Honor Bound

Commander Caroline Pirelli felt like a traitor, leaving most of her shipmates to chancy reentries wherever their lifepods happened to take them, but she’d abandoned the ship on board one of the assault shuttles and they had a job to do. There were half a dozen of them, not counting the one that General McKay had taken earlier-five from the Decatur and another that was the standard complement for the Sheridan-and thank God it was SOP to keep them armed and ready in case of emergency.

Because I’d say this definitely counts as one, she mused.

As the senior officer on board, and a qualified pilot, she rated the co-pilot’s seat on the bird, so she had a very clear view out the cockpit window as the shuttle entered the atmosphere, flying point in a lopsided V formation. The brown, green and blue hemisphere stretched below her, half sheathed in darkness, half bathed in the glow of dawn as the blinding glow of the sun emerged from behind the curve of the Earth. It was beautiful, she reflected for a moment, suddenly realizing that she was home again and also realizing how much she’d missed it.

Hope Mom and Dad are okay, she fretted silently. They lived near Capital City…

* * *

“Pull back!” Ari Shamir yelled over the general frequency as he ran from position to position, grabbing each of the troopers in his company and pushing them in the direction of the designated rally point on the other side of the original LZ.

It was hard getting most of them to listen: they’d been fighting on and off for hours, and scavenging the dead for ammo when they hadn’t been fighting… the biomech’s and their own. They’d lost half their number as of the last surge, and God alone knew how many were dead in this assault. Everyone was in a haze, getting tunnel vision and focusing on putting rounds downrange to the exclusion of all else, including commands over their radios.

Ari stumbled and nearly went down as a bullet slammed into the armor pad over his right thigh; he felt as if he’d been smacked by a baseball bat, but he didn’t think that the slug had penetrated. He limped-ran to the last fighting position, a hole dug hastily between two trees, then fell into it, taking cover. There had been two Colonial Guard troops in the hole before this last attack; one was gone, hopefully to the rally point, while the other was sprawled half-in and half-out of the fighting position. Blood soaked the dirt and grass around him, though Ari couldn’t see where he’d been hit.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Ari thought that he should feel something, horrified or sad or sickened… but too many people had died that night for him to work up the emotion. Ari caught his breath for a moment, crouching at the bottom of the hole, and tried to flex his right leg. It hurt like hell, but it didn’t seem to be broken and he couldn’t feel any blood soaking it.

“Roza,” he transmitted on her frequency. “Are you at the rally point yet?”

There was no reply and now he did find the energy to curse. Pulling his carbine up, he climbed out of the foxhole and fired off three quick bursts at a pair of biomech troopers who were advancing across the open field between him and the ditch. One of them went down and the other staggered and Ari took the opportunity to make a run for it.

He should have gone straight to the rally point and organized what was left of his company, but instead he ran a serpentine course that took him across the last line of defense to where Roza’s company had been dug in, behind a low berm that had once been the back wall of a convenience store. Biomech corpses were scattered in clusters of two or three everywhere he looked, but they began to grow thicker as he approached the berm.

The whole length of the earthen wall was buried beneath a pile three or four deep that spilled over the top… and that was where he began to see the bodies of his people. Some had been cut down from behind as they tried to run, but others were half-concealed under the corpses of the enemy, dying where they had fought.

Heedless of his own safety, he pulled out a flashlight and began shining it on each of the bodies, desperate to know.

“Roza!” he called on her radio frequency, then switched to the external speakers and shouted it. “Roza!” The word echoed through the night, but there was no reply.

There… he’d seen movement from one of the bodies, hunched up against the inner wall, with a biomech corpse collapsed over it. He grabbed the Protectorate trooper by the back of its armored vest and yanked it off, grunting with the effort of moving the massive, 120-kilo body. The biomech’s faceplate was shattered, its face pulped by a 8mm slug and its blood coated the barrel of the CG trooper’s rifle from the point-blank shot.

More blood-human, this time-stained the right arm and left side of the Colonial Guard armor from bullet wounds, and something, maybe the concussion from a grenade explosion, had damaged the helmet, knocking loose the faceplate. It was Candidate Matienzo and he was barely conscious, his eyes blinking at the glare from Ari’s light.

“Matienzo, can you hear me?” Ari asked, shaking the man’s shoulder.

“Captain Al-Masri?” Matienzo muttered groggily.

“Where is Lt. Hudec?” Ari asked, remembering to use her cover name. He was fairly sure that Kage hadn’t bothered to explain the situation to the officer candidates.

“Don’t know,” he shook his head, wincing as it obviously caused him pain. “We were trying to fall back…”

Ari grabbed Matienzo’s left hand and pulled him to his feet. “Come on,” he said, “we have to get to the rally point quickly.”

They were turning to head away when he heard the gunfire nearby. There had been the constant background noise of automatic fire in the background for so long he had shut it out, but this was nearby, not even fifty meters away. Ari sprinted towards the sound, trusting Matienzo to follow him.

This is crazy, he thought as he ran. If I keep chasing every movement and gunshot, I won’t make it out of here. She’s probably dead. But he didn’t care and he couldn’t leave her. He’d rather stay there and die than leave without her. The thought was intimidating: he was thirty years old and had never felt that way about anyone before.

It didn’t take long to find the source of the gunfire-it was just over a small rise then down into what had been a drainage ditch a hundred years before. Four biomechs were on the banks of the drainage ditch, firing down toward the culvert; someone was taking cover in the concrete-lined tunnel, returning fire sporadically.

Ari sighted via the aiming reticle in his helmet HUD and fired a three-round burst into the back of the closest biomech’s neck. The Protectorate trooper pitched forward like a marionette with its strings cut, its spinal cord severed, and he shifted to the next target before the other biomechs realized he was there. By the time the second biomech went down, the other two were turning, but it was far too late: the Colonial Guard soldier had crawled forward out of the culvert and was adding another gun to the battle.

Ari saw out of the corner of his eye that Matienzo had come up beside him and was firing his battle rifle one-handed-at this range, it didn’t matter, as none of them could miss. The remaining two Protectorate troopers fell under the withering crossfire and suddenly the area around them was deathly quiet.

Ari jumped down into the drainage ditch and knelt down to help the soldier there as she dragged herself out of the culvert. She couldn’t stand: there were bullet wounds in both her legs and her helmet was gone, a gash in the side of her head matting her short, dark hair with blood. She was also the most beautiful thing Ari had seen in his life.

“Thank God,” he breathed as he lifted Roza from the ditch. Then he remembered to key his external speakers. “If it weren’t for this damn helmet,” he said, “I would kiss you.”

“Later, kedves,” she leaned her head against his chest for a moment. “Now, we must get out of here.”

“Hold on,” he told her, crouching down and throwing her over his left shoulder, hearing her gasp at the pain it caused in her legs and wincing in sympathy. “Matienzo!” he said. “Watch our backs and follow me.”

His left arm wrapped around Roza’s legs and his right hand filled with his carbine, Ari took off at a trot, as fast as he could manage carrying her extra weight and as fast as they could go and still allow Matienzo to keep up. The first hint of false dawn was visible as a grey line across the eastern horizon and Ari used it as a beacon, more real and visceral than the indicator on the map in his HUD, more comforting than the lines of tracer-fire that cut through the darkness all around them.

“Hurry!” He could hear Matienzo’s yell over his external audio pickups and he risked a glance backwards. A