Honor Bound

few hundred meters behind them, hundreds of biomechs were swarming out from the wash and he could see hundreds more behind those, all pushing in, spurred on by whatever human was controlling them, sensing that this was the time to throw everything in on one final attack.

“Kusemek,” Ari grunted, reverting to the curse words of his youth on the streets of Tel Aviv. Motherfucker. He tried to run faster, but his right thigh felt like jello and Roza was not a small woman: a meter seven and 54 kilos of muscle, not to mention the weight of her armor. His breath came in short, painful gasps and his feet pounded the dirt, sending jolts of pain up the muscles of his back and into his shoulders with each step, and still that icon on the map seemed so far away…

The pounding of his own pulse in his ears was so loud that he almost didn’t hear the whine of the turbines, couldn’t understand Matienzo’s shouted warning… and was totally unprepared when the officer candidate took him and Roza down in a body block. He rolled off of Roza, ready to scream an obscenity at the younger man, which was when he saw the assault shuttle screaming down behind them, anti-personnel missiles dropping free from its hardpoints and rocketing their way.

Ari threw himself down over Roza, catching a glimpse out of the corner of his eye of Matienzo curling into a fetal position, hands over his head, and then the whole world exploded. A pressure wave lifted him and Roza off the ground, sending them tumbling across the ground, coming to a rest in a rut in the field. When his head stopped swimming, Ari saw a wall of fire where the advancing biomechs had been, the line of fireballs slowly mushrooming into the night.

The assault lander rose into the sky above them, climbing against the bright stars then tumbling back into a turn that took it down the way it had come, passing back over the next wave of Protectorate troops and letting loose another flight of air-to-ground missiles. Ari watched in awe as the ground erupted with a chain of explosions a kilometer long… and then felt elation as he saw a half dozen more assault shuttles coming in from the west, breaking out of a V formation to split up and split the enemy force into separate sectors.

Waves of missiles rained destruction down on the Protectorate forces, secondary blasts from their APC’s exploding in antiphonal counterpart. As they expended their missiles, the shuttles opened fire with chin cannons, hovering on belly jets to pour explosive shells into clusters of surviving biomechs.

Roza sat up beside him, pain etched on her face but satisfaction in her eyes as she clung to his neck for support and, he hoped, just because. Ari worked free the yoke at his neck and pulled his helmet off, feeling the refreshingly cool night breeze drying the sweat on his forehead. He leaned down and kissed Roza gently, savoring the warmth of her, the softness of her lips for a long moment.

She put her head against his chest and just rested there for a moment. Thinking of her wounds, he patted at the pockets of his tactical vest, but found them empty.

“Matienzo,” Ari said, “do you have any smart bandages left?”

“No, sir,” the young man said, shaking his head… then stopped and stared at Ari curiously, seeing him with his helmet off for the first time. “Captain Al-Masri,” he said, frowning, “what the hell happened to your face?”

Ari laid his head back on the grass and laughed.

* * *

Jason McKay stepped down the ramp of the lander slowly, chains of exhaustion and pain dragging at him. His emotions were a roller coaster, taking him from deep sadness to extreme relief and almost giddiness, and it took a concerted effort to keep himself from breaking into sobs. There would be time for that later.

Dawn was breaking over the trees, the golden light coloring the billowing smoke that climbed into the morning sky and adding a hint of gold to Shannon Stark’s red hair where she stood waiting for him, her helmet held under her arm. She looked as drained as him, but they met somewhere in the middle, falling into each other’s arms.

“Hi honey,” he whispered in her ear, recalling words he’d spoken to her over five years ago, “I’m home.”

She snorted, punching him lightly in the shoulder.

“Easy!” he hissed, wincing. “I think my collar bone is broken.”

“I told you you should stay behind that desk,” she said, touching lightly at the bandage on his neck, her tone still playful but tears welling up in her eyes.

“General McKay,” General Kage approached them, clearing his throat. He had stripped off his helmet as well and sweat matted his dark hair. McKay kissed Shannon on the forehead, then turned to face the CeeGee officer.

“General Kage,” he said, nodding to the man. He didn’t know what to expect from the man, but given past experience, he decided to try to defuse the situation preemptively. “Sir, from what I’ve seen and been told, your people fought very well here. Their sacrifice saved tens of thousands of lives.”

“And you saved our lives, McKay,” Kage acknowledged, surprising Jason with his gratitude. “So I gather from that,” he waved at the other shuttles, which were still patrolling back and forth along the battlefield, hunting stray biomechs, “that our ships in orbit prevailed?”

McKay’s expression was grim. “Yes, sir, they did. But not without a hell of a cost. The Bradley is disabled, and the Decatur and the Sheridan have both been destroyed. Admiral Patel,” McKay kept his voice from breaking with an effort of will, “sacrificed his life ramming the enemy cruiser with the Sheridan after the crew had abandoned ship.” He nodded at the assault aerospacecraft. “Some of them are on those shuttles.”

Shannon had looked up sharply when he mentioned Patel’s death, then closed her eyes, mouth moving in a silent prayer, her hand grabbing his in a tight grip. McKay sighed. “It’s not quite over yet. There are some Protectorate ships still insystem, but our cislunar cutters and the Fleet Headquarters station should be able to stand them off until the rest of our cruisers arrive.”

“There is one other matter that needs resolving as well, McKay,” Kage reminded him. McKay squinted curiously, but it was Shannon who answered the unspoken question.

“Antonov,” she said. “I doubt he would put his ass on the line out here in the battlefield, especially not dragging around Fourcade and Riordan. So,” she shook her head, “where the hell is he?”

* * *

Brendan Riordan had been wondering for days now when Antonov and Fourcade were going to kill him, and now he thought he finally knew. He’d had his suspicions when they’d received the transmission from… well, from someone telling them that the Protectorate cruiser in orbit had been destroyed and that Dominguez was dead. They’d been hiding out in a safe house in the middle of nowhere outside Ottawa when they’d got the news and Antonov had flown into a rage, smashing everything in the place not bolted to the floor and smacking Riordan around a bit before Fourcade had managed to calm him down.

That was when Fourcade had mentioned the shuttle, and Riordan had begun to suspect that he would shortly be a dead man.

“We just need to get into cislunar space,” Fourcade had said, trying to mollify a seething Antonov. “Then we get in contact with one of the remaining ships and have it take us back to Novoye Rodina. They still can’t touch us there with the defenses we have in place… and we can add more before they’d be ready to make a run at us. Yes,” he’d admitted, spreading his hands to forestall the outburst he had known would be coming, “we’ve lost a lot of resources, but we have the ability to make more. General… I know you’re a patient man. You waited more than a century to attempt to exact your revenge because you wanted to be ready. We just have to be patient for a little longer.”

Antonov had still been incensed, but he’d gone along and they’d taken Riordan’s private flyer, the one whose registration had been spoofed so that it would come up as a different vehicle every time it was used, and made a beeline for west Texas.

Neither of them had spoken to him the entire way, but he’d known why he was being brought along. For years now, he’d kept a private shuttle in an unobtrusive little hangar on a shut-down storage facility just outside the boundaries of the Rio Grande Nature Preserve. It was a just-in-case emergency getaway vehicle; a bit of paranoia that he’d felt was justified by the various pots into which he’d stuck his political spoon. The hangar and the shuttle were only accessible to his DNA and biometric identification, so they would need him alive to access it… and then they wouldn’t have any need for him at all.

Riordan understood full well by now that he had made several huge mistakes, the biggest of which had been