Chapter 04 - I Thought We Were Friends Now?

Year 248 P.L. Rychter Calendar
Coordinates: 54.1°S; 42.2°E
Site Designation: Coaler's Basin, Eastern Badlands

||

The new bars emblazoned on the shoulder of her uniform felt heavy.

Lieutenant Kaydie Brackenshaw had never wanted a promotion, but apparently she was just a little too good at her job to be allowed to stay put. And too many of her comrades in the Scout Cadre had died in the line of duty. These days being a survivor was qualification enough, it seemed.

The badlands wind bit at her swarthy, weather-beaten skin, and dark hair whipped around the base of her neck from beneath the rim of her blast helmet. Behind a pair of armoured goggles her grey eyes surveyed the tracts of the Southern Barrens, the glass reinforced and overlaid with a rudimentary HUD inside. She looked out as her blade-shaped skiff scythed through the torched air, the dusty, dried up lake bed of Coaler's Basin opening out before her.

She was twenty-six now, with a decade of war under her belt. After fighting that long, Brackenshaw didn't really know what to make of the newfound 'peace' with the Scraegans. Stopping the killing seemed like an objectively correct outcome, but the little voice in her head said that they'd left the job half done. After gearing their entire civilisation toward all out war for fifty years, shouldn't the human race have more to show?

"Valley – SC-10," came the voice of the commander of the accompanying HK-Atom, digging her from those bleak thoughts.

"Go ahead, Valley."

"Seismics showing clear and no Crawler traces on long range radar. Can you confirm?"

"Copy that," she replied calmly, striding back towards the rear of the skiff, soldiers on either side of her with long anti-armour rifles locked against firing rails on the upper deck, scanning the desert for threats. "So far, so quiet, just how we like it."

She passed one of the skiff's deck guns that rose from the middle of the armoured decking, manned by two soldiers – a spotter and gunner – ready to direct their deadly fire at a moment's notice. A second twin-linked rail cannon jutted up out of the stern, just in front of another spotter's cupola at the rear. Barrels swivelled left and right, hunting for a target.

Hopping up onto one of the firing steps, she peered back through the dust plume kicked up by the skiff's powerful lifter engines. The bulky Hunter-Killers were visible in the haze. Their silhouettes clumped along more than a hundred meters back, spread out in a textbook skirmish line.

"Haven't been any Crawler attacks report east of Alldeep for two weeks, ma'am."

"I'm aware."

"So you think we'll be sleepwalking this route much longer?"

Brackenshaw clicked her tongue disapprovingly. "You'll patrol the routes command says you patrol, Sergeant. No sense gargling about it."

"Yes, ma'am."

The disappointment was palpable. Valley and his squad were part of the fresh crop of Brekkan Hunter-Killer units; brand new mechs and brand new pilots who arrived just a little too late for all-out war. Young men and women picked for their aggression; for their violent aptitude. She could understand his feelings, even if she didn't condone them. He'd probably been working for this for most of his life.

"Just stay on our lead and keep your spacings tight," she continued. "If I know Rychter, the real action'll smack you in the teeth when you're least expecting it, so keep your people sharp, eh?"

"Copy that."

"Boxley – SC-10," another voice cut across the comm, this time from the scout skiff way out in front. "Got a contact out here, Lieutenant."

In an instant Brackenshaw was striding back across the deck to the prow of the skiff. "Lay it on me."

"Long range seismics have a Scraegan pack moving toward the Coaler's border. If the readings are right they're on an intercept course with us."

"Intercept course?" She frowned. "Check your readings and confirm that."

"Checked them three times, ma'am. Definitely looks like they're looking for a meet up."

Brackenshaw clicked her comm link to the wide band, addressing all six skiffs in her flight. "All units, long range seismics – get me confirmations."

Two minutes passed. Every skiff – including her own – reported the same readings, and she felt a twinge of unease in her stomach.

"Alright, everybody keep your spines strapped in, eh?" she told them firmly. "It's not like we've got comm-to-comm with our new friends. Maybe they've come to get some help with a Crawler problem."

"Well, least we'll get to test out the translator," Sergeant Hynan drawled. "See all that R&D money at work."

"Volunteering, Sergeant?"

"I don't know, seems like a command prerogative, doesn't it?"

"Thought you might see it that way." Brackenshaw smiled thinly. "All units run full combat checks and standby. If we're about to get led into a pissing Crawler nest I'd like to be ready for it."

Leaning over the gantry rail, she peered through optics of her combat goggles. She could see the straggled line of skiffs out in front, but no sign of the Scraegans beyond.

Then she saw the lights.

A dozen pinpricks; the glare of tiny suns piercing the dust and grit.

It took her a couple of seconds to realise what they were, but the lights grew rapidly in size, and took on the unmistakable boil of blue white fire. Furnace-cannon bolts, fired from extreme range. For a moment Brackenshaw didn't quite believe what she was looking at, but then ten years of training and experience kicked in.

"SC-10 – all units!" she screamed. "Incoming!"

The warning came in the nick of time. Out in front, Boxley's skiff lurched out of the path of two bolts, leaving the blasts to scream off into empty space.

"Evasive manoeuvres," Brackenshaw bellowed, leaping back down onto the deck and dropping flat just as her pilot complied.

Suddenly the surface of Coaler's Basin was a storm of white hot explosions. Furnace-cannon shots ripped past them, tearing up furrows in the ground, scorching and melting long trails in the sand. Her skiff swung and dipped with gut-wrenching force, and she scrambled to her feet, catching the firing rail with one hand and looking out.

The air was filling with volley after volley of furnace-cannon rounds. From the density she guessed a warpack of maybe twenty – enough to make it dicey if it came to a full on engagement. Thankfully at such range the odds of a hit were remote. With plenty of room to manoeuvre the agile skiffs slalomed around the bombardment.

Then she saw the three skiffs closest to the Scraegan line traverse onto an attack heading, their main cannons swivelling to bear.

"Got 'em ranged now, Lieutenant," Hynan barked.

"Pissing Rivers," Boxley spat angrily. "Guess somebody didn't get the memo that we're not killing each other anymore, eh?"

"Valley – SC-10, we are on our way," the Hunter-Killer sergeant barked. "Moving in at assault speed."

"Belay that!" Brackenshaw shouted, but before she could speak further a furnace shot almost cut her skiff in half. The pilot swung them hard, just swinging the tail out of the firing line. The blast came so close that she felt the heat sear across the flank of the skiff.

"Engaging!"

And then the closest skiffs started shooting back. Cannons thumped into life, and in the distance she could finally see the hulking Scraegan bodies in the distance, stalking through the sand like forgotten gods of the desert.

Shells flew. Brackenshaw saw the whole world getting ready to fall apart all over again, and the jolt of horror found its way straight to her lungs.

"Hold your fire!" she screamed over the comm. "Repeat, all units hold your fire!"

"Lieutenant?!" Hynan sounded aghast. "Ma'am, they're out here playing for keeps."

"HK-Atom," the rookie officer barked. "Moving to engage."

"NEGATIVE!" Brackenshaw roared as she went scrambling across the deck of the skiff, heading towards the stairs that led down into its belly. "Valley, negative on your last."

"Ma'am?!"

"Do not engage those Scraegans, this is a direct order!"

"They opened fire on us-,"

"Drown me, all of you, this is not a pissing debate! Valley, pull your people back or I'll have you strung up on charges so fast you'll never see the inside of a Hunter-Killer again."

Silence filled the comm and for a horrible moment she thought the young man was going to ignore her and throw his mechs into the grinder. Chasing glory against the old enemy – risking everything for the sake of a good story to tell the other recruits if they ever made it back to Brekka.

"Copy that, SC-10," Valley muttered, almost petulant at being robbed of a good fight. "Pulling back."

Brackenshaw felt a tide of relief wash over as she caught the stair rail, looking out onto the battlefield. The Hunter-Killer bodies began skulking backwards in good order, guns trained on the Scraegan positions, even as furnace-cannon blasts tore up the ground around them.

"And the rest of you, back off right now," she shouted, sliding down the skiff's narrow stairway into the main section. "Defensive formation. Boxley, Rikhotso, flanking positions at two hundred meters with bracketing solutions. Hynan, Jauper, Gansalle: haul back out of range, spin up your mine launchers and man all firing rails."

What in the name of the watching bloody Lords is going on?

In another time she wouldn't have hesitated for an instant. She would have sent Valley and his Hunter-Killers into meat grinder and been there right alongside them. But something about this was all wrong. Something was missing; some crucial piece of context that would make this make sense.

As a Scout Cadre Lieutenant, she wanted to have that context before anyone had to start dying.

She sprinted through the narrow interior of the skiff. White lights illuminated the armoured guts of the vehicle, and from a reinforced compartment at the stern, a sapphire glow shone where the skiff's pilot slung them on their wild, evasive trajectory.

All around her the soldiers of her platoon were rolling off of bunks, snatching up rifles and bolting for the upper deck, sure-footed and used to the violent manoeuvring of the Scout Cadre vehicles. Brackenshaw slung her own rifle across her shoulder jerked to a halt at the skiff's three dimensional combat suite. A real time view of the badlands beyond the walls played out in front of her.

The six dots of her skiffs were already dispersing, each one of them commanded by an officer she'd been able to hand pick – on of the few perks of her new rank. Amongst them, ten more blue indicators marked out the position of the retreating Hunter-Killers.

"Valley?" she called.

"Ma'am?"

"Form your people up behind us."

"I ... shouldn't we be out in front, ready for the charge?"

"Negative. If they do advance, we'll disrupt them with a full mine drop. Then I want your squad ready to counter-engage and knock their pissing teeth out. Copy?"

"Copy that," Valley replied, finally sounding like she'd said something he could get his teeth into. "SC-10 forming up on your lead. Just give the word."

Brackenshaw hoped she wouldn't have to. She shuffled around the display, trying to make sense of what was happening.

"What in the Everflowing's going on, ma'am?" asked Corporal Locke, a blond haired soldier currently hunched over the display, her brow furrowed in bafflement. "I thought we were friends now?"

"So did I." Brackenshaw shook her head, her eyes drawn to the pulsing red of the Scraegan indicators. "Any movement?"

"Seismics show them holding position," Locke answered. "At least for now. What do you wanna do?"

"Pass the word – everybody stays exactly where they are. Not a bullet leaves the chamber without my say so."

Locke nodded, passing the order along the chain as Brackenshaw examined the display more closely. With one hand she keyed a command into the console, overlaying a lattice of white lines that marked out the pre-war territories the Scraegans and humans had been fighting over.

They were just over the edge of one of them, on Scraegan land – at least, in the roughest sense imaginable. Coaler's Basin had been the site of running border skirmishes for decades, and no-one really owned any of it in a meaningful sense.

So what was going on? Brekkan battle groups had been performing joint ops deep in Scraegan territory for weeks now. Her force had barely brushed the edge of one of the greyed boundaries in the south and the Scraegans had opened up on them. She shook her head slowly, mouth twisting in a thoughtful grimace. A dozen kilometres further south there were a handful of known Scraegan warrens.

Were these warriors just overzealous militia, spooked by the site of a human military column? Or had the message just somehow not reached this portion of the Scraegan army that they didn't have to kill humans on site any more.

She waited.

Nothing and no-one moved. The Scraegans had stopped firing. They just lurked out there at extreme range. Brackenshaw pushed her goggles up of her face, squinting at the display.

"Regular stand off, ma'am," Locke murmured. "What do we do?"

"That's very good question, Corporal." Brackenshaw bit her lip, her mind racing, fully aware of the cascade of events that would follow if she got this wrong.

"Cameras and sensors," she said eventually. "We logged everything?"

"Yes."

"Good."

"Why would they do that? Why just open up like that?"

Brackenshaw shook her head. "I'm not sure. But they're not pursuing so they're not just out to kill us."

"Think we got too close to their warrens?" Even as she said it, Corporal Locke didn't look or sound convinced.

"SC-10," Boxley called. "Got a good look at 'em now, ma'am. They're just sittin' out there."

"Any hostile moves?"

"Well, not more than they've done already."

Nodding to herself, Brackenshaw tugged a stylus out of a holder in the display console. She reached forward, and used it to mark a thin line of red on the 3D hologram. She drew a red X on the exact point Boxley's skiff had been before the Scraegans opened fire. It was well beyond the 'border' within the Coaler's Basin, but still kilometres away from any Scraegan settlements, and their trajectory would have taken them nowhere near those population centres.

"Scratch my last, ma'am," Boxley said again. "They're starting to move and they're coming our way."

"Shit." Brackenshaw drummed her fingers on the side of the console. On the display the Scraegn indicators were indeed starting to inch forward. "E.T.A?"

"Slow and steady. They're not trying to hide anything. They want us to know they're coming."

"Orders, ma'am?" Valley called.

The Scraegans had fired first. In the simplest terms, they started it and no-one would bat an eye if Brackenshaw ordered her people to fight back. Did she really want to gamble that this was just some isolated incident? Take the chance that this wouldn't spiral into something much, much worse?

Did she really want to risk tipping the whole planet into conflict all over again?

Kaydie Brackenshaw was not going to be that person.

"SC-10 – all units," she said over the wide band. "This is Lieutenant Brackenshaw. You are to execute combat withdrawal on my command."

"Withdrawal?" Valley exploded. "Brackenshaw!"

"Ma'am, you sure about this?" Hynan asked. "We turn around now and we might be giving the Scraegans open season on anybody working in their territory."

"All of you, lock it up!" Brackenshaw snarled, anger rising inside her like a volcano. "I am your commanding officer and this is my responsibility. And if we really are about to start another war with the Scraegans, it can be on somebody else's conscience."

Bạn đang đọc truyện trên: AzTruyen.Top