The Conscripts: Fight or Die (Blood War Book 3) (18 page)

“When did you know you were different?”

“When I was very young. When we are babies, we are given to a human couple until it is time for our Xotoli training. My human mother recognized my humanity early and told me to hide it from the Xotoli. I loved her so much it was very difficult when they took me away. In my training I was just as strong and quick as the others—I just didn’t have the killing instinct they did, and I didn’t identify with the Xotoli the way the others did. I learned how to hide it over the years. The main reason I was chosen as an embed was that I excelled in acting human. We had classes that would weed out those who could not hide their Xotoli instincts. I could.”

Netis raised her head and looked directly at Istas.

“Then on Rift, when you killed the other hybrid, I was glad. I knew then that I was with those like me. I was human. I didn’t want to go back to the Xotoli. I wanted to stay with humans. So when I was given the assignment to kill General Sand, I decided I would not. I could no longer hide. I would have to stop the assassination and take the consequences.”

“Very interesting,” the Anjin Mother said. “That might be the only reasonable explanation. But you must test her somehow.”

“You knew that there was a very good chance you would be killed as you tried to stop the other hybrid, did you not?”

“Yes.”

“And if we did not kill you, then certainly the hybrids would kill you for not fulfilling your assignment?”

“Yes.”

Istas sat back in her chair and watched this young woman closely. She picked up none of the tension and hatred she had when she first met Raina Carroll, the senator’s wife. This woman was calm and at ease with her decision, knowing that it meant almost-certain death. Istas decided to test her the way she’d tested Raina.

Istas leaned forward until she was almost touching Netis, her eyes holding hers. With one hand she reached across and gently placed her hand on Netis’s arm and released her sexual pheromones. The reaction was immediate. Netis’s eyes dilated and she flushed with sexual desire. Istas watched Netis’s startled reaction. It had to be very strange and confusing to have a strong sexual desire for someone in the midst of an interrogation. Istas sat back and watched Netis squirm in her chair. With a small smile she held Netis’s eyes. She could almost see the sexual images that were flashing through her mind. Now she knew that Netis was telling the truth. After her encounter with Raina Carroll, she had discovered how a dangerous hybrid reacted to normal human stimulus.

“Excellent, child. A perfect test,” the Anjin Mother whispered in her mind.

This woman was what she said she was, Istas thought. No hybrid could fake such a reaction. She was more human than alien. Istas stood.

“I believe you,” Istas said.

“But.…”

“How do I know?”

“Yes, I mean.…”

Istas touched Netis’s chin with one finger, and Netis could not talk, her sexual excitement was so strong.

“That is how, dear. I might tell you how I did that someday, but right now, I need to get you cleaned up and out of those restraints and this room. We will go somewhere else for my questioning.”

Istas turned to the camera that had been recording their meeting and said, “Release her. I will interrogate her in one of the offices, not in this cage.”

Sui-Ren System

Chika

Naval Special Warfare Squadron

Mike Boat 79

Lee scanned the instruments closely. They were closing in on the drop zone. The last seconds before a drop were critical. Lee had to have the ship horizontal and at the proper drop speed. Any significant deviation and the Raiders’ retros would not be able to compensate. The drop would be a disaster. The green rectangle now had turned red, with a dotted red line down the middle and a bar showing the speed window for the drop. Lee kept the nose of his ship dead on the red line as he slowly pulled out of his attack dive and pulled the ship toward horizontal.

He was coming in too fast. The bar was in the red, so he had to bleed some speed off. He eased back on the throttle and flared the ship a little more. Ground fire of all types was pounding the ship now, but the armor that had been added after 703 was taking the fire with no problems. All systems remained in the green. The fucking corporate types had finally listened to the pilots—this was one sweet ship. Lee eased back on the throttle even more, and the speed dropped into the green. He glanced at his instruments again. Good altitude, good speed, good angle. It was all green. The drop-countdown clock in the corner of his display continued to spin down. Just a few more seconds. Come on, Lee thought to himself. He couldn’t change altitude or speed now. He had to hold on no matter what. The lives of the Marines in the compartment depended on him. Something flashed across their nose.

“Fuck! Laser towers!” Odaka said.

Four laser towers were firing at Lee’s formation as they approached the spaceport. The laser towers stood a hundred feet above the ground and looked for all the world like decorative obelisks. There'd been nothing in the briefing about these towers. The flyovers and other sensors had somehow missed them. The nearest one flashed, and the two ships on Lee’s right took the full brunt of the laser strike. One engine immediately began to smoke, then caught fire.

“Two, can you make the drop?”

“Roger. Still got three engines. She’s holding steady.”

“Missiles away,” Odaka said.

Three air-to-ground missiles streaked from their rails, heading for the laser towers. They were joined by missiles from the rest of the formation. One after the other, the towers’ tops disappeared in flashes of light and debris-filled explosions. Lee put the mini-rail metal storm on auto and let it rake the ground just to add to the mayhem as he concentrated on keeping the ship on the drop path, at the right speed and altitude.

“Thirty seconds,” Lee announced.

Come on, no more surprises. Let me get the Raiders dropped, and then we can begin to go to work, Lee thought. He was fighting the urge to dodge the ever-increasing ground fire, but he held steady. The metal storm’s .50 caliber pellets were kicking up a dust as they raked buildings and open ground along their path to the drop point. Only every tenth round was a tracer, but it looked like a solid line swerving back and forth in front of the ship.

The rectangle began to pulse red and a large word appeared: Drop.

“Drop, drop, drop!” Lee announced over the comm. Good luck, Marines. Better thee than me. I wouldn’t want to be dropping into that hell, Lee thought.

Lee could feel the change in weight as the Raiders began dropping out of the belly of his ship. He watched closely as the drop counter went from red to yellow as the Raiders dropped from the belly of the ship. When the green light went on, signaling that all the Marines were out, Lee banked the ship to the left, with the rest of the flight following him. He glanced at his display. The ground fire changed from arcing up at them to concentrating on the Raiders.

1st Raider Battalion

Alpha Company

First Platoon

Nani watched as Lieutenant Taro ejected, then Elias. Now it was her turn. Nani’s seat’s straps snapped off and her seat shot her into the void. Something was wrong—one of the straps had not released at the same time as the other strap. Instead of heading feet first toward the surface, she was almost on her side. Nani remembered her training and began to count. One-one thousand. Two-one thousand. If she reached five, she would have to fire her retros manually and hope for the best. Three-one thousand. Come on! Her retro system finally sensed that she was at the wrong attitude, and one of the rockets fired to correct her angle.

When it fired, her body came back up to the vertical—her correct drop attitude—but it continued to fire. She was now being pushed in the wrong direction, she was heading away from the drop zone. As she reached for the manual override, the system corrected itself again and the other rocket fired. But she was way off the drop path by the time it did, headed off by herself. The retro system was crude—it was only designed to slow a dropping Marine so she could make a safe landing. It wasn’t meant to fly her all over the damn sky.

Nani frantically searched the surface as she fell the last hundred feet, trying to orient herself. It looked like she was going to be to the east of first platoon’s drop zone. That meant she would be in the middle of third platoon’s area over by the runway. Shit, that put her almost a quarter of a mile away from the rest of the platoon.

As Nani neared the ground, her retros fired right on time. But they had used too much fuel trying to correct her attitude, so she landed hard and had to roll to keep from breaking her legs, even in armor. She silently thanked the training in the ancient parachute-landing fall that she had hated so much because she had thought it was a waste of time. Nani was lying on her stomach. She was on the edge of the runway in front of what the briefing said was the weapons shop. Around her she could see other Raiders landing and moving toward the line of buildings.

The buildings were strange looking from the ground. They looked normal enough, but everything seemed to be out of scale, way too big. The architecture was different somehow.

She remained on the ground. No one seemed to have noticed her landing. With her night-vision visor down, she could see a lot of movement in three buildings to her right. The buildings had large overhead rolling doors, and they were all open. The hybrids showed up brightly on her visor—they were running in various directions as they responded to the sudden attack. To her right she saw a squad of Raiders form up and begin to move toward the buildings.

A fire team laid down covering fire as another team bounded forward. To her left was the administration building and the control tower. She could see movement on the roof, as some Raiders had either landed there or made their way up to clear from the top down. Her platoon would be in that direction, past the administration building and control tower.

Suddenly somebody fired a .48 into the weapons shop. She saw several hybrids who had just emerged from behind some equipment blown back into the building. A Marine was standing over her.

“You hurt?”

“Negative.”

Nani glanced at her heads-up. It showed Weening from the second platoon along with Basso and Mara from the third platoon. The company was all mixed up. She jumped to her feet and pulled her .48 off her chest. The main objective for the company was the administration building and control tower, so they all had the same eventual objective.

“I say we head off for the admin building. We’re all supposed to take it anyway,” Weening suggested.

“Sounds like a plan,” Basso chimed in her calm voice. Nothing shook her. She was the best sniper in the battalion. “I need to get up in that tower.”

“Lead on,” Mara, her spotter, said.

“I got point,” Nani said.

The four bounded toward the administration building with Nani in the lead. Without having to organize, the other three fell in behind her, Weening on her left and Mara on her right with Basso in the center of the wedge. They were not taking much fire. Most of the fighting seemed to be concentrated around the repair shop to their right and ahead of them behind the administration building. That firefight had to be her platoon. They were in the shit and she was just getting her bearings.

She needed to move. Just as she was within one big bound of the administration building, a group of armored hybrids burst out of the doors, running toward the firefight to their right. The hybrids had not seen their little group. To Nani’s left was a large piece of earthmoving equipment that could provide good cover. Nani bounded over and landed by it. The other three landed around her. Nani put her .48 to her shoulder and opened fire with the others. They caught the hybrids from the side and rear. Two went down, but the others turned toward them and charged, firing their weapons from the hip.

There had to be at least ten of them, and they were moving fast. Nani continued to slowly and carefully put three-round bursts into the faceplates of the hybrids. Each time she hit one, its head was thrown back and it dropped in its tracks. Weening and the others were doing the same, until the last one fell and was still. Nani stood up and was about to take the lead again when something emerged from the administration building. It was huge, with black armor and a massive weapon that looked like an overgrown rail. It saw them and headed in their direction. It was incredibly fast for something so big.

Nani realized with a start that it was a Xotoli, the first one she had seen. The videos of the ones she had seen in training did not do them justice, they were truly intimidating in real life. She hesitated then she and the others fired almost as one. The rounds from the rails bounced off the armor, throwing a shower of sparks and surrounding the Xotoli with an orange halo. The rounds were not slowing it down. It was moving toward them so fast that after only one burst it was almost on top of them. Nani heard the cough on Basso’s .50 caliber snipers rifle. The Xotoli took the round in the chest and was thrown back. It staggered and almost fell. It regained it's feet, turned, and started to run toward them again.

What could take a rail .50 and still get up? Nani thought.

“You stupid fuck, you should have stayed down!” Basso said.

Her rifle coughed again and again. This time the Xotoli went down. Basso had calmly just blown the legs off the Xotoli. It still tried to crawl forward, using its huge long arms to pull its body. There was no quit in that fucking alien, Nani had to give it that. The .48s still bounced off, Nani hoped they might distract it. They waited for Basso to kill the thing. She blew one arm off at the shoulder, then the other off at the elbow. The Xotoli squirmed around on the ground, obviously suffering.

“That's for what you did on 703,” Basso said, her voice cold.

“You going to finish the thing?” Nani asked.

“Goddamnit, Basso! We don’t know what it’s capable of! Now kill it so we can move!” Weening barked.

Nani heard Basso exhale over the radio before she pulled the trigger and blew the Xotoli’s head off with a carefully aimed round to its thin neck. Nani took the point and bounded toward the administration building. She was careful not to get too close to the Xotoli. She heard an explosion just behind them as she made her next bound.