Tarkos translated while Bria’s armor opened and she stepped back into it. Tarkos told his armor to open also.
“You’re going to blow this,” the soldier complained.
“Sir,” Tarkos said, “this is anti-matter. It’s like they have a nuke over there. We’ve been authorized to seize that anti-matter, because the Enforcers are not here yet. I appreciate that this is your operation. But we have capabilities which will be of… use to you.”
The man shook his head. “You’re not helping. You’re taking over. And you’re fucking this up.”
Tarkos frowned. “I’m sorry. But we have our orders also.”
He stepped back into his armor.
“I won’t open the door,” the soldier said.
Tarkos looked at the other men, who sat still in their benches. They looked at him and Bria with something like hate.
“If you don’t open the door, we’ll just walk through it,” Tarkos said. “Please, follow behind us as best you can. But wait a moment after we enter the building. You don’t want to get caught in the neural stun field.”
His armor closed.
He turned. For a moment, the door did not open. Bria reached forward, about to rip it from its hinges. It slid aside. Bria switched her armor to stealth mode, becoming a blur.
She hit the ground running so fast that her armor sparked on the pale concrete.
_____
Even using the power-assist in his armor, Tarkos could not keep up with Bria. He still had fifty meters to go when the door to the warehouse exploded inward, shards of wood tumbling off of Bria’s mostly invisible form. His armor beeped in warning as Bria slammed a full force neural dampening field through the space beyond. Then Tarkos leapt through the door.
They had entered a wide room, stretching off the length of the building, with a ceiling five meters above. A second floor must be above them then. A dozen men with guns in the room all toppled backwards. Tarkos’s targeting programs painted boxes over each one but he did not fire.
Bullets pinged off the floor. His armor traced trajectories and painted green arrows at the source: crouching on the top of a stair, two men with very large machine guns. They wore helmets. Those, and the distance, were perhaps sufficient to protect them from the field.
Tarkos targeted their weapons and lifted an arm. But before he could fire the long black barrels of their guns fell away, sparks flying off the metal as they spun down to the floor. Bria hit the stairs, running up at the men.
Tarkos spun, taking in the view. They had to find the anti-matter as quickly as possible. He assessed only two possibilities: it was upstairs, or on this floor. Bria had reached the top of the stairs and thrown the men off. They fell screaming to the hard concrete below. So she would take the upstairs. He would search this floor.
A door opened to his left. A bald man with a dark beard stepped out, pistol raised, scanning the room. His eyes passed over Tarkos, whose armor still imitated the scene behind him.
Tarkos ran at him. The man caught the blurring of the background and looked straight at Tarkos. He fired the pistol twice. One bullet went wide, another skipped off Tarkos’s shoulder. The chameleon skin turned black there, no longer able to operate in stealth.
Tarkos slammed straight into the man. He went down with a crash, and bones cracked as Tarkos ran over him, heavy boots stepping on arms. He pushed into the room beyond.
He had a second to take in the room: a close space with a table set for a meal. Half a dozen plates with food still on them. Glasses full of beer set haphazardly. Only one other door, straight across the room from him.
A young man stood by the table. He raised an old-fashioned revolver and fired. The bullet cracked against the chest of Tarkos’s armor. The armored whined, protesting mildly, expressing minimal damage.
Tarkos stepped forward and slapped the gun from the man’s hand. He had red hair, freckles, a shocked and frightened expression. A boy, Tarkos realized. Barely twenty, if not younger. He stood, staring, recognition dawning. Something about the eyes, the small mouth.
“Are you Stevie Yeats?” Tarkos asked. The boy cringed. Tarkos realized his voice boomed, volume set to high on his armor’s speakers. But he left it that way.
“Lay on the floor, put your hands behind your head. Shout ‘I surrender.’ If you do that, you’ll live, and you can see your sister soon.”
Before the boy could answer, the door before Tarkos opened. He raised an arm and extruded a laser.
In a blur, something leapt through the door and shoved the table aside. Tarkos had a second to see it before it slammed into him. Black, humanoid.
He hit the wall and tumbled to the side. The figure was gone, through the other door and out of view. His armor played back the images in slow motion.
“Bria,” he radioed, getting to his feet. “Human in armor coming your way. Seems to be good armor. Fast. Power assisted.”
“Antimatter here,” Bria replied.
Tarkos hurried through the door.
The human soldiers were filing through the shattered front door now. Tarkos turned off his armor’s stealthing. He pointed back at the room. “One man in there,” he said aloud, his armor amplifying his voice. “He wants to surrender. Don’t know if there are others. The anti-matter is upstairs. You should—”
He saw the figure in black armor race to the top of the steps then, following the path that Bria had. Fire blazed from the cannons on its shoulders, drowning out Tarkos’s voice. Then the ceiling above collapsed.
_____
When Bria leapt to the top of the stairs, all four eyes wide, she took in the scene in a second. A square room, with a ceiling of dirty glass. On one wall, a large doorway slowly opened. By the doorway stood a crane. Its cable dangled down and connected to four cables on a platform. On this platform a silver cylinder sat on one flat end. Four humans stood by the gleaming cylinder, their backs against the taught cables. They were helmeted, aiming long barreled projectile weapons at Bria.
Bria told her armor to hit the four with a neural dampening field, full force. The four should have dropped but they did not. The helmets and their clothes, she concluded , were lined with some kind of defense. Instead, they swung their weapons up to aim at her. At this short distance, her chameleon field could not hide her. Their rifles began to flash.
The bullets cracked into her armor. She could tell by the sound of their impact that the projectiles were high caliber, and moving with extreme velocity. They scoured the chameleon layer off her suit. The stealthing ceased. Her suit began to complain, alarms howling in protest, and a small map in the corner of her vision showed her where fractures had been made in the ceramic metal of her armor. The force of the four guns pushed her back.
She had targeted all four of them when first coming into the room. The suit’s computer would track them constantly, independently. She extruded the lasers in her armor’s forearms. Targeting prisms spun in the lasers. She would prefer to take their guns away, but the danger was too great: the cylinder beside them was a magnetic bottle, and surely held the antimatter. She let the weapons fire. In the next 500 milliseconds, each human was shot four hundred times.
She leapt forward and landed standing beside the magnetic bottle before the four killed humans fell to the floor.
But her suit radio crackled. Tarkos. “Bria… human in armor coming your way.”
She turned toward the stairs and saw it: a human, or humanoid form, in black armor. The maw of a large projectile weapons gaped over a mount on each shoulder. The dull sheen of the material, the strangely pointed joints, reminded Bria of Rinneret technology. So, perhaps the Rinneret had made this for the human traitors. It could be formidable. Bria targeted the joints in the legs with her lasers.
The armored human began firing. Explosive bullets made bright flashes at Bria’s feet. Bria realized a second too late that she was not being targeted. Rather, all around her, the thick wood floor exploded into fragments.
She fell through, her heavy
armor cracking splinters. She fired a grappling line by reflex. It caught in the ceiling as she fell, jerked her taught, slowing her fall, and then the human in armor targeted the ceiling and the grapple ripped away with the shattering of wood. Bria fell again, and landed heavily on her side, hurting her ribs and driving out her breath with an angry bark. But she rolled onto her four feet and ran for the stairs. She passed Tarkos, the slow human running from across the room. In a blink she saw the human national soldiers spreading out into the room behind Tarkos.
She jumped the steps four at a time. She bounded up into the room above.
The human figure in armor stood, hands on the magnetic bottle. Bria raced toward the human, diving over the hole in the floor that she had fallen through. She slammed into the black armor. Armor-on-armor screeched as they slid toward the broken window. Bria planted her feet, extruding gecko grips, and began to strike the armored human, stepping forward, driving the figure back. The armored human turned the shoulder mounted weapons on Bria and fired down at her. The bullets ricocheted off Bria’s armor, fired at a sharp angle and too close. Bria pushed on, her armor screaming in protest. She pushed through the window. They fell.
_____
Tarkos ran to the top of the stairs. His momentum carried him forward, and he barely managed to leap aside of the gap in the floor that Bria had fallen through. His boots scraped at the wood floor as he ran along the splintered edge of thick wood. He saw Bria’s back as she fell over the edge of the open loading window. Bullets fired sprayed over the ceiling, fired by the human in armor, sending shards of white glass showering down. It blinded Tarkos for a moment, as glass clinked over his armor and on the ground all around. He crunched over crystal, towards the magnetic bottle.
It was silver, with a crude circuit board bolted to the top. Tarkos leaned over this. He found a simple alphanumeric keypad, the kind you could take off an old computer, and beside that, a small screen—taken, it seemed, from a telephone—that displayed numbers. 9:54. 9:53. 9:52.
A countdown.
Tarkos called the cruiser. He heard its engines whining up to speed. He told it to turn off stealth mode and come immediately to his location.
He patched into the cruiser’s communication system, using its long range communications equipment.
“Vice Commander,” he said.
“I see it,” McDonough replied. “I’ve been watching the fight over your suit transmissions. If that’s a counter, then that’s not much time.”
The Predator Cruiser hove into view before the window, a huge black shark sliding through the air and pausing just outside and above his view. Gray clouds swirled high above it. Tarkos told the ventral hatch to open, and to drop a tow cable. The silver line slid down, then turned in the air and moved towards him like a snake. When the blunt end of it touched the warehouse floor, it twisted like a sidewinder and snaked towards Tarkos.
“I’m going to take it up,” Tarkos said. He grabbed the cable, which turned from rigid to supple in his hand. He ran the end of it through the four eye-bolts that topped the magnetic bottle. He touched the end back to the cable, and it wrapped tightly around. He took a line from his own suit and latched onto the tow line. He reached up with one arm, and gripped the line. He told the cruiser to reel them in.
“That’s not much time,” McDonough repeated. He seemed to be admonishing himself.
“No,” Tarkos agreed. “It’s not enough time. I can’t just send it straight up. I’ll have to go up with it, and hope to disarm it.”
“No, Harmonizer,” McDonough said. But Tarkos was already in the air, lifting toward the ship. The magnetic bottle dangled at his knees. He saw in a glance Bria wrestling with the figure in black armor below. Then Tarkos lifted through the hatch. When the magnetic bottle came through behind him, he closed the hatch and told the ship to lift at 2 apparent gees, straight up, inertial dampers on full.
He lowered the bottle to the floor, easing the cable down. He could feel the extra weight of his body, but the armor assist made it easy to move.
9:01. 9:00. 8:59.
“Any suggestions?” Tarkos asked.
“We have techs talking with the system through your armor. It’s very crude. Basically a homemade computer. But the encryption on the passcode is good, they’re telling me.”
Tarkos grunted.
8:30. 8:29. 8:28.
He told the ship to share in his helmet a downward view. The Earth fell away. The inertial dampers had started to work. He felt 2 gees, but rose now at nearly 3 gees. Still. If this anti-matter touched real matter, it would shower a whole continent with gamma radiation.
“You should jump,” McDonough said. “Take a reentry slide. Tell the ship to accelerate to maximum gees.”
Tarkos nodded. Then frowned, realizing the gesture might not show up on McDonough’s view, so he added. “Yes, sir. But let’s try to disarm it. I have a few minutes.
8:01. 8:00. 7:59.
“No,” McDonough said. “That’s bullocks. You need to get it as far as possible.”
“You said yourself,” Tarkos protested. “We are going to lose this referendum if we keep having these disasters. Tell me more about what your techies are learning.”
“Nothing. No. Wait. They’ve located the stored passwords. They’re small. They figure that the password is probably… four characters.”
“Will it explode if I type in an incorrect password?”
“What? Wait.” McDonough’s voice grew distant as he talked with someone nearby. Then it grew loud again. “No way of knowing. Maybe not. That’d be daft, since people make mistakes on keyboards, and a mistake would blow them up just as easily as anyone else. But no way of knowing.”
Tarkos nodded. The right thing to do then would be to wait. Get as far as he could before trying it.
“Four characters,” he said.
6:17. 6:16.
He held up his hands. The fingers of his armor were too thick, too clumsy, for typing on a small keyboard.
He stepped back and told his boots to grip the floor. He told the ship to slow till the apparent acceleration inside was 1.5 e-gees. Then he opened his armor.
“What are you doing?” McDonough demanded. His voice switched from the armor to the ceiling speakers.
“I can’t type with that armor on,” he said. He stepped uneasily forward, legs feeling wobbly. He lifted his heavy arms and held them above the keyboard.
Four characters.
5:17. 5:16. 5:15.
“Any four characters,” he said allowed.
“That’s a lot of combinations,” McDonough observed. “Get back in your armor and abandon ship.”
Tarkos frowned. Four characters. What would they be?
He held his breath and typed. M. E. G. A.
5:01.
5:01.
5:01.
McDonough shouted. “You did it!”
Tarkos exhaled. He realized only then that he’d been holding his breath. He told the ship to slow to an apparent e-gee.
“What was that?” McDonough asked.
“Something I’d seen on the news,” Tarkos said. “Make Earth Great Again.”
“Good to stay abreast of current events,” McDonough laughed. “Alright. We’ve an Enforcer ship on its way to you. It will take the antimatter. We can fly your ship to rendezvous as quickly as possible, if you pass us control.”
“Good,” Tarkos said. He stepped back into his armor, and it closed over him. “I’ve got to get back to Bria.”
_____
Bria landed with a grunt on the back of the truck. She could see nothing: the featureless black head of the armored figure atop her filled her view. Its shoulder cannons continued to fire, but the shells went wide, over Bria’s shoulders. They shredded the metal bed of the truck beneath her. So: the human in this armor lacked facility with weapons. Better that way.
Bria told her suit to extrude its shoulder mounted lasers. They cut a diamond pattern, burning widely. She heard the metal guns clatter, fire t
wice more, and then grind to a halt.
She shoved the figure away, off the truck bed. She rolled onto all fours, but the armored human already stood beside the truck. It reached forward and grabbed Bria’s back legs and pulled.
This human prefers claw-to-claw combat, Bria concluded. Not weapons trained, but not afraid of close violence.
Bria bent her knees, speeding her motion towards the armored human. She spread her arms wide and slammed them together on the figure’s neck. Metal crunched.
The armored human spun, leaning back. Bria was thrown, tossed through the air. She hit the pavement of the big parking lot, her armor sparking as she tumbled. Dust and scraps of paper swirled around her: the cruiser hovered above, engines blasting air over them.
The armored human pulled a rifle from a thigh holster. Bria charged. The weapon fired, and a heavy slug slammed into Bria, throwing her to the side. Her armor screamed in protest. Bria hit the ground, the armor’s claws already scraping deep furrows in the concrete. She targeted the gun with her shoulder lasers, broad pattern sweep. Another slug hit her before the gun fell into sparking pieces. She rolled over from the impact.
Before she could get to her feet, the human jumped down on her, feet hammering into Bria’s shoulder. The armor protested but she did not feel the blow. She seized the human’s legs and twisted. In one motion, Bria climbed atop the falling human. She put both claws on the face of the helmet. Metal screamed as she squeezed. Her fingers pained her, the tendons in agony, as she strove to overpower the power-assist in the armor. Something crunched. She heard a human voice shout in outrage and fear.
She ripped her hands away, tossing the face plate far off into the sea.
A human face cursed her. A woman, Bria suspected, though she had trouble telling the sex of humans. The woman struck at her, making Bria’s helmet wobble slightly, but otherwise causing no damage.
“Go to hell, bug,” the woman hissed.
Bria instructed the neural stunner in her shoulder to target the human’s exposed face, and fire with full force. The woman’s mouth went slack.
Bria stood, and began to pull the armor apart, roughly peeling the black metal layers, exposing the human inside.
Earthfall Page 9
