Birthright: Battle for the Confederation- Reprisal Read online

  The Primans were not far behind, firing several explosive rounds into the surrounding walls, hovercars, and building facades across the wide street. As he feared, the debris started to fly, obscuring vision and only adding to the fog of war that made clear analysis of the situation harder than it needed to be.

  His element of Marines began their movement down the street, moving at a fast walk. The big advantage now was that they were out in front, and the Primans were forced to give chase. He risked a glance across the street through the rampant blasterfire, shattering glass, and smoke to put eyes on the other element. He could just check the moving map and IFF positions projected on his glasses, but his nanite-enhanced contacts were much preferred. He was able to combine actual images, infrared, and position information to get the sort of clear picture that the pilots had with their synthetic vision gear. He saw a Marine take a blasterbolt to the helmet and go down, realizing that perhaps sometimes he could see too much with his abilities.

  He shifted his attention to urging the Senator and Damar on amidst the group of Marines. They rounded a shot-up hovertruck and took momentary cover on the far side as the Marines laid down a barrage of fire back towards their Priman pursuers. Mithus and Von exchanged glances, the looks they gave each other carrying the same meaning- we just might make it.

  Mithus was suddenly aware of several Marines near him on the ground, where a moment before they had been in the fight. He quickly turned around and saw to his horror that a Priman mobile force had arrived down the street to cut them off, counting around twenty more troops as well as a surface-effect armored personnel carrier. For a split second all he could think of was how many years’ worth of pay he’d trade for a good suit of Confed powered armor, then discarded it as wasteful and began to react.

  He gathered Senator Dennix and Ples Damar and in one big crush of humanity he dragged everyone from behind the hovertruck into a shot-out storefront. It was a restaurant from a popular chain on Delos, and the errant thought passed through his brain that this particular menu carried a lot of tasty offworld items.

  “Von,” he yelled for the benefit of his dermal patch transmitter, “I’ve got our cargo in the restaurant.” Mithus quickly surveyed the room, noting the overturned tables, broken glass, and general chaos, but no other people turned up visually or with his infrared scan. He considered it secure for the brief while they’d need the cover.

  He turned to see Von spin around the get ready to dash towards the restaurant. The Marines were already mostly oriented towards the new threat, though at an extreme disadvantage where cover was concerned for the time being. Mithus simply settled on his job of safeguarding the Senator and let the Marines worry about the exfil.

  Mithus saw the heat-warped telltale of high energy laserblasts inbound. They rammed into the street from the direction of the new Priman attackers. Though he couldn’t see because of his position in the restaurant, he could tell by the large and continuous fire that it was most likely the dual barrel blaster turret on top of the Priman APC.

  Blasts rocked the hovertruck Von was hiding by just as he started to run for the restaurant. He jumped the last few feet towards a blasted-out window in the building just as the power cell for the hovertruck exploded in a shower of flames and sparks. The SAR operative came crashing through the window, propelled by the explosive blast, landing unceremoniously and rolling several times before he came to a stop. Mithus charged over to check him, and didn’t like what he saw. Von had several deep cuts on his back, a puncture wound about where a lung should be, and by the discoloration and uncharacteristic protrusion just under the skin of his left forearm, he had a compound fracture there as well. At least he was still conscious.

  “Von, report.” Mithus kept it all business, hoping Von’s training would persevere through the pain and potential shock of his injuries.

  “I may vomit,” he replied weakly. “Having nanites work on lung,” he croaked out.

  Mithus understood. While the nanites were good, they couldn’t magically fix up a person in Von’s condition. He must have diagnosed his punctured lung as the most serious injury and was prioritizing the nanites to work on patching that up as best they could.

  “Captain Herin,” Mithus called out, looking at the blue dots on his IFF display and realizing that none of the Marines were moving. They were pinned. “Are we immobile?”

  It was hard to hear Herin’s reply, even with the transmission sent directly to his ears through the dermal patches. The blasterfire outside was getting heavier, and the Marines’ counterfire was starting to wither. They didn’t have the ammunition or time for this.

  “We’re consolidating on your side of the street,” the captain replied. It was not a good sign; Mithus figured they had lost too many men to work two separate elements now, and a quick count of the IFF dots projected on his glasses confirmed that. Accepting the fact that things were rapidly headed towards an unpleasant conclusion, Mithus took station back at the window of the restaurant and started providing covering fire to the Marines, who now were pulling back towards the restaurant. In a few seconds, he’d have to lead a charge out the back of the restaurant and take their chances in the open city. Their transport would either have left or more likely been shot down, and all he could hope for was a quick end.

  The Senator, meanwhile, had reached a point of pure clarity. He had experienced a moment when all his options, decisions, and possible actions passed through him, coming into focus and working out to their inevitable conclusions. He saw what he needed to do in order to help not only the Confederation, but more importantly, himself.

  The Senator and Damar had been shoved back to the payment counter of the restaurant, near the darkened kitchen area and away from the din of the battle raging just outside. Even still, the occasional blaster bolt or ricochet flashed into the broken front windows, and a handful had even penetrated the room itself. The room was fairly dark, power having either been shut off or disabled somehow. The upscale fixtures were strewn about haphazardly, and this would serve the Senator’s purpose.

  Mithus was down to his last magazine of armor-piercing ammo and the final power cell for the rifle. He looked at the countdown on the lower left corner of his shooting glasses and saw the timer with only thirty seconds left on it before the dropship tried to land. With only a half dozen Marines still standing, he knew the way this was going to finish.

  His despair sank one more level as he heard the whine of high performance fighter engines piercing the sky above, saw the shadows pass over the street and felt the shockwave as something came right over the block low and very fast. It had to be either Priman fighters or a dropship under pursuit. He heard another one pass overhead, heard the rapid fire staccato of multiple laser cannons chopping away at what must have been a target. Even though he had prepared himself for it, when he heard the explosion booming down the street and the sound being amplified as it bounced of the buildings he still jerked just a bit. Only then did he see the Marines cheering and pointing excitedly to the sky.

  “Alright everybody, get ready to run,” Mithus heard Captain Herin yell over the net. Mithus couldn’t take it anymore and edged out of the restaurant onto the sidewalk to see what was happening. And it was the most beautiful thing he’d seen in ages. A flight of two Intruders down low with four Talons up high for cover was circling the landing area, and in the distance he saw one of the ungainly looking dropships skimming the tops of the buildings at it raced for their pickup point.

  The noise he’d heard had in fact been a Talon chasing off a Priman interceptor, and Mithus felt a renewed sense of hope.

  He watched as an Intruder peeled off from up high, rolling into a split-S and coming downhill towards their position. As it descended from higher altitude, it opened up with its’ autocannons, the buzzsaw sound better than any symphony Mithus had ever heard. The heavy armor piercing rounds tore through the Primans at the end of the street, ripping through the armored personnel carrier and sweeping through the troops a
round it. The big rounds were destroying the street as well, tearing up huge chunks of concrete and raising the noise levels so high the Mithus instructed his nanites to activate the noise canceling features of his dermal patch, blocking out the deafening crescendo. It passed quickly, but after that, the street was clear, smoke and falling debris hanging in the air against a backdrop of almost eerie silence.

  As he saw the shells tearing through the street, Zek Dennix had turned to Ples Damar and considered his move, realizing he didn’t have more than a couple seconds. He made sure to keep an eye on Mithus as well.

  “Mr. Damar, how long will you need me yet before I have served your masters’ purpose?”

  “What?” replied Damar. Now was most definitely not the time to be worrying about their bargain or its long ranging consequences. “What in the name of dark matter does this have to do with anything right now?”

  “Because if we make it out of this, I am starting to wonder if this bargain needs to be altered.”

  Ples Damar could only respond with a look of confusion. The Senator had been turned; he was under the Primans’ control. Damar had enough evidence on him to ruin him politically and quite possibly make treason charges stick, so the man couldn’t back out now. The only way out was for the Senator to remove him…

  Damar realized too late that the Senator was simply waiting for another pass from the Intruders outside. Sure enough, they were strafing the street outside once again, though this time from the other direction. The pilots were not going to take any chances with the Priman ground forces and were obviously intent on sanitizing the area to maximum effect. The old saying was that they didn’t get paid any extra to bring ammunition home, so they had apparently chosen to expend plenty on the street and Priman forces outside.

  As soon as the noise of the autocannon shells destroying everything outside once again reached its’ peak, the Senator raised his small holdout blaster and fired once into Damar’s chest. His finger pulled the trigger, almost unbidden by his conscious mind. If he had thought about it, he wasn’t sure he could have done it, so he just concentrated on that trigger, let his muscles flex and tried not think about anything beyond the here and now.

  The Senator realized that Damar’s body needed to be left behind. He couldn’t take Damar with him, because under an autopsy it would be discovered that Damar was a Priman, and Dennix couldn’t have the cloud of a Priman who was his most trusted advisor hanging over him. That way was political death. However, if he left Damar on Delos, there was a chance his body would be recovered and the Primans would realize that Dennix was no longer under their influence, which might adversely affect his abilities to deal with them in an official capacity later. Still, it was the lesser of two evils- Dennix was ready to become his own man, and his plans for the Confederation were his alone and didn’t involve constantly butting heads with Damar. He didn’t relish what he had just done and was not proud of it, but he tempered it with the fact that he himself was just a tool to Damar, and he had little doubt the Priman would have made a similar choice given the opportunity.

  Mercifully, Damar expired quickly, though his eyes fixed on Dennix with an accusatory look that he couldn’t break away from. Part of the Senator was revolted by his actions. He had never killed anyone, and here he had struck down another man in cold blood. He wanted to touch him, apologize for his actions, try to tell him something comforting as his life force burned out. The other part, that which won the internal conflict boiling within, told him how to prepare the scene. Realizing that for all he knew, Mithus could detect whether he had fired his blaster, he threw it back over the counter into the darkened kitchen. He crouched down next to Damar and gently but quickly removed Damar’s blaster from his grasp, and would pass that man’s blaster off as his own should Mithus ask.

  Senator Dennix took a step back, a wave of revulsion quickly passing through him. He closed his eyes for a second, embraced what he’d done, and forced it to pass. When he opened his eyes again, Damar was still there on the floor, slumped against the serving counter, with a fist sized blaster burn in the middle of his chest. From here on, the Senator was going to be the one in control.

  Adopting what he hoped was a suitably shocked look on his face, the Senator ran up to the shattered front windows amid the confusion of the end of the Intruder’s second pass down the street.

  “Mithus!” he yelled.

  The SAR trooper, having taken a half step out of the window to fire on the Primans, ducked back into the restaurant, his spirits noticeably higher. “Okay, Senator, get Mr. Damar up here. We’re leaving right now while that air cover is good!”

  “But Mithus, Ples has been shot!” Dennix tried to play it up without going too far, but was aiming to look as though on the edge of hysterics. “There were laser blasts coming into the restaurant! They flew right over our heads, and one of them hit Ples! My friend is on the floor, I think he might be dead! He can’t be dead! You have to look at him!”

  Conflicting emotions passed through Mithus. They didn’t have time for this, but it needed to be done. He vaulted over broken chairs and an overturned table to see Ples Damar just as the Senator had described him. He had a still-smoking blaster burn on his chest. Looking into other spectrums with his contacts, he saw a rapidly decreasing body temperature, no pulse or blood flow, and no electrical activity in the brain. The man was in fact dead.

  The Senator had once asked Damar how the SAR troops, who seemed to have some amazing abilities, didn’t detect Damar as a Priman. Damar had admitted that he always wore a small device disguised as an ordinary ring. The device reflected the high degree of skill in Priman sensor and detection technology. It masked the small but noticeable variations in physiology such as blood pressure, internal organ alignment, and electrical signatures, from all but the most powerful scans. There was no way to spoof a solid DNA or blood scan, but to an observer with portable equipment, Damar’s gear could hide his Priman physiology. This equipment served him one last time, for even though Mithus ran the full scan available to him on Damar, he didn’t see the slightly different arrangement of organs or electrical patterns in his brain.

  Mithus turned and looked the Senator in the eyes, touching the man’s shoulder with one hand.

  “Your friend is dead. We need to go, right now.”

  Mithus turned to leave, but something held the Senator back. He looked at that ring, and in one quick motion he removed it from the dead Priman’s hand, placing the hand gently back in the man’s lap. He put the ring in his pocket and raced after Mithus to the front of the building. He didn’t know why he felt the need to take it- maybe as a memento, maybe because he thought it might be useful to him someday, but nobody would ask why he had done it. People would say it was just something he had taken to help him remember his dead friend, who had helped him through the past half year during his ordeal on Delos.

  He met Mithus at the front of the restaurant, where Von was standing unsteadily with his help.

  “I’m ready,” the Senator said soberly.

  Mithus just nodded, then watched Captain Herin. The Captain finished firing one more blast downrange at the Primans who had pursued them from the plaza, then motioned for Mithus and company to go. It wasn’t the picture-perfect, victorious march to freedom that one would expect from a holovid, but to Mithus it would do just fine. The three of them, followed closely by about a dozen Marines, some of which were also being assisted by other comrades, staggered towards the just-landed dropship, which was also adding the firepower from its’ top turret to the mix. Around overturned and burning hovercars they marched, down three city blocks that looked every bit a warzone, with sporadic Priman laserfire overhead. Finally, they reached the open side door of the transport and piled in, some making it only as far as the interior before they dropped from exhaustion or injury, the ones who made it further in pulling the injured Marines behind them to keep the entrance clear. In seconds, everyone was in, the loadmaster called “Clear!” into his headset, and they
all felt the dropship lurch skyward as it began to claw its’ way out of the atmosphere.

  In the chair that Mithus has strapped him into, the Senator couldn’t feel any elation at his present situation. Damar was dead, and he himself was only halfway home. He knew there was an epic battle raging above the planet and throughout the solar system, and not only did he still have to make it to a transport ship in one piece, but the transport as well had to survive. The day was just starting.

  Captain Pencron stood tall at the center of his bridge while he worked hurriedly on a plan. Twenty Priman capital ships were headed their way, and even now were splitting up into two elements of ten each. They obviously hoped to split up the Confed forces and keep them on the defensive, leaving a window open to fire on the dropships coming up from the planet as well as the Marine Assault Ships headed down to the upper reaches of the atmosphere to meet them.

  The situation was thus: scores of dropships, loaded with Confed Marines and hopefully the Senator, couldn’t simply wait in the atmoshpere for the Confed fleet to beat back the Priman force; Priman interceptors were rising from the ground on great plumes of drive exhaust, racing to catch them. Their escort of Intruders and Talons wouldn’t be enough to counter the fighters from the ground as well as those being vectored in from space.

  Similarly, the Assault Ships were not best suited for ship-to-ship combat, and were hampered by their need to slow to a reasonable recovery speed and hold a steady course while the dropships made their landings in the under-hull landing bays. The rest of the Ninth Fleet would be too far away to be able to fight off the Priman force- which left Pencron one option as he saw it. His battleships and Captain Sosus’ Intruders needed to drive a wedge through the incoming Priman formation and keep them busy just long enough for the Assault Ships to complete their recoveries. By that time, the seven ships of Admiral Illam’s force would be there to help. It wasn’t the best plan for those that aspired to a long and healthy life, but with too many forces converging at the same spot, the best thing to do was to stay mobile, and that meant flying through the teeth of the enemy. Captain Pencron was going to knock loose a few Priman teeth today.