by Melissa Good
After a second, they followed, and the three of them carefully padded out across the rock floor that was dotted with darker shadows of still bodies they skirted.
Dev kept the scanner poised, getting readings now that they were inside the homestead. She found she was almost used to the smell of death, able to move past it as she followed the crowd.
They had sealed the outer door again, so maybe the guards weren’t worried about being followed, or they figured they had them outnumbered.
Which they did. Dev paused inside the opening, peering cautiously out and then emerging into the hall where she found their quarry had already vanished. She tuned the scanner and retuned it, picking up only residual markers from Jess.
“Where’d they go?” Doug asked, in a whisper.
“I don’t know.” Dev angled toward the wall. “I don’t see an...” She stopped. “Oh.”
April immediately looked at the scanner. “Oh shit.”
The flood of armament was unmistakable, and Interforce security quickly filled the end of the hall and headed toward them.
“Hey.” A whisper caught their attention, and they looked down corridor to find Jess’s uncle Max in a narrow opening. He gestured furiously at them, and after a moment, they raced toward him, ignoring the shouts from security as they reached the opening and went through. Max slammed the door behind them.
“C’mon.” Uncle Max limped quickly ahead of them. “We gotta be in place when she pulls the trigger.”
“What trigger?” April asked. “You mean Jess?”
“Who else?” Uncle Max snapped. “Took you long enough.”
He moved down a long corridor that had grates periodically in the floor and even, squared off walls.
“We had to go into fucking space,” April said. “And break into a space station. So shut it, huh?”
Uncle Max glanced over his shoulder at her, and then briefly grinned. “Good job,” he said. “Didn’t really expect to see ya back.” He looked over at Dev. “Hey there, Rocket.”
“Hello,” Dev responded. “April and Doug did an excellent job bringing a space ship up to let us return.”
“Bet those pilots loved it,” Uncle Max said.
“I killed them,” April replied
He paused. “Out on the pad?”
“Up on the station. They pissed me off.” April pointed at Dev. “She flew it back. Where are we going?”
“Here.” Uncle Max pushed open a door and gestured them forward. “The shitheads think they scared us off, or killed us off but really—”
“They just pissed you off,” April said. She walked out onto a stair landing and looked over it.
They were in a large cavern with a ceiling extending far up into the darkness. There were steps carved into the wall about halfway up. Below them were thousands of people, arranged in groups, dressed in the rough work clothes of the Bay, but with a sense of organization April immediately recognized.
“Yeah.” Uncle Max started down the steps. “Let’s hope this doesn’t take too long.”
JESS WAS AWARE of the eyes watching her, and she knew behind her was nothing now but trouble. The halls were full of Interforce security. There was no sympathy in the faces watching her being marched toward the operations center.
The idea that Jason had sold her burned. The knowledge that there were no friendly ears at her back clenched her guts, and not knowing what had happened to Dev, after that rush of running boots made her crazy.
She put on a good face, though, concentrating on remaining relaxed and confident, leading the group around then through the passageways and halls toward the protected section where they kept all the systems that ran the Bay.
Where Interforce had been born, really, the checks and structure very much like what Base Ten had. Many of the weapons and computer systems they all used had been developed right here in this old rock escarpment.
Did Alters realize that?
Jess went down through a crossroads and then through an arch, and she was at the entrance to ops, sealed and solid with nothing but the oldest of old school ident pads protecting it.
She paused and put her hand on it. After a moment, the pad shifted color. Then a long low clicking sound happened, and the rock wall in front of them slid aside
“Son of a bitch,” Alters said. “We’ve been trying to get into here for a week. Thanks, Drake.”
Jess started to walk forward and then hands pulled her back. “Hey!”
“Get her in restraints,” Alters said as security poured into the space. Figures stood and turned toward them. “Just kill the rest of them.”
Jess blurred into motion. She kicked backwards against the guards, dodging a set of shackles. She lunged to the right and then ducked under a blast as she was grabbed again. She used her forward momentum to grab a console and haul herself forward. Then she felt blows and the stunning force of a zapper against her spine.
Other hands grabbed her and pulled her forward. She twisted and half fell over a console as the ops watch came scrambling over at them.
“Stop!” Alters yelled. “We’re taking charge!”
Jess flexed her body and yanked one hand loose, suspended between competing forces that were pulling her back and forward. She hauled herself down and slammed her hand down into an indentation in the very center of the control set, refusing to let the forces haul her backwards until she felt the bone deep tickle against her nerves.
The panel flickered and there was a crackle of comms opening. “Drake!” Jess yelled into it. “GO!”
“Foxtrot Ultra!” One of the ops cons yelled. “Go, go, go! Release!” They dove for the floor and ducked behind the consoles.
A low siren wailed, and all around them they heard the sound of motion, of rock and steel shifting, and thick, heavy booming thumps that shook the very air.
The guards turned Jess over and put a gun to her throat. They grabbed her blaster from its holster as the sound got so loud it made ears buzz.
“Drake! What in the hell did you just do!” Alters was at her side, a knife in his hands, his one good eye vivid and wild.
Jess smiled at him. “I loosed the dogs of war.” Her heart started to beat more powerfully, and color started to leach out of her vision. “Or maybe the wolves of war.” She heard the rasp enter her voice and knew they did as well, and then it all went crazy. “And If I were you I’d run.”
THEY BARELY HAD time to get down to the rock floor before the lights changed, morphing from bluish white to red, as a low bonging tone started to sound.
“Didn’t take her long at all,” Uncle Max said, with an exultant tone in his voice. “All Drake, all the way.”
“You have any idea what’s going on?” April asked Dev as they felt the room start to move around them. Everyone stood up, an electric excitement rising.
“No idea at all,” Dev said. “I just hope Jess is all right.”
“Probably not,” Uncle Max said. “They’ll kill her once they realize what she just did. Damn shame.”
April slid in front of him and poked him in the chest with her knife. “What did she just do? I don’t really have time for games, old man.”
Uncle Max stopped and looked at her. April’s expression didn’t change, and she didn’t pull back. “That’s a nomad knife.”
“Earned one.”
A faint smile appeared on his grizzled face. “There’s an armory here at the Bay. Last time we opened it, Jessie’s grandpappy took a nuclear missile out of it and blew up ten thousand people and a crap ton of land they can’t use no more.”
“That’s what that is?” April sheathed her knife as the rock wall to their left slid open. “She just picked a side?”
From the gap in the wall rolled a wall of air, full of the scent of old oil and mechanicals. “Nah,” Uncle Max said. “There’s no picking for her. She’s all Drake all through.” He regarded them seriously. “But you all will need to decide to shoot at us or shoot at them.”
“Already did,�
�� April responded tersely. “Before I got on that fucking shuttle.”
Max nodded.
“Excuse me,” Dev said suddenly. “Did you just say they were going to make Jess dead?”
The crowd started moving forward, excitement rising. “Let’s go.” One of the men nearby slid a pack onto his back.
“Let’s get rid of these bastards.”
“They will, Rocket.” Uncle Max waved them forward with him. “Soon as they figure it out. Their fault, the idiots.” He shook his head and limped faster. “Lemme get my hands on a launcher, can’t wait to take one of those asses out of the air.”
Dev felt like she was caught in a violent windstorm, bits of programming coming up into her consciousness, only to be blasted aside as the knowledge hit that she might not see Jess again.
That Jess might, in fact, already be made dead.
“C’mon Rocket.” Doug patted her gingerly on the arm. “Don’t believe the worst until it happens.”
Comms crackled into her ear as she followed him by rote, moving with the mass of bodies into a chamber that opened their view as they cleared the door and she touched it with a mechanical gesture. “This is Dev.”
Maybe it would be Jess?
“Dev, it’s Doctor Dan. We heard the alarm go off. Can we help?”
“I don’t know, Doctor Dan,” Dev said as she got a good view of the room, full of devices she didn’t have any real knowledge of. “Jess did something...and now they think maybe she’s going to be m...” The overwhelming sense of despair came over her without warning and it made her have to stop speaking.”
Doctor Dan understood anyway. “I’m coming. Hold on, Dev. I’ll do my best.”
The comms clicked off, and Dev found a piece of rock to put her back to, staring out over a cavern now alive with people picking up devices and full of a rising emotion. The man she remembered was called Mike, who was security for the homestead, stepped out and threw his hands forward.
“FORM UP!” He bellowed. “Make sure everything’s energized!”
Men and women were throwing aside covers and tops of boxes. They pulled what were, apparently, weapons out of storage crates and started up vehicles that quickly turned out to be hovercraft, with rough seats and heavy blasters forward and aft.
Doug shook his head. “Fuck it. I’m going.” He headed for one of the vehicles, where April was already jumping aboard. “Short career!” he yelled back over his shoulder.
All Dev could hear in her head were echoes. Flashes of memory, clips of Jess’s voice. She had no desire to join the Bay staff. No desire to be part of the force that was gathering. All that mattered to her, right now, in this moment was Jess.
A breath, and she turned and bolted back the way they’d come in, through the outer cavern and toward the tunnels that led from it.
JESS TWISTED VIOLENTLY as the zaps drove pain through her body, and she was back, suddenly in the enemy station knowing herself betrayed. That brought a surge of rage, and she used that to throw off the hands of Interforce security who were trying their best to contain her.
The Bay station ops were shooting from behind their consoles and ducking the responses, somehow keeping the agent’s back from the controls Jess had triggered with her biometric presence.
“Shit!” She heard Alters yell. “This is unresponsive!
“Fuckin A, you chicken masterbater!” One of the ops yelled at him. “Wait till they get to those disintegrators! You’re gonna be fuckin fish chum!”
Alters grabbed Jess and forced her to look at him. “Is that true?”
Jess merely turned her head and clamped her teeth in his arm, ripping her head back and forth as she fought to get free.
“These people are crazy,” one of the security men said. “Out of their damn minds.”
“Sir! Someone’s gone through the landing bay with our chips!” Another guard yelped. “Going for the carriers! Sir it’s the bio alt!”
“Blow that damn thing when she touches it!” Alters yelled back, wrenching himself free of Jess’s teeth then hauling himself backwards as Jess suddenly went from raging to explosive in a heartbeat. “Shit!”
Two security guards went flying as Jess got her feet on the ground. Then she went for the third, brushing past his hand to hand guard and going right for his throat. He grabbed her, but it wasn’t enough, and she had her teeth in his jugular and her jaws closing before he could stop her.
Before anyone could stop her. She shoved his body away from her as she scrambled on top of a console and launched herself at Alters who was trying to move fast enough to get away from her.
She let the hate take her. He was nothing but a target. His Interforce uniform meant nothing to her. All she could hear was his voice...giving that order.
Blow Dev up? Jess felt herself go over a threshold as her hands reached him and her head slammed into his. She closed her eyes to keep the blood from obscuring her vision as she felt his nose break under the impact. She grabbed his jaws in her hands and changed motion in mid air, using momentum and the strength of her fingers to snap his head around and break his neck.
Then she was on the security guard with his portable operations console, his fingers rattling hurriedly at the keys as he backpedalled away from her. “Stop! Help! Stop her!”
All the security guards headed for him, two of them blasting at Jess as she reached him and took the console from his hands.
She turned at the last moment and the blasters hit the console, sending blue flares through it. She kept going around too fast for them to stop firing as the console cleared the guard holding it, and his head was blown off his body.
“Go, Drake!” Ops yelled from behind her. “We got ’em!”
Jess would have gone anyway. She came around the corner into a squad of security heading the other direction and didn’t even pause an instant before she threw herself at the first of them and got his blaster from him before he could react to the blood and burn covered figure coming at them.
She wrenched the blaster around and started shooting, the gun recognizing her as Interforce and agreeably blew apart her erstwhile colleagues. She saw them realize who she was, and the fifth and sixth of them threw their hands up and fell to the ground.
She jumped over them and hauled herself down the hallway, spitting bits of skin and blood out of her mouth as she ran.
Sirens were going off incessantly. In the distance, she heard concussive fire, and she knew the long kept weapons of true war had been broken out.
She left that to her homestead. All her mental energy was diverted, focusing on the landing bay and the overwhelming need in her guts to protect Dev. She felt it as a mania, a burning in her that pushed aside duty and honor and she didn’t really care.
A flicker in her peripheral vision. She turned and fired with little thought, the blast bouncing off the rock walls and sending the oncoming body diving to the floor to escape it. Who was it?
She didn’t care. Ahead of her was the main entryway of the stakehold, and as she cleared the space the whole world fell in on top of her.
DEV PUT HER back flat against the wall, breathing hard as she waited for the hall entry to clear of Interforce personnel. They were all running in the direction she’d come from, all wearing armor and carrying weapons, all in the dark blue of security.
Security. Dev ducked around the corner of the corridor and got between the staircase and the wall. She reached up, grabbed the wrought iron, and quickly pulled herself upward.
They might have the stairs in scan. But she used the bars to climb in the shadows, trying to ignore the horrible clenching in the pit of her stomach and the constant barrage of thoughts of Jess.
She wasn’t really sure why she was trying to get to the carrier, except that was the one thing she knew well, knew of herself, as well as from programming. She thought if she could get to it, maybe she could do some good work.
Maybe Jess would need her to do something.
She hoped Jess would need her to
do something.
She hoped Jess hadn’t been made dead.
She had to stop climbing and held on for a long moment, her chest hurt so badly. It was hard and confusing, and she pulled herself close to the bars as tears burned her eyes.
So hard. She felt so bad, thinking something had happened to Jess, even though part of her knew they could always be made dead at any moment. She got a boot up on one of the ornate curls and took a few breaths then continued upward.
At the seventh level, she pulled herself up and over the rail and raced down the corridor, this one bare and empty, the end, half blocked by a shattered stone door. She went over and listened past it, not wanting to reveal her presence by opening a scan.
It was quiet, she could hear rain outside. After a moment she slipped inside and looked around. The landing bay was empty. Only two carriers were inside, and the rest of the floor was full of rubble and discarded parts.
As she took a step forward, she felt the tickle of a scan, and froze. Then she burst into a run, pelting across the floor toward the carrier with her name on it. Across the floor she saw motion and ran faster, a half dozen guards running in her direction.
They had an angle, but she was faster. She got to the carrier and triggered the unlock. She dove inside and hit the retract just as they reached the pedestal the carrier was crouched on. They slammed into the outside and then hammered on it. She got to her feet and got into her chair, pulling it close as she started up the systems.
The shields powered just in time as they started blasting at her, the long battery soak giving her plenty of power to bring the boards online. They came around to the front and shot directly at the forward screen.
She hit the retract to close the hard shield, and it slid into place. The restraints retracted around her as all the systems came online.
She started a deep scan as the sound of blaster fire exploded around the carrier. Her hands were poised over the pad, but she stared at it, unable to force herself to put in the codes that would find Jess in all that chaos.
