“This is Sam. I read you five-by-five.”

The King-class SSTO gave a bang and a groan as the building heat of reentry caused its metal frame to flex. Someone sitting by Samantha snickered. She turned to face him. It was PFC Ethan. It was easy to recognize his stubble, pointed chin, and smile under the hard flight helmet and mirrored visor the Dread Fist Company mercenary infantry were issued.

“Is that not procedure here? No radio check?” Sam asked, looking down at him.

“Is it for you, milite?” Ethan replied.

Sam faced back forward. Eight men and women, strapped into jump seats, looked idly on, a gallery of chins and lips under a set of visored helmets. The six to either side of Sam and Ethan were watching, too, she was sure. Even absent a show, they would be watching Sam. It would be hard for them not to, frankly. She stood a good half-foot taller than any of them, even without combat boots on.

“Diligence is half the job,” she said to him, ignoring the jab.

“The radios work. Chill out.”

Sam faced front, saying nothing.

A minute later, a gentle pop in her ear opened up the buzz of the radio channel. A thin, modulated voice came on. “Alright, lads and lasses. Twenty minutes to touchdown. That so-called Kaiser guy is a cornered rat in a hole down there. Bring him in.”

As the SSTO plunged through the upper atmosphere, the roar of the winds against the hull pressed into their ears, even covered as they were with their headsets and helmets. The heads and bodies across from Sam began to rumble and jostle in a rough unison with the movements of the craft.

Ten minutes later, the wind relented, easing down into a benign whistle. The King had entered the final glide phase. The irregulars checked their gear and grabbed their straps, getting ready to lift their harnesses and dismount. Sam tapped her most important bits of gear in a well-rehearsed sequence: plastic medkit on the right thigh, radio receiver on the left hip, radio earpiece on the left ear, heavy battle rifle strapped down at an angle beneath the seat. And one extra, for this mission profile: a pair of cold, carbon steel handcuffs, secured in her left velcro pocket.

Sam checked one more thing. She reached to the control on her hip and flipped the dial past its first threshold. A high, evil whine arced between her ears. Sam’s jaw tightened.

Have they noticed? She thought. No doubt; that’s an active sensor signal. We’re marked.

She flipped the dial back, silencing the whine. Just as she did, her CO came back on. “Time zero. Move to waypoint Alpha. Good luck.”

Sam thought to announce her observation on the channel, but why? The infantry squads had two designated radio operators and the SSTO had a signals specialist. Between them and the pilot there were three or four people whose job it was to monitor the frequencies and identify whether something really did represent a threat. And none of those people were her. So she stowed the thought, and she joined the chorus of infantry throwing up their jump seat harnesses and pounding boots on steel in a coordinated scramble to the rising bay door.

Outside, down on the largest of the Resmond islands on the planet Volga, it was a cloudy, grey day. The King had touched down in a wide, tall alluvial plain, a blanket of green overgrowth incised deeply by a haphazard network of rivers and basins. The blocky winged SSTO sat on its landing struts, its bottom drive engine wash singing the grasses, about a dozen meters from the lip of a huge grey-brown gash in the terrain. It was an abandoned titanium mine, 40 meters from top the bottom, the descent terraced by packed roads that wound around the side for heavy equipment to lumber up and down.

The first six Dread Fist infantrymen spilled out of the King’s main bay and hustled to the lip. Sam followed close behind, rifle ready.

A crack split the air as Sam’s right foot hit the ground. There was some other noise hard on her right ear. The mercenaries ahead of her dove to the ground, and she slid to a halt, joining them.

A glance back: PFC Ethan, a dark scuff in the center of his fatigues, being dragged back into the bay by his arms. Shit.

Lieutenant Fae’s voice buzzed in her ears, thin and modulated but urgent. “Anybody see it?”

“Negative.” “No.” “Not me.”

Sam found a tiny embankment at the edge of the slope and crawled up to it, planting her shoulders and the back of her neck against it. She raised her head to peek for a half-second, then hid again.

“There’s a small concrete building, bottom of the west slope, bearing three-four-zero. Probably that.”

Lieutenant Fae, prone a few yards away, nodded. “Olsen, get your SAW on that, bearing three-four-zero. On my mark, Bravo squad left; Charlie squad right. Squad leaders switch over to command channel.”

That was plan A that had been discarded, then. When the Dread Fist had been told that Johan “Kaiser” Hect was hiding in a remote mine, little more than a dug-out cave in the temperate swamps of Resmond, it was assumed that their OpFor would be, at most, disgruntled miners with intermediate caliber rifles and diamond tipped rock cutters. Marginal people, a few of them probably outlaws themselves, finding common cause with a desperate man on the run. That assessment wasn’t off the table, but at least one of those disgruntled miners was a mean shot with their rifle.

So they were on to plan B. Rather than walking up to the front door and kicking it in, they’d just have to do things the hard way. Sam smiled.

There was a gentle steel click, cloaked under the nearby whine of the King’s engine, and then Olsen opened up with the SAW, filling the air with a percussive, rhythmic roar.

“Mark.”

Bravo squad (down Ethan) leapt to their feet and tore down the slope of the hill. Sam gripped her rifle by the barrel shroud, holding it vertical along the plane of her body and pushing it tight against the sling over her shoulder. She held her left hand and forearm on the rocky sloped wall of the strip mine to steady her descent. It hurt like hell, the loose and jagged rocks raking along her side and arm, but it was better than being slow. Even with tracer rounds streaking down onto the concrete building, peppering the walls and doors with lead, warding any would-be sharpshooters from the windows, Bravo squad was exposed out here. Each of them alone with the malign thrill of the death that could take them at any moment.

But Alpha squad’s suppressive fire did its job, and death kept its distance for a time.

Sam and her four squadmates hit the floor of the mine and ran toward the structure.

Her squad lead, Sgt. Stimwell, belted a command into their ears. “Olsen will stop soon. Sam, cover left window. Al, right window. Chen and I have the door.”

The machine gun fire ceased, the last three shots echoing into the sky. Sam raised her battle rifle and trained it on the left window. She slowed from a run to a creeping walk, her eyes fighting to pierce the dark void of the window. Daring the sharpshooter to show himself. Fearing that he needn’t in order to bring death. It was damn dark in that room…

There was a glint of glass. The front lens on an optic and a muzzle brake thrust out of the shadows! Sam jerked her own sights onto it and squeezed off a burst. She wrestled the sights back onto the window. It was an empty black void again.

“Contact.”

Sam’s heart was pounding. She had been lucky. Too damn lucky.

“Roger, Sam. Brave bastard.” Stimwell and Chen were lined up at the door. “Once we’re in, you’re after us. Charlie will come in behind us. Ready?”

“Yes,” “Yep,” “Affirmative.”

“Go.”

Chen swung the butt of his rifle against the door handle, breaking something, and then he pivoted square with the door and kicked it in with the thrust of his leg. He and Stimwell hustled in, pieing off corners within the darkened interior.

Sam and Al hurried up to join them as the building—a squat little grey brick about 20 meters to a side and half as much tall—flashed and pounded with gunfire.

Sam was the next inside, and she swung her rifle around at high ready as she examined the scene. She stood at the top of a steel catwalk platform; the only way off was a set of stairs down to a concrete floor eight meters down on her right. At the bottom of those stairs, Chen sat, clutching his side with one hand. Stimwell stood above him, his rifle swinging about much like Sam’s, searching for targets.

On the left, an aluminum ladder was propped up against the wall. At its top was the window that Sam had fired into. There was just enough of a concrete shelf at the window to provide a firing platform. A man in muted goldenrod battledress lay dead—his neck torn to bloody ruin by a bullet—beside his scoped rifle at the foot of the ladder.

“Clear,” Stimwell barked. “Sam, come on in. Al, keep an eye on that.” He gestured at a wide, ten-meter-by-ten-meter steel platform flush with the concrete floor of the bare little building, ringed by a railing. At one corner was a rectangular gap with a steel ladder built into the side. By the looks of it, it was a cargo elevator with a service corridor running down alongside it.

Sam jogged down the stairs and ripped open her medkit as Al paced down behind her, watching the service ladder. Chen leaned back against the concrete wall with a wince, and he pulled off his helmet.

Sam knelt down and felt at the left side of his torso. “Keep your bucket on, soldier. We’re in a hot zone.”

“Can’t a man take a breather?” Chen rasped with a smirk.

Sam decided to let it slide as she cut away some of his battledress. His ballistic plate had stopped two rounds, but a third round had come in around it. It was a nasty-looking wound, but not a truly bad one. A rifle round had caught him in the ribs, maybe cracked one, but had glided along the side of them and out the back of his pack. The wound surely stung like hell, and it was bleeding badly, but as long as they took the time to dress it, Chen would make it back. Sam set to work with the gauze and bandages after reporting as much.

“Roger,” Stimwell replied. Charlie squad was filing into the building now. “We tagged the guy who got Chen, but he got down that rathole. Our man must be down there.”

Lieutenant Fae and Alpha squad arrived a few minutes after them. “What’s this?” she asked. “Why’s there a building at the bottom of a strip mine?”

There was silence in the room.

“Armor bay,” Sam offered.

Fae’s head spun about. “A tank bunker with no exits?”

“Sealed or poured over, ma’am. Or hidden. But this elevator is here for a reason, and we don’t see any doors large enough to justify an elevator this size. Which means the doors were hidden or closed up permanently.”

“Roger. So we think Kaiser might be in an armory down there.”

Sam put some pieces together.

“Yes, ma’am. It’s dangerous, but we should go right now or not at all.”

“Elaborate?”

“The two shooters they posted here were a delaying action. They have something in that armory they began preparing when they marked us inbound on the King.”

If Fae recognized what Sam was implying about the OpFor’s ability to track their drop, she didn’t show it. “Roger, but we won’t rush this. Bravo squad, evac Chen. Regroup and we’ll begin the assault.”

No. Now or not at all. “Ma’am…”

“You have your orders, private. Get to it.”

Fifteen excruciating minutes later, Lieutenant Fae finished reorganizing the slightly depleted infantry platoon for an assault on the elevator shaft. Simple, by the book work: they’d drop a few fragmentation grenades down there, followed by a smoke grenade, and then they’d drop down into it with their thermal scan displays active on their visors. They’d have a clear view of any remaining defenders, and those defenders would struggle to acquire targets in return.

Sam knew she ought to be feeling some sort of awful, sinking pit in her stomach. She knew, in the forefront of her mind, that these old tactics, these millennia-old breaching drills, were poorly suited to anything but, frankly, police actions. She looked over at their kill, the shot and broken body wearing the dull gold fatigues. Outfitted for war. Just a disgruntled miner, sucked into Kaiser’s orbit by his radiating charisma?

Or something more?

“Lieutenant, permission to speak?”

“Quickly.”

“We missed our window of opportunity. We should expect an ambush at the bottom. We should prepare heavier equipment.”

“Can it. We’re not missing our payday.”

“… Understood. Let me go first, Lieutenant.”

Sam couldn’t see most of Fae’s face under the visor, but she could easily imagine her eyes hardening and narrowing. “I told you to can it. Is this a Legionnaire’s honor thing?”

“No, ma’am. I believe this to be a dangerous duty I am well suited to, ma’am.”

Lieutenant Fae looked up at Sam. There was no denying that she was uniquely suited to this duty. Her size alone—”they don’t make ‘em 6’6’’ in New Hope,” Al had quipped—marked her instantly for one of the eponymous peers of the Legion of Peers, an heir to a long and storied lineage of warriors, the product of generations of carefully brokered genetic matches, and a woman terribly out of place in a mercenary company operating four planets outward from the Legion’s home world. In the six months she had been with the company, her icy calm on patrol and her enthusiastic dedication to training, carrying on well after most of the irregulars had headed to the showers in the afternoon, seemed to confirm everybody’s assumptions—and suspicions—about who a milite might be.

Not that she was technically a milite. Her name and bloodline would have entitled her to a proper commission back in the Dominion of the Legion… but for the tiny detail of her exile from the Dominion. Which rendered the whole point moot. If they wanted to think of her as a milite, they could think of her as a milite.

“Fine, if you’ll quit being a pain in the ass about everything,” Fae replied. “Bravo squad does breach. Al and Stimwell do the grenades; Sam hits the hole. Liv and Dan,” she continued, pointing at two of the riflemen from her Alpha squad, “are in after Sam. The three of you tell us what you see and I’ll dispatch Bravo and Charlie.”

A few minutes later, two bangs underlaid by an aural lattice of ping-ping-ping shrapnel impacts echoed up the elevator. A half-heartbeat later, Sam swung herself over the ladder and slid down the ladder poles into the hiss of the smoke grenade.

Her boots hit the diamond-pattern metal with a hollow thump, and she swung her rifle up to ready and turned to get her bearings. Little yellow flecks on the thermal scan showed where the grenades had exploded and the shrapnel had heated the metal surfaces of the corridor as they struck at deadly speeds. Nothing else was hot down here—so, no human bodies. The pattern left behind by the grenades was enough to help make out the outlines of the corridor. A single wide and tall set of bay doors led to this platform, and the corridor beyond was straight for a short distance before disappearing into the deep purple darkness that lay beyond the thermal scanner’s effective range. The corridor seemed to support two levels of catwalks partway up its height, one about two meters over Sam’s head.

Sam noted the little red pips at the corner of her visor for the visual and magnetic scan modes, indicating those the scanners’ filter readings were too homogenous: that is to say, it was too dark in there for visual light and too uniformly metallic for a useful magscan, so thermal was probably the most useful scan. On a hunch, however, she flipped to magscan.

And then she threw herself desperately against the left wall of the corridor, taking cover behind a support column for the catwalk above.

“Sam to Alpha lead,” she shouted, as a menacing hum emitted from further down the corridor. “Delay assault!”

“You’d better not be fucking with me, private,” Fae replied over the radio.

Metal pounded on metal down the corridor.

“I’m damn well not, ma’am,” Sam snarled, unable to contain herself in the urgency. “Contact, one full squad of battle armor, dead ahead on the hallway.”

“What the—” Fae’s reply was cut off by the roar of rifle fire as four huge guns let loose in the corridor. Sparks rained down as the big bullets slammed into the column and then ricocheted haphazardly about the corridor. The rush of expelled gasses and a heavy sliding noise at the back end of each booming report gave away these guns as large, armor-mounted recoilless rifles, stabilized by the ejection of gaseous countermass and cycled by ponderous electrical autoloaders. “—ack up here, NOW!”

“Negative, Lieutenant,” Sam said. “They won’t miss me on that ladder.” She lowered herself to one knee, altering her target profile behind column in case a round got through it. One, two, three, four, five…

The hallway filled with noise and sparks and death. They had failed to hit Sam again. She had been lucky—and she was getting sick of having to be lucky.

Seven or so seconds to make a move. Sam looked up. The catwalk? A beam had been left dangling by the last assault. That was it. But she was running low on time…

She had an idea, but she had to get lucky one more time. Judging from the way the thudding footsteps were getting closer, there was only one more time to get lucky.

She ripped a grenade off of her belt and hooked a finger through the pin. Three, two, one…

BANG. Metal slugs danced about the hallway, but, for one last time, none slammed into Sam. But the column shattered, spraying shards of brittle steel toward the service elevator, and metal groaned above her.

Sam hurled the grenade down the hall at the hulking yellow-orange blobs in her scanner, subtle irregularities in the neon-yellow magscan rendering of the corridor. It landed at their feet, and she crouched behind the stump of the column as the catwalk sagged lower toward her.

One… two… three!

With four seconds left before the next volley, she swung herself up onto the sagging catwalk and scrambled further up. Then, right before the volley was supposed to go off, she flattened herself, and the grenade exploded in a gout of heat and flames. It would singe the paint on the armor, or, at best, maybe knock one on its ass. But the heat of the grenade’s explosion, right in their faces, would overwhelm their thermal scanners, if only for just a moment, and by the time they could see again…

Sam was two meters above them and ten meters behind them, pounding farther down the corridor and around a corner.

Fae’s voice came in weakly, struggling to tread water over a great ocean of static.

“Like I’m saying, Sam, I can’t come down there and get you.”

“I understand, Lieutenant. I’m not asking you to come get me. I’m advising to make an assault in order to fulfill the contract, or else evacuate and leave me behind.”

“Think past your damn bravado for a second, milite. Just sit tight. They need to surface at some point. You evade them, or surrender if you need to, and we’ll bait them out to attack.”

Sam shook her head in the darkness of this forgotten service corridor, barely more than a duct between two corridors accessible from the uppermost catwalks. “Negative. Our enemy is military. We do not benefit from ceding to them the tactical initiative.”

“But you want to assault them? Against battle armor?”

Sam sighed. “Don’t we have naval lasers aboard the King? If I can activate the elevator…”

“Out of the question.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so. I’m not taking a risk like that. With you or with your platoon mates.”

“We’re taking a greater risk by sitting on our haunches,” Sam said, as evenly as she could. Her chin and hands trembled with the effort of restraining her frustration.

There was a brief silence. Then, Fae said, “Sam, evade them. We’ll get them topside and cut them up. Fae out.”

Sam resisted the urge to slam her fist into the corridor wall—her enemies could be listening—and instead shook her empty hands lamely as if that would whisk the anger off into the stale air.

She looked left, looked right, sighed, raised her rifle, and tiptoed down to the left.

Sam crept low along the upper catwalk. As tempting as it was to peek over and get eyes on the ground, her ears would do a fine job, and they wouldn’t risk giving her away.

She followed this corridor—perpendicular to the one that led to the service elevator—to take her deeper into the complex, away from her searching enemies. It went for a fair distance (100 meters, Sam guessed) before the catwalks terminated in rails. The walls of the corridor were lined with flat lifts, three on the left, three on the right, and three at the terminal wall of the corridor. The lifts had been summoned to different levels, seemingly at random.

The nearest lift was on the level of the catwalk below. Sam stopped and listened to the silence for a beat before peeking over the side. With all clear and quiet, she mounted the nearest ladder and crept down to the lower catwalk.

The lift surface was dusty—these lifts hadn’t moved in untold years. But the doors that the lift had risen to all those years ago were open. Sam peeked inside.

She froze.

A few seconds later, when she was satisfied that fire and death would not claim her, she stepped inside.

Two steely humanoid forms, two-and-a-half meters tall from heel to helm, were harnessed to the wall. They were damn ugly things, all boxy volume, welded plates, and sharp corners. EAP conduits—artificial muscles—ran alongside bundles of cables at the calves and down the upper arms. Huge boxy gauntlets were painted with danger stripe and terminated in beefy-looking steel hands with stubby but fully-articulated digits. The integrated helmets had dual, bug-eyed lenses, shielded from a high-power forehead lamp by a brim.

Sam marked them for industrial exoskeletons. Probably mining suits, old, cheap, and long forgotten in this strange underground complex.

But a half-ton of steel was a half-ton of steel.

Sam checked the corridor one more time, and then she ducked back into the exoskeleton bay.

She removed her plate carrier and dumped it on the ground, most of the bits and bobs of her kit going with it. Her grey-green battledress jacket went down next, and then, wearing her cool cotton-blend combat shirt, Sam stepped up to the first of the exoskeletons. She felt around the back for the integral power back and found it, housed in a tall half-cylinder running up the back, something like a giant oxygen tank. She turned a dial and felt the hum of systems coming to life.

Excellent. Still running after all these years.

After giving it a moment to allow the power pack to reach operating output levels, Sam ran her hand along the flanks of the exoskeleton until she found a steel lip on its right side, and she pulled. The chest cavity swung open on a hinge on the left flank, a bundle of tensed EAPs wrapped around a thick steel pin now supporting the huge weight of the front shell.

She backed in, feeding her legs down into the exoskeleton’s legs and pressing her back into the polymer liner. She found the belt of a harness on her left and drew it across her waist just above her hips, feeding it into a receiver in the liner on her right. The harness was a segmented framework of steel, and with a hiss and a click, it pulled tight at the waist.

Sam fed her arms into the suit’s arms, through the banded loops at the upper and lower arms, and found the hand grips in the gauntlets. She gripped them tight and brought them up, feeling the EAP bundles in the arms respond to the movements of her arms, moving dozens of kilograms of steel in each arm as effortlessly as if it were her own skin.

With the right arm, she reached across and pulled the front shell closed, and then she pulled the helmet down over her head.

“Sam to Alpha lead.”

“Alpha lead here. What is it?”

“I found an old mining exoskeleton in here. I have it powered up. Moving to rendezvous.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I’m very serious, Lieutenant.”

Lieutenant Fae sighed. The exoskeleton’s sensitive radio receivers and excellent signal correction systems relayed it to Sam’s ears with admirable clarity.

“Evade, damnit. Don’t go picking a fight. We want to draw them up and out into the trap.”

“I read you loud and clear. Sam out.”

Sam pounded down the corridor, her exoskeleton’s steel soles screeching, grinding, and slamming against the tread-plated floor. She tracked along the right-hand wall, watching branching corridors to the left swing slowly into and out of view, then snapping her head to the right as she tore out into the intersections.

With the unholy sound this thing made at running speed, there was no doubt that her foes had noticed her. The only question was whether her echoing footfalls would give away her exact position or echo deceptively throughout this cavernous complex.

It was getting warm in the suit: the integral power pack felt hot like bricks in the summer sun through the plate on her back, and the EAPs driving the exoskeleton’s arms and legs were likewise warming up to the power coursing through them. Sam felt thankful that the helmet lining had been thoughtfully designed to absorb the sweat on her brow. That would be small comfort, though, if she couldn’t break through quickly to the elevator and had to play cat-and-mouse with the four armored foes. She’d be lit up like a Christmas tree on the thermal scanner.

And then she had another thought: the squad of battle armor that had nearly killed her at the service elevator hadn’t appeared on her thermal scan. They must have planned to hide in the darkness of the corridor, powered down to avoid being seen. A clever little play, made possible by fifteen minutes of prep time. She thought back to the marksman who had nearly killed her. He had set up a firing position on that narrow sill at the top of the ladder, and he had taken Ethan full in the chest at at least 300 meters.

These weren’t a bunch of idiot yahoos with a bone to pick. This was a fighting force. Better than outland pirates; better, even, than most principality garrisons…

She was yanked from her ruminations by an irregularity on her thermal scan. Down the corridor to her right, down a turn she had intended to take, she saw a red blur cross the hallway. She cursed: once again, she had gotten lucky. They were a professional, and they were running to get backup rather than take her on alone. Had she been unlucky, they would have been an idiot yahoo with a bone to pick, who might’ve taken the shot and killed her.

She pounded down the hall as fast as she could, and then she whipped around the corner. Still at a full sprint, she brought her rifle up to level and held down the trigger.

About two thirds of her shots plinked uselessly against walls and another third plinked uselessly against the armor under the red blur. But what mattered was the threat, that one stupid shot would penetrate the soft rear face of a joint and cut a power cable or cooling tube. Her foe turned to take the bullets on their front plates.

Sam charged.

Her lone adversary had time to lift and fire one gigantic slug from their recoilless rifle. As the bore swung up to face her, a void with death at its bottom, Sam said a prayer and lifted her left hand, bracing it against her chest and helmet like a boxer’s high guard.

The concussive bang of the rifle was dulled considerably by the environment seal of the exoskeleton, but a horrid clang and squeal shot through the metal bones of the suit as the slug impacted and skidded along the oversized steel-plated gauntlet. The thick hunk of metal was originally meant to serve as a shield against ejected rock while operating heavy drilling equipment up close. But in a pinch…

The faceless enemy held the rifle level for a beat as the next round began clanging into the chamber on the automatic feed belt, but they realized that Sam would be on them too quickly. They held the huge barrel point-forward to try to spear Sam like it was a lance—or at least blunt the momentum of her charge—but that was a fatal mistake. Sam jammed her right foot into the ground just to the right of the barrel, near the breech, in what would have been an athletic slide, but the sheer weight, angle, and steel-on-steel impact against the corridor floor simply brought her entire augmented mass to a halt.

Then she grabbed the barrel and wrenched it forward.

This was something her enemy wasn’t prepared for. Whoever they were, they weren’t used to CQB in this battle armor—it wasn’t made for that anyway. So, clutching the huge recoilless rifle, they fell forward with it.

Face down on the floor, there was only one way to end it.

Sam balled up the oversized mining gauntlets together and crushed down on the back of the armor’s neck.

“I have reached the elevator. The control panel here is either broken, powered down, or locked.”

“Roger. Control station further down, you think?”

“Affirmative.”

“Dismount and come on up the ladder.”

Sam muted her microphone to sigh within the safe confines of the sealed exoskeleton. She switched it back on.

“We can’t abandon this equipment to them. This is our chance to make good on the capture. Our only chance. You want the payday?”

“God damnit Sam.”

“Let me take the opportunity to recon. They’re pulling back; I can take advantage of that. And if they do take a shot, I might survive in this armor. Besides, even if they take the bait on the trap up there, we’ll need to get in to find Kaiser himself.”

“FINE. Don’t come up here, then. I’d rather you not get killed; I don’t want to have to do the goddamn paperwork. But apparently I can’t do anything to stop you. Do your damn recon. Report back.”

“Yes ma’am. Sam out.”

The next half-hour of plodding through the complex proved uneventful but enlightening. This side of the complex was a grid network of four north-south corridors and four east-west corridors, each terminating in a roughly square chamber. The uppermost chamber in the east was the elevator; most of the rest of the chambers were wide, tall, and bare, but for catwalks and cables slopping about from the ceiling: Empty armored vehicle bays. The ones that weren’t vehicle bays were multi-tiered armor bays, similar to the one where Sam had found the exoskeletons. These, however, were empty. With the addition of the interior chambers between the corridors, this armory could have stored and staged enough equipment for a full armored cavalry battalion with infantry support. Just two of the bays were closed and locked; the rest were open.

The Kaiser hadn’t holed up here by accident, Sam thought.

The corridor second-from-the-bottom on the west end stretched further into the complex, into darkness.

Sam toggled back on her thermal scanner as she crept down the hallway, doing her best to suppress the footfalls of her suit from “hideous clanging and screeching” to “heavy thumping.”

The corridor terminated at an airtight personnel door in the wall, dwarfed by the size of the steel wall it was set in. Sam flipped her radio to her squad channel.

“Sam to Alpha lead.”

Static.

It was as she had figured; she was too deep for the signal to reach. Sam listened for another moment before flipping the radio off, wrenching with one armored hand on the hatch-wheel until it spun loose, and prying the door open.

This interior hallway was empty, and, as Sam discovered when she flipped to visual light on her visor, wood-panelled and lit by florescent lights set in a drop ceiling. Twenty meters away, there was another hatch-style door, and halfway down the hall on the right-hand wall, a wooden door. The matted carpet was once, as near as Sam could tell, a luxurious naval blue, but now it was visibly moldy, packed down by decades of foot traffic, and tracked over with grime.

Training her seized recoilless rifle at the opposite door, Sam stalked down the hall to the wooden door at the halfway mark. She pushed it open.

Sam’s heart skipped a beat.

This control center was as wide as the hallway it ran alongside. Two rows of instruments and operations terminals, dead and still, ran from the left wall to the right wall, parted by a central walkway of decrepit blue carpet running from the door to the opposite wall. The opposite wall was a wide glass pane, wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling, offering a commanding view of a spaceport launch zone.

There, a Neptune-class assault lander towered 100 meters into the open sky from atop its launching struts. Clouds of vented H2 gas billowed about beneath it as it prepared for launch.

One gangway was still attached to an open hatch on the dorsal side of the winged monster, just off-center from where Sam was facing. At its base, through a momentary part in the clouds of H2, Sam caught a familiar glint of steel. She switched to thermal scan. Not far from the liquid fuel engine nozzles beneath the craft, shrouded in a shifting cool blue haze, there stood three orange blurs, holding steely recoilless rifles.

A delaying action! This launch sequence began hours ago and they’ve been stalling this entire time. How soon…?

Sam glanced back up at the Neptune. Four shallow-domed turrets clung to this side of the ship, spouting paired barrels of various shapes and sizes. That was probably six laser weapons and two naval-grade autocannons that could be trained on Sam if she gave herself away here. This exoskeleton might—might—withstand a brief flash of energy from one of the mounted lasers. But the autocannons were certain death… and a closed casket at the funeral.

The defensive armament on the vessel alone outgunned the entire Dread Fist Company at full strength, to say nothing of whatever might be inside. Kaiser was no cornered rat. He was a power unto himself, and wherever he was preparing to go now…

… Didn’t matter as much as the fact that he was getting away. There was only one thing to do. Report.

Sam crept forward, keeping low and as quiet as she could in this clumsy metallic second skin. She found a terminal that had a familiar, friendly layout of dials and and spectrometers: the communication operator’s desk. She felt around for a switch or a power indicator to try to get it enabled on primary or backup power. If this fed into a transmitter/receiver somewhere up high, maybe it could reach Alpha lead…

Sam saw an evil glint out of the corner of her eye, and she ducked.

A glassy crack rang out into the room as a large-caliber slug punched a hole in the reinforced windows of the control room.

Sam lay flat for a second, holding her own huge rifle close. She wasn’t dead yet. And because of that, some things were beginning to make more sense.

She rolled the cumbersome suit over until she lay supine in the central walking path, her steel feet framing the Neptune. She clutched the recoilless rifle. When she had stolen it from her fallen foe in the armory, she had been relieved to see that it was only partially integrated with the battle armor. It had its own trigger, handle, and receiver; the only thing that was truly integral to the battle armor was the power for the round-cycling system and the ammunition storage.

And so she had taken it, knowing that she could operate it, but with one severe drawback. Every shot would count, and after every shot…

She contracted with her EAP abdominals until she was sitting up in a half-seated position, aiming down the sights of the rifle, an optic tube fixed to the receiver at an angle. She snapped to a target, finding a blocky, menacing steel helm under the crosshairs. She squeezed the trigger and heard the boom fill the room behind her. There was another flash and movement of steel as the figure dropped out of her sights.

Without looking to see what had become of her target, she rolled back to prone, just to be in a different place, and she reached for another round in the exoskeleton’s upper arm storage block. Without the benefit of her foes’ battle armor ammunition feed systems, she was forced to manually breech load every shot she wanted to take, like an ancient terran line infantryman.

A line of one, Sam thought bitterly.

She held the breech open with the stiff, augmented strength of her metal arm, she fed the round in with her other hand, and she released the action, which snapped itself shut like a slamming truck door.

She rose to one knee behind one of the instrument consoles and brought her rifle to ready over the top, searching for a target at the foot of the Neptune.

There were none. The launch pad was clear. The Neptune hatches were closed, and the gangway was separating.

Uh oh.

The swirling, vented gasses on the launchpad puffed outward suddenly, and an eighth-second later, a deep, oppressive bass thrumming filled the air.

A second later, the pressure wave blew out the compromised window of the control center.

Sam switched off the exoskeleton’s external audio channels and braced flat on the floor moments before the building came crashing down on her.

The gauntlet felt no further resistance as it reached open air.

Sam dragged herself out of the rubble carefully, trying to avoid emerging immediately into a four-story tumble. The mining exoskeleton, having been pressed into service as light battle armor, was finally getting a chance to excel at its original purpose: protecting its operator in the case of an unanticipated tunnel collapse.

The Neptune had taken off. Kaiser had gotten away. Sam had been spared being crushed by tons of concrete and rebar, but nothing could spare her the crushing feeling of defeat pressing down on her chest. Good merc companies weren’t supposed to botch contracts like this. Good mercs delivered.

Sam hadn’t delivered.

When she could finally see daylight out of her visor—after several minutes of waiting and then digging and crawling—the Neptune was long gone from visual range. The smoke was dense, so she flipped over to magscan to get the lay of the land. The launch gantries and umbilical structures looked a little worse for wear: some of the parts had been blasted away where decades of neglect had weakened their connections. Near a lump of struts and conduits, there was a smaller, shinier metallic heap: a fallen battle armor, disabled by Sam’s single shot from the control center. If the operator had survived the rifle fire, they had been crushed and incinerated by the energy of the launch.

Sam half-scrambled, half-climbed down the ruined face of the building. It, too, had been ill-maintained over the years, and the breach in the control center window had been the final insult to its integrity. The launch had devastated the entire wing of the complex. As Sam put her steel feet down on the concrete launch pad, she began to wonder how she could get back into the armory wing, which seemed like the surest way to rendezvous and report.

She flipped open the box on her flank and fiddled with her radio controls. Maybe with the Neptune airborne, the rest of the company might have changed their plans. If they had taken the King up, maybe she could reach them, and finally, report.

What would she say? What should she have done better? Could she have presented a more attractive target, to bait the Kaiser to retain more forces and keep the Neptune grounded? Or would that have freed up the Neptune’s weapons, which had been locked during the final launch sequence? Could she have pressed Fae harder to begin the assault fifteen minutes earlier, to defeat the armor squad before they were ready and seize the launch pad?

Was this on Dread Fist Company leadership? Their intel was sparse and they had completely failed to pursue more, before and during the operation. And their tactics were archaic. Breaching with rifles and grenades might have bagged them their marks back during the Jan-10 War, but it wouldn’t work now. The Legion had changed the face of infantry combat with their power armor, and the company needed to catch up or perish.

But wasn’t that too easy, just to blame them? Sam had been heedless, perhaps; reckless in her rush to prove to her leaders that aggression and initiative would win the day. Had her mistakes ultimately brought them failure?

As she thought ahead to the bitter taste of the after-action report, she rotated the radio channel dial one tick at a time. A procession of differently-textured whines and static blankets cycled through her ears, until, suddenly, a crystal clear signal came through.

“… We lay down our lives for Volga. Will we go silently?” A chorus of voices could be heard shouting “No!” in the background. “No. Our hand has been forced. Our hand has been forced. We’ve done all we can, for so long, but the powers that be would not tolerate it. Would keep us down in this anguish, for years, for centuries. You understand what I’m saying. But now I will not tolerate it. I will not give up my dignity, and neither will you. I know you won’t.”

Sam frowned. She considered what she knew about Kaiser. In the company briefing, back in the wood-panelled meeting room at HQ that smelled like sour cigarette smoke, they had put up a slide with Johan Hect’s New Hope contract passport on the left and some terse bullet points on the right. His ID listed him as tall and heavy, 191 cm and 95kg. His face was round and slightly flabby, but with an oddly prominent, taut chin. His eyes seemed to smile, even twinkle. It was an odd image to try to comport with the thin, sandy voice—it must be his, right?—being broadcast now.

He was supposed to be given to narcissism and ambition, having defected from the Fetesti-Mare principality militia with a large fraction of his company to set up a half-mercenary, half-bandit gang headquartered half the world away, on this remote island of Resmond. Was that what she was hearing now? Narcissism and ambition? Sam struggled to fit the ideas together.

What she could certainly understand was an Neptune-class orbital assault ship, crewed by at least three dozen and capable of transporting a full-strength armored battalion.

Her contemplations were cut short, however, by the squealing of metal bearings and springs. A large metal door was sliding open, revealing a bay in the wall to her right, about 300 meters across the expanse of concrete and debris.

Worse, the squealing wasn’t actually caused by deteriorating ball bearings or hinges. It was too clean, too even, too keen.

It was the squeal of a fusion engine coming online.

“This won’t be our legacy, no. But it is a step—a step toward that legacy. One foot in front of the other, on the path of…”

Sam slapped the radio receiver off and sprinted for the nearest cover, a crumpled gangway. As she neared it, the walker stepped out of the bay. Once it had cleared wide of the metal doors, she could make out its magscanned form in oranges and reds against the green backdrop: eight and a half meters tall, a lean, wide, beak-like torso mounted atop a pair of reverse-jointed legs. A Fusilier, Sam knew immediately. Two boxy appendages bracketed the torso, giving this machine away as one of the variants that mounted a pair of ordnance launch pods. A barrel spouted from under the metal beast’s chin, probably a laser weapon or a machine gun for secondary armament.

Why did they leave it and its pilot behind? Had they run out of room? Did they intend to hold this complex with a garrison? Did they just want to bloody the mercs on their tail?

With the analysis and calculation run as far as they could, Sam had a moment to feel the surge of terror and adrenaline. Right now, it was just her against 30 tons of high-tech weapons and malice.

Then, with her heart pounding against her armored chest, she left her cover and sprinted for the next lump of scrap, ten meters to her right.

The walker seemed to snap to attention, its torso tracking Sam’s movement for the two seconds she spent exposed. Sam noticed a strange, intense rippling pattern in the magscan and a violent hiss by her feet.

She threw herself down behind the heap of fallen trusses, slamming her steel back against it and breathing hard. That’s when she realized what the magscan pattern and noise were: the Fusilier had taken a shot at her! That barrel on the chin was a laser weapon, which had melted steel and pavement not a full meter behind Sam and to her left as she ran.

Lucky, again. Just a few moments of angle closer and that laser could have bored into her chest and cooked her in her armor. Or taken a leg off below the hip. Or…

Sam shook her head. What was important is that she knew now: one infantry laser. Now, were those missiles or rocket pods?

She turned around, searched the fallen trusses, and found an angle to peek through the tangle of steel without exposing herself too much. The Fusilier was thumping around, circling, forcing her to move soon. She couldn’t quite make out the magscan silhouette well enough, but she had a guess…

Sam sidled around, keeping the mass of metal between herself and the stalking battle walker. One, two minutes crept on, as she kept herself out of the line of fire. The Fusilier drew closer, hesitantly. The pilot was probably taking care not to let Sam surprise them and claw her way onto the walker’s frame: a risky pain in the ass for the Fusilier, even if it would win an engagement like that nine out of ten times.

Sam stopped and flipped the visor to visual light, peeking through the trusses.

The pods on the side… three tubes each, meant for narrow, long missiles.

Long-ranged missiles! Meant for indirect fire, but can be guided by the walker’s own sensors in a pinch…

She ducked back down. One infantry laser and two guided missile launch systems. If she stayed in close, she’d have a hole burned through her body sooner rather than later. But if she ran out of the laser’s effective range, all it would take is one guided missile out of six to cripple her exoskeleton or kill her outright.

Unless…

She slid open the breech of the rifle a few centimeters. The brassy round with its perforated cartridge lay menacingly in the chamber. She let it clack shut.

Sam wheeled out around the truss, aimed, and fired, like an action hero with no regard for her personal safety.

The Fusilier winced as the round ricocheted off its canopy. A scuff—not even a puncture or a crack—was all that marked the round’s passage across the armored viewport.

But by the time the pilot had recovered from their own reflexes and brought the machine’s weapons back to bear, Sam had already pounded tens of meters worth of pavement away from it. She was safely behind an upturned service vehicle before the walker could trigger another salvo of deadly heat and light from the laser cannon. She had reset the distance between herself and the bird-legged beast.

The Fusilier began its slow spiral in toward the service truck, again, circling to force Sam to scramble awkwardly around it, closing to ensure that she could not do so forever. One foot in front of the other, it closed in, laser cannon trained on the vehicle, ready to snap to one side and terminate its target.

Seventy seconds later, it stood directly over the service truck. Its quarry was no longer there. It stared hard at the ruined vehicle beneath it for a second. Then, the pilot probably switched from magscan to thermal imaging, then from thermal to visual light. That’s when they would have noticed the discarded exoskeleton lying in a heap of parts by the truck’s cab.

Sam, meanwhile, was two hundred meters away, the distance growing with her every stride.

It was a long shot to hit such a small target with a laser, but not for a guided missile salvo. But by the time the pilot had primed a missile to fire, they had realized their error: now that their target was dismounted, its signature was far too weak for a lock.

Sam made it the last hundred meters to the walker bay and the tunnels within, and the Fusilier watched her go.