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                      Caveat Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain, as are the works of H.P. Lovecraft and Alexander Dumas. However, freshly-created, original fiction is the copyright of the author. Note that my work adresses adult themes, and is therefore not recommended for YA or children. Copyright All textual material on this website is copyright by Mike Adamson. All artwork with the exception of the book and magazine covers is copyright by Jen Downes. |
Ash rained softly from a silver-mauve twilight over the ruins of Castelium City.
The 43rd Battalion had bugged out in the afternoon, leaving this raw, nasty planet to the enemy. Now Sendaaki were landing in a dozen places, their organic-seeming vessels drifting down from a sky filled with the fallout of the blaze that had consumed the three human cities established here. Master Sergeant Vana Drexler, the only human being left on Acrasius C-1, controlled her breathing and reminded herself, she was a volunteer. This is for a reason, she thought, eyes closed, savouring the cool air that wafted through the helmet of her combat armour. When she opened them, she saw the targeting field of her weapon, a softly glowing grid over her view of the proscenium of the capital, where it lay on the far side of Proclamation Square in ruined majesty, its roofs hammered in and still blazing in many places. She lay in the filth and ash amongst charred and twisted beams, shattered concrete and burned plastic on the fourth floor of a once grand tower, the Castelium Hilton, and looked out over a wasteland of smashed paving and the charred stubs of ornamental trees. The Sendaaki had battered this colony from space after staging a brutal bluff to draw off the Colonial Fleet. The battleships Hannibal and Hercules had withdrawn after them — to a pre-planned pincer action that cost the enemy a cruiser but left the planet wide open to the anticipated Sendaaki counterthrust. One hour was all the enemy needed, and they timed it to perfection. C-1 was on the very edge of the Acrasius Sector, where the battles had ebbed and flowed for the last year, and most of the civilian population had been evacuated months ago. The human race did not want to relinquish its grasp on a planet so close to Earth norms that terraforming was complete in fifty years—and to be driven out was unthinkable. Two divisions and ten ships were committed, but both sides were capable of tactical deception. Now only a forlorn wind stirred the smoke from a million fires, the pall bringing unnatural, early twilight. The Middle Stars would shine dimly through the haze tonight, but Drexler was not thinking of her home on far-off Utopia or of the wider picture of the conflict — merely of living through the day. She was on no suicide mission; her survival was crucial. As yet, no human had ever seen a Sendaaki. The private, retreating race whose ire humanity had aroused showed itself to none, not even those races with whom they maintained diplomatic relations, and little had been gleaned in the years of tenuous contact before the war. But today, they would land on this planet, in this very city, and a single human being would be here to see them. The mass of steel and concrete interfered with scanners, and a low-power countermeasures field surrounded her position to further scramble enemy instruments. Her mission was to observe, record, and collect a specimen of the alien organism for analysis. Not a prisoner — Just a sample. The odds of success were poor, but as a race that did not engage in face-to-face conflict if it could be avoided, the Sendaaki had no conception of the role of the private soldier. Sniper was a special kind of human being. The job took skill, courage and commitment, but also deep thought, a philosophical outlook, commitment to long periods of waiting in comprehensive camouflage, allowing the target to come unsuspectingly to the killing ground. The ideal of taking out the target cleanly with a single shot was the calling and conceit of the profession, and Drexler meant to be the first sniper to take down the enemy. An hour had become two since the last landing craft boosted back into orbit, to the cruisers Stanford and Cambridge, and the ships had left to rendezvous with the battleships. The enemy could have the planet for an afternoon, if they could hold onto it: the Hercules would already be launching her squadrons into a shielded approach vector behind the bulk of C-1's larger moon, and they would roll in on ground targets when the time came. Drexler waited. Let the enemy come to you, she repeated silently in her mind, the mantra of the sniper. She would see them, mark her target, and take it at the opportune moment. A prearranged signal would tell the fighters to come in and plaster everything within five square kays. She would not be here when hell rained down — at least not the second time. And very definitely not the third. She felt them in her bones — the approaching ships. She had been briefed on enemy vessels but had never actually seen one, and when the globular, pendulous masses of gleaming metal descended from the angry sky over the buildings beyond the proscenium, she blinked to trip her visual recording system. The camera slaved to the scope of the sniper rifle framed the landing perfectly, and she adjusted magnification to zoom in on the upper parts of the nearest vessel as it grounded out. Nothing about it was recognisable as performing any familiar function; it was alien by every definition of the word, and a cold chill went up her spine. No one knew what fate awaited humans who fell into the hands of the enemy; none had ever returned to speak of it, and she did not wish to gather such information firsthand. Passive sensors had been scattered through the city and were watching for the enemy. They fed back to her suit computer through a carefully-laid nervous system of fibreoptic landlines, so the air remained EM silent. Her visual field was quiet for a while but began to light up with readings — pressure gradients, seismic vibrations. The grounded ships were disgorging their loads, and a thrumming set of impacts confused the system until the computer suggested "footfalls" as the most apt designation. She accepted the label with a blink and watched as those steps fanned out from the landing area. But moments later, she saw several flattened discoid sub-craft rise over the rooftops and drift away, each emitting an EM beam that showed up on her scanners. They were sweeping the ruins in detail. She bared her teeth in a savage grin: the game was definitely on. The squadrons would be passing the larger moon by now. Timing was everything. The Sendaaki would likely consider the approaching formations merely a spoiling attack and stand their ground, and Fleet was willing to take twenty-five percent casualties to make this work. Twenty Wolfhound heavy strike planes were on their way, covered by a like number of Harpy interceptors, and the whole strike package was aimed like a knife blow into Castelium City. Come on, show me a target, Drexler whispered under her breath, willing movement in her field of vision. A disc craft went flitting by, and a thrill raced up her spine for a moment, but her stealth field was good. With the precognition of a fine sniper, she knew the time had come and raised an armoured hand to draw back the cocking slide of the .60 cal. Kruger, which lay propped on its bipod amongst the rubble and filth before her, its long barrel extending close to the lip of concrete at the drop. A box magazine of ten rounds gave her immediate firepower. A second magazine lay beside the weapon, though the odds of her being able to reload in a crisis were low. The stock was snugged in against her armoured shoulder, and the cheek of her helmet lay against it. The input of the weapon's scope displayed in her faceplate and tied into her computer's overall coverage and data processing. She needed only to squeeze the trigger to send the tremendously powerful rounds across the vast square in a fraction of a second, sweeping down any living thing in the process. The fighters would now have cleared the moon; the enemy would be scanning them, and fighters might go up — but the enemy had a habit of complacency. If they were not dealing with capital ships, they relied on their close-in systems, perhaps too much — Colonial Intelligence had recommended this as a tactical weakness. So, Drexler was not surprised when the Sendaaki stepped out in the open, despite there being colonial craft closing on the planet. My God, they're humanoid! she thought, her heart racing as she swung the long weapon gently to track the figures emerging from the ruins of the proscenium. They were tall, very tall, she guessed the better part of four meters, maybe more. For a moment, she thought they were of conventional tetrapod layout, then she noted the bizarrely double-jointed legs and long epipodials, like a gazelle—these creatures were nimble. Body geometry like that, added to extreme height, meant they would cover ground like a cheetah. Their upper limbs were also double-jointed, and the hands were elongate, while the head was in the normal position for organisms with bilateral symmetry. She could make out no details; the beings were sheathed in some dully-gleaming mechanical carapace that displayed no visible joints, nor was it of any identifiable colour, but changed hue depending on surroundings and light — adaptive camouflage, she thought. Digital crosshairs hovered over one being, then another, and she switched zoom to back out from individuals and take in the group. Ten, fifteen, more...they seemed to be engaging in a moment's gloating over taking this planet from the humans, just walking the battered ground and looking over the smashed city. In small knots, they paused to inspect the things they found — the hulk of a ground vehicle, the stub of a tree, a crushed waste bin — all human things and puzzling to them. With the greatest care, Drexler brought up a chart of the area and identified sensors in the net in a rough shape surrounding the aliens. She tied the sensors to a signal routine that would program them to broadcast an ultra-short pulse in the high-EM range — in essence, strobing to mark the target — then she looked up over the area. She had her choice of three aliens, but the criteria of the job made one optimum: a single being out on the left flank of her field of view, separated from his or her companions by maybe fifty metres. That one would do nicely, and she dropped the sighting reticule over the broad chest. Now she was waiting on the planes. In her mind's eye, she saw them streaking through space toward the planet, jinking to avoid orbital debris, their stealth shields at max delivery to confuse enemy tracking as they punched into the atmosphere. They would let themselves rebound to give away speed, then adjust course — fool enemy scanning by laying a heading for one of the other two cities and holding it for long moments, and at the last possible instant, changing vector for Castelium. A single blip in her ears warned her they were inbound, shedding speed as they blazed through the atmosphere, and she counted softly under her breath. Ten seconds, twenty... Detonations began to follow the fighters in the high atmosphere as Sendaaki batteries flung hate at them. The figures in the sprawling square reacted to a message, turning to look up into the east — but it was too late. Drexler tripped the targeting beacons and the sensors pulsed, then she squinted behind her tough faceplate as she braced for incoming, all the while cursing as her chosen target began to stride east toward its comrades, into the strike radius...it might not exist in a few seconds. The Wolfhounds came down like thunderbolts, unloading just a selection of their ordnance. Missiles snaked for the grounded ships in a diversionary attack as half a dozen high-yield demolition units tumbled into the square and flooded it with flame. The fighters blurred over so fast, she never saw them, just felt their intense pressure wave rock the buildings around her. In the moment the first bombs fell, she squeezed the trigger and felt the Kruger thump back against her shoulder, rewarding her with the sight of the tall alien punched backward off its feet as the round passed clean through it. Part of her had worried the weapon would be ineffective, that the Sendaaki had personal shields or some such flight of fancy, and she was glad to see that, even at personal scale, they were every bit as mortal as herself. The confusion of the strike masked her shot and preserved her anonymity. The bombs sterilised the area, while her target was far enough away from the designated blast radius to survive intact. That was the plan, and it had worked more or less as intended. She acknowledged that this was the limit to which she could hope. One shot kill, she thought with pride as she rose out of the muck and rubble, a powerful figure in the drab-camo, self-powered combat sheath of the Colonial Forces. She abandoned the Kruger, grabbed up a hefty sample case, and bounded from the ledge to descend into the square to a repeller-cushioned impact. She raced through the swirling spot fires and freshly heaped wreckage, acutely aware that she was exposed like raw flesh. The alien was dead, its carapace scorched but intact, and Drexler had no time for reflection or thought of any kind. From her side, she took a laser cutter and triggered it; the flare shield of her face plate snapped on to save her vision as the intense beam severed the neck with one stroke. Without hesitation or squeamishness, she grabbed up the huge helmet and the head it contained and dropped it into the case. It barely fit, and she hammered it in, closed the lid and hit the quarantine circuit, so a bead of flame flashed around the joint to create a hermetic seal. Now she was on the knife's edge, and the suit covered the ground in long, racing strides as the fighters looped around and bore in again. One of the alien ships was lifting off as Drexler glanced north. Streaks of light rose from the oblate shape, matched by crackling flashes all around it as the fighters unloaded their railguns, and thousands of explosive rounds hammered the shields to soften them up for missiles. Ten seconds since her call; fifteen — she was making for the only safe place in the city centre, the vertical access to the subway system, the entire underground that had been the first Castelium, in the days of terraforming. The shaft was a transit corridor two hundred meters deep and fifty wide, and its depths could potentially survive the blast when the second wave hit. Now that all hell was loose, the fighters broke silence, beamed her a vector signal, and she willed power to her limbs — run, run! Trip and you're dead! She saw the shaft come up ahead at the conflux of several roads and byways as the planes came in like stooping hawks. This time, they let go the lot, thermal warheads, hi-ex, liquid fury and shrapnel, and the entire central district of the city disappeared under the breaking storm. Three planes disintegrated in the air as Sendaaki batteries zeroed on them, and fire from the ships intensified. But the mountainous wall of flame washed over the alien craft, swallowed them up like a tsunami and moved on. As the radiant heat flash raised her suit skin to 500 degrees, Drexler jumped for her life. She soared out into nothingness and fell in a perfect ballistic arc, down, down into the great vertical access, blurring past arcades and malls, transit links and subroads, until her repellers slowed her plummet. She grabbed tight to a stanchion, sliding fast, then her gauntlets locked to hold her as the concussion of the airstrike made the earth move and the shaft above filled with flame. The wavefront washed down the accessway, but in the confined space, it used up the oxygen quickly and turned to a greasy pall, roiling back up on the convectional currents. When the smoke cleared, Drexler's suit was blackened but undamaged. She looked up, and the sky beyond the shaft was flickering crimson, testimony to the destruction above. She blinked through menus to load the next signal and sent it on its way, a high-power burst directly upward; then she released her grip and slid down the great structural member, deeper and deeper, away into the cool earth, where ash and filth rained from the burning floors above. This was the worst part, as she had always known it would be. She hit bottom and flattened out against a support column in the midst of what had been a bustling city. It was now devoid of life and filled with blazing trash and wreckage. She was waiting, hoping and praying that this one last act played out as close to its plan as humanly possible, but with the signal sent, her input was at an end. The sample case, at the magnetic grappling point on her backpack, made her clumsy and slow, and if it came to an evasion scenario, she would have to jettison it. She would hide it somewhere, where she might go back for it if, by some remote chance, she survived — alone on a planet dominated by the enemy — until Fleet counterattacked and pushed them back into the wild stars from which they came. The light of the inferno flickered on the open base of the shaft like the gullet of hell, and as she waited, it was not hard for Drexler to accept that she was not going to get out of here. But in reality, a matter of seconds went by before she heard the building shriek of engines, and a shadow formed at the heart of the shaft, cast by a descending shape. She shaded her faceplate and looked up to find the savage outline of a Harpy dropping down the accessway on vectored engines. Landing gear deployed as she watched, and in moments, the powerful craft settled in a welter of blowing ash and garbage. The canopy went up, and the armoured pilot beckoned her desperately. This was a two-seat model, and the rear cockpit was vacant. A cargo hatch dropped open in the lower fuselage, and she stuffed the case into the compartment, saw baffles close about it as the hatch whined closed. Then she went up the hull at kick-in panels, and the servos of the suit flipped its dead weight over into the rear seat. Mooring harness locked into the armour at multiple locations, and before she could shout "Go!" the pilot brought the canopy down and throttled up. "Hang on!" he called tightly as the craft's vector changed, tilting over until it hung vertically on its thundering mains. Then he slammed open the throttles, climbed like a bullet through the shaft, erupted into the flaming twilight, and left the devastated city behind. Final act, Drexler thought, teeth gritted against the tremendous G-force as she uncovered a trigger pad on her suit's left forearm and entered a code in her blink-menu. Failsafes cleared. Armed. The fighter's computer routed data to her, and she saw the disposition of enemy forces, the landing ships approaching from the other two cities to backup the three in Castelium. She held off five more seconds as the survivors of the attack and cover squadrons climbed for space. She closed the trigger. Castelium ceased to exist as a ten-megaton thermonuclear mine on the top floor of the Hilton detonated in an airburst at two hundred and fifty meters' altitude. It wiped the city clean and took out the alien landing ships, overwhelming their shields with raw nuclear fury delivered point-blank. One ship on the periphery survived but was flung mercilessly across the sky; but for the enemy, the Acrasius C-1 landings amounted to almost total loss. The Sendaaki capital ships were out there too, but the Hercules battlegroup would be closing in hard, launching the rest of their fighters in a protective screen to bring the strike unit back aboard unscathed. Only as they left the planet astern and Drexler looked back at the dissipating nuclear cauldron where the capital had been, did the sniper allow herself to think of the thing in the cargo bay. Alien genetic structure — in which could be read morphology, strengths and weaknesses — was in that preserved tissue, and her visual recordings would provide a great deal more information. She was astounded that three years could have elapsed without a personal encounter, but alien war was under no obligation to unfold according to the same expectations as terrestrial conflict. But one thing had never changed: doublethink. Drexler threw one last glance at the fading fires of the mushroom cloud on the horizon and nodded with a cold, dead feeling inside her. In the end, the sniper's maxim held true, whether for a bullet or a nuke. One shot kill — and by it, pre-empt reactions. The enemy may be implacable, but humans could be ruthless too. © Mike Adamson 2018 |
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