Captive Embers (The Wardens' Game Book 1)

by Brian Mansur

  He added, “Either it’s another Warden lockout, or there must be a mother-load of scramblers somewhere in the cargo bay.”

  Claire’s voice said, “Pressure stable.”

  Sean slammed his palm at the Feni’s door controls and brought his weapon up beside Horvath’s. The hatch swung into an empty corridor. The sirens cut out. Heart pounding in his ears, Sean realized he needed to tell the A.I. something.

  “Claire, as soon as we’re out, shut the airlock and quick-cycle it back so Blake can get through.”

  “Copy Lieutenant,” she replied.

  “See what you can do about automating that request. The commander is going to blow your computer cores any second.”

  “Don’t sound so happy about it, sir.”

  Sean didn’t react to the remark.

  “Stay here,” he told the two medical officers. He stepped out and closed the lock’s hatch behind him. Swallowing hard, he released his mag-boots and kicked off for the intersection with the main corridor. He wished to heaven they could have spared the time for Horvath to send a drone ahead.

  Stopping short on the intersection’s lip, he angled his fifty-caliber weapon downward. Its scope fed a video through the weapon’s handgrip, into his gloves, and onto his HUD.

  He panted with anxiety. He had to be the one to check over that edge. Not Horvath. Not Blake. Not after all that had happened.

  He took three final, rapid breaths, and stuck his weapon out.

  Despite himself, he jerked back, the shift of momentum sending him into a rearward arc. As he replanted his foot, a gasp escaped his thumping chest. With that draining release, he realized two things: not only was he still in one piece, but the hatch at the end of the corridor hadn’t opened.

  He repositioned himself to look again, studying the image from the rifle. A piece of mech blocked the broken porthole. When it didn’t move, he concluded it was the one Blake and Horvath had damaged before.

  He waved for Horvath and Sarah to move. Sarah emerged first, maneuvering the mauled corporal past Sean at the intersection. He glanced up as they floated by. The ghastly sight of Watson’s blackened leg stumps made Sean’s stomach turn over.

  The clang of Horvath shutting the airlock’s door provided a welcome excuse to look away. He noted the gurgling pumps as they extracted the little room’s atmosphere. In less than a minute, Blake and the Feni’s survivors could enter. As Horvath hauled away the other two unconscious marines, a subsonic rumble emanated from the MAC’s direction. Metal creaked ominously. Sean braced as the deck shifted subtly beneath him.

  Blake must have blown the remass tanks.

  He imagined hydrogen gas spewing from the MAC’s pressurized reservoirs. They would act like impromptu thrusters, threatening to rip the craft off of its docking port. He reminded himself that all airlock clamps were designed to handle the torque caused by a punctured tank. The docking seal would hold firm. Probably.

  Sean repositioned himself on the T-junction’s far side. This let him glance back and forth between the main corridor and the MAC’s airlock. The hatch controls continued to blaze red for vacuum on the other side. After several seconds of staring, he prayed for Blake and the rescue balls to appear in the hatch’s porthole. A gloved thumb bumped against his helmet as he unconsciously tried to bite its nail. He was on the verge of moving closer to the lock for a better look when he, at last, saw movement.

  He released a lungful of air, fogging his helmet.

  And then a light winked through the porthole. Since no noise followed, Sean couldn’t be sure if it had been a burnt-out bulb, a spark, a muzzle flash or the partially obstructed explosion from a grenade.

  Without Claire to run a spectral analysis on the light, he considered several unpleasant possibilities. If a mech was assaulting the MAC, Sean didn’t know what he could do to help the men inside, assuming they still lived. He toyed with going back through the lock quickly. Thanks to their earlier preflight breathing regimen, his risk for decompression sickness wasn’t all that high. On the other hand, he very much doubted that his semi-automatic rifle could disable the enemy’s Gatling and grenade tubes before they blasted him apart.

  Then something else occurred to him. If they faced more mechs, what was there to stop the things from floating over to the life pod and disabling it. They could even shoot the little ship while it jetted away at a paltry one gravity of acceleration.

  This entire inner struggle of overlapping thoughts, beginning at the flash through the porthole, took place in less than two breaths. By the end of it, Sean clenched his teeth and made his decision. He deactivated his magnetic soles and pushed off for the MAC’s airlock and the Lakshmians—away from the lifeboat.

  “Horvath! Riley!” he shouted, feeling the unreal weight of his choice come crashing down on his shoulders. “Button up the lifepod. Launch in sixty seconds if you don’t see me knocking on the porthole, no matter what.”

  As Sean landed on the MAC’s outer hatch, he looked through the lock’s porthole. To his profound relief, a white rescue balloon covered it. That meant Blake was pushing the Feni’s crew to safety.

  Sean punched controls to close the Feni’s outer hatch. This halved the space in the airlock. It would slow a mech down if it tried to breach the MAC’s side. Meanwhile, anyone in the Feni’s partition could finish pressurizing and escape.

  A second later, a message bleeped onto the readout: door obstructed.

  What the—?

  “Need a hand sir?” a husky female voice called from behind. Sean whipped about to find Horvath settling at the T-junction.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he snapped. “Didn’t you hear what I said?”

  A grin crept up Horvath’s left cheek. “Marines don’t leave anyone behind, sir.”

  Sean stared at Horvath for a full second, furious over her willful failure to obey his instructions. At last, he said, “Get back to the—”

  A thud from behind him interrupted his tirade. He whipped around to peer through the airlock’s porthole. Where a white rescue ball had been, he saw Blake’s helmet pressed against the multi-layered transparent alloy. From beneath blinking HUD alerts, Blake’s face contorted in a silent, agonized scream.

  Sean flinched at the sight. His anger with Horvath deferred, he yelled, “Blake is hit!” In that instant, he realized that the flash from before must indeed have been a grenade. “A mech is on its way! It might already be inside the MAC!”

  He rechecked the airlock controls. The Feni’s outer hatch remained open, but a gauge told him that the air pressure past the door was rising to equalize with the Feni’s. A clock said they had 19 seconds to wait.

  Sean banged a fist against the porthole, hoping to get Blake’s attention, but the man’s eyes remained shut. He shouted Blake’s name to the same non-effect. As the seconds slipped by, Sean watched the commander’s features wither into unconsciousness.

  “No!”

  Then he noticed the readouts in Commander Blake’s HUD. The small human figure in one corner pulsed red. Blake was dead.

  At that same moment, Sean watched the man’s body do something that fresh corpses should not be able to do. It jerked. It didn’t move much, but the shift was unmistakable.

  Sean’s eyes grew wide with a deepening alarm. Anything disturbing the commander’s body should have made him tumble away from the porthole. But Blake remained in place.

  Sean’s upper back and chest blazed with raw terror. Suddenly, he understood why the Feni’s outer door hadn’t closed and why Blake’s limp form still hung in place.

  “There’s a mech in the airlock!” he yelled. “Go, go, go!”

  As he shouted, he drew his legs up and rotated to brace both feet against the door. He kicked off with all his strength, rocketing toward the intersection. On checking “above” him, however, he gasped. Ahead, Horvath tumbled along a leisurely trajectory through the access way’s center.

  Sean guessed that the woman had tried to move without first unclamping he
r mag-boots. The mistake had detached her from the wall as intended but left her drifting slowly into his path.

  “Look out!” he cried.

  The woman yelped as Sean collided with her legs. He careened into a bulkhead where he snagged a shoulder on a mound of supplies that sent him pin-wheeling helplessly back into the middle of the corridor.

  Sean knew then that no matter what else happened, neither he nor Horvath had any hope of escape. He glimpsed the airlock’s timer as it reached zero. In a few seconds, the mech would have the door open and a clear shot at anyone in the hall. It wouldn’t miss.

  “Launch Sarah!” he shouted. “Launch!”

  But it was too late for that also. Sarah was no longer in the escape pod. He looked up and saw her rounding a corner scarcely five meters behind him.

  Only seconds before, Sarah had been working on an oozing gash that Watson’s suit sealant hadn’t fully closed. She reached into her aid bag for another bandage then stopped herself. She choked on a sob.

  “I can’t fix him,” she whimpered to herself.

  She secured Watson in his cot and turned to regard the unconscious forms of Sergeant Martinez and Corporal Yontz. Still encased in their night-gray armor, Horvath had already strapped them into the vertically positioned acceleration couches.

  You have to triage them. She couldn’t waste everything on one patient who probably wouldn’t live anyway.

  Shifting about in the narrow aisle, she took the gloved hands of the other two marines in hers. Medical data flowed from their suits into her visor. Each marine had clearly suffered concussions from the grenades that had gone off too near to them. She noticed blood beading along a cut in Yontz’s forehead: a wound he’d sustained despite the cushions sewn into his radio cap.

  They needed to get away so she could get them out of their suits. The realization made her note a red alarm blinking. Her rebreather remained offline, and the oxygen reserve wouldn’t last much longer.

  As she decided to go find Sean to tell him all this, she heard his voice again, catching his alarmed tone but little else. She recalled the grizzly scene of Watson being blown apart from the knees down.

  I won’t hesitate again.

  Sarah flipped around and jetted through the lifeboat hatch. Sean yelled again, followed by Horvath’s brief screech. Sarah’s blood curdled as she sailed the handful of meters down the access way. She rounded the corner exactly when Sean cried out for her to launch.

  Sarah froze. Not far off, she saw Sean’s white suit flattening against a wall. Beyond him on the corridor’s opposite side, Horvath pulled into a crouch, her hands reeling in a rifle strap. Past the marine, the airlock to the MAC swung open.

  Sarah beheld the obsidian form of a mech inside the lock. It clutched Blake in front of it like a shield. The machine’s forward hydraulic limbs crumpled Blake’s armor beyond the tolerances of human anatomy.

  Before Sarah could think to scream, Sean and Horvath fired on the mech. The gargantuan monstrosity allowed them a second to pelt its armored shell. Then the inorganic beast flung Blake’s body at Horvath as though passing a ball. The lieutenant gawked as Blake’s corpse knocked the marine off her magnetic boots and toward Sarah’s position.

  Reflexively, Sarah tried to catch the woman with an arm, but the dead commander’s ricocheting body smashed Sarah against the bulkhead first. The nurse lost her grip on the wall railing and tumbled away.

  As Sarah scrambled for a handhold, she heard Sean shouting her name again, telling her to get away. Disoriented, she didn’t know which direction to flee. She looked left, right, and then up. The mech, in no hurry at all, had pushed forward, leaving the rescue balloons to jostle in its wake.

  Sarah looked on as Sean bravely held his ground. He fired round after round into the advancing wraith’s glossy black finish, but it didn't even slow.

  As it neared him, the mech’s Gatling muzzle angled toward Sean and flashed once. At first, Sarah’s mind didn’t connect the light with Sean’s sudden, off-axis twisting. She blinked. A split second later, she understood that Sean had been shot.

  “No!”

  But as Sean spun, his arms came to life. He scrambled for a handhold, leading Sarah to cut her scream, mid-vowel. She saw then that Sean had only been surgically disarmed with a shot from the mech’s cannon.

  Had she been thinking more clearly, Sarah would have realized the three astronauts in the corridor should’ve already been dead. Their opponent’s precision fire control far outstripped anything a human could manage. The mech was showing off.

  Sarah’s gaze shifted as the mech’s bulk eclipsed Sean from sight. Like a giant metal spider snaring a moth, the machine closed upon Corporal Horvath. It caught the woman from the rear in a vice about her slender abdomen. Horvath thrashed and squealed.

  As if to ensure Sarah had a good view, the mech shot out its free limbs to wedge itself in the hallway’s center. Horvath and her captor jerked to a halt a few meters from Sarah’s trembling form. Once stopped, the monster clamped a palp around each of its victim’s biceps and thighs. It splayed Horvath like a wild animal about to be skinned.

  Sarah stared into Horvath’s bulging eyes. Then, the doomed woman screamed hideously. Sarah flinched, knowing that the pain caused by the machine’s crushing grip must be excruciating.

  A series of loud pops filled the hallway. The screaming transformed into a string of withering, staccato shrieks as the mech tore Horvath’s limbs off.

  The sound of shredding skin and cracking bone filled the corridor. An arm tore loose, and blood gushed from severed arteries. The mech flung Horvath’s arm aside like a hunk of meat. Hydraulic pistons pulled at Horvath’s lower limbs like a wishbone. All the while, the woman wailed and sputtered until, lungs drained, she paused to gulp down enough air to cry out again.

  Sarah watched, unable to do anything. She couldn’t see Horvath’s fifty caliber weapon. Then she remembered the low-powered handgun she had for emergency. She couldn’t hope to cause meaningful damage to the machine with it, but she could stop Horvath’s suffering. She aimed it at the marine’s visor, hands quaking.

  She couldn’t pull the trigger.

  Horvath’s leg split off. The gaping pelvic wound showered the hallway with crimson droplets.

  The mech finished rending the other leg before tossing Horvath’s limp corpse at Sarah. Blood and body parts slapped across the nurse’s face-shield. The mech turned around and headed the other way.

  Sarah fought the urge to vomit and screamed Sean’s name. She couldn’t imagine living with herself if she allowed the mech do to him what it had done to Horvath. In that moment of shock, she cast aside any thought for her patients in the pod and her status as a non-combatant. Instead, she scanned about for another weapon. The black muzzle of Horvath’s gun, still clipped to her body’s remaining arm, hovered nearby. Now that the mech wasn’t in the way, she could reach it.

  Sarah hadn’t trained on the marine’s Z-coil fifty rifle, but it had a loaded magazine, and that was enough. Almost in a trance, Sarah planted one magnetized knee to the deck, positioned the stock to her shoulder and fired.

  One round after another pelted the mech’s chassis, but it ignored her completely. The magazine ran dry after four shots. Then the machine reached the corridor’s far end.

  Sarah scrambled to find a new cartridge on the marine’s blood-painted suit. Meanwhile, the mech’s Gatling barrel barked once. Sarah’s head jerked up to see glittering shards from the shattered airlock porthole zipping about. Then she heard Sean’s muffled scream from behind the door. The hole had equalized the pressure between airlock and cabin. All the mech had left to do was coax the door to open. Sarah imagined the thing crushing Sean’s body between its metal palps.

  At last, she found a new magazine and fumbled to lock it home.

  The first round penetrated the mech’s weakened armor above its main power bus. Sparks and yellow flame spat, but a back-up switched on, and the juggernaut continued to work the hatchway controls. A
nother shot dented a motor’s gears, seizing up a limb. A third hit the main sensor dome, destroying several optics.

  The airlock door swung forward.

  “No!” Sarah shrieked and pulled the trigger once more. The bullet exited the muzzle at almost a kilometer a second. This time it found a hole in the degraded plating along the mech’s back and struck the main computer hub. At the same time, a massive surge from the damaged bus overwhelmed the machine, tripping its master breakers. The hulking monstrosity froze just as it reached for Sean.

  It took two more shots before Sarah realized that the mech had stopped moving. Her body trembled. Her head throbbed. She felt like throwing up.

  Sean apparently required a few seconds himself to understand that the chance to bolt had come. He shouldered the mech aside, its magnetic grapples having lost their electrical charge. Then he kicked off for Sarah.

  “Everyone else is dead!” he called as he flew toward her. “Get to the lifeboat! There may be more mechs on the way!”

  Sarah, however, couldn’t move. Horvath had drifted back into her line of sight. The marine’s lifeless remains transfixed her.

  “Move!” the lieutenant yelled as he touched down on the wall behind Sarah. “We’ll come back for them!”

  She let him grab her by the hand and yank her away. Within seconds, they entered the escape pod and blasted from the Feni. The little lifeboat’s computer sent them hurtling for the Tsunami.

  Once the rockets cut out, Sean unbuckled himself from the pilot’s chair and jetted down the narrow aisle to Sarah at the back.

  He screamed at her. "Why didn't you launch when I told you?"

  Sarah’s gaze snapped up. "I didn’t hear…” she began. She couldn't breathe.

  Sean held her shoulders so she had no choice but to look at him. His ungentle handling frightened her.

  Sean yelled into her face, "Horvath is dead because she didn't do what I told her to! And you had wounded to think about!”

  Sarah’s eyes teared at his censure. She had saved his life, and this was the thanks she got?