equipment.

  “Hey! Fish head!” called Yergin. “Watch this!”

  The RIL turned to face the man. Yergin fired his plasma pistol in its face.

  Unlike the hypersonic darts that traveled too fast for the human eye to track, the ball of plasma seemed to scorch through the air in slow motion, spreading out over the force shield as it curved around the RIL’s face.

  Dazzled, Yergin’s assailant swung its tail at the annoying human.

  A good hit with an armed tail tip could smash through light vehicles, batter legionaries inside the best combat armor, and would have had no trouble ending Yergin, except the SOTL was no longer there. He was sprinting for one of the ice manipulators, ducking under the tail as it came over and sliding along his side on the slick ice until he was where he wanted to be.

  The RIL charged Yergin, but was enveloped by heavy blaster fire from one of the turrets that must have freed itself from the smoke. It was a powerful light show. Energy weapons would never penetrate its shield, but the newt was blinded.

  Osu was supposed to be in a melee himself, but his opponent didn’t seem to regard him as a threat and was engrossed in the other fight.

  “That’s right,” he said to himself as he crept up. “Keep watching the show.”

  Trying to imagine he was landing face first on a soft sea of bubbles, rather than 300 pounds of hostile amphibian, Osu tipped himself onto the Littorane. The force shield pushed back, but not hard. He began to sink through.

  “It’s a dead newt walking.”

  Osu looked up and saw SOTL Zy Pel riding the Littorane’s tail, and holding a bloodied blade aloft. It was unlike anything Osu had ever seen: twin crescent blades with a neon green edge.

  “Poison blade,” explained Zy Pel.

  Poison? Since when had the Legion ever authorized the use of poison? It wasn’t just the weird blade; there was a lot about Hines Zy Pel that was nonstandard. One day, Osu would get to the truth of the man’s story, but first they both had to survive the Littorane attack. With Osu still not quite through the force shield, its wearer shook itself, ridding it of the legionaries like human fleas.

  It raced for its comrade who’d attacked Yergin.

  But Yergin was no easy prey.

  The sapper had penetrated his RIL’s force shield and was sitting on the ice manipulator canister while gripping the base of the newt’s tail as if riding a highly pissed off alligator. Bending low across the alien’s back, he was firing a weapon. At first, with all the violent motion, and with Osu jogging off to assist, it was difficult to see what Yergin was trying to do.

  And then it became clear.

  The weapon he was firing... it was the manipulator hose. He was aiming it at the RIL’s head like a flamethrower. Or, rather – Osu corrected himself – as an ice thrower.

  Yergin, you’re a genius!

  A thick spear of ice shot through the RIL’s throat.

  Yergin wriggled into another position and sculptured a fan of ice that burst out of the newt’s chest.

  “Jump!” screamed Osu a secon
d before the newt he’d fought slammed into its comrade that had been speared with ice.

  Yergin did jump. But just as the force shield made it difficult to get inside, so it made it difficult to exit in a hurry. He bounced off the inside of the invisible barrier.

  The two force shield bubbles slammed into each other like bowling on ice. Osu’s newt transferred most of its momentum to Yergin’s which went spinning off the ice and into the water, taking a flailing Yergin down with it. Osu’s newt followed, slithering off the ice floe with a trembling body and half its limbs limp.

  It seemed Zy Pel’s poison was working. Not that its usefulness was going to lessen the reaming out he’d earned for carrying an unauthorized weapon.

  Osu began organizing Yergin’s rescue.

  But the sapper bobbed back to the surface, which brought a sigh of relief to Osu. He had no desire to send people under the water if he could avoid it. The newts owned that zone.

  Strong hands reached down and hauled Yergin wet and shivering out of the water.

  While De Ketele updated Osu on the casualty situation – two being treated inside the beetle for blaster wounds – Grymz used the surviving ice manipulator to first melt the ice that had formed on Yergin’s clothing and then jet warm air over him.

  “If you’re offering salon service, Corp,” Zy Pel said to Grymz, “I could do with a shave and haircut.”

  Yergin gave a shaky laugh. Osu expected Grymz to offer a piece of his mind, but he said nothing. What was it about Zy Pel that let him get away with murder?

  As Yergin walked off to the warm beetle, Osu looked over the edge at the half-built ice bridge. Legionaries could hop across, but it was nowhere near enough for the beetles.

  “Strengthen the bridge,” he told Grymz. “De Ketele, organize overwatch. My comms are fried. I need to speak with the lieutenant in person.”

  De Ketele didn’t reply. He shrugged and pointed behind Osu.

  “I’m here,” said the lieutenant.

  Osu looked around to see not just the lieutenant but everyone out of both beetles, including two sappers on stretchers.

  “It is not necessary to work further on the bridge, Grymz,” said the lieutenant. “We’re still bait and must not appear impregnable.”