Setosha - the Beating Heart
Copyright© 2010 by Prince von Vlox
Chapter 15
Setosha, Family North Point Land
Joanne Burton eased her head around the outcropping of rocks, studying the ship nine kilometers away, sitting at the end of one of the valleys in this part of Family North Point land. The ship had brought a landing party, some 300 soldiers, who were spread out into defensive positions around it.
This ship showed the basic box structure favored by the Imperial Design Bureau. Joanne had seen Idenux ships once. They used the sphere. And Family ships were tapered cylinders. Both the latter had a form of lethal beauty, though she wouldn’t have admitted it about an Idenux ship to anyone. This boxy monstrosity poisoning North Point land with its presence, though, was just plain ugly.
“Are we ready?” she asked through her shunt. Her right hand was connected through a small box to a wire that led down the draw to where a thin-lipped girl was sitting next to a missile launcher.
“Aye, ma’am,” the girl replied.
Joanne looked at the Imperial ship one last time. “Go ahead when you’re ready.”
“Get your head down, ma’am.”
Joanne knew she shouldn’t be out here. Her place was in the caverns near where the few men of Family North Point lived. But this was the first incursion into North Point land, and she and the half-crippled Marine who had been training the girls wanted to attack those troops and the ship they’d come on. Everything was in place; it was time to do something.
She heard a whoosh from down the draw. She looked up, expecting to see the missiles fly past, but they didn’t. Instead, she caught a glimpse of fast movement far down the draw as the missiles flew off in another direction.
“Why are they going that way?” she asked. “I know you told me once, but remind me.”
“We don’t want the Impies to know where the missiles came from,” the girl said. A number of other girls materialized out of the rocks and began disassembling the launchers and loading them on the horses standing patiently nearby.
Joanne hadn’t moved from her first position. She turned back towards the ship. The missiles had been launched; they should be almost ... the first two missiles sprang out of a distant draw, spreading apart with a billow of smoke.
The ship’s defenses lashed out at them, and both missiles were stopped in a shock of fire and smoke. Additional fire lashed at the rocks near where the missiles had appeared.
“That didn’t work,” Joanne said. “I thought--”
The next four missiles sprinted through the smoke, silver blurs in the morning light. These didn’t use the solid-fuel reaction motors of the first pair; that smoke had been simply to cover the following missiles from the point-defenses on the target ship. Those defenses stopped one of the missiles, but the other three slammed into the ship. Yes! That was why she was out here. She needed to see that. No more of the vermin’s ships on North Point land.
For just a moment it seemed as if nothing had happened, and then the ship came apart in a blossoming of angry red flame and hurtling pieces. Joanne felt the heat wash her face, noticed a leaf in front of her suddenly turn sere, even from nine kilometers away. She pulled her head down as the flame licked outward, then turned inward on the remains of the ship.
“You might want to roll under cover, ma’am,” the girl said laconically. “Pieces coming down.”
Joanne looked up. There were pieces up there, and some of them looked like they were coming right at her. She rolled into the hole she’d dug under a large rock, tucking herself into as tight a ball as her old joints could stand. The ground shook as the pieces slammed down all around her.
She lifted her head when the ground stopped shaking. There was a misshapen piece of fire-blackened metal just a few meters away. A little closer and North Point would be someone else’s problem, she thought. Patch, bless her, was on Home, attending Council. At least she wasn’t forced to see this horror.
Joanne crawled out of her hole. Still keeping low, she picked her way down the back side of the slope, reeling in her communications wire. She paused when she saw a leg in what remained of a black boot right next to the wire. She regarded the remains emotionlessly. Good riddance, she thought, and resumed coiling the wire.
“We’re all set,” the gal said when Joanne arrived. The horses with the rocket launcher had already disappeared. Joanne mounted the mare they’d given her. These younger girls had been surprised that she’d known how to ride. She didn’t tell them that she had spent her girlhood giving riding lessons.
Just before they disappeared over the ridge, Joanne drew her knee up and casually turned in her saddle, glancing back. The smoke from the dead ship hung forlornly in the afternoon air. The Imperial Reaction Team should be arriving in a few minutes, which wouldn’t do the ship any good. She hoped the Impies would enjoy the mines and other traps her gals had spent most of the night setting up.
She turned back to face the trail and urged her mount to pick up the pace. It was a three-day ride back to the caverns. This was the only Imperial ship that had dropped on North Point land. There would be more Imperials arriving soon, maybe even larger formations of lower-quality occupation troops. She and the old Marine had plans for those troops. She wanted to give them a long and painful exposure to North Point hospitality.
Assault General Count Viktor Koeyera looked up as the priority signal sounded on the main board of his command post. “Another one?” he tiredly asked his aide.
“Assault Transport Bergholtz is off the screen and not reporting,” his aide said. “That’s the third one today.”
General Koeyera nodded. “Retaliatory strike on that location. If we’re lucky, we’ll catch some of the bitches still in the area.”
The aide repeated that command into his communicator, and three minutes later, a missile flashed downward from one of the Imperial Navy’s orbiting warships. Ten minutes after that, the main screen showed the flash of the nuclear strike. “Third Battalion of the 93rd Infantry will encircle the area,” the aide said.
“That whole northern part of the continent is causing us nothing but problems,” General Koeyera said. He sighed heavily and got to his feet. “I’ll have Operations plan a sweep through there. I’m sure they can scrape up a brigade or two someplace.”
“That shouldn’t be too hard, sir,” his aide agreed. “And that should pacify the bitches.”
“Spare me the protestations of confidence, Jan.” The General scowled and punched at one of the buttons on the keyboard in front of him. “On the day we dropped into this hell-hole, we lost 28% of our landers and 40% of our first wave. In the month we’ve been here, we’ve averaged 100 casualties a day out of 138,000 combat troops. A hundred each day!” He looked at the main screen; it outlined the places where there was fighting. As usual, it was an irregular mess of little engagements everywhere.
Fortunately, most of those being killed were either the Expendables, brought here just for that reason, or the hastily trained troops they had culled from the dregs of a dozen planets, “voluntary labor” conscripted from all over the Empire, given a drug treatment and a few days of training, and sent off to die for the Emperor. These men came mostly from the newly conquered systems. Losing a few thousand of them didn’t bother him; that’s what they were there for. No, what really hurt were all the skilled veterans he was losing. Apparently, the bitches had figured it out and were laying ambushes for his Regulars. That was where his losses were concentrated right now.
He looked at a different symbol on his map, representing a pair of Internal Security battalions. Maybe he should send the gray bastards in. It would do them good, blood them a bit. Let them go commit atrocities where there was fighting, not where things were calm.
“Jan, hold off with the 93rd. Let’s send in the Internal Security troops. That’s what they’re here for, and only yesterday their commander was asking me to use his troops in their proper role.”
His aide flashed a smile. Like all regular officers, he didn’t care for the Internal Security troops, considering them little more than armed thugs. “I’ll get the orders out, sir.”
General Koeyera went back to studying his map. If he had his way, the Navy would boil this whole planet down to bedrock with nuclear strikes. But that wasn’t the Emperor’s strategy. The Emperor wanted to bleed the bitches, and that plan seemed to be working, but sometimes, General Koeyera wondered who was doing the most bleeding.
Republic City, New Republic, PSK
Agriesz Joandel watched the target as it approached the killing zone. The range wasn’t long, scarcely 300 meters. He preferred to be closer, but that wasn’t possible. Instead, he would have to settle for a single shot from his accelerator rifle. It had taken two weeks to set this up, two weeks of working with their contacts in the PSK Naval Administration. But if he could succeed, strike that, when he succeeded, it would throw a major ... The target stopped, bending over to get something next to the fountain.
Joandel firmed up his sight picture. He took a breath and let half of it out slowly. Gently, he touched the firing stud. The rifle recoiled, driving him back.
He released the rifle and rolled out of his firing perch, dropping two meters to the catwalk below him. From there, he ducked through a narrow door into the loft next to the elevators of this particular building...
“Backside clear,” his cover man said as Joandel passed him. Joandel continued down the stairs and slithered through the open vent into the maintenance closet. There he made a few alterations to his appearance, then sauntered out into the main hall, the controls of a cleaning bot in his hands.
His Team Leader picked him up an hour later. Nothing was said until they were at their safe house. “How did it go?” Joandel asked.
“Well enough,” Storm Leader Pirazz Gwynndar said. “The target moved slightly after you engaged it. It wasn’t a hard kill, but it went down.”
“How bad?” Joandel was a perfectionist, and he insisted on knowing.
“A partial that sent the target to the hospital. We’ll view the video during the debrief, but only after you get something to eat.”
“Yes, sir,” Joandel said, recognizing the tone. He methodically ate the food, trying to hold back his curiosity. Only when he was done did the Storm Leader set up the video.
Joandel recognized the moment when the target bent over, but the target didn’t stop; he kept moving, and then the round hit him. The target reacted spastically, as if it were a small animal hit in the spine. Limbs went in all directions, the body pirouetted on one leg, slamming into the fountain. Within seconds, guards flooded the area, guns drawn, scanning the buildings around them. One of them, wearing an infrared visor, pointed towards the firing perch.
“I think they tracked the heat trail from the round,” Gwynndar said as the video ended. “That’s the only way they could have done it so fast.”
“Any problems after that?”
“Nothing we didn’t handle,” Gwynndar said. “We cleared out, but left our local stooges on site. They ambushed the PSK Investigation Team and killed five before they were wiped out.” His mouth twitched slightly in what could have been a smile. “Two of the Investigation Team’s dead were from their Forensics Squad.”
“But our people got out in time.”
“Of course,” Gwynndar said. “The Expendables did their job.”
“And got expended.” Joandel’s tone was flat as he kept digging for the answers he wanted. He didn’t care about the Expendables; their job was to die for the Emperor, though that wasn’t what they thought. But being Expendables, their thoughts didn’t count.
“It happens,” Gwynndar confirmed with a shrug. “The target was taken to the Royal Naval Hospital. At last report, the target is still alive, though under intensive care. We have unconfirmed reports that the target may recover.”
“We should do something about that,” Joandel said. “Maybe I could finish the job.”
“Risky.”
“Everything is.” Joandel considered what they could do at the hospital and smiled. That could be a sweet coup. Not only could they remove a few more targets from their list, but maybe they could get rid of some more of those never-to-be-sufficiently-damned forensics specialists. They and their kind could ruin this whole mission. “Maybe we could leave a little present for the doctors,” Joandel said. “Make it harder for them to treat other casualties.”
Gwynndar thought about that. “I like it,” he said at last. He realized the direction Joandel was going with this, and he approved. “That could solve a lot of problems.”
Joandel nodded. “Let’s not do this as a full-scale raid, though. Let’s do this by leaving a few things. A raid would draw several Kingdom Security Reaction Teams.”
“Or, worse, either the Bitches or the Guards Regiment.”
“Do we know for sure it was the Bitch Marines the other night?” Joandel asked. “Do we know they’re the ones that did for Annizan’s Team?”
“We finally confirmed it was the Guards Regiment,” Gwynndar said. “We grabbed a couple of eyewitnesses off the street and extracted the information from them. Definitely Guards Regiment.”
“I thought the preliminary report said powered armor,” Joandel mused. “In the reports I’ve seen, only the Bitches use that.”
Two months before, Danhoffer’s team had tried a small bit of sabotage at the Families Embassy. They still weren’t sure why it hadn’t worked. Three nights later, Danhoffer’s team had been eliminated, killed, or captured; they still weren’t sure. The only thing that had come out of that fiasco was that the Families had developed the nearly mythical powered armor. They were a technologically hampered culture, and yet had somehow solved the computational and power requirements to make powered armor work on a planet’s surface.
His counterpart, secreted high up in PSK Intelligence, had been pressing his PSK sources to learn how they’d done it, so far to no avail. He had filed objections to Families Marines taking an active part in the war on New Republic, citing sovereignty and other issues. All had fallen on deaf ears. The Families, it turned out, were ‘consulting’ on a number of issues and had merely been sharing some of their ‘technical expertise’ when they attacked.
Retaliatory strikes on the Families got nowhere. Under common diplomatic usage, they were allowed to defend their embassy grounds. They did so with a great deal of aggressiveness, and that had led to the loss of two teams and the crippling of another. All in all, their presence was a new factor in the war being waged on New Republic, one he had not reported back to Lexeon for fear that it would lead to his recall.
“It was armor, but it wasn’t powered. It looks like a form of technology transfer.” Gwynndar scowled, staring blankly at the vid as he thought through the situation on New Republic. His mission was to cause sabotage and general mayhem, today being an example of the latter. He also had unofficial orders to make any cooperation between the Bitches and the PSK difficult. “They didn’t do anything we know the Bitches can do: run, fly, or shoot that damned strange missile of theirs that tears up buildings.”
“Is there any way we can get at them? Joandel asked. “The Guards Regiment, I mean, not the Bitches. Every time we’ve had a go at the Bitches, they’ve hurt us.”
“Nothing comes to mind,” Gwynndar said. “That doesn’t mean there isn’t a way, though. I’ll have someone look into it. It may take some time. We’re losing sources. The PSK has tightened up access, and I’m down to this team and one other.”
“We’re still effective,” Joandel said. “We don’t have to bring a complete team in anymore, not since we made contact with those dissident groups.” He smiled in amusement. “Why, they even believe in dying for their cause.”
“It just proves if you look hard enough, you can find anything,” Gwynndar replied, “especially in the PSK.”
“Maybe we can set something up, you know, a random hit of some kind.” Joandel stared at a map of the city. “It doesn’t matter what, just so the Guards have to respond. Draw them out where we can get a few of those pretty bastards.”
“Perhaps,” Gwynndar said. “Like I said, I’ll think about it. Meantime, what were you thinking about in that hospital?”
“A bomb,” Joandel said, “maybe two. Plant the first one where it’ll maximize casualties in the medical staff, and the second where it’ll catch the reaction forces. Perhaps a directed charge that we can trigger from a distance.”
“That might work.” Gwynndar nodded as he pictured the scenario. “Were you thinking of dropping the building?”
“No, just making it unsafe. It was something I saw when I was a kid. There was this building that was wrecked during an earthquake, but it didn’t collapse. It took a lot of resources for them to deal with the building. I want to do the same thing here. I thought we could plant a few bombs around the place first and trigger them from time to time during the recovery. That would maximize the confusion.”
“Good idea. All right, we’ll need to get you inside. It can’t be as security staff, and visitors are screened.”
“The only other group with free access are the patients.”
“Maybe you could do some random shootings,” Gwynndar said. “Then, when people react to that, you set off the first bomb. In the confusion, you can get out, and we can trigger the second bomb from a distance.”
“How do we get me in?”
“We’ll need an ambulance. That’s simple enough. We’ll generate a few bodies, and then hijack whatever shows up. After that, we’ll...”
Six days later, Joandel climbed into the ambulance and began putting on a medic’s uniform. He turned disinterested eyes away from the three medics lying in the alleyway who would never need their uniforms again. “Set,” he finally said.
“Let’s go,” Gwynndar told Trazar, who was driving. With a low growl from the engine, Trazar rolled them out onto the street, siren moaning.
Five minutes later, they rolled to a stop at the Emergency Entrance to the Royal Naval Hospital. Two guards and a doctor came hurrying out. Gwynndar opened the doors for them. “No rush,” he said. “We lost him.”
“You sure?” the doctor asked, looking in. “Sometimes...”
Gwynndar shook his head and pulled back the covers on the stretcher, revealing the body. The slack roll of the head and the flat lines on the monitors answered the question. “I thought we could hold him,” Gwynndar said. “God, I hate losing them like that.”
“What happened?” the doctor asked. The guards walked away, bored. Joandel and Trazar unloaded the stretcher and pushed it ahead of them as they walked into Admissions.
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