“Take cover!” She hit the floor and covered her head with both hands.
Knife-edged shards of Rasu pelted her defensive shielding, and she winced from a sharp sting in her calf as a piece penetrated the shield and her skin. Most of the shards, however, shot over her head and hopefully not into Joaquim.
She lifted her head in time to see him repeatedly fire a Glaser into the chest of an advancing Rasu, until the sheer force of the blasts forced it to stumble backward and fall through the opening to the bottom floor far below. The last Rasu lay in overloaded pieces on the floor beside Joaquim.
She grabbed Dashiel’s arm, interrupting his intense conversation with Adlai and Katherine mid-sentence. “Tell everyone to get ready. The quantum block will fall any minute now.”
Nika leapt to her feet, ignoring the scream of protest in her calf; she had to hurry. She inventoried the components of the space. It was definitely a control room, because she’d seen these types of Rasu modules before, on the platform at their stronghold. But with no obvious and quick way to determine what module controlled which functions, her only option was to open one up and dive in.
While Joaquim kept watch for reinforcements arriving from below, she sliced open the cover of one of the modules and gripped one of the photal fibers. A working knowledge of the Rasu programming language was now deeply embedded in her own systems—
I dash among my fighting and falling sisters as they clear the path for me. The floor vanishes again, but I leap over the chasm and reach the bank of equipment. I look left, then right. It stretches for a hundred meters in each direction.
How to locate the correct module? There can be no hesitation and will be no second chances. I stand flush against the equipment, where the Rasu cannot afford to dissolve the floor, and study the flashing lights, reading their output using the ceraffin’s algorithms.
Internal power flow. Engine stabilization. Radiation shielding and conversion—a module dances out a pattern of light, and the melody tells me its purpose is the one I seek.
A shock erupts from beneath me. I fall.
—and she soon identified the nature of the instructions passing through the fibers. She followed the relevant ones to the hub that controlled the defense grid.
“We’ve got company on the way. Faster would be better.”
“Trying,” she muttered through gritted teeth. Dammit, she couldn’t corrupt the hub from this access point. She tried to visualize how the programming web must correspond to the physical equipment, then rushed to another module across the room as weapons fire shot up through the opening in the floor and Joaquim returned fire. She tore into the cover of the module, tossed it away and thrust both hands inside.
“I’m out of grenades, and we are not out of company.”
She removed one hand to fumble through her pack and retrieve a grenade, which she tossed over her shoulder to him. “My last one. Make it count.”
He nodded slowly, an odd wistfulness lifting his features. “I will. See you on the other side.”
“What?” She gasped as he activated the grenade and leapt down through the opening.
The explosion shook the control room so violently she barely stayed on her feet, and enough chunks of blood and flesh flew up through the opening for her to recognize full well what had happened. Godsdammit!
Focus. This will all be for naught if you don’t get the defense grid down. She choked off a cry and redoubled her efforts, letting the alien code flow around her. There—the central brain of the defense grid.
She opened up her internal pathways and let the virutox course out of her hands and into the photal fibers. Encased in a wrapper of Rasu programming, it shouldn’t be flagged as a foreign invader until it was too late.
Her mind lingered as she watched the virutox begin to wreak its destructive havoc. Throughout the control room, alarms began to peal, and a module behind her shorted out in a flurry of sparks.
Still she watched, all the way until the signals necessary to operate the defense grid stopped reaching their intended destination. Then she withdrew her hands and tried to look around, but code and kyoseil had imprinted themselves on her vision like halos after a blinding solar flare.
Her fingers fumbled over the walkie-talkie until she was able to activate it with a thumb. “Virutox implanted. Alex, Caleb, get out of here. Siyane, you’re up.”
“Let’s move!” The conductivity lash at Alex’s wrist whipped out through the air to strike what remained of the last nearby Rasu, stunning it in place. Then she grabbed Caleb’s trembling hand, blade and all, and dragged him away from the temporary carnage.
They ducked inside a storage container, and his hands fell limply to his sides. No air reached his lungs. “Alex….”
“It was my fault. I shouldn’t have gotten so close. You were doing what you needed to do to protect us.”
“But I—”
“Focus, priyazn. We’ll talk about it later.”
How could she call him that when seconds earlier he’d nearly severed her head from her body?
Nika’s hushed voice on the walkie-talkie jolted him out of the immediate shock. “We’re headed up the spire. Two more minutes.”
“Acknowledged.” He tried and failed to meet Alex’s gaze. “Let’s see this through.”
“You bet.” She gave him a brave smile, shattering his overtaxed heart, and they headed out of the storage container and back into the fray.
Instantly she vaporized a large piece of passing machinery. He retrieved his Daemon from the ground and fired on a small vessel rising into the air, doing little damage but perhaps drawing some attention away from the spire.
Out of nowhere two motorized Rasu sped past them, and he shoved Alex into the outer ring. She exhaled harshly, aimed the Rectifier high above them, and took out a vessel accelerating in the direction of the spire. He tossed two archine grenades into an open door in the middle ring—then they were running again as explosions resounded behind them.
“Virutox implanted. Alex, Caleb, get out of here. Siyane, you’re up.”
Abruptly every Rasu unit in sight began racing toward the spire. One mind, one consciousness, and they now knew they had been corrupted.
Caleb fired one last shot at a distant section of the middle ring, then took Alex’s hand in his and sprinted for the closest exit.
69
* * *
NAMINO
Siyane
“Marlee, can you come here for a second?”
Marlee sighed and cast a sideways glance at Morgan as she stood and headed into the cabin. She and Morgan had been talking for the last twenty minutes. Nothing monumental, just mission stuff, but it was so nice. It had also taken her mind off the fact that twenty minutes had passed since Caleb and Alex took off for the Rasu compound—a reality that now came slamming back into the forefront of her mind. How long was it going to take them? The longer they were inside the compound, the worse things were bound to go for them.
She almost bumped into Ava, who was brushing up against everyone in her way as she wove a stormy path through the cabin and back again while stroking her (for now) dormant gun arm. Obviously not happy at having been left behind. Marlee maneuvered past the woman, then past Parc, who was busily playing with the data center controls—Alex would have a conniption fit if she found out—to finally reach Selene, who crouched beside a woman sitting on the couch with her head dropped low between her knees.
“What’s wrong?”
Selene winced up at Marlee. “She isn’t feeling well. I think it’s merely stress from the evacuation today, but would it be all right if we got her some water and let her lay down in the bed downstairs?”
She was hardly the arbiter of Caleb and Alex’s bed…except for the time being she kind of was. “I’m sure they won’t mind. I can’t promise her privacy, though. We don’t have enough room up here to kick everyone out of the lower cabin.”
“Understood.” She patted the woman on the shoulder. “Come on, let�
��s get you downstairs, nice and easy.”
Marlee cleared a path to the staircase for them, even as her gaze kept returning to the viewport at the front of the ship. Once Caleb and Alex had departed on the bike, Morgan had vacated downtown for a quiet, non-Rasu-infested stretch of plains a few kilometers west of the compound. Clouds swept angrily across the sky, and she swore they grew more agitated as they approached the inky, ominous spire in the distance.
Abruptly several cruiser-sized Rasu broke off from their overhead patrols and accelerated toward the compound. Marlee bumped and elbowed her way to the cockpit, arriving as Morgan was straightening up in her chair and opening multiple HUD screens. “What’s happening?”
“If I had to guess, one or both of our teams just kicked a hornet’s nest in the compound.” Morgan’s voice rose above the din in the cabin. “Everyone should sit or grab onto something that’s bolted down. Things ought to get interesting in the next few minutes.”
Above the compound, a swarm of tiny Rasu dots made it impossible to discern any details about what might be transpiring inside. From the east, the first of the cruisers drew near the spire.
The walkie-talkie sitting in a makeshift cradle on the dash squawked to life. “Virutox implanted. Alex, Caleb, get out of here. Siyane, you’re up.”
Morgan cracked her knuckles. “Finally, I get to shoot something.”
Concern gripped Marlee’s heart in an icy fist. “What if the defense grid isn’t down yet? We don’t actually know how long it will take for the virutox to do its work. We shouldn’t burn all our negative energy missiles until we’re certain.”
“True.” Morgan rolled her eyes. “We’ll test-fire the main weapon and see what it draws out.”
The Siyane rose into the air and crept closer to the compound. A silvery beam shot out from beneath the ship and impacted the outer barrier of the compound without provoking any automated resistance. “Excellent! Bombs away.”
Morgan tapped the center of the screen directly in front of her, and four aerodynamic missiles burst forth from the belly of the Siyane. The instant they were away, Morgan began strafing to port and rising higher in the air.
Rasu Compound
Beneath Nika, renewed thrums signaled the arrival of yet more Rasu, and she no longer had her protector to fend them off. She wasn’t getting out by going down, so she peered up. The power vortex writhed and contorted above her like a malevolent sun. Maybe the virutox was affecting it, too.
She’d given Joaquim her last archine grenade, so she couldn’t blow a hole in the exterior wall and escape that way. She could always simply allow herself to die here, and her copy on Mirai—her original, in truth—would live on. But she didn’t want to die. She was fucking tired of dying in sacrifice to the Rasu.
She thrust her hands back into the wiring. She’d seen something while she was rooting around, and it took her only a second to find it again. The power controls. The virutox had wiped away the failsafes and security protocols, and she was able to send an overload command directly into the main power line.
By the time she’d removed her hands, the vortex above her was thrashing about like a star going supernova. She crouched in the farthest corner, trying to make herself as tiny a target as possible, and readied her wingsuit to deploy.
The poles at the center of the room started sliding upward, ferrying Rasu to come kill her.
The vortex exploded in a cacophony of searing electricity, blowing out all the walls. She scrambled to her feet as the floor disintegrated beneath her, clambered past the remains of a cracked module, and leapt out of the spire.
Siyane
All four missiles slammed into the apex of the spire. The explosion was like nothing Marlee had ever seen. A ball of obsidian flame erupted at the point of impact. It seemed to fall in on itself for an instant—then a shockwave of nothing but void rushed out in all directions, vaporizing everything in its path, including one of the approaching Rasu cruisers.
The other two cruisers, however, pivoted and accelerated in the general direction from which the missiles had come.
As the Siyane pitched up and to port again and their angle of ascent increased to at least thirty degrees, Marlee found her attention drifting away from the incredible rupture in the fabric of space-time ahead of them and toward Morgan’s profile. All traces of projected boredom or ennui had vanished from her features. Her fingers flew over the virtual HUD panels with a grace and speed customarily reserved for virtuoso musicians. While her eyes swept across every screen and datapoint, she bit into the left side of her lower lip and poked the right side out, which…Marlee blinked. Was it hot in here? Of course it was hot in here; the ship was filled to capacity with terrified people.
In the span of a heartbeat they’d traveled to the opposite side of where the compound used to stand—it was now a dusty but serene crater—and cruised surreptitiously along the lower edge of the cloud cover. Meanwhile, ten kilometers away the two cruisers continued to scour the region for the source of the attack.
“Nice flying.”
“Eh…” Morgan rubbed at her neck “…I’m embarrassingly out of practice.”
“Then I’d love to see what it must be like when you’re in practice.”
Morgan stared at her, one eyebrow toying with arching. “Noted.”
Marlee swallowed. Definitely too hot in here. She grasped for anything else to focus on, and belatedly remembered the whole ‘her family and friends being in mortal peril’ thing. She leaned forward to peer out the viewport in concern. “Do you think Caleb and Alex made it out of the blast zone safely? And Nika and Joaquim, too?”
Morgan gestured toward the walkie-talkie. “We’ll know when they comm us.”
Rasu Compound
Nika’s wingsuit deployed to halt her plummet to the ground, where hundreds of Rasu gathered to storm the spire. Too late.
She soared, once again invisible, above a compound in utter chaos. From this vantage, the Rasu seemed almost vulnerable. She only hoped one day soon the impression would become a reality.
As she cleared the outer barrier wall, four missiles soared past her to crash into the crumbling remains of the spire, and she smiled—
—a shockwave slammed into her and sent her tumbling through the air. Her momentum carried her forward while a powerful elemental force fought to drag her backward, into the hungry grasp of the void.
She forced her limbs straight and made her body into an arrow, both to arrest the tumble and to increase her aerodynamic momentum away from the miniature black hole writhing behind her.
The ground spun in dizzying circles beneath her, rapidly at first then gradually more slowly, until it finally settled into place when she’d sunk to a mere fifteen meters above it. Her brain continued to spin inside its skull casing, but she managed to tuck her legs into a ball against her chest, and her left shoulder took the brunt of the blow as she crashed into the ground. She rolled twice and came to a stop flat on her back.
She tried to gasp in air, but her diaphragm refused to respond. Her body convulsed until an emergency signal from her OS jolted the diaphragm back into operation. She rolled over and coughed up dirt and soot until her chest ached so much she was certain she’d cracked several ribs.
Everything hurt, and she was bleeding from multiple locations, but she pushed herself up to her hands and knees and wobbled around to look in the direction from which she’d come.
The spire was gone, along with the rest of the compound and all the Rasu. In their place, a deep crater had been carved into the soil.
A sweet, sweet deluge of messages began pouring into her OS.
A round of high-fives among most of the Advisors preceded a renewed flurry of activity as everyone swept into action. Dashiel wrapped her up in his arms and spun her around in the air. So dizzy.
On her hip, the walkie-talkie crackled out static. “We’ve got your tracker location. On our way.”
Oh, good—a ride. She grimaced and forced herself to her feet,
then tested out each of her limbs in turn.
Time to take this planet back.
Siyane
Marlee snatched up the walkie-talkie and activated it. “Caleb, do you read? Alex, come in, please. Nika? Somebody answer me!”
She could feel Morgan’s curious gaze boring into her, but she didn’t back down. “I repeat, anyone on this channel, come in. The spire, the quantum block and its power source have been destroyed—the entire compound has been destroyed—but there is an increasing number of Rasu in the vicinity. Please respond with your location.”
Her foot tapped impatiently. If any of them ruined the big day of triumph by dying, she was going to be righteously pissed.
A familiar voice filled the cabin. ‘Morgan, please inform me if you require my assistance in any way regarding the operation of the Siyane. Alex says that as soon as it’s safe for you to do so, land about three kilometers to the southeast of the compound. They will pick up the others and come to you.’
“Roger that, Valkyrie. Welcome back.” Marlee flopped into the cockpit chair with a massive sigh of relief. “It’s always like this with them, isn’t it?”
Morgan shrugged. “It’s been a while since I’ve kicked around in their orbit, but near as I recall, yeah.” She kept one eye on the Rasu cruisers in the distance as she descended toward the plains below and eased the Siyane to the ground, her mouth drawn into a frown. “I hope they get here pronto. We are still way too close to ground zero for my comfort.”
“Right. I’ll go below and try to hurry things along.” She maneuvered through a cabin full of shell-shocked passengers, hopefully free of bruises or broken limbs, and headed down the staircase. Once downstairs, she nudged a couple of people out of the way to open the hatch to the engineering well and descended the ladder.
Inversion (Riven Worlds Book Two) Page 40
