📘The Star Pirate's Folly | 18: Volunteer
Nullsuit combat requires a fundamental shift in the mindset of any soldier: gravity no longer dictates the rules of engagement.
This is Hanlon’s Reader, an independent author’s publication. Here you’ll find stories, books, essays, and other things. I’ll be tinkering away here for a while.
If you’re using a web browser to read, you can use these links to help find your way:
📗Short Stories | 📘Books | 📙Personal Essays | 💌Newsletter | ❓About | 🏡Home
App Users: the categorized Tag links above don’t work in-app, so you may find it easier to use the Content Calendar or direct links to story posts to navigate my publication.
📘The Star Pirate’s Folly — 16 | 17 | … | 19 | 20
Chapter 18: Volunteer
“Whistler, you got any more drones?” Sweat-soaked inside his nullsuit, Two-Gut Gruce couldn’t keep the desperation from his voice. He’d split up his squads along the hilltop, scattered them to avoid losing too many in a concentrated attack but kept them close enough to keep formation. The muscles in his legs tremored from exertion—without the suit’s assistance he would have collapsed already.
“Down to three,” Whistler said.
“We’ll need some cover,” Gruce said. “Or more targets at least. Keep moving, you grubs know the drill.”
A chorus of “yups” from the other men. Gruce opened the private channel to Starhawk.
“Ready, boss.”
“Got ten of my birds headed your way, Two-Gut,” Starhawk said over the common channel. “Give ‘em thirty seconds. They’ll be more use than Red Shade was, I’m sure. I’ve seen kittens put up a better fight.”
Gruce’s eye twitched at the insult. He couldn’t hear his men’s laughter, but he could feel it in the silence that followed. All he could muster was, “Sorry, boss.”
“If you don’t think you can do this, don’t waste my time. Their guns are forming up again and I’m an easy target up here. Die quickly or get the job done so we can leave.”
Furious, Gruce shouted orders to his men. “Alright you mangy apes, snap to and keep steady! I’ve got center, Whistler’s left flank, Pluck you’ve got the right! Ten seconds and we charge!”
“What do you mean he said no?” demanded Hargrove.
Sergeant Mallory glared. “What do you think ‘no’ means?”
“I’ve been held here for hours! You can’t just—”
“We are trying to protect you,” the Sergeant said. “Along with the rest of the entire population of this city. You’re not nearly as important as you think you are. There are hundreds of others missing and we don’t have the resources to put your needs above everyone else’s.”
“I’m not asking you to do anything but let me go.”
Mallory shook his head. “Everyone else in the city is trying to get down here and you’re trying to get back up. You understand it’s about to be a war zone out there?”
“Yes, and I won’t leave someone I’m responsible for to fend for herself in the middle of it!”
“You got on that bus, Mr. Levene. You chose to put yourself in our protection.”
“I made a mistake.”
“The decision’s been made,” Sergeant Mallory said as he turned to leave. “There’s nothing I can do.”
“Then you’re useless!” Hargrove shouted.
His shoulders dropped when the door slid shut. He didn’t know what else to do. If they wouldn’t let him out, he couldn’t help Bee. There had to be some way for him to do something—anything. He was trapped with no obvious means of escape.
When his datapad rang, Hargrove knew it had to be another solicitation. He checked the display and almost threw it against the wall when he saw the same number that had just called him minutes before. Well, he’d give them a piece of his mind—at least yelling at someone would give him something to do.
“Why are you calling again?” he demanded.
“Oh, I’m so thrilled to speak with you again, sir. I have an incredible opportunity for you today.” The man’s voice gushed excitement.
Hargrove cut him off before he could launch into what sounded like a well-rehearsed pitch. “Your name.”
“Of course, sir. My name’s Robert626 and I’m a recruiter for the Volunteer Core Militia.”
“Privateers,” Hargrove said with disgust. “Dress it up however you like, I know what you are. And you don’t recruit volunteers. That’s idiotic.”
“Well, we’re an all-volunteer outfit, but no one can sign up if they don’t know about us! We have to get our name out there somehow.”
“Do you have no shame, calling a man to profit from his misfortune?”
Robert626 hesitated. “Misfortune? Sir, you just collected on the most lucrative bounty in the Core for years. And considering the man you killed I’d say you did a good deed today. VCM is always on the lookout for new talent, and we think you’ve got what it takes.”
Hargrove cringed at the man’s can-do attitude, and was about to tell Robert how ridiculous the whole proposition was when a thought struck him.
“What can you do for me?” Hargrove asked.
“Well, let me just start off with what we call our ‘Core Values.’ The Volunteers are a network of reserve privateers that extend from Surface all the way out—”
“No, no. What can you offer me? Not money—I have specific needs, and you might be able to help me.”
“What kind of needs?”
“A girl I know went missing before the comet passed. I want to find her, but I’m inside a bombardment bunker underneath Overlook City. The police won’t let me leave and they’re too busy to comb the city looking for her, but I might know where to find her. Can you get me out?”
“Sir,” Robert626 said with firm resolve, “it would be my absolute pleasure to assist you today.”
One hour later, Sergeant Mallory stormed into the room with another man in tow. The oddly proportioned sergeant stood at the door and gestured for Hargrove to get up and leave.
“Alright, let’s go,” Mallory said. “You don’t want our completely secure fortified facility to keep you alive, it’s your right to be a moron and get yourself killed. We’ve got all this square on the record so when you get hurt don’t think you can get some kind of settlement from this—we’ll come down on you with all the stars in the ‘verse.”
The slim man who followed the sergeant in walked toward Hargrove, hand outstretched in greeting. He wore a tight-fitting white jumpsuit with black and red trim. Hargrove shook hands with him.
“Wonderful to meet you, sir. I’m Robert626 and now that I’m here you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
“Just get me out of here,” Hargrove said.
“Half a mile from the dome, boss,” Gruce said over the private channel to Starhawk, heaving for air as he sprinted downhill toward the dome with his men.
“You sound fat, Gruce,” Starhawk said with an amused chuckle.
Before Gruce could react to the barb, superheated beams of light sliced through the canopy above his squad. Dicer, his number two, crumpled instantly as a red laser bored through his skull, burning through the nullsteel armor like plastic. The suit drifted eerily through the air, weightless, Dicer’s body still twitching inside.
Two-Gut threw himself away from his position and felt the heat from a laser scorch the armor on his right shoulder. Aerial attack—drones, maybe. Bad news. He scrambled behind a massive fallen tree trunk and swapped his filters to x-ray. His lens display picked out four human targets above him—a squad of nullsuits. So they came out personally to greet his attack.
“Suits in the air, scatter!” Gruce barked over the common band. “Whistler, drones up!”
“We got you, big man,” rumbled an unfamiliar voice in reply. “Squadron C assisting.”
Diving away from the tree trunk, Gruce glanced at his map as three warships peeled off from the formation of ten above the city, just beyond reach of its defenses. The four suits above him flitted around, their laser beams raking the forest floor nearby as they struggled to hit him. Whistler’s drones drew their fire for a moment, giving Gruce time to take cover and watch as his air support swooped in.
Machine guns from the three ships shredded two of the enemy suits and the other two dropped into the forest. One was too slow and a hail of bullets found its target just as he dipped below the tree line. Gruce grinned and doubled back toward the last remaining suit. That would be his ticket into the city.
Gruce spotted the fallen suit face down on the ground near Dicer’s body. Looked like he yanked himself down too hard, crumpled his arms underneath his body. Rookie mistake. Lost his weapon, too. Gruce vaulted over the fallen trunk and surged the gravity nodes in his boots and palms to pull himself down onto his foe, driving a vicious heel into the suit’s exposed neck as he landed.
The Overlook City trooper inside the suit died in an instant under Two-Gut Gruce’s heel, snuffed out like Dicer on the muddy forest floor beside him. He kicked the suit over onto its back. No glory in a merciful death. Gruce knew if today was his day he wouldn’t go out so peacefully.
“Pluck, I’ve got our key to the city,” Gruce said.
“Moments, dearest,” Pluck said, the words tumbling from his mouth with excitement. “Only moments.”
On the map, Pluck’s icon came streaking toward him. The squirrelly tech expert leaped onto the dead suit with a gleeful cackle and pulled a long spike from his belt which was connected like an umbilical cord to his suit. He arched his back as he brought the spike over his head with both hands and plunged it into the top of the suit’s helmet.
The dead man’s suit spasmed as though in agony, writhing in the mud underneath Pluck who howled and whooped as he struggled to hold the suit’s arms down.
“Oh, I’m in deep,” Pluck moaned. “Still warm, it’s all still warm. Everything, everything, give me everything, my love!”
“Boss, we got keys,” Gruce said over the private channel to Starhawk.
“Good,” Starhawk said. “We’ll make a hole. Get inside, get the map, and get to the gate station. My birds are dropping you some fresh grubs. Don’t be wasteful.”
Gruce watched as the three warships overhead opened their underbelly doors and hugged the treetops. Six more armors stepped out of each craft and plunged into the forest nearby. The ships zoomed off to rejoin the others above Overlook City. Flak clouds blossomed in their path and a trio of sonic booms cracked the air as the three nimble craft dodged away from the city’s defenses.
Gruce drew his rifle as he approached the new armors. These were Starhawk’s men, not his. Any one of them could have orders to put him down and take over.
“Fresh grubs up front!” Gruce shouted over the common band. “First one in the city gets a quarter of my share.”
A raucous cheer went up and several of the more enterprising new recruits shoved their squadmates out of the way to get a head start. Now numbering twenty-eight, the armored pirate soldiers stormed the city, zigzagging randomly to avoid being tracked by the city’s defenses. When his men in the lead broke through the forest into open grassland Gruce saw more squads of enemy suits deploy from the city. Drones, too.
It would be a bloody advance. Gruce brought up the rear of the formation with his own men, stopping at the edge of the forest. The troopers in the Core weren’t used to fighting battle-ready men like his, true killers who fought to win. They’d be a good distraction for his own crew, the real threat. With access codes to the city’s entrances they could break inside undetected.
His men in the lead were out in the open now. They didn’t have the trees for cover, so they changed tactics—the men took a waterskier’s stance, leaning back while using their boot nodes to push them a few feet from the ground as their palm nodes pulled them forward. At breakneck speed they raced to the city’s walls.
“Cloaks up,” Gruce said over the private channel to the remaining ten armors from his original crew. “Put some distance between you and every man around you. We bounce high and fast to the city when the hammer drops.”
Hargrove stuck close behind the recruiter as they made their way toward the elevator to the surface. Every other person in the compact hallway hurried in the opposite direction, forcing them to shoulder their way through at points. They were followed by two Overlook City police officers, their escort to the surface.
“How did you get me out of there so fast?” Hargrove asked.
“A VCM badge gives you a lot of leverage,” Robert626 said over his shoulder with a wink.
Hargrove was suspicious of the Volunteers’ intentions—nothing good ever came from an unsolicited call. But at least he was out of that damn holding room. Now he could focus on finding Bee.
“When we get up there we should try the hotel first,” Hargrove said.
“Oh, we’ve got a team looking for her already,” Robert626 replied.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you gave me her information and I passed it along to one of our teams up in the city.”
“I didn’t know,” Hargrove said.
He hadn’t seen the recruiter make a call, which meant if he was passing information along it was through a neural link. Thought computers made Hargrove’s skin crawl. His opinion of Robert626 and the Volunteer Core Militia sank further.
“Don’t worry, they’ll find her—they’re very good. We only work with the best.”
Hargrove stopped in the bustling hallway. “No, I want to look for her myself. That was the deal.”
Robert626 swung around to face Hargrove, pulling him off to the side. “I completely understand. Of course we’re going to look for her as well—we’re on the way right now to a squad of VCM troopers who are going to escort us through the city. But we’ve got some of our very best members on it already. They might even find her before we get up there!”
Hargrove pushed past him and resumed walking to the elevator. “Let’s just go.”
“Absolutely, sir,” Robert626 said, hurrying to catch up. “It’s right around the corner here. I’ll take your oath in the elevator.”
“Oath? What oath?” Hargrove demanded, whirling on the smaller man and forcing him to stop again. “You never said one word about that.”
Robert626 shrugged. “It’s more of a ritual, really. All for one, one for all, that type of thing. It’s not a big deal, trust me. Just part of joining the club.”
Hargrove glared. “I don’t trust you.”
People started to jostle them now as they passed, angry that the two men forced the flow of traffic in the hallway to move around them.
“Come on, move it,” one of the officers flanking them said.
“Let’s just wait until we’re in the elevator,” Robert626 urged, nudging Hargrove forward.
“No, you’ll tell me about it here. I won’t have a choice once we get in there.”
Robert626 seemed hesitant, but after a moment’s internal deliberation he took on a stiff and formal tone. “The Volunteer Core Militia regretfully rejects your application, sir. Good day.”
The recruiter shoved past Hargrove with surprising strength and threaded his way through the crowd to the elevator. Stunned, Hargrove lost sight of the man in the white outfit. That was his way out, his only path to Bee.
“Wait!” Hargrove shouted as he chased after Robert626, heedless of the calls of the officers behind him.
Starhawk brought the remnants of his fleet in close, keeping to the blind spots in the orbital guns’ coverage. They coasted in low planetary orbit directly over Overlook City, the last population center in range of bombardment—and the juiciest. Before long, the noose would close in around him and he’d be forced to fight or flee.
His flagship Deep Fog sandwiched itself between the two carriers Polyphemus and Bleachbone for protection. Ten warships filled out the fleet with moderate firepower—he’d sent the other ten to assist Gruce, who was somehow still alive. The fool could have made it through the atmosphere intact if he’d stayed aboard Red Shade and slowed her descent instead of evacuating. Instead he let her burn into a steaming pile of slag.
After Red Shade went down, Starhawk aborted the pincer attack and brought his fleet back in close. Every one of his remaining ships had its guns pointed at Overlook City. Two-Gut and his men on Surface were breaking away from the wild grubs charging toward the city. Now it was Starhawk’s turn to add to the chaos.
“Let’s knock on the door,” Starhawk said to his fleet. “Focus fire on the southern edge of the dome.”
Dozens of cannons primed and launched a salvo of bombardment shells specially designed for orbital attack. Without the Core Fleet at home the station must have been hesitant to engage, but now they would be forced to send ships after him—they couldn’t stand by and let the bombardment continue. Starhawk would keep it going as long as he could. His men would need the support.
“Fighter coverage,” he ordered.
The carriers Polyphemus and Bleachbone opened their docking bays and released squadrons of spherical drone fighters. Hundreds of them swarmed into defensive formations between Starhawk’s fleet and the orbital station. When the hangman came for him he’d be ready.
Hargrove caught sight of the stark white jumpsuit Robert626 wore and lunged forward, grabbing the man by his shoulder. He lost his grip on the slick material and the recruiter slipped a hand like iron around Hargrove’s wrist, pulled him forward, and twisted his arm behind his back. So strong—
“Oh, it’s you,” Robert626 said, immediately releasing Hargrove. “I hope I didn’t hurt you.”
“It’s fine, it’s fine. Just quickly—tell me about this oath.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but your application has been rejected.”
Hargrove felt the blood rise to his face. “Now, you listen here! Your organization invited me, not the other way around. You’re a recruiter, for stars’ sake! We had an agreement!”
Robert626 shook his head in apology. “It’s out of my hands, sir.”
“I want to join your damn group and you’re not going to stand in my way!” Hargrove boomed.
The recruiter beamed and stuck his hand out. “The Volunteer Core Militia is happy to formally accept your application.”
That took the bluster out of him. Hargrove balked but took the recruiter’s hand. “What?”
Robert626 leaned in with a grin as he shook Hargrove’s hand. “We always say no to new recruits the first three times. Helps to weed out the ones who aren’t serious. Are you ready for the oath?”
“Fine. Yes. I’ve come this far.”
“Do you, Hargrove Levene, declare yourself a member of the Volunteer Core Militia?”
“Yes.”
“Do you swear to protect the brothers and sisters of the Volunteer Core Militia as they have sworn to protect each other?”
“I swear.”
“Welcome to the Volunteers, Mr. Levene.”
📘The Star Pirate’s Folly — 16 | 17 | … | 19 | 20
📗Short Stories | 📘Books | 📙Personal Essays | 💌Newsletter | ❓About | 🏡Home