Heaven's Devils

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

KEL-MORIAN INTERNMENT CAMP-36, ON THE PLANET TURAXIS II

Having captured the factory, the next challenge was to assemble a convoy and load it. Once Zander completed a quick inventory of what was available, Tychus learned that he had six trucks, two buses, two tracked, armored personnel carriers (APCs), and a saber command car at his disposal. So he put the saber at the head of the column, followed by an APC, the trucks, the buses, and the second armored personnel carrier.

Three members of the STM platoon had been killed in crash landings, and two had been taken out subsequent to touchdown. That left Tychus with thirty-one of his own people, plus a dozen rangers who had been lucky enough to survive a dropship crash. That gave him a force of forty-three soldiers to protect some three hundred POWs, roughly ten percent of whom might be healthy enough to fight, and were busy arming themselves just in case.

Could the convoy break through into the zone? He hoped so. The only alternative was to stay at KIC-36 and wait to see who would arrive first. A contingent of Kel-Morian troops? Or some Confederate dropships? Given the fact that they were well inside Kel-Morian-held territory, it would have been silly to put his money on the dropships.

There was a sudden roar as gravel flew in every direction and a dusty vulture hover-cycle came to a stop. Not only was Jim Raynor at the controls, he was wearing goggles he’d acquired with the vehicle, a collection of garments scrounged from the factory’s locker room, and a pistol he had taken off a dead pit boss. There was a big grin on his face as he revved the engines. “Look what I found!”

Kydd had been forced to jettison his armor and initiate its self-destruct device when its control system crashed. He looked small standing next to Tychus. “Don’t let him do it, Sarge… . The last time he drove one of those things we wound up in jail.”

But it was too late as an overmedicated Jim Raynor waved and took off down the road. His voice could be heard over the comm in the saber. “I’ll scout ahead,” Raynor said, “and let you know what to look out for.”

Tychus swore as he saw an Avenger chasing a Hellhound across the valley, gave orders for everyone except Ward to shuck their armor, and did so himself. It was too bad, since the hardskins would have given his people an edge in a head-on fight, but they were too large for the already crowded vehicles and wouldn’t be able to keep up no matter how fast they walked or jogged. But there’s an exception to every rule, and since Ward had the capacity to launch eight independently targeted rockets, he was ordered to ride in truck one.

Having freed himself from his suit, Tychus entered the saber, snatched a mic off its clip, and gave the necessary orders. “Keep the vehicle ahead of you in sight, but stay three truck lengths back, and kill your headlights. The comms can be monitored by the enemy… . So don’t use them except in an emergency. Over.”

Zander gunned the engine and put the saber in motion. They had a long way to go, and the clock was ticking.

THE DISPUTED ZONE, ON THE PLANET TURAXIS II

As part of Overseer Brucker’s regiment, it was the Kel-Morian Snakehead Komando’s mission to keep a close eye on the northern sector of the zone, send in regular intelligence reports, and interdict any Confederate patrols that happened along.

The unit was camped in and around a scattering of house-sized rocks, with a clear free-fire zone all around, and good visibility for the sentries perched atop of the biggest boulders. So Foreman Kar Ottmar felt reasonably secure inside his boxy command vehicle as he typed another letter into his hand comp. He couldn’t send it of course, not until the Komando returned to base, but doing so every night was part of a long, frequently interrupted conversation with his wife, Hana.

He could imagine her getting the electronic letters ten or fifteen at a time, and the flicker of firelight on her pretty face as she read them aloud to the children. He never spoke of the fighting in hopes that his family would never face the horrors of war. So he was telling them a story about the dusty brown lizard that had taken up residence in one of his hats, and what the reptile liked to eat, when a comm technician rapped on the half-open door. “Sorry to bother you, sir, but Assistant Overseer Danick is on the horn. He sounds pretty upset. It seems the Confeds attacked KIC-36 and laid waste to it.”

Ottmar swore silently as he hit “save” and left the lizard story half-told. The comsat truck was parked about fifty feet away and protected by light-dispersing camouflage netting. A minute later he was inside the vehicle and sitting on a fold-down seat. A bare-breasted pinup named Viki smiled down on him from her spot just above the comsat terminal as he pulled a headset down over his head and adjusted the lip mic. “This is Snake-Six. Over.”

“The bastards dropped out of the sky!” Danick proclaimed, as if such a thing wasn’t fair. “They weren’t wearing parachutes, they were using some kind of flying armor, which enabled them to land with pinpoint accuracy. We’re still in the process of sorting everything out, but it’s clear that Overseer Brucker and about forty of his guards are dead, with ten WIAs, and major damage to the base.

“That’s not the worst of it, though,” Danick continued hotly. “The Confeds freed the POWs and they’re headed your way! I want you to stop them, Kar… . More than that, I want you to kill every one of the bastards and leave their worthless carcasses to rot in the sun! Do I make myself clear? Over.”

Ottmar could visualize the lick of hair that would be hanging down across the other man’s forehead, the bulging intensity of his eyes, and his slightly purplish lips. “Yes, sir. Very clear. Over.”

“Put your comm tech back on the line,” the assistant overseer instructed. “We’ll feed you everything we have on the column’s position and direction of travel.”

“Yes, sir,” Ottmar replied, and surrendered the headset to the comm tech.

As the officer stepped down from the truck, he wasn’t surprised to find Taskmaster Kurst waiting for him. Somehow Kurst always knew when something was about to happen. He was a big man with a walrus-style mustache and a lantern jaw. “Sir?”

“The enemy laid waste to KIC-36—and killed fifty of our men. Rather than give aid to the wounded, the bastards shot them. We’re going to hunt the slimeballs down! I want the Komando combat-ready thirty minutes from now.”

The exaggerations were intended to motivate the troops, and judging from the anger in Kurst’s eyes, the strategy was working. “Yes, sir!”

Ottmar smiled grimly as the taskmaster departed. The Confeds might have some fancy armor, but they were burdened with hundreds of POWs, and a long way from Confederate lines. He and his Snakeheads were going to find the degenerates and make them sorry they’d ever been born.

The drugs were beginning to wear off, and Raynor was exhausted as the sun rose in the east and he guided the vulture out of a canyon and onto a flat plain. He’d been riding the hover-cycle for hours by then and felt like an old hand as he cut power and let the machine coast to a gentle stop. What had been a single road now split into three well-defined tracks.

Stiff fingers fumbled for the stimpack, found it, and slapped the device against the back of his neck. It buzzed softly. That meant it was empty, so Raynor threw it away. Damn. All the places where Moller had stuck needles into his body hurt like hell.

The saber rolled up to a point about twenty feet away and came to a stop. Tychus climbed out, eyed the sky, and lit a cigar. Puffs of smoke trailed behind him as he made his way over to the hover-cycle. Raynor, who had just taken a long pull from a water bottle, gargled and swallowed. “We’re sitting ducks out here.”

“Yup,” Tychus acknowledged. “We sure as hell are. That’s why Vanderspool wants us to find a defensible spot and hole up.”

“What for?” Raynor demanded. “Why can’t they send some dropships to pick us up here?”

“There’s a shortage,” Tychus answered laconically. “That’s what Colonel Shit-for-brains claims anyway. We lost too many dropships last night and they have to bring some in from the north.”

“Well, that’s just wonderful,” Raynor responded. “I guess I’d better go find a hole for us to crawl into.”

“You do that,” Tychus said agreeably. “And Jim …”

“Yeah?”

“Find it soon. Most of our vehicles are running on fumes.”

Raynor swore, pulled a pair of goggles down over his eyes, and gunned the engines. The vulture fishtailed as it took off and raised a rooster tail as it sped west. Various rock formations could be seen in the distance, and Raynor was trying to figure out which one of them was closest when something caught his eye almost directly ahead. It was too symmetrical to be natural, yet so large he couldn’t believe it was man-made until he topped a rise, and the entire machine came into view.

It was roughly the size of a thirty-story office tower laid on its side. And, judging from the enormous tracks that were partially buried in the sand, the enormous device was a so-called “mineral stripper,” a mobile processor that could “eat” a fifty-foot-wide strip of ground as it crawled across the surface of a planet, extracting the minerals, and process them on board. Waste materials were fed out the back as trucks pulled up alongside to receive the ore and carry it away. The words RAFFIN BROTHERSMINING were printed along the stripper’s rusty flank in letters twenty feet tall.

Judging from the damage that could be seen, and all of the sand that had accumulated around the machine’s monstrous tracks, the processor had been bombed during the early stages of the wars and had been abandoned thereafter. Could they hide inside? And wait for help to arrive? Yes, there was plenty of metal to protect them, and the stripper was closer than the rock formations in the distance.

Raynor skidded to a stop, flicked a switch, and spoke into the mic. “Sierra-Nine to Sierra-Six… . Come to Daddy. I have it. Over.”

The reply wasn’t what he was expecting. “Hit the throttle, Nine… . You have an inbound Hellhound at three o’clock!”

Raynor was still in the process of absorbing the words as geysers of sand jumped into the air all around him and there was a sudden roar as the enemy fighter flashed overhead. Raynor gunned the engine and sent sand spewing in every direction as he took off. The vulture caught a large pocket of air as it passed over the top of a dune and pancaked in twenty feet beyond.

The impact nearly threw Raynor off the bike, but he managed to hang on as the hover-cycle began to regain its momentum, and the Hellhound circled back. The distance to the stripper had been halved by then—but Raynor knew that the pilot was going to get a second chance at him. So he cranked the handlebars to the left. That caused the vulture to turn in on the fighter and made the Kel-Morian’s target that much smaller.

Since the vehicles were rushing at each other at a combined speed of more than three hundred miles per hour, the pilot had only seconds in which to score a kill. Raynor looked up, saw laser bolts coming straight at him, and marveled at how pretty the lights were as they plowed parallel furrows through the sand. A slight turn to the right was enough to steer the bike between the incoming beams as the Hellhound roared overhead.

That was Raynor’s cue to execute a sharp turn to the right and make a run for the protection offered by the stripper. The rest of the convoy was halfway across the open area by that time, each vehicle throwing up its own plume of dust, as they raced toward safety. The only exceptions were the APCs, which sat side-by-side, roof-mounted double-barreled gauss cannons stuttering as they attempted to bring the Hellhound down.

Then a bus came too close to a low-lying rock formation, ran up onto the ledge, and flipped over! The vehicle skidded for fifty feet on its roof, wheels still spinning, before finally coming to a stop. POWs were just starting to crawl out through the windows when the Hellhound came back to strafe the wreckage. The bus burst into flames and a column of oily smoke boiled up into the sky as if to mark a funeral pyre.

It was a terrible loss, but one that gave the rest of the vehicles enough time to circle around both ends of the stripper and seek safety between the processor’s mighty treads. It was darker in there, and cooler too, as Tychus exited the saber to find Raynor waiting for him. “They know where we are now,” Raynor said grimly. “Ground units are probably en route. Let’s bring the APCs in to block both ends of this hulk.”

It was a good idea, and Tychus was about to say as much, when an accelerated spike hit. The explosion wasn’t that big by military standards, but sufficient to blow a huge divot out of the sand just inside the north entrance and cause Tychus to change his mind. “Get the POWs out of those vehicles!” he shouted. “See the stairs to either side? Take them up and put them at the very center of this thing. And do it yesterday!”

“Where the hell did that spike come from?” Raynor asked, as the rangers hurried to obey Tychus’s orders.

“I don’t know,” Tychus answered grimly, as his cigar waggled up and down. “But I’ll bet we’re gonna find out.”

Ottmar and his Snakeheads were sitting atop a low ridge that ran east to west across the plain. The mineral stripper was clear to see about a mile ahead. Thanks to information provided by the Hellhound pilot, not to mention the thick black smoke, the fugitives had been easy to locate.

Ottmar panned the battlefield with his field goggles. Eight combat four-wheeled light attack vehicles (LAVs) led the charge. In keeping with the Komando’s motto, “Move fast and strike hard,” each LAV was armed with a fixed gun and was large enough to carry two armored soldiers. The four-wheelers could travel at speeds up to sixty miles per hour over a reasonably flat surface. That made them perfect for scouting, quick raids, and rat hunts like this one.

Two sloths followed close behind. Repurposed to function as tanks, the sloths had once been huge earth movers to which large caliber cannons had been fitted in place of dozer blades, along with lighter slugthrowers for anti-personnel use. Metal plates had been welded all around the circumference of the machines and were angled wherever possible in order to deflect incoming projectiles.

The rest of the unit, including the command vehicle, the comm-truck, the supply hog, the fueler, and the men required to defend them were almost ten miles to the rear. Having lost their battle with the Hellhound, both of the captured APCs were burning. The fighter, which was running low on fuel, was on its way back to base.

As the tanks fired on the stripper, the resulting explosions were little more than tiny flashes of light against the machine’s vast gray bulk. “Snake-One to all units… . Save your ammo,” Ottmar ordered. “The Confeds are inside that monster by now. Over.”

That was when the driver of the LAV to Ottmar’s right jerked spastically and a distant crack was heard. Then, with a ponderous dignity, the Snakehead fell sideways onto the ground. A sniper had seen an open visor and taken his shot. The rats had teeth!

The number two man on the right-hand LAV was behind the controls by then as Ottmar twisted his throttle and sent his attack vehicle surging forward. The key was to get in under the beast, kill any guards who might be waiting there, and fight their way upward. A simple matter, really—and one he would take pleasure in.

Ward could see the oncoming LAVs and knew what they hoped to accomplish, as he left the shadows and lumbered out to stand at the very center of the huge opening. Quad rocket launchers sat atop Ward’s squared-off shoulders, and a Kel-Morian gauss cannon was cradled in his arms. This was the moment he’d been waiting for, and there was a smile on his lips as targeting data scrolled across his HUD.

“Ward!” Tychus yelled over the comm. “Get your dumb ass back over here! That’s an order!”

But Ward couldn’t hear anything other than the sound of his wife calling their children in to dinner, and the music of their laughter, followed by a series of explosions as the Hellhounds bombed his village. He staggered as incoming fire sparkled against his armor, but was only marginally aware of the danger as he chose each target with care. Once the process was complete, Ward was careful to brace himself against what he knew was going to be a massive recoil. There was a satisfying whoosh as all eight of the rockets left their launchers at once, locked onto the heat generated by the targets they had been assigned to, and corkscrewed across the sky. The gauss cannon was up and firing by that time, an LAV exploded, and Ward gave thanks. He was a happy man.

Ottmar figured the man who stood legs apart at the very center of the opening was either very brave or very foolish—not that it made much difference, because in a moment he was going to be very dead!

Then he saw the flash of rockets being fired, the vapor trails they made, and knew what would happen next. There was little more than a couple of seconds in which to think about Hana, the children, and the brown lizard before a rocket blew Foreman Kar Ottmar and the man seated behind him to bloody bits.

Not all of the eight rockets found their targets, but five of them did, and that was sufficient not only to blunt the Snakehead attack, but to leave the survivors without sufficient transportation.

Ryk Kydd, who was up on the processor’s stern observation deck, could see the stranded KMs and the burning vehicles. He was very unforgiving. Three shots rang out—and three Kel-Morians fell.

But the sloths were still in commission, as were three LAVs, and they were damned hard to hit as the four-wheelers wove in and out.

Ward was shooting at the sloths with the gauss cannon, but he was out of rockets, and it was a waste of time. But he stood there blasting away until Tychus dashed out into the opening and tackled him. Nobody other than Tychus would have been strong enough to snatch an armored man off his feet and push him to safety, even as the beneficiary of his kindness threatened to kill him.

Then the enemy was inside the tunnel as two four-wheelers entered, firing as they came. Two rangers threw up their hands and went down as a hail of spikes punched holes through their body armor.

But their short-lived success was over as Raynor pulled out from behind a parked truck and followed the LAVs toward the other end of the tunnel and the daylight beyond. The vulture’s grenade launcher made a steady chugging sound as it lobbed grenades straight ahead.

Raynor wasn’t very skilled with the weapon since he’d never had an opportunity to fire one before, but it turned out that he didn’t have to be, as one of the four-wheelers took a direct hit, and the second ran into a pair of explosions that sent it skidding out of control. Black smoke whipped past as the vulture carried him around the wreckage and out into the open area beyond.

Meanwhile, as the first sloth came to a halt beneath the stripper’s massive bulk, Harnack was there to greet it. He was wearing goggles, and carrying a captured shotgun as he dropped onto the vehicle’s rear deck from a catwalk above.

There was a loud clang as the top hatch opened and fell against steel. That was the moment when the Kel-Morian saw Harnack’s face grinning down at him. Harnack’s grenade fell inside, rattled as it fell into the compartment below, and wound up just a foot away from the reserve ammo locker.

Harnack jumped off and was fifty feet away by the time the ammo blew. The explosion also damaged the second sloth, which continued to shake convulsively as rounds cooked off inside the wreckage.

Only two of the LAVs were still operational at that point, and both of them made a run for it, as half a dozen Avengers arrived on the scene and attacked them from the air. Both vehicles were destroyed in a matter of seconds.

Suddenly all sorts of orders were coming in as ten dropships appeared and began to land one after another. The first dropship to touch down disgorged eight armored soldiers, who immediately went to work rounding up the POWs.

Meanwhile, Tychus, Raynor, and Harnack began to make their way out from under the gigantic crawler. Moments later Kydd, Zander, Ward, and Doc fell in behind them. Together they walked out of the tunnel and into the sunlight beyond. The job was almost finished—but there was one more thing to do. Find the rest of the Kel-Morian attack group and kill them.

Thanks to the tracks the sloths and the LAVs had left behind, it wasn’t all that difficult to find the rest of Foreman Ottmar’s Komandos. The unit’s support vehicles plus two LAVs had taken shelter under a protruding rock shelf where they would be in the shade and invisible from above.

It was a pretty good hiding place, all things considered, but not good enough to protect the KM soldiers from the heat-seeking missiles fired by a pair of Avengers, or the troops that landed shortly thereafter. The fueler was on fire, the comm-truck was badly damaged, and bodies lay scattered all about. “Check the bodies to make sure they’re really dead,” Tychus ordered. “And we are taking prisoners, so mind your manners.”

Raynor could have remained on the dropship, but couldn’t stand to sit there while the rest of the team hit the dirt. So he followed them into the shadow cast by the outcropping of rock, saw the undamaged command vehicle sitting off to one side, and drew his pistol.

The door was partially open, but he was careful to approach at an angle, so he could see inside. “Hello? Anybody there? If so, put your weapons down and come out with your hands on top of your head.”

There was no response. So Raynor made use of the pistol barrel to push the door open, and took a moment to peer into the relative darkness, before climbing a set of fold-down stairs. It was hot inside the truck, very hot, and once Raynor was sure that the vehicle was empty of people, he wanted to bail out. But first there were some files to go through. The intel people would want to look at any reports, maps, or other official documents that were accessible.

Raynor had just opened a camo-covered briefcase, and was shoving files inside, when he came across a hand comp. A single touch was enough to turn the device on. The document that blossomed on the screen was a letter from one of the KMs to a woman named Hana. His wife? Yes, he thought so. But rather than the sort of letter that one might expect a soldier to write, Raynor found himself reading a story about a lizard. A tale clearly intended for the author’s children.

Raynor scrolled to the bottom of the document, saw that the story was unfinished, and shook his head sadly. It was hard to believe that the man who had written the letter was all that different from the people Raynor served with every day. That wasn’t what the government claimed, though. According to the Confederacy, all of the KMs were monsters. Brucker was—no doubt about that. But this guy? Raynor wasn’t so sure.

He shoved the hand comp into the briefcase, followed by a personnel roster, both of which would be eagerly welcomed at Fort Howe.

While Raynor continued to fill the briefcase, a tiny brown head popped up from the boonie hat that was resting on a side shelf. After checking its immediate surroundings for signs of danger, a small lizard emerged and darted out of the hat. Its mottled body was motionless for a moment, as its tongue tasted the air, and its nearsighted eyes stared at the area directly in front of it.

Then the lizard was off, scurrying the length of the shelf to the point where it could jump down onto a tool box, and from there to the floor. After that it was a short run to the open door, the fold-down stairs, and the hot sand that waited beyond.