by Brian Mansur
Without hesitation, Henry dived behind the “immune” woman, using her as both a shield and a prop for his pistol.
“Help me up!” she ordered Henry.
Before they could move, however, one of the attacking soldiers shot at the nearby vehicle. His rounds ricocheted off. One pegged Lilith’s thigh, penetrating her skin-tight suit-pants. She squealed in renewed agony, clutching the limb with her uninjured arm.
Behind Lilith’s party, the watching enforcer’s optics registered what had happened. The Warden stormed forward.
“Halt!” it roared. A pair of electrodes blasted from its arm. They struck the offending soldier, dropping him mid-stride. His fellows ground to a stop on seeing the enforcer racing at them.
The mechanoid stomped up to the fallen male and flipped him onto his back. He twitched in a pain-ridden daze. Extending shimmering blades from each of its upper appendages, the enforcer skewered the man’s shoulders. The Warden raised its prey off the ground, examining him.
“Reyansh Luthra,” the machine said in a synthetic growl. “You have broken the Warden Code by violating a protectorate’s immunity. The sentence is torment and execution for you, your parents, your sister, your previous two lovers, the following close friends…”
It listed one person after another. By the third name, the condemned man had regained enough of his senses to begin pleading for someone to kill him. He knew what horrors the enforcer would make him suffer.
None of the soldiers dared help: the price for interference would be to suffer an excruciating death. A few of them, however, attempted to skirt the scene toward Lilith. The enforcer said, “Stop! You accessories to this violation will stay and witness the price of disobedience!”
A grim smile crept over Lilith’s face. Unimpeded, she, Henry and Markem dragged themselves into the air car. Within a minute, they had lifted away.
While Lilith settled back in her seat, the execution proceedings blazed from the dashboard screen. A grid of ten windows depicted a captive Mr. Luthra and his loved ones being accosted by enforcers.
They work fast, Lilith marveled.
When the Wardens informed the doomed of their fates, they wailed in abject terror. While Lilith clamped down on her thigh’s flesh wound, she sneered at the Lakshmians.
Serves you right for betraying me. May you all burn in hell.
Location: CIC, MSV Tsunami_
Since someone had to monitor Lilith, Rafe had little choice but to expose himself to the gruesome executions. The Wardens wouldn’t allow the vid-window to be closed or moved off-screen. He could reduce, but not mute the volume. At best, he could shrink the proceedings into a corner of his HUD. He tried to ignore the shrieks as Wardens flayed, eviscerated, stabbed, quartered, gouged, scourged, strangled, burned, chopped, and electrocuted their victims. Through it all stung one thought.
Lilith was still loose.
As if to underscore the setback, an enforcer said, “Humans of Cervantes, learn this lesson well. You must not defy us.”
The words ate at Rafe’s spirit.
How do we break free of those monsters? They’ve made this misery possible and for what?
In reply, he heard only screams. The minutes rolled by and he found himself fighting off the urge to vomit.
He wondered how Anna was coping with the vid or if Karen was even alive to see it. Helpless, he stared with catatonic intensity at Lilith’s pulsing red dot, feeling tense all over.
Then a bit of motion on another screen stirred him. He saw several rocket contrails streaking through the wide-angle camera on James’ drone. The comms-hampered brigade hadn’t quit fighting, Rafe realized. Shortly after, a cluster of explosions peppered a hexagonal building. He trained the drone’s camera on a smoldering hole in the roof.
Rafe overlaid the colony map to identify what they’d hit and keyed his general microphone. “We struck Segment 5’s control bunker. It’s likely out of action.” His delivery lacked enthusiasm. Given the chorus of dying souls playing over the speakers, he doubted anyone would fault him.
Then he noticed Lilith’s sky car had flown to within a few hundred meters of the drone. The view zoomed in, revealing a pocked frame. The damage explained why it had taken so long for the thing to climb to altitude.
He realized those soldiers had been bolder than he would dare. But had it won them anything? Figures moved inside the sky car’s cabin. Lilith was right there, and all he could do was watch her.
Don’t throw away your bullets, he recited, forcing himself back to calm.
A moment later, Claire flashed an urgent text message from General Parashar.
“Arbiter ready. Stand by to attack.”
Location: Sky car, Segment 5, Lakshmi Colony_
It took the crippled air hopper several minutes to reach the relative safety of the colony’s hub. Only then did Henry cut the propellers back. When the engine noise diminished enough to talk again, Lilith accessed the comm system.
“Natrix, report!” she yelled.
“Empress!” The machine rattled off something Lilith couldn’t hear over the screaming execution victims.
“Say again?”
“I said I’m so sorry about what happened.”
“Yes, yes,” Lilith said with a cough. “I’ll decompile you later. Some Lakshmian soldiers attacked me. I want to talk to Dalip.”
“General Parashar has killed the president, my Empress.”
Lilith pulled her mouth into a thin line. She knew the military generally hated her, but she’d thought the weaponry she’d demonstrated had cowed them. Killing their own president meant they were willing to risk total destruction to get rid of her.
“What else?” she asked.
“I overheard a conversation between the General and Captain Paulson. He claims to have codes for an Arbiter and plans to invoke Unrestricted War soon.”
Lilith felt hairs tingle along her neck. That wasn’t supposed to be possible. She shot Henry an accusing glare. “What do you know about this?”
Henry focused on the car’s controls as he maneuvered them near the colony’s central truss. “If I was part of the coup,” he called, “you wouldn’t be here. You’d be in custody, and Markem would have a bullet in his head instead of his knee.”
Markem said, “He makes sense to me, Mistress.”
The demoness squinted at Henry. “Dalip’s people knew full well that any Arbiter I gave them wouldn’t let them put Lakshmi into Unrestricted Warfare. So, where did they get one that could screw with my immunity?”
“How should I know? I personally shipped off the ones you sold to Celes.” He paused in thought. “We can check if the freighter rendezvoused with—”
“Don’t bother. You obviously kept one here. Maybe your government insisted. It doesn’t matter. Either way, you knew.”
Henry cocked his head in annoyance. “What must it be like not to be able to trust anyone you can’t blackmail, torture, or kill?”
“Why don’t you ask your wife?”
Henry rolled his neck. He caught sight of something through the paneless window. A swarm of rockets, perhaps a kilometer away, raced for some unseen target. Straightening, he said, “We don’t have time to argue. You need to start Phase Three. Now.”
Lilith stared Henry down for a count of five. She called him an obscenity then gazed out the windshield. For several breaths, she stewed in anger.
Of course, he had a point, as usual. Given the all-out rebellion on Lakshmi, she should cut her losses.
“Natrix,” Lilith said, “how many colonies do I still control?”
“Eight, Empress.”
Lilith growled and thought, I suppose eight will have to do for now. That’s over twenty million lives to start with. And once the ships I bought from Celes arrive, I can conquer more.
She wheezed after a severe inhalation, then said, “Authenticate Laila omega four three seven zero. Execute Phase Three.”
“Command accepted,” the A.I. responded with emotionless effici
ency. “Executing.”
“Finally,” Lilith said. She peered out at the colony around them and imagined the scene of terror about to befall her subjects.
They’ll be mine to command, she mused with satisfaction. All of them.
“Empress,” Natrix said with chagrin. “The Segment 5 servers have been destroyed. Local control has been severely reduced.”
Lilith uttered something crass. Losing those servers made using the population in Segment 5 difficult. Turning to Henry, she said, “We had better find a way out of here.”
Before Henry could react, Natrix shouted, “Alert! Unrestricted Warfare condition set!"
For a stunned second, Lilith sat in disbelieving silence. Then Henry cursed at her and flipped a series of switches. The sky car tore free of the hub and accelerated away. “We have to get you to an enforcer. They need to release you from immunity tracking.”
Lilith grasped for the nearest armrest, more out of sudden fear than from Henry’s rapid maneuvers. Against her will, at the thought of her vulnerability, she began to hyperventilate.
Henry spewed more vulgarities and said, “Your constant complaining… You’ve wasted so much time. You’ve screwed us, Lilith!”
Location: CIC, MSV Tsunami_
“Lakshmi is under Unrestricted War!” Claire trumpeted. “Lilith is vulnerable!”
“Hold fire on the nukes,” Paulson said. “Target six Goblins in ripple mode on her and launch.”
A second passed. Then another.
Claire said, “Captain, there’s a problem. Some new immunity protocol won’t let me lock onto Lilith.”
Paulson snapped, “Does brigade have any missiles left in Segment 5?”
Claire replied, “HQ element is still under jamming. The peripheral units report zero missiles and mortars remaining. Also, they’re outside of any unit’s smart-bullet range.”
In his HUD, Rafe saw Lilith’s sky car release from its perch and veer off.
You’re not getting away this time!
He grabbed his console’s control stick and punched a key to unlock the drone’s clamps. His finger slid the accelerator forward to dive after Lilith.
Paulson asked, “Can you catch her?” Ordinarily, the child-sized drone couldn’t match an air car’s speed.
Rafe noticed smoke trailing from the left engine and said, “They’re hurt. We have a shot.”
Second by agonizing second, the car crept closer in Rafe’s HUD. He noted the craft descended with frightening speed. Before long, the air rotating with the colony increasingly pushed them spinward.
Rafe checked his altitude. Less than a thousand meters remained. The damaged car’s lead fell to only ten meters.
To the dying Reyansh Luthra, Rafe promised, What you’re going through will mean something.”
A tone warbled, and Claire said, “Drone main battery is low.”
“Never mind that,” Rafe muttered. “Switch collision-avoidance to audio only.”
“Done,” Claire replied. “Caution, your vehicle will no longer automatically steer to avoid obstacles.”
“Fine. Range to target?”
“Sky car is ten meters ahead. Altitude, three hundred meters.”
The car loomed in the vid window. Rafe pulled on the joystick, and his quarry dropped from the main viewer. He caught his breath as an eddy from the car’s engines bucked the drone.
He tweaked the glide slope until the image smoothed.
Claire said, “You’re losing them.”
“No, I’m not.” He hadn’t flown drones for years on dark ops missions to not know what he was doing. He flicked his gaze to the three-sixty camera. As predicted, his quarry was leveling out to land. Rafe, however, had aimed for a point forward of their path.
“Collision course!” Claire shouted over an alarm.
The sky car’s own accident-avoidance system banked it away from the drone, but Rafe had planned for that. He nudged the joystick, dropping his nimbler craft in front of the car’s intake ducts. The inrushing air sucked the drone straight into one of the thrust and lift turbines.
As his camera glitched out, Rafe said, “Gotcha!”
Location: Sky car, Segment 5, Lakshmi Colony_
Lilith never saw what hit them. She jerked at the anti-collision siren, felt the car turn sharply, then heard a metal thunk in one of their engines. An instant later, the master alarm blared.
Henry said, “They got us!” The world outside began to tumble.
From the back, Markem called, “Shut down and use the emergency jets to—”
“I know!” Henry barked. His fingers whipped across the controls. The engine whine lessened.
Sounding like a frightened child, Lilith asked, “Are we going to make it?”
Henry ignored her as he worked the joystick back and forth. “Seventy-five meters!” he called. The air copter wobbled violently. “Fifty!”
Panting, Lilith watched the habitat’s inner surface zipping by. “Henry!” she cried.
“Twenty-five!” he said and pressed a big red button. A set of emergency landing jets activated.
Henry yelled, “Hold on to something!”
Lilith screamed as the vehicle slammed into a potato field at a relative one hundred kilometers an hour. The car’s landing gear snapped on impact, tilting the tail into the dirt. The cabin’s occupants screamed as they cartwheeled across the landscape.
Location: CIC, MSV Tsunami_
Rafe followed Lilith’s red indicator with unshakable intensity as it came to rest. He glared at it for several seconds. It didn’t wink out.
“Captain,” he said with a twist of dread and hope, “she still isn’t dead, but she must be banged up.”
“Claire,” Paulson said, “tell that crack strike team to get to Lilith before the Lakshmians do.”
“Relaying Captain, but there may be a problem.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There’s unusual Warden activity on Lakshmi. I think you should have a look at some of these SPOT reports.”
A beat later and Paulson exclaimed, “What the hell?”
Rafe keyed in on what the captain saw. The text accompanied by live video added another couple of knots to his already twisted bowels. “What are the enforcers doing with the Lakshmians?” he asked.
29
Location: Office building, Segment 5, Lakshmi Colony_
I have a job to do.
Sarah closed a vascular clamp on her sobbing patient’s shredded artery—a female office clerk who’d been caught in the fighting.
Let me save another life, the nurse prayed. Please.
Her vision blanked to be replaced by a picture of Sean falling into space. He might not be dead, she reminded herself. She unwrapped a pressure dressing and placed it in the woman’s fist. Guiding the hand to a gouge at the upper arm, Sarah said, “Press hard.”
A shout from the office’s foyer made the nurse look up. She saw a pair of black-clad marines entering, with one supporting the other. She noted the casualty wouldn’t put weight on his left leg.
“Sit him down over there,” Sarah ordered. Her finger pointed at the big monitor that she’d shot to pieces when the executions began.
She blew a strand of hair from her forehead and stroked the battered woman’s cheek. “It only looks scary,” Sarah said, straining sweetness and calm through a forced smile. “I promise, you’re going to be fine.”
Another explosion rattled chunks of glass from the busted front windows. The wounded woman yelped. Sarah leaned over to shield her. When the nurse looked back up, she saw marines outside shooting.
The lieutenant yelled, “Are they getting closer?”
“They’re leaving!” someone hollered. “They’re running away!”
Sarah hoped that didn’t mean the Lakshmians were evacuating so they could pound the area with mortars. Or something worse. She wished that she could call up one of the marine’s helmet cams, but the jamming hadn’t abated.
It unnerved her
plenty to hear the victims’ terrible screams echoing from speakers elsewhere in the office. She shook herself and rose to tend to the next casualty.
“Hey,” another marine called. “What are all those Wardens doing?”
The comment brought Sarah up short. Unease tingled along her scalp. She turned around.
At first, she could only see one enforcer striding down the street. Nothing unusual about that. They sometimes swapped out for maintenance. Maybe it was damaged by the fighting.
Then Sarah saw a second and a third. Without realizing it, she’d crept to the shattered window. What she beheld drew her eyelids back. Wardens lined the street.
As one, the mechanical zombies spoke: “All resident humans will assemble at Joyti Park. Non-residents will proceed indoors and make way. Comply immediately, or you will be punished.”
Sarah’s face paled. Do they mean the wounded in here too?
She got her answer as an enforcer turned into the building. The marines parted for it like fish scattering from a shark. It stopped before the strewn-out patients and said, “All Lakshmians will move as instructed or be executed.”
“What?” Sarah breathed. The half-dozen injured locals stirred. Most propped or pulled themselves up in a show of obedience. The office lady whom Sarah had helped, however, uttered a small whimper. She’d lost too much blood to do more than rock in terror. The Warden raised its arm, singling her out.
Pity and horror gripped Sarah’s heart. She saw in the woman’s supine form the haunting specter of her helpless mother during cancer therapy.
Sarah’s inner voice cried to save the person.
Before she could consider the risk to herself, Sarah stepped between the enforcer and her patient. “Please, Warden, these people are too hurt to go anywhere!”
She expected the machine to lash out at her. Doing anything that could be perceived as challenging or disrespecting a Warden usually earned several broken bones, at least. Sarah trembled.
