Clines shot me a skeptical scowl.
“Panspermia? You really think that’s the explanation for all this? RNA on comets got all the way not just out to the Tahni but to these worlds too? Over two, three hundred light years? Naw, man, there’s only one way this could have happened, and that’s the Predecessors.”
“Not that again,” Vicky said, slapping her palm against the hood of the rover. “I’ll sit through your conspiracy theories about Tahni superstition and hidden alien threats, but I will not listen to you go through this Predecessor bullshit again.”
“We can’t do anything else with the harvester until we go into town tomorrow and get a new power coupling fabbed,” I declared. I looked up at Vicky. “Wanna make a day of it, grab some lunch, hit the zocalo?”
“That sounds good!” Clines enthused. “I’ll meet you guys at the hopper pickup in the morning.”
Vicky tried to look upset with Clines, but she couldn’t keep up the façade and finally just started laughing.
“Sure,” she acceded.
“And until then,” Clines said, jogging back to his rover and pulling out the rifle, cocking an eyebrow toward me. “Wanna go see if we can find that dragon?”
I looked a question at Vicky.
“Fine,” she said. “But you’d better be home before dinner.”
Clines laughed and slapped me on the shoulder.
“You take the gun, compadre,” he said, sliding behind the wheel of his vehicle. “I don’t want to drink and shoot.”
“But drinking and driving is fine,” Vicky whispered to me.
I gave her a kiss, tasting the salt of her sweat, then picked up the rifle. Its weight was welcoming, comforting, somehow. I slid in beside Clines and pulled the door shut.
“Let’s go kill something.”
2
“Get everyone out of here!” I yelled at Vicky, and I hit my jets.
The mecha was leaning forward, its weight on its front foot, slightly off-balance because it had never been built for agility, just enough brute force to carry around an antiproton reactor and a shitload of weapons. I rammed my shoulder into the thing’s trailing leg, my teeth clacking together with the impact, and ran the jets so far into the red I could almost hear them screaming for mercy.
It didn’t knock him over. I hadn’t thought it would. I just wanted to buy time, and that I did. He lost balance and had to slam his trailing foot to the ground, which, unfortunately, took me to the ground with it. The armor was tough. It could take a huge beating and keep working, but unfortunately, us humans had to be inside it.
Every time we got a new guy in the platoon, they would always wind up asking why we had to be in the suits, why the Marines didn’t just put an AI program in the suit computers and let it do the fighting, and someone would have to repeat the same explanation that Captain Covington had given to the platoon leader who had given it to everyone else. It was the old story about how automated weapons had been tried during the Sino-Russian War and had turned against their own side. It might have just been because the computer systems weren’t sophisticated enough back then, but no one with the power to change things had ever trusted them again, so us poor, vulnerable humans still had to pull the triggers.
When my back hit the concrete foundation of the building, I could really have come up with some great arguments for automated weaponry. I’d had cracked ribs before, and I was fairly sure I had them again. The pain sucked the breath right out of my chest, replacing it with white fire, and I wanted more than anything else to just lie there on the ground and rest, to let someone else do the rest of the fighting.
That wasn’t an option for a few reasons, the main one being that if I stayed on the ground, the mecha was going to squish me flat. The massive oval of its foot pad hovered above me and I punched the jets again, sliding through oceans of debris but getting out of the way of the stomp. The mecha’s foot pad cracked the floor beneath it, shaking me right through the BiPhase Carbide of my armor. I had to get up, and even though the Vigilante would do the work, the only way it could react was by me using the muscles that I would have needed if I’d been just trying to move my own body and not the three-meter suit of armor. And moving fucking hurt.
I rolled to my feet, screaming into the privacy of my helmet, knowing no one would hear, and turned to face oncoming death. Instinct screamed at me to get distance, but experience yelled just as loud that I should stay close. The mecha was an artillery piece, and its heavy weapons were designed for distance fire. Neither the proton cannon nor the coil gun turret could depress far enough to reach me, but the damned KE guns could.
Tantalum needles cracked off my armor, no single one of them able to penetrate, but the combined effect of hundreds of the things enough to wear my protection down and kill me, given time. Thankfully, even though my plasma gun wouldn’t penetrate the mecha’s armor over anything vital, there was one target I was fairly confident about servicing.
I blasted the thing’s right-hand KE gun with a plasmoid, the ionized gas melting the infantry-defense weapon to slag. The Tahni pilot must have really liked that gun, because he seemed to take its loss personally. His leg was the size of a tree trunk, and when it impacted the left shoulder of my suit, it threw me four meters, straight through the back wall of the building…
…and I woke up screaming.
“Cam!” Vicky said, her hands warm against the clammy skin of my arm, her voice soothing. “It’s a dream, Cam. It’s just a dream.”
I was panting, dripping sweat and I forced my eyes open wide, trying to reassure myself that I was back in our bedroom on Hausos, not fighting for my life on Tahn-Skyyiah. The room was dark but not pitch-black, moonlight filtering in through the open window along with a cool, night breeze…and an ear-splitting roar that shook the walls.
“What the hell?” I gasped, swinging my legs off the bed and lunging for the window.
We left it open at night in the summer, counting on the sonic screens to keep out the insects, though given how poor a job they did against the rock dragons, maybe we shouldn’t have been so confident. I pushed aside the filmy veil of the shade and searched the night sky, holding up a hand to block the light of the Asvins, the twin moons of Hausos, sailing their nightly course from one horizon to the other.
A few degrees below the gibbous moons, another pair of glowing circles pierced the darkness, much closer together and lower to the ground. It could have been thunder rolling over the plains from the storm that had never passed over us, but it wasn’t. It was a sound almost more familiar to me than thunder. It was a shuttle. There were a couple of small transport jets on-planet, kept mostly for the use of the Corporate Council, but they were a quarter the size of a shuttle, their turbofans almost silent by comparison with the atmospheric drives of an aerospacecraft.
“Where the hell are they going?” Vicky wondered. I hadn’t noticed her get out of bed, but she was beside me in the window, the oversized T-shirt she wore to bed fluttering slightly in the breeze. I wore only shorts, and was beginning to notice the chill creeping up my back from dried sweat.
Her question was a good one. The spaceport, a grand name for what was basically a field of fusion-form pavement a kilometer long, was outside the town, a hundred kilometers west of here.