by J. N. Chaney
“You don’t understand, Cain. This is a salvage operation. Nothing personal. I can bring you in dead or alive and count the operation a success. Everyone on my team knows my preference.”
“Cain, respond,” Grady said, finally breaking through my radio link.
I ignored him, trying to pretend I hadn’t heard his voice. The last thing I wanted was for Callus to know my friends were this close.
“We are coming to you,” Grady said. “I have three grenades. I’ll throw two when you bolt for it, and the last one to cover your movement.”
“This sucks,” I said.
Callus laughed, thinking I was admitting defeat. “Not for me.”
"Grady, it's a trap. Get the hell out of here."
The spec ops team sprang into action. Callus and two others rushed me. I fell back, shooting one in the pelvis. He went down screaming and the other stopped to help him.
“That was dirty,” Callus snarled, looking for a shot.
Other members of his team were swarming toward Grady, unaware of what was about to happen. I threw myself to the ground as two grenades went off. My adversary was a beat slower, but still saved himself from a blast to the face.
We arose from the smoking rubble. Tangles of cheap metal siding and other parts of the deck were scattered everywhere. One of the spec ops guys was completely gone. Stunned silence held both sides of the confrontation until I heard Elise scream.
The missing man had been blown high enough into the air that he didn’t come back down.
“Take your team and get out of here before they all get killed,” I said, waving the barrel of my HDK toward downed soldiers and the one heading toward the environment shield.
Unlike the first man I’d seen this happen to, he bounced off the shield and came back down faster and faster as gravity reclaimed him. He waved his arms and legs all the way down then hit the deck with a sickening crunch.
Callus responded to my warning by firing a stream of bullets at me, then vaulting over his cover to reach the next point between us. “You can’t win, Reaper. I already have reinforcements in route.”
“Grady! Let’s get out of here!”
This would’ve been a lot easier if he hadn’t shown up to help me. The one time I wanted him to hang me out to dry, he came gallivanting into the middle of a battle I had under control—or was at least managing—then stopped answering his radio.
We were close enough to shout now. No need to rely on radio earpieces.
Soldiers groaned in pain and crawled behind cover to apply first-aid. I saw one man applying quick-clotting agent and then a pressure bandage to another man.
Callus ducked out from cover and fired several well-placed shots that hit too close for comfort.
“Grady! Sound off if you can hear me.”
“He’s down,” Elise shouted from out of view. She didn’t have good cover. Instead, she had the youthful flexibility that allowed her to get really low. I also realized she had two handguns now.
“Put one of those in the holster so you can reload,” I shouted, looking for the doctor and my old friend.
A trio of dropships descended behind a nearby building. Moments later, they were back in the air and headed for the UFS Thunder. It wouldn’t be long before Callus had more than enough manpower to storm our position.
“Cover me!”
Elise popped up from behind cover and opened fire on every Union soldier she saw. She missed a lot but forced them to duck down for a couple of seconds, during which time I sprinted to her position.
Doctor Hastings was a quivering mess as he tried to help Grady. His extensive medical knowledge was less useful than it should have been on the battlefield. He’d managed to apply a tourniquet to one of Grady’s legs and keep pressure on a chest wound.
“Just pour the quick-clot powder all over it. I don’t care if it gets infected or burns. We’ve got bigger problems,” Grady ordered between clenched teeth.
The doctor did what he was told, hands trembling so badly that he spilled most of the clotting agent.
I ignored both of them and crouched beside Elise. Staying behind the metal curb for cover was hard, but the position wasn’t bad. We were backed into a corner that we couldn’t escape from.
In that moment, I realized something. If I rescued Elise and her father from all the dangers of Dreadmax, it would only be to sentence them to death at the hands of the Union—once the Union had what they wanted from them, that was.
There was no way to win.
“We’re not going to make it, are we?” Elise asked.
I looked at Grady and Doctor Hastings. They were both white as sheets but quiet now. If we were to have any chance of escaping, I couldn’t have them screaming and giving away our position.
“Hal,” Grady grunted, the effort it took him to speak clearly evident. He waved me over with a hand that looked like it weighed a hundred pounds. “I need to tell you something.”
“Elise,” I said, then pointed. “Watch for the next attack from Callus and his commandos.”
Grady gripped my gear, grimacing in pain.
“Make it quick, Grady. One way or another, we’re leaving.”
“You’re leaving, but don’t worry about that right now. I’ve got to tell you something. You’re going to get the lethal injection no matter what after this mission. No one would tell me why. They led me to believe you had one chance to redeem yourself, but I can read between the lines. You’ve got technology in you that can’t be controlled. They couldn’t generalize it to other test subjects and your field trials went beyond what they expected.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
He shook his head, too tired from blood loss to elaborate. “I’ve got one last fight in me. Get out of here. What you do with them,” he said, nodding toward the doctor and his daughter, “is up to you. They’re coming, Hal. Let’s get this show on the road and kill some of these bastards.”
I patted him on the shoulder, unsure of what to say, and slipped closer to Elise. “How many magazines do you have for those pistols?”
She held up the loaded weapon in one hand and a magazine in the other. “One extra. What did your friend say?”
“He just confirmed what I always knew about him. He’s a dumbass who is going to die badly. Get ready. When I start shooting, grab your dad and shove him down that maintenance trench. Once we’re in it, speed will be important because there is no place to hide and it won’t take Callus long to come after us.”
“Your friend doesn’t look very fast.”
“He’s not coming with us.”
A wave of ululating cries swept over the buildings, announcing the arrival of an epic horde of crazies. I also heard engines, horns, and crew-served machine guns. The locals were joining this battle either accidentally or on purpose. Shit was about to get real.
“You’re leaving your friend?”
“Why not? I’ve done it before. You want to stay? All I really need is your dad.”
“You’re so full of shit,” she said. “I hope I’m never like you.”
Callus moved across the deck with his reinforced team. They moved by squads—two laying down suppressive fire each time one of the others moved. I didn’t even try to shoot back.
Crazies jumped from buildings, immediately overwhelming one squad that had been too focused on my position. A machine-gun truck raced through the middle of it all, firing in every direction. The heavy slugs punched through walls that looked solid, but also ricocheted like angry hornets. One of the prison gang members started throwing canisters of rocket fuel with burning fuses. Smoke added to the confusion.
Callus and his squad leaders mostly ignored the chaos, advancing relentlessly toward my position regardless of what the crazies, RSG, and NGs did to each other. The only exception was a Union squad that went after their buddies being dragged into hatches and doorways by cannibals.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” Elise said, panic creeping into her vo
ice.
“You’ll get used to it.”
“Fuck you. You get used to it.” Some of her fire returned.
“Go!” I shot Callus, hitting his chest armor while he was running flat out toward us, unable to shoot back while maintaining the sprinter’s pace. He fell. Others picked him up. I looked for new targets and chances to reload.
Grady lobbed his last grenade and fired his HDK with one hand.
Elise and her father hobbled into the maintenance trench, both of them looking back through the smoke, steam, and tracer rounds. Both were scared. The difference was Elise was also angry. The doctor looked confused and defeated.
“Go after them, you dick!” Grady shouted.
I tossed my former friend and extra magazine, then took his advice.
17
CATCHING up to Elise and her father wasn’t as easy as I had assumed it would be. I understood she was quick but thought of the doctor as a lumbering mass of indecision. She was too small to push him far, and if he resisted, I’d find them having a father-daughter argument while bullets flew over their heads.
Grady’s final stand rose to a crescendo not long after I began navigating the maze of trenches and tunnels in this area. It still intrigued me that, from space, the surface of Dreadmax looked almost smooth, like a thick ring of armor plating that was almost a complete sphere except for the spine running down the middle that everything rotated on.
Most of the power core was located in the spine, what some people called the tower. Personally, I thought that the first term was more accurate, but it didn’t matter. Anything that was truly important to a ring station was stored near the center.
“Can you help me out, X?” I asked.
The Reaper AI affixed to my nerve-ware didn’t respond immediately, which could mean several things, most of them bad. Had I finally overloaded the micro hardware?
X-37 spoke with a slight glitch in his voice. “One moment. I was considering the ramifications of a total power core failure and what that meant to residents of Dreadmax.”
Ice shot down my spine. Nerve-ware AIs were not supposed to be able to read a person’s mind. We’d had this discussion before. I understood this was coincidence, but it never gave me a warm fuzzy feeling when it happened. I decided to give X-37 a taste of his own medicine. The silent treatment wasn’t that difficult when I was running hard enough to put myself in deep oxygen debt.
“Be mindful of your environment. You’re moving faster than normal and your heart rate is ten percent higher than it has been since you fell,” X-37 said. “Continue on the path of least resistance. I believe Elise will be in flight mode, not much different from a wounded animal. She’ll go as fast as she can and take routes that are easy for her less athletic father to manage. However, the schematics show a junction with too many options, where she will likely wait for you or at least hesitate.”
I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that. “You mean an intersection?”
“Not precisely,” X said. “The junction is three-dimensional. She will have to choose from fourteen horizontal trenches, ascending stairs, or descending stairs.”
Not far ahead, I saw one of the large observation towers looming above us. It was a handy landmark. “I seriously doubt she’ll go below decks.”
“That is unfortunate. The observation towers are like trees, reaching high enough to observe and manage a large portion of the top deck but also reaching down to access the spine. My estimation is that very few of the people on Dreadmax understand this.”
“Don’t care.” I really didn’t. Why would I?
“Your biometrics tell a different story.”
“You and I both know Dreadmax is done. Am I pissed off about thousands of innocents going down with it? Sure, X. I’m a cold-blooded assassin, not a heartless jerk-off.” Not long ago, I’d been watching kids play on an intricately fabricated jungle gym. Mothers and fathers had worked nearby. Bug was right, the shipbuilders were good people.
I didn’t want them to die like this.
X-37 interpreted my silence correctly and tried put me at ease. “I’m sure the thousands of relatively innocent human beings on Dreadmax will survive. Your friend Bug in the surveillance tower mentioned Climbdown Day. This suggests they have a plan to survive the collapse of the environment shield. And you witnessed the engineers attempting to fix a starship.”
“Do you honestly think either of those plans will work?” Why did my AI have to mention the kid?
“It is unlikely either plan will succeed,” my AI said. “But you don’t care.”
“You got that right, X.”
“Deception detected.” X-37 had the best poker voice I’d ever heard. How could I compete with that? I was hard, but he was a machine.
Images of Dreadmax collapsing upon itself and then exploding into drifting chunks of metal ran a loop in my head that I mostly ignored after the first annoying manifestation of guilt.
None of this was my fault.
“I’ve completed my analysis of the schematics for this area,” X-37 said. “It only looks like a maze from your current vantage point. Unfortunately, I can’t put the entire map in your HUD.”
I adjusted my pace and searched for Elise. The tower loomed above us, the largest vertical structure I’d encountered on Dreadmax. It was probably thirty meters in diameter at the roughly hexagonal base. Four of the sides were out of proportion to the others and hosted bay doors almost as large as those at the RSG stronghold.
This place was made for moving heavy equipment. Everything on Dreadmax was big, like the designers had pretended they were giants.
“X, you said there were stairs. Is there a lift?”
“Yes. There is a lift with a one-thousand-ton capacity, but it can move heavier loads if the gravity generators are turned off, of course. This is how most of the construction was done. However, I do not believe the lift is functioning and would serve no purpose to our current mission if it did.”
“A simple yes or no would have been fine.”
X-37 beeped so quietly I doubted it was meant for me to hear. The digital little jerk needed an update. “The question seemed out of place. Please refine your inquires in the future. Stop being a dick.”
“Whatever. Shut up while I search for Elise.”
“You’ll recall I was speaking of the map,” X-37 said. “The layout of this area is important. Given the number of connected maintenance trenches and other access ways, there is a high probability you are being enveloped by the rogue spec ops team trying to kill you.”
“I’m pretty sure we’re the rogues and they’re the Union-sanctioned strike team.”
“Admitting that they are right and we are wrong interferes with my functioning,” X-37 said, almost accusingly.
Whoa! Hold on there! “That’s not what I said. Just factor in that the Union is bad and your life will be a lot easier.”
“I am an artificial intelligence. A bundle of programs, essentially. Look at it from my perspective.”
“Okay, X,” I said as I spotted Elise crouching near one of the large bay doors with her father. She looked determined but uncertain. Her father tried repeatedly to drink from a water bottle that was empty.
Pulling back to conceal myself, I took a cleansing breath and lowered my heart rate. “I’ll make it simple for you. We’re the good guys, they’re the bad guys, and your job is to keep me alive. Maybe two or three other people as well.”
“Mission directive updated.”
“And also find me some Starbrand cigars,” I said looking for a place to move.
Stun grenades rained down all around me, filling the area with smoke and noise. Three squads of spec ops soldiers burst from as many maintenance trenches. Bullets and tracer rounds cut through the smoke as I dropped low and ran to the cover of the ramp. The edges were thick enough to keep heavy equipment from sliding off. I’d never been so safe.
Too bad I couldn’t stay. Callus’ team rushed me, confident I couldn’t see them.
To my enhanced vision, they looked like red silhouettes running through near total blackness. My right eye saw the smoke, my left eye saw variations of heat and cold, and the Reaper nerve-ware helped my brain interpret the sensory input as one image.
“Time to go,” I said, ducking around a corner without standing from my crouching position. Duck-walking felt about as good as lighting my quadriceps on fire, but it was better than being shot in the face.
I’d trained for this in a previous lifetime. This far into a mission, everything hurt.
X-37 didn’t comment.
At the first gap in their suppressive fire, I ran at the nearest squad, adjusted my course, and found a man-sized hatch near one of the roll-up bay doors. It was closed, probably locked, but the frame around it was excessively thick—brutish architecture that must’ve been popular when this section of the deck was constructed.
“Why don’t they have infrared optics in their helmets?”
“Unknown,” X-37 said.
Elise screamed angrily. Gunfire followed. “Get back, dickface! I see you creeping!”
The sound of her pistol ceased abruptly and she screamed without the shit-talking attitude.
Her father yelled, “What kind of Union solider are you? Why would you do that?”
I’d seen some tough women fight and that was what she sounded like, minus her juvenile battle cries.
Moving toward the infrared silhouettes behind the sounds, I found the doctor stumbling through the smoke, searching the area in front of him with his hands.
“Hastings,” I said, grabbing him and pulling him toward another access door to the tower. “Shut up and do what I say.”
“My daughter’s in trouble. We have to find her. Where have you been?”
“Of course she’s in trouble. Now shut the fuck up and stay hidden until I come back for you.”
“He threw her into a… into a gap. The… lift is down or something. She’s probably dead.”
“She’s not dead. I heard her. Now keep your mouth shut or you’ll both be dead.”
