War Against the White Knights (12 page)

As his eyes scanned for hostiles, his thumb hovered over the gun’s safety.

Romulus floated aft along the deployment tube while he brought up an image of Janna on his wrist display. He had taken the photo when she was still convalescing after the Hardit attack on Khallini. In those days the parasite was more thinly laid over her skin, leaving her enough flexibility to give him a deep smile of contentment. She loved and was loved by him, and in that captured moment anyone could see it in her face.

He loved her still, of course. All the terrible things that he had done had been for her. But if she knew how far he had gone, if she’d had even an inkling of what she was carrying inside her in that photograph… He shuddered to imagine her reaction.

The alien consciousness oozed into his mind and congealed into words of command. “Proceed without delay!”

The words were spoken in a distortion of his own voice. The growling and barking of Hardit speech was entirely absent, though he presumed a Hardit was behind the command. He couldn’t even be sure of Hardit involvement; of anything.

The Hardits who had done something to him had also implanted a bomb inside Janna. They’d made him watch as they inserted the deadly tube and secured it to her aorta. The price he had paid for keeping Janna’s bomb inert was to make physical contact with senior Legion officers. That was all he’d been told to do.

It seemed so innocent a betrayal.

The first time he’d met General McEwan, on the eve of the Battle of Tallerman, he’d felt a prickling on his neck, suddenly terrified that they had planted a bomb inside him too. But nothing happened. Maybe the Hardits had listened in somehow. He had no clues, just speculation.

Life had continued. Life
with Janna
had continued, even better than before since they’d accepted his request to rejoin her in the Wolves.

Until five minutes ago, when his mind had been wrenched open and a voice inserted within. A voice that had commanded Romulus to proceed immediately to the deployment tube outside the Deck 13 hangar entrance. Or else Janna’s bomb would detonate immediately. He’d had no idea until then that they could talk to him.

“Hurry!” urged the voice.

As he pulled himself down the tube in an aft direction, the alien presence in his mind strengthened, the sense of an oozing invader hardened into an iron grip on his will.

The question of what precisely the Hardits had gained from his treachery grew urgent. Meet senior personnel. Repeatedly if possible. That was all he had done. It sounded so innocuous, but there would be a dark Hardit secret at its heart, and whatever it was he was sure it would soon be revealed.

“Halt!”

Startled, Romulus looked around but no one was there. The command had sounded different – more solid – but perhaps that was a reflection of the strengthening grip of the Hardits.

“I said halt!”

Romulus grabbed the ladder recessed into the bulkhead and slammed to a full stop still not understanding why the Hardits had swapped from urging him to speed up. Had he reached his destination?

The answer became clear when a human Marine in an ACE/2 battlesuit coalesced out of the air.

For a sweet moment, Romulus felt relieved that this was a
human
Marine who had de-stealthed before him. But that moment didn’t last.

The Marine wore the insignia of a corporal in the Guards, the elite unit set up to protect Legion VIPs. There had been an exclusion zone declared in the area leading to the hangar because General McEwan had passed this way recently and you didn’t get more VIP than him. But McEwan should be off in his shuttle by now. If the guards were defending the deployment tube then something had gone badly wrong.

“This area is restricted,” stated the corporal. “Explain your presence.”

Romulus wanted a singularity to appear and suck him inside its event horizon. How could he explain his presence?
It’s all right, Corporal, I’m here because the Hardits ordered me. Oh, hell!

The Marine raised his carbine. The motion wasn’t so much threatening as relentless, as if to say I won’t hesitate to shoot if you don’t supply a convincing answer.

“I’m off duty, Corporal. I came to get away, to think.”

“Liar.” A ring of monofilament teeth flicked out from the barrel of the Guard’s carbine. He let his helmet go transparent so that Romulus could see the Marine’s gaze roaming over his body, selecting a target. “You get one more go before we find out whether that filthy parasite coating your skin will protect you against an SA-71’s teeth.”

“I’m here to meet my girlfriend,” Romulus said hurriedly. Actually, it wasn’t a bad story, and with matters obviously coming to a head it didn’t have to hang together for very long. “We expected the exclusion zone to be lifted by now and we wanted… time alone.”

The guard said nothing, just scowled at Romulus.

Shit!
Romulus hurled curses at himself. How could he be so stupid? The first thing the guard would do was check Janna’s location and ask her to corroborate her lover’s statement. That was the problem with being a minor celebrity: everyone knew far too much about you.

Romulus could almost hear the deadly whine of the carbine’s teeth revolving in a blurry ring of destruction that could carve effortlessly through hide, flesh, and bone. But instead of spinning his weapon’s teeth, the guard retracted them inside the barrel.

“Confine yourself to your quarters,” the corporal ordered. “The Master-at-Arms will be informed. You
will
be disciplined. Now leave this area immediately.”

What should he do now? Romulus took in his surroundings, seeking clues. The ladders and maintenance panels looked normal. The red paint marking the charged walkway that ran along the inner bulkhead looked worn and in need of refreshing. The corporal was the only other person in sight.

His eyes could not be trusted, though. The corporal had deliberately switched off the stealth function of his battlesuit, and was unlikely to be operating alone. How many other Guards were out there, invisible guns trained on him and awaiting his next move?

He had to face it, the way ahead led only to a swift death. And that was a coward’s way out of the mess he was in.

Sorry, Janna.

Romulus pushed down on the ladder and began his retreat. He formed words in his mind, hoping whatever the Hardits had done to him meant he could transmit as well as receive.

I tried. Just leave Janna alone, okay? I’ll work around and come from the other direction.

Suddenly, strong hands yanked him off the ladder and pinned his arms painfully behind him.

“Hey! I’m going,” he protested, but the grip only tightened until he feared his bones would pop from their sockets. Another hand pinned his neck. “Will you stop that?”

The answer came as an explosion of energy bursts behind him.

Romulus tried to twist around, to see what was happening, but he was caught in the hold of powered exoskeleton. He had as much chance of shifting free as lifting a battlecruiser in one hand.

Then whoever had grabbed him twisted Romulus around so that he faced the consequences of his treachery head on.

What he saw made him feel sick in the pit of his stomach.

There had been four Marine Guards. Now all were dead.

Twenty soldiers winked into visibility. Like the dead Marines, they wore powered armor with helmet visors as black as the void. But there was no mistaking the elongated snout of the helmets, the short stature or the armored tails.

These were Hardit special forces.

Had they brought him here to be a decoy, to distract the guards?

He tensed, expecting his usefulness to have extinguished after his last, pitiful act of betrayal.

But instead of killing him, they shoved him down the center of the deployment tube. Without the ladder to grab onto, he fell aft, feet first, completely at the mercy of these Hardit commandoes.

Weapons opened up a short distance ahead, and the tube flared with the heat and light from powerful explosions.

Romulus fell toward the sound of guns.

Nearby, weapons fire toward the nose of the ship shook the deployment tube.

Arun readied his pistol, knowing it was little more than a gesture. His guard had readied portable field generators to cover the deployment tube in both directions. Anyone who could get through the shields wasn’t going to be slowed by his pistol. He’d faced a shield once before at the Hardit mining base on Antilles. Two squads of cadets had thrown everything they had and hadn’t even scratched it.

But this time Arun was inside the shield. He was safe.

The guns fell silent.

“Contact lost with forward perimeter, sir.”

Pioretti’s words sent a chill through Arun. Ruiz, Larson, Castellanos, and Bella were four of the most experienced Marines in the Legion, and they’d lasted only seconds. What the hell were they facing?

As if in answer, a barrage of spheres flew at the shield. Each was the size of his thumb and had no obvious form of propulsion. They looked like toys – until they slammed into the invisible force shield and unleashed their payload.

There was no explosion, at least not one visible to Arun, but the force shield took on a faint ruddy glow, like a distant fire reflecting off a tunnel wall.

So far, so good. But then another barrage of the spheres hit, strengthening the red coloration of the shield enough that its convex shape was plain to see.

Missiles were bobbing down the deployment tube in a constant stream now, bumping into the force shield and brightening it from red to orange to a rich blue. The attack was apologetically quiet, but for the shield to be so overloaded that it glowed blue meant that colossal amounts of energy were being unleashed just meters away from his face.

Arun’s gun hand twitched but the shield prevented anyone from shooting out as much as the enemy from firing in.

The shield quickly jumped from blue to a searingly bright violet.

In the last moments, when the destruction of the shield seemed imminent, Arun glanced behind, checking whether this light show was a distraction from the real axis of attack. Perhaps it was, but he could see nothing behind except the outer perimeter guard of four Marines.

But the force shield did not fail. The missile assault ceased.

Had a relief force arrived to chase away the attackers?

No.

The enemy had come to gloat.

Or so Arun assumed.

But only a single figure appeared, being obviously pushed down the tube against his will by someone behind who remained invisible. The visible figure was Romulus.

“Can you see who has Romulus?” he asked Pioretti.

“Negative.”

The sergeant’s reply was only to be expected. To have gotten this far, past so many layers of sensors, their unidentified enemy had clearly developed an innovation in stealth technology that would be beyond the comparatively modest capability of a Marine battlesuit’s sensors.

The enemy de-stealthed.

They looked similar to the Marines protecting Arun, except their build was slighter, with an elongated snout to their helmets, and with armor protecting their tails.

Hardits!

How the hell did they get here?

Arun’s throat went dry as the three Hardits raised their weapons. In the process they released Romulus, who drifted gently toward Arun in the pseudo-microgravity, waving his arms wildly but to no avail. From his position in the middle of the tube, Romulus was unable to grab anything with which to alter his vector.

The Hardit who had released Romulus flicked its tail in a gesture of command that Arun remembered from deeply buried memories of his time as an Aux slave to the Hardits.

Arun’s attention focused on the other two invaders, expecting them to act, but instead the force shield popped and went out.

The Hardits opened fire, Arun’s Marine guard and Major Spreese returning fire simultaneously.

Instantly, Romulus changed from helpless scenery to an active participant. From his boot, he whipped out a Wolf-issue combat blade made of monofilament-edged composites that could cut through armor. He proceeded to demonstrate this capability by stabbing the nearest Hardit through the neck, and then ripping the blade out to leave her half-decapitated.

For once, Arun did what he was supposed to, sheltering behind his living shield of Marines. In a firefight like this, he wouldn’t last an instant if caught in the open.

The firefight was over in seconds. Two more Hardits were dead, floating up the corridor against the microgravity, pushed by the momentum of the railgun darts that had ended their existence.

Romulus was unconscious, blood spooling from his head where a savage blow had caught him.

“We need to get deeper into the ship,” Arun told Pioretti. He was about to add: ‘and out of this comms blackout’, but slammed his jaw shut instead. The sergeant didn’t need a jabbering officer to tell him how to do his job.

Pioretti said nothing. The Marines were locked in formation but did not move.

“Let’s grab Romulus and head forward in case there are more behind us,” said Arun, but before he’d even finished speaking the savage truth caught up with him and he knew there would be no reply. He’d lost Spreese too.

The situation was finally revealed. Hardit commandos disabled their stealth systems and slid into his perception. Twenty of them filling the tube both forward and aft of his position.

Training and instinct cut in. Arun raised his pistol.

The Hardits rushed at him.

He fired, aiming at the nearest commando’s visor.

The Hardit dropped its weapon and clutched at its eyes, but its comrades were almost upon him.

Arun snapped a shot at another target, but his plasma burst was easily absorbed by the commando’s armor. Before he could get off another shot, Hardit arms reached from behind him, and his pistol was wrenched painfully from his grip.

Arun cursed himself for his stupidity. He should never have shot at them. He should have turned his weapon on himself. Now he was a prisoner of the Hardits. Now he was a liability.