Hellsky (Hunter-Killer #3)

Chapter 28 - By the Company You Keep

Joining the dots was an activity Brackenshaw was not looking forward to.

The first steps of her enquiries had been straightforward enough, and there was nothing untoward in Parsher's deployment orders at first glance. All signed off by the regimental commanders, along with a hundred others that same day, to assign Parsher to her expedition out to the liaison post. He just one soldier in the mass of Brekka's military, unremarkable in every way.

It made him the perfect man to carry out the attack, she supposed. Whoever was helping him had left nothing behind to give them away.

Except for one loose end.

Someone had signed off the Mammoth's cargo before it carried its deadly payload south. A bomb big enough to do what had been done at the Liaison Post would have had to be transported in a decent-sized crate, particularly if, as Aurelia suspected, the device was home made.

She walked calmly through the bustle of Stamm Basin's main hangar, exchanging nods and greetings with subordinates and salutes with superiors as she passed them. Officially she was here just as Lieutenant Kaydie Brackenshaw, just inspecting the skiffs of her platoon, making sure her underlings were ready to deploy when the word came.

Nobody paid much attention to her beyond that.

But when she reached the point in Stamm Basin's grid of tram lines where she would normally have turned left, she turned right and headed off towards the Mammoth armament yards. The acrid smell of fuel washed over her, a chemical tang stinging the back of her throat she drew closer to the grumbling thunder of the machines.

A huge avenue bisected the hangar's southern quarter, wide enough for a whole squadron of Hunter-Killers to march in a single rank, fed by the Mammoth yards. Brackenshaw stuck to the clearly marked out pedestrian walkways, and saw a pair of the lumbering behemoths pass by, looming over her like great armoured whales. Gun turrets faced forward, and she could just see the small shapes of the command crew high in the armoured cupola of the driver's station.

Give me a skiff any day, she thought as the Mammoths crawled off on their deployment. Brackenshaw couldn't imagine trying to drive something so cumbersome.

She checked her data slate as she closed in on the main yards. Her Mammoth was an older model, a three-decker brute designated simply as 'MDV-108' that had been in service for more than a decade. Currently it was getting patched up, having taken a beating in the retreat from the Liaison Post.

She passed several other stationary Mammoths with engineers crawling all over their massive hulls. Replacement plates of armour were swung into place by broad-armed cranes, and the air sizzled with the flare of welding torches. Brackenshaw winced as one of them clanged thunderously off a Mammoth chassis, swung in a little too quickly by an overzealous operator.

She stalked on through the resulting cloud of swearing from the other engineers, and into the next bay, where MDV-108 squatted, its great, rust brown hull lit up by floodlights. The broad, flat bulldozer blade on its front had been scorched with the unofficial name: STEADYWEATHER.

A man in Engineering Cadre overalls stood with his back to her, half inside one of the Mammoth's forward wheel housings. He had a heavy wrench in one hand, the other reaching inside to tug and yank at some mechanism she couldn't see.

She checked her slate again. Looked at the man; looked back at the file she'd pulled. Then she braced herself for a possible confrontation, and opened her mouth.

"Corporal Bryner?" Brackenshaw called.

The man jerked; the wrench he was holding slipped out of his hand and clattered to the floor. He rounded on her, and spat out a foul curse just before he noticed the rank bars on her uniform. Then his face went rigid and he saluted sharply.