Endless Night (The Guild Wars Book 3) Read online

  “Breach imminent,” said the pilot of Sun’s own pod.

  “D-Clock 5/4 is through,” reported a Goltar that Sun presumed was its commander, Lieutenant Mishkan-Ijk.

  “Midnight-Four-One, any sign of the enemy? Over.”

  “Negative, Major,” replied a series of clicks and rumbles that Sun was now certain emanated from Mishkan-Ijk.

  “This is D-Clock 5/3,” said Sergeant Kruse. “Contact.”

  “Set your beacon, Kruse,” said Sun. “We’ll link up at your entry point and press on from there. Remember what the boss said, make a splash, and do it in the blood of our enemies.”

  “Don’t forget,” said Jex over the squad channel. “There’s six Gs pulling us to starboard, which means we’re coming out on the wonk. If anyone isn’t confident to fly through that, crawl out that beak. I won’t laugh at you until later. Anyone wants to hit ’em with the old Suffolk punch, on me.”

  * * * * *

  Chapter Eight

  The Midnighters’ newest recruit, Obadiah Jex, was a mystery man. His VOWS scores were adequate, and his guild record solid, but Sun had wanted references and those Jex could not provide, claiming everyone who knew him was either dead or in hiding from the Guild occupation of Earth. The closest thing to a reference had come from Top. The big Spaniard had once seen Jex win a CASPer climbing event some of the European Merc companies had set up during cross-training exercises in the Atlas Mountains. He’d told her that Jex could use his jumpjets to soar as gracefully as an eagle. Not bad for the metric ton Mk 7 CASPer Jex had been flying.

  Sun had been so desperate for recruits that she’d taken on Jex anyway, and this was his first chance to prove his worth in a combat mission.

  With deft footwork, he de-clamped from the overhead, half twisted in midair, and sailed through the beak of the boarding pod. He smoothly arced into a vertical ascent up the ladderwell they had broken into.

  McNeil, Ripper, and Plunger followed suit. They were experienced troopers, but lacked the fancy flying skills of the Englishman from Suffolk.

  McNeil overcompensated for the six G of pseudo-gravity and hit the port side of the beak, almost crushing Washington as she flew past the Goltar pilot. Ripper and Plunger managed the exit, but then crashed into the ladder like flies hitting a clean glass window. With an effective weight of five metric tons apiece, the ladderwell seemed to suck them down in the direction of the engines, but they soon radioed that they had grabbed hold of the ladder and were climbing up.

  “Six Gs demands respect,” Sun reminded her squad. “It ain’t pretty, but where we can, we crawl.” She paused as Betty scampered over McNeil and clambered up the footholds to either side of the ladder as if climbing under six Gs was as easy as riding a bouncy castle to the nine-legged Tortantula. It wasn’t lost on Sun that those holes looked purpose-designed for Tortantula. “You crawl, too, Betty. Those snails driving the ship can up the thrust at any time. Even you could be hurt.”

  “Don’t worry, Major,” replied Betty. “Big G makes my feet tingle and leaves a bad taste in my mouth, like eating rotten Goka, but I can still make glorious slaughter.”

  “Good to hear,” Jex reported. “Betty and I are in a passageway one deck above you. No signs of life. It’s wide, too. We can fit two CASPers across.”

  “Secure your position,” Sun ordered as she crawled out the beak and contemplated the short leap to the ladder. “Kruse’s D-Clock 5/3 is under fire on that deck and about 200 meters toward the ventral side of the ship. We’re going to link up with our Goltar squad and bust them out.”

  “Roger that,” Jex replied. “What about Top?”

  “His team boarded two decks above you. He’ll take a little time to join us.”

  “At least Top’s squad is climbing down,” said Turnaround, who was now climbing up the ladder just below Sun. “They’ve got it easy.”

  Sun wasn’t so sure. A CASPer had no problem at all operating in six Gs, but for the Human woman inside, it soon became too difficult to contemplate coordination of the four D-Clock squads. Grasping the next rung on the ladder, one step after the other, was all she could think of. Blood had drained to her boots, leaving a fuzzy gray window in her mind through which she concentrated on the next rung, and the next.

  If it weren’t for the pinplants nudging her along, she felt sure she would lose her grip and fall. But as hard as climbing the ladder was, descending under such a strong downward pull was surely even more difficult.

  Suddenly fearful that Albali’s CASPers were going to drop from above, she looked up, and felt an agonizing pain in her neck as the acceleration threatened to rip her head from her body. She would have snapped her vertebrae if not for the nanite hardening and the CASPer support harness.

  “Major. Major! Stop climbing.”

  The high pitch of Turnaround’s shouting voice brought Sun to her senses.

  She’d climbed past the passageway, overshooting by several rungs. She dropped back down and let Jex pull her down into the passageway.

  On her hands and knees now, her head was on the same level as her heart and other organs. G-forces were much easier to resist. She allowed herself a few seconds to recover while Betty watched the corridor ahead, the big alien’s laser rifles at the ready and fangs slavering with neurotoxins.

  “Call out,” she said over the squad channel while she got a fix on the other D-Clock squads. “I want to know how you’re standing up to the Gs.”

  They had all safely made it to the passageway having found the going as tough as Sun, but also finding that operating prone or on hands and knees was going to be much more practical.

  She already knew the Goltar were adapted naturally—and further nanite hardened—to withstand rapid pressure changes as they dove and ascended the oceans of their worlds. It seemed to make them acceleration resistant, too. Washington had locked down the boarding pod and joined them, jumping from the inward-facing ladder to the one facing out to the hull so he could overtake her Human and Zuul squad mates. Once out in the passageway, she took on a strange upright posture like an old wooden clothes peg, though with two of her seven limbs holding pistols.

  Kenngar reported a similar story to the Humans. The high Gs had robbed the Zuul of his sense of smell—which Sun knew from experience would make him edgy—but not before he had detected the odor of other Zuul on this ship in significant numbers.

  It was the first good news Sun had heard since boarding. The battlecruiser would carry mercs—probably had its own company of marines, too. In these thrust conditions, she would much rather face Zuul than Tortantula.

  She checked the status of Top’s squad and was disappointed to see it had slowed severely. They were now one deck above Sun’s position, but even stimmed to the eyeballs on extra CASPer candy, Top worried that his troopers would black out and plummet down the shaft. Reluctantly, Sun ordered Top to get out on the deck above and move directly above Kruse’s position. They had enough breaching charges to punch down through the deck, and enough jump juice to drop through the hole without smearing themselves onto the deck below.

  Kruse’s position was worse. The veteran sergeant had set his beacon to sound out loud and clear, but the signals from the CASPers in his squad were being jammed. Sporadic transmission fragments were getting through to her, though, which proved at least some of them were still alive. Beyond that, she knew nothing.

  Sun’s team set off as fast as they could on hands and knees. It wasn’t fast enough for Betty, who acted as scout, slicing the pie to check around intersections where normally Sun would deploy drones. It wasn’t that Sun considered her Tortantula trooper to be expendable, but she was tough, and the drones her squad was carrying weren’t up to the task of operating under these high Gs, simply dropping to the deck and refusing to budge.

  If any security cameras had survived the EMP grenades they’d rolled down the passageways ahead of them, the view must look ridiculous—a squad of wheezing mechs advancing into the ship on their hands and knees. But it w
as no joke. Sun was breathing hard, and her lungs, throat, ribs, neck…hell, her everything was bruised and sore.

  When she’d signed up with her first outfit, no one had taken the time to explain that during a high-G assault, a vise would clamp around her bladder, closing with every forward shuffle along the deck, until it was left with the capacity of a rubber thimble.

  She checked the medical status of her other CASPer pilots. Heart rates were red zoned across the board. Lactate buffers exceeded. Before joining an Earth-based merc outfit to look out for her wayward sister, she been a professional ultra-endurance runner, which meant she recognized these signs. Her team was soon going to hit the wall like marathon runners who set off too soon and crashed in the final mile.

  “Take a two-minute break,” she told her team. “Rehydrate and take some candy. It’s no use reaching Kruse just in time to pass out from exhaustion.”

  As the other CASPers groaned to a halt, some collapsing flat-out prone on the deck, she sipped from the water tube and stuffed a tab of CASPer candy into her mouth. The stim took the form of gum. Supplies being down to the last few boxes, they were into the “experimental” flavors the techs had thrown together. Hers was tarragon and rum, which worked surprisingly well, especially when she felt the supercharging effect burning through her mouth and boiling into her veins.

  “Midnight-One, Midnight-Three-Delta, do you copy? Over.”

  Midnight-Three-Delta? That was the Goltar pilot from Kruse’s breaching pod.

  “Midnight-Three-Delta, Midnight-One. Copy good. Over.”

  “We’re pinned down by Zuul mercs, unable to secure the breach point. I’ve had to EVA onto the outer hull of the pod to get through the signal jamming. We’ve taken three casualties, including the sergeant. Corporal Oranjeklegg is in command. He thinks the Zuul have paused their assault to lure you in.”

  “Can you hold out?”

  “For now. They appear content with keeping us pinned down. May I offer an alternative explanation for the Zuul tactics?”

  “Go ahead, and don’t ask permission next time.”

  “Zuul cannot operate effectively in this thrust environment. They’re even more exhausted than you Humans.”

  Sun took a painfully deep breath through her punished lungs and allowed the anger to build a little. The pilot meant no malice, but she merely expressed the common Goltar view that Humans were unimportant…as unimportant, as she suspected, as they considered the cause of Earth’s liberation from Peepo. “I know we’re exhausted, Midnight-Three-Delta. Our advance is slow, but we’re steadfast, and we will relieve you. Tell Cleggy that advancing through this ship is like our trek through the jungles of Rakbutu-Tereus. It’s hell, but we will reach our destination, and we will have the victory.”

  “Of course, Major. I meant no offense. I know many of my people are yet to be convinced by Humans, but we under your command have learned the value of both you and your race, Major Sun.”

  “You ain’t seen nothing yet, Midnight-Three-Delta. Out.”

  “Rest time’s over,” she told her squad.

  Betty sprinted back down the passageway to her crawling squad mates. “I’ve made contact,” she told Sun excitedly.

  “Focus, Betty. Specifics!”

  “It’s the pollywiggles.”

  “The what? Oh, you mean Lieutenant Mishkan-Ijk’s Goltar squad.”

  “Yes, the pollywiggles. That’s what I said. Hurry up now, Major. We don’t want to miss the slaughter.”

  The two squads soon united, the upright Goltar bobbing along stiff limbed in the middle of a CASPer sandwich, able to fire over the crawling Humans in their metal suits.

  Just one junction later, Betty caught a laser shot deflecting off her exoskeleton as she cautiously turned the corner as she’d been trained.

  She was unhurt. In fact, she was so eager to kill, that she began bobbing up and down in frustration at the slow advance of her comrades behind her. “Zuul,” she reported. “Lots of tasty Zuul waiting behind a three-tiered barricade. Twelve in all, with laser rifles.”

  Destroy their will to fight, the Lieutenant Colonel had ordered. Sun’s tactical preference was for ambushes and sneak attacks to catch her opponents unawares before they even knew they’d lost the fight, but there were exceptions. The need to relieve the pressure on her people in 5/3 was one. “Execute frontal assault against lasers,” she ordered.

  “You heard the boss,” yelled Jex in his peculiar accent. “Time to grease up, boys and girls. We’re doing the Slippery Shield Maiden. Ripper, you’re with me in the front rank. McNeil, Plunger, second rank, ten yards behind. Lieutenant Mishkan-Ijk, kindly ready your team to mount up.”

  Lieutenant was only a temporary rank for the Goltar officer while he was on secondment under Sun’s command. Upon completion, he would return to his position as second-in-command of Midnight Sun’s marine force. Everyone knew the real reason he was serving under Sun was as punishment for speaking out too often that the code of the Goltar demanded they should honor their pledge to directly support the Four Horsemen and Earth.

  The former lieutenant colonel and the Human major had taken advantage of this “secondment” to train together and innovate new combined tactics.

  Such as the Shield Maiden.

  * * * * *

  Chapter Nine

  Obadiah Jex allowed his elbows to twist out and knees to slide back until he dropped to the deck, grunting with relief. The prone position lessened the crushing weight on his back that threatened to slice his flesh through the cockpit harness and smear patties of Suffolk meat over the inside of his fancy Mk 8.

  The deck felt so inviting he wanted to just lie there forever. What insanity was this to fight on hands and knees under heavy gravity?

  Midnight madness, Obadiah. That’s what. And you lead Midnighters now, so best get used to the insanity, boy.

  “Shield maidens!” he bellowed. “Grease up and check you have disabled your rear jets.”

  At his pinlinked command, grease designed for Midnight Sun’s deck gimbals oozed out of pouches on his CASPer’s front. Meanwhile, the other maidens confirmed the rocket motors in their feet were active and those mounted on the backs of their CASPers were not.

  Major Sun had originally suggested piggybacking Goltar on top of the CASPers as an aerial assault tactic, but the sea-alien Lieutenant Mishkan-Ijk had experience with heavy-G combat and added in this messy floor variant.

  While the belly of Jex’s CASPer was becoming as greasy as the inside of a Saturday-night kebab van, the haptic suit he wore conveyed the sensation of two monsters from the briny deep slithering onto his back.

  He’d seen plenty of aliens in his career. Killed a lot, too. He’d earned and spent a small fortune as a result. He’d never seen these pollywiggles before, though. Goltar, they were properly called; never heard of them.

  And they were a proper merc race?

  The weirdest thing was the eyes at the top of their elongated, bony heads, which peered out at you through round viewing windows in their helmets, like an old-time deep-sea explorer looking out through a submersible’s portholes. The way they stared made him feel as if he was the deep-sea monster.

  “All set, Sergeant Jex,” said Mishkan-Ijk. This was the first time he’d taken orders from an alien.

  “Right you are, sir. Shield maidens, present shields.”

  Jex and the other three maidens raised their forearms in the air and activated the laser shields mounted there. He reversed the view on his Tri-V goldfish bowl and satisfied himself that McNeil, Plunger, and Ripper also had their shields deployed and their cargo of slithering monstrosities were ready.

  “Midnighter shield maidens,” said Jex, “and, err…passengers. On my mark, twat the bastards…Punch it!”

  “Punch it!” echoed the others, but Jex barely registered his old unit’s battle cry as he tapped his jumpjets and taxied around the corner into full view of the Zuul position. Throttling forward, he rocketed toward them with mere moments to as
sess what he was up against before they collided.

  It was a bloody wedding cake, that’s what.

  Three tiers of a portable armored bastion blocked the passageway. On each level, four Zuul mercs were firing laser rifles through loopholes at him and Ripper.

  Deadly laser beams reflected off the shields, scorching the passageway and frying a slate set into the port bulkhead.

  Fire suppression sprinklers emerged overhead and rained down murky water.

  Just like a wet afternoon in Ipswich, Obadiah.

  The sea monsters on his back raised tentacled limbs above the shields, and fired their little pistols made from bone or coral, or some such alien nonsense. Jex was no weapons-tech boffin, but little pop guns like that looked pointless against Zuul mercs armed and armored for Oogar.

  As he sped along the floor like a living torpedo on a waxed tea tray, the Zuul got wise and lifted their aim, bringing a strangled cry of pain from one of the alien marines Jex was carrying.

  The pollywiggles didn’t stop, tapping shot after shot at the enemy.

  Most of it ricocheted off the shiny armor, but there were Zuul yelps of pain and anger as the coral pistols placed shots through the holes and dented rifle barrels.

  “Well, tie me to a tree and call me Brenda,” Jex muttered, impressed by the incredible accuracy of the Goltar.

  “Sarge?” queried Ripper.

  “Just commenting, boy. You ready for takeoff?”

  “Always.”

  “And…lift!”

  Jex increased the angle of the forward nozzles on his jumpjets and boosted their thrust to the maximum. There was a pop as his grease seal broke, and he lifted off the deck. “Punch that, mother—”

  Before he could finish his war cry, Jex’s CASPer smashed into the upper tier of the Zuul defensive “cake.”

  The position was probably constructed from super alien tech clever at absorbing explosions and bullet impacts, and reflecting and ablating laser shots, but what it lacked was good old-fashioned mass.