by Richard Fox
The demon pointed at him and strange words sounded through the mask.
“Same to you, fucker.” Pulling the pin on the rocket warhead, Fastal threw it at the demon, dove to the ground, and covered his head.
The Myrmidon reached back and made a lazy swat, the targeting systems in his armor easily identifying the weapon’s arc. While the advanced systems hardwired into the Myrmidon didn’t ID the device as much of a threat, the onboard computer lacked data on just how shock-sensitive Tyr munitions really were.
The Myrmidon hit the warhead easily enough, but the blow triggered the detonator. The blast knocked the Myrmidon off his feet and he rolled down the boulder and over more rocket warheads.
Zorig shook his head, struggling as his systems tried to reorient after the concussion from the blast. Alert warnings flashed across his HUD, but his containment layer hadn’t been compromised. The muscle-assist servos in his knees jerked as he tried to stand up, so he reached back and hit one knee with a fist. That was enough to get it working again.
Zorig looked up and into the muzzle of Fastal’s revolver. A bullet struck his harlequin visor and his head snapped back, a slight crack across his visor. The Tyr slapped the firing hammer and emptied the pistol in short order into Zorig’s face and neck.
An amber icon filled his HUD and Zorig fell back. One of the bullets had dislodged one of the small interlocking plates of his environmental layer at the top of his shoulder, and he twisted away to protect the spot. Falling against the boulder, he swung his gun arm out in an arc, firing on full auto. The bullets cut through nearby trees like a scythe through wheat and more trees fell into the growing fire.
The Myrmidon’s arm hit the boulder, leaving his body open and exposed.
Fastal jumped up, dagger in hand. He grabbed the front of Zorig’s breastplate and stabbed the tip of his blade into the chink of the armor. Zorig felt a twinge of pain through the cocktail of drugs surging through his system.
The indig had actually managed to hurt him.
The amber environmental alert turned into a pulsing red biohazard symbol.
Zorig grabbed Fastal by the front of his fatigues and looked the alien in the eye. This indig wasn’t terrified. Zorig could feel his hate. The Myrmidon whipped Fastal aside and sent him crashing through the burning top of a fallen tree.
Zorig put a hand over the breach in his suit and sealants sprayed out and over the cut. The warnings switched to amber and he ran back to the landing zone.
****
“This is the last of them.” Solanus’ voice sounded through speakers in Hulegu’s helmet. He sent an order with the flick of his eyes and watched a holo map against his visor as his team collapsed their perimeter and came back to one of the two shuttles outside the mountain base.
Solanus was on the ramp of the other shuttle, taking inventory as smaller warheads flowed up and into her craft.
“You want to be on that one on the way back to the Matsui?” he asked her through the comms.
“Why not? It’s fun watching the techs piss themselves being in a hold full of indig weapons of mass destruction,” she said.
“Suit yourself.” He logged the time for each of his Myrmidons as they stomped up the ramp into his shuttle…all but one were back aboard. He saw Zorig come out of the forest, his suit beat up and smoldering in places.
“I sent you to clean up the trash. What took you so long?” he asked as Zorig bounded forward.
“Trophies.” Zorig held up the string of ears, freshly burnt.
A warning pip appeared over Zorig in Hulegu’s HUD. With a stiff arm to the chest, Hulegu stopped him from setting foot on the ramp.
“Why’s your telemetry data not coming through?” he asked.
“Indigs must’ve damaged the transmitter.” Zorig tried to sidestep Hulegu, but the chief stopped him again. “What? They got lucky with a grenade or something. Component swap. The rest’ll buff out.”
“Main, engage slave override,” Hulegu said, and his onboard systems linked to Zorig’s suit.
A pulsing red biohazard warning appeared over Zorig in the HUD.
“Your enviro layer’s compromised.” Hulegu drew a heavy pistol from where it was mag-locked to his thigh. “And you’re infected.”
“What? No!” Zorig tossed the necklace of ears away. “They never—nothing got through my layer!”
Hulegu aimed the pistol at Zorig, then ripped the tip of Fastal’s dagger from Zorig’s shoulder. He flicked the broken metal away.
“Look,” Zorig said, raising his hands. “It’s nothing, boss. I can quarantine on the way back to the ship and—”
“You know company policy,” Hulegu said. “We don’t have serum aboard the Mitsui, only aboard the Leo. Then there’s a cost to treating you after you fucked it all up.”
“I’ll forfeit my pay!” Zorig leaned to one side and waved at a group of Myrmidons at the top of the ramp. “Charlie! Miles! Spot me, you know I’m good for it.”
“We leaving? Indigs radio chatter’s picking up. I don’t want to know if our shields can handle their air-to-air missiles,” said the shuttle pilot through the comms.
“Sorry, Zorig, you’re a threat to the team…and you’re no longer economically viable.” Hulegu shot Zorig between the eyes, his pistol more than enough to beat Zorig’s already cracked visor. The bullet rattled against the inside of Zorig’s helmet before exiting his ear and striking the dirt.
Zorig fell back with a slight push from Hulegu.
“Button up.” The team chief holstered his weapon and marched up the ramp as the shuttle lifted off. He couldn’t see his men’s faces behind their many different masks, but he knew what they were thinking.
“We split his share at the end of the mission. Don’t fuck up.”
The Myrmidons hit each other in the chest and shoulders, cheering at the pay raise.
****
Hours later, as the sun rose over the mountains, General Fastal kicked Zorig’s shoulder.
“Every warhead is gone,” said one of the Royal caste, the local intelligence chief. “They even took the fissile material stockpile. Is that…that the one?” He kept a healthy distance from the body, but Fastal—his arms and one side of his face bandaged—knelt close enough to nudge the dead Myrmidon’s head with the muzzle of his pistol.
“It is.” Fastal looked to where the alien shuttle had been, then up to the sky. “And no, I don’t know why they killed…it.”
“Is it a machine, perhaps? That would explain why your—”
“Machines don’t bleed.” Fastal kicked dirt over the pool of dried blood beneath Zorig’s head. “Now get that ambulance over here. I have to go and explain to the King how I failed him in my duties…and he’ll want to see this. Whatever it is.”
Chapter 24
Yenin grunted as she pushed another drone out of her shuttle. Grabbing a handlebar, she leaned out over the edge, watching as the coin-shaped drone tumbled end over end toward a cloud layer thick with rain and flashing with lightning. Ice crystals formed against the front of her visor and she wiped them away.
The safety line connected to the small of her back pulled taut as she leaned out farther.
The sabot cover flew off the drone and its descent stopped. The drone snapped from side to side as its gravitic engines came online.
“Good release.” Yenin swung back into the cargo bay and bumped against the bulkhead. “How many more we got?”
“And drone seven’s got a telemetry link with the geostationary satellite.” Cisneros tapped on a tablet, cursed, then tapped again. “I hate doing this in gloves. One wrong key stroke and I have to redo the whole thing. And we’ve got three more. Easy to count.” He jerked a thumb at the trio of remaining drones.
“Just hoping we had a spare aboard. These things don’t always go off the right way.” She walked away from the open ramp as turbulence shook the shuttle.
“Corporate would probably order us to land and do a recovery, even if they hit the damn ocean.
” Cisneros gripped the bench he was sitting on as the shaking got worse. “Hey, you fly-boys know we’ve got delicate equipment back here, right?”
A flight path appeared on Yenin’s HUD, showing them at the edge of a hurricane and their course toward the eye.
“Quit your bitching,” the pilot said through their comms. “The good-idea fairy must’ve whispered something to Leo, because now they want a survey done plopped dead center of that monster. Something about climate mapping or some bullshit. I don’t fucking know. I don’t fucking care. All I know is that I’ve got to get the drop done or I’ll lose my mission-completion bonus. You guys want your bonus or not?”
“Do we even have a choice at this point?” Yenin asked.
“I can’t fly this thing.” Cisneros pulled a D-ring off his back and snapped it to a runner line on the bulkhead. “Safety first.”
The shuttle buckled as a gust of wind hit them. Out the ramp, the sky turned thick purple as they flew into a cloud bank. A fork of lightning cut across the opening, flashing the cargo bay.
“Hey up there,” Cisneros beat a fist against the bulkhead twice, “don’t mean to tell you how to do your job, but can’t we fly over this mess?”
“This storm’s acting weird, some sort of magnetic particles throwing off the gravitics. We just lost some altitude is all…it’ll clear up once we hit the eye,” the pilot said.
“He seem that confident to you?” Yenin asked on a closed channel to Cisneros.
“Nope, but whatever. Again, I can’t fly this thing. Can you?” he asked.
“Nope, but whatever.” She pulled the locks up from the base of a drone and pushed it down the rails to the opening.
The storm beyond was a maelstrom of grey and purple cloud layers, and rain lashed the lowered ramp. The shuttle wavered slightly in the wind, and she was grateful—just for a moment—that it was designed well enough to handle all this.
The pilot had been a nervous wreck while the Myrmidon shuttles were taking off from whatever snatch-and-grab the director had them on. He’d said something about the indig air force starting to react.
She was pretty certain the locals couldn’t fly—or target—anything in the hurricane. So she took comfort in that too.
“This is a first,” Cisneros said. “Flying into the eye of a storm on some Podunk planet. Corporate should use our feeds for recruitment ads.”
“Looks great on the screen.” She grunted and pushed the drone almost to the edge as the shuttle’s nose dipped slightly and gravity tried to pull it back down the rails. “Not as much fun in pers—ahh!”
The shuttle fell into a dive and the drone slammed back into the other two. She fell toward the fore of the cargo bay, but her safety line locked in place and she swung like a pendulum into the bulkhead. Her flight suit softened the blow, but she knew she’d have a decent bruise later.
“What the hell?” Cisneros bumped up against the front bulkhead of the cargo bay.
The shuttle lurched back to level and the unmoored drone rolled down the rails. Yenin caught it and kicked a foot brake, stopping it in place.
“Woo, that wasn’t fun,” the pilot said. “Sure hope you two are buckled up back there. Got some more static on the scope.”
“Just tell me when to make the drop.” Yenin stepped across the drone to get to the other brake, when thunder crashed. Lighting struck the shuttle and Yenin gasped as electricity overloaded her suit’s systems and sent a shock up her legs.
She slumped against the drone, gripping handrails at the top. The drone case pressed against her and she realized that she was lying on it.
The shuttle was in a nose dive.
Smoke billowed up from the port side and Yenin reached for a small fire extinguisher on her belt. She was dimly aware of Cisneros yelling about something as she aimed the nozzle at a patch of flames dancing up from the power packs in the bulkhead.
A sudden tug of gravity threw off her aim, then the shuttle banked hard as the engine in the starboard wing went haywire. She grabbed a handrail on the drone and kept from smacking against the bulkhead again. The shuttle went nose up and she hung on for dear life as she looked down to a roiling ocean beneath her.
There was a creak from the foot brake holding the drone fast. Her heart fell into her stomach as she realized she’d only set one of the two brakes.
“Greg? Greg!”
The brake failed and she went down the rails with it, letting go just before she went flying out the shuttle. Keeping her hold on the drone might’ve ripped her arm out of the socket. Instead, she found herself dangling out the back of the shuttle as it hung beneath the hurricane, the gravitic engines malfunctioning and shooting off sparks.
In the distance, she made out a coastline, tall trees racked by the wind.
She slapped a button on the safety line and an internal winch began inching her back up to the shuttle. Yenin looked down at the massive waves sweeping toward the shore, then back to the shuttle. She hit the emergency button again, but it was still taking her back up.
“Hey!” she shouted into her comms. “Can you fix the drives or not because—”
Lightning struck the shuttle’s nose and the engines failed completely. She fell, the safety line going tight as a blast of wind slapped into her and the shuttle.
She pulled the emergency release and the line snapped off her.
Now she was falling—falling and screaming as a wave rose out of the ocean and swallowed her whole.
Chapter 25
Daniel drove through the tight streets of his neighborhood in King’s Rest. The morning traffic was the same as it ever was, and the Tyr went about their business as if nothing was out of the norm. Same street vendors. Same busy streets.
“They don’t know,” he muttered. “What is the King waiting for?”
He stopped at an intersection and a hand slammed down on top of his hood. Constable Pyth stood in front of the bumper, his one arm leaning hard on the car and a look of simmering anger on his face.
Daniel rolled his passenger side window down as Pyth went to the door and jiggled the handle.
“Is there a problem, officer?” Daniel asked.
Pyth reached inside and unlocked the door, then sat down.
“Let’s talk. Again.” Pyth pointed to a parking lot next to a clothing store.
Daniel had a fairly decent idea of what the constable wanted to say to him as he pulled off the road.
“We had an agreement,” Pyth said sternly.
“Just so you know,” Daniel said, putting the car in park and keeping his hands on the steering wheel, “I’ve been out of town for the last day and haven’t even been home yet.”
“Your boy…” Pyth pointed at Daniel, then pulled his hand back, “your boy found my sweet Lussea and now she’s…she is a wreck right now.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“She just had her first communion, properly veiled—beautiful ceremony that cost a decent chunk of my retirement fund—and she was on her way to the matchmaker when your boy found her and said there’s some sort of crisis coming. What crisis, Clay? You said you were being reassigned for good. I told her you were being reassigned. Yet here you are. Explain.”
Daniel swallowed hard. Michael must not have let the cat completely out of the bag, or else Pyth wouldn’t be doing his best to have a civil discussion.
“There was a…disagreement within my caste,” Daniel said. “Politicking over accounts and some errors with bookkeeping, nothing I was involved with at all. So the tribe chiefs reset everyone until things can be sorted out in the Linker way, which is none of your business, Blooded.”
“And this ‘disaster’? I now have a closet full of toilet paper, Clay. Why is there so much gods’ damned toilet paper in my house, Clay?” Pyth set the ball of his fist against the dashboard.
“We Linkers…we have connections, obviously. At the moot, we learned that the heretics are mobilizing their armies. The neutral city-states to the south might not be so neutra
l in the next couple days.” Daniel made up the lie at the spur of the moment. He only had to get through this encounter, not maintain the lie into the future. He just had to sound plausible.
“That might explain it…” Pyth rubbed the back of his hand against his chin.
“Explain what?”
“You’ve been gone for a few days. Notice anything unusual?”
“That’s right and I stopped just long enough to grab a change of clothes and leave for an audit. Nothing unusual.” He began sweating as his plans to remain hidden amongst the Tyr began to unravel.
“Central put out a blanket surveillance order on your neighborhood, big names on the seals. You see anything out of the ordinary, you—how much longer are you going to be in town? Lussea was a wreck at the matchmaker’s. I lost my deposit because the hag running the agency couldn’t even interview her properly.”
“Another day or two.” Daniel reached for the purse at his hip, then grabbed the steering wheel again. “You’re less because of me, Blooded. Can I make amends without insulting you?”
“Your money’s no good with me, Linker. My wife insisted I beat some sense into you, which I could do. I’ve only got one arm, but I’ve got both legs to kick your ass.”
“Tell her you roughed me up. I’ll confirm that story if ever asked. My apologies for what my boy’s done,” Daniel said.
“Ahh…kids. Young and stupid, but they think they’ve got it all figured out and they’re invincible. I see it every day.” He tapped the medallion on his chest. “Just keep your boy buttoned up. He bothers my girl again and my wife will call in her people. Priests are pretty good at finding ways to excuse their behavior, even when they’re doing it for someone with this face.” Pyth gestured to his Blooded markings. “Last warning, understood?”
“Understood.”
“Gods’ gaze be upon you,” Pyth said and got out of the car.
****
Daniel shut the door to the underground garage, activated the intrusion detection systems, then bounded up the stairs and into his kitchen.
