by Myke Cole
“We’re compromised,” Reeves said. “The control room isn’t going to help us now. Those things are out of their cells.”
“That’s not it,” Schweitzer said. “There’s more contacts by the front door where we came in. At least two alive, and at least another three like these.” He gestured to the crippled Golds on the floor. “Look, man. You did great here, but you can’t keep it up. Not against this many.”
He met the eyes of the team around him, saw the question written on their faces: How can you possibly know this?
“I can hear them,” Schweitzer said. “Heartbeats and a . . . scrabbling. The Golds don’t move like people do. Call the QRF.”
Reeves shook his head, stamped his metal foot against the floor. “We fight our way out. I’m not risking any more lives.”
“Don’t risk your own. You killed a Gold straight up. There’s nothing more for you to prove. The mission is scrubbed, so cut your losses and go.”
Reeves held Schweitzer’s gaze for a long moment. A soft whispering reached them, echoing out from the building’s vestibule. More ropes dropping. Scratching followed, like a cat walking on metal with its claws out. “We don’t have a lot of time,” Schweitzer said.
Reeves cursed, toggled his commlink. “White, white. Blue. QRF for extract. We’re sheltering in place.”
Schweitzer shook his head. “We may have to fall back.”
Reeves nodded, the determination that was as close to fear as a SEAL came showing in his eyes. He looked at Schweitzer but spoke into the commlink. “We’ll try to hold to the first deck, but we may have to go deeper.” He pulled out a small metal canister, thumbed the end, and tossed it into a shadowed corner. “I’ve marked our last position. Keep in mind the enemy may move the beacon.”
“Blue, white,” Ghaznavi said. “We’re spinning up the QRF. Going to be a minute.”
Reeves nodded to the team. “Frank, get a munition on this entryway. Sharon, you and Kristine on the other egress. Schweitzer, stick with me.”
Schweitzer heard a click, a metal thud, and the rapid clacking of bone claws. “They’re coming right now,” he said.
“Frank! Put a siren on it!” Reeves shouted, dropping to one knee and letting the machetes dangle from his wrists by their lanyards. He raised his carbine and thumbed the selector switch to the airburst rounds. “So much for keeping quiet.”
Cort knelt, pulling a slender black wedge from a pouch on his tac vest, setting it in the entryway, trailing a wire back to a detonator in his hand. “Not braced,” he said. “The casing is going to go flying.”
“Yeah,” Reeves said, as the first of the Golds turned the corner.
It bristled with short bone spines, thin and curving, looking like the corpse of some giant porcupine. They covered its hands and feet, clacking on the concrete floor, breaking its grip so that it skidded on the smooth surface as it turned the corner, sliding into the far wall. The spines whispered against the cinderblock as the Gold turned, mewling with eagerness, started toward them.
“Boss!” Sharon shouted from the other entrance. “Multiple contacts inbound to my position.”
“Figure it out!” Reeves shouted back. “We’re tied up here.”
Another Gold appeared behind the porcupine, and another. Schweitzer was focused on the nearer threat, registering the new arrivals only as man-shaped flashes of gray. Cort was uncoiling the wire, crouching back as far as he could. “Now would be a good time, Frank!” Schweitzer called, spinning up his buzz saw.
“Fuck,” Cort breathed. “Cover up!”
The black wedge exploded, spraying a cloud of metal balls into the corridor. Schweitzer could see the sparks as they ricocheted off the walls, leaving tiny gray-white pockmarks in the cinderblock. With no support, the wedge spun as it detonated, the plastic black case launching into the air, slamming Reeves’ chest hard enough to activate the cell on his STF armor. The suddenly hardened plate saved his life, but the blow picked him up and launched him across the room, sliding on his shoulders until he slammed into the far wall beside Sharon.
The mouth of the wedge turned as it exploded, the metal balls spraying mostly against one side of the corridor, leaving the newly arrived Golds completely unscathed. The Porcupine was cut to ribbons, scraps of gray flesh and splinters of bone raining across its fellows as they charged forward.
Schweitzer resisted the almost-overwhelming urge to race to Reeves’ side, to help Sharon face whatever was coming from behind. They were hard operators. They would find a way. Ops worked because team members trusted one another to get their jobs done.
And Schweitzer’s job was clear.
Schweitzer raced into the smoke-filled corridor, so fast that a few of the ricocheting balls bounced off him, their force so attenuated that they didn’t activate the cells on his STF armor.
He chopped down with the buzz saw, felt the smoke around him stirring as the Gold in front of him leapt backward into a somersault, legs whipping up so quickly that its feet ripped past mere inches from his face. Cold and dead, the Gold left no heat signature, and Schweitzer squinted through the clearing smoke to catch a glimpse of the creature completing the flip and landing on its feet again, crouching deep, hands spread wide. Schweitzer didn’t see the second Gold and didn’t wait to. He had this one moment while his enemy regained its balance. He wasn’t going to miss it. He crossed the distance so quickly that he could feel the smoke whipping over his shoulders in what must have looked like miniature jet contrails to the operators in the room behind him. He swept the buzz saw down, forcing the Gold to raise an arm to block before it had balanced itself from its flip. It toppled sideways, and Schweitzer only had to change the angle of the blade to send it past the Gold’s guard and deep into its shoulder. He put his good hand against his carbon-fiber forearm and pushed it through until it sparked against the floor. The creature fell in two pieces.
Gunshots from behind him. The rest of the team was handling whatever had been coming through the opposite door.
Schweitzer was scanning for the next threat when it hit him. Burning gold eyes and gray flesh flashed in his vision, and then arms were wrapped around his waist, carrying him into the corridor wall. Schweitzer elbowed the Gold in the back. It shuddered but held on. He elbowed it again, this time bringing a knee up into its sternum, hammer and anvil. He felt ribs crack, and the Gold let go, allowed Schweitzer to kick it back into the corridor, where it stumbled into more gray shapes rounding the corner.
Schweitzer didn’t bother to count the new arrivals. He knew there were too many.
“Reeves!” Schweitzer backed up as fast as he could without falling. “We’ve got to get out of here!”
“We’re clear back here!” Reeves shouted back. “I think.”
Schweitzer finally turned. Smoke boiled out of the rear corridor, filling the room. He could make out the heat signatures of Reeves, Cort, Sharon, and Kristine stacked on the doorway. Schweitzer couldn’t see any Golds, but then again, with the smoke, he couldn’t really see anything.
Thudding of bare feet behind him. There was no time and no choice.
“Go!” he said, deliberately slowing to let the operators into the corridor first. He didn’t know what was ahead of them, but he knew what was behind them. In this case, the devil he knew was not better than the one he didn’t.
Reeves didn’t hesitate. He shoved Kristine into the corridor, then tapped Sharon to follow, motioned to Cort. Getting his people out first. A good leader.
Then the smoke swirled aside long enough for Schweitzer to see the shiny metal nubs on the walls. Some were scorched from whatever explosive the team had used to clear the corridor, but Schweitzer could still smell the liquid nitrogen, see the tiny blue flicker of pilot lights.
“Reeves, No! Don’t . . .”
Kristine was already pelting down the corridor, running heedlessly, all too aware of what was coming
behind Schweitzer. The cloud of liquid nitrogen hit her broadside, first bulling the smoke away, and then turning it into dazzling filaments, curling in on themselves and sawing toward the floor like threads of cotton candy blown on a strong wind. She didn’t scream, merely slowed, then stopped mid-stride, one arm raising to shield her face.
Sharon skidded on her heels, threw herself backward, arms pinwheeling. The freezing vapor billowed out, and Cort and Reeves spun away from either side of the corridor, back into the room that had suddenly become a trap, freezing death before them, rending death behind.
The Golds’ feet thudded behind him, and Schweitzer could hear the whisper of air as the first of them leapt, trying to clear Schweitzer’s dead body to get at the living ones behind him.
Schweitzer grabbed Sharon. She shouted, throwing an elbow into his side, unable to tell if the arm around her belonged to friend or foe. But she was already off-balance and falling backward, the billowing cold of the liquid nitrogen still spraying, filling the corridor with pale white gas and twisting filaments of frozen smoke. Kristine was still in there, arm raised, knee up in mid-stride. Her armor, her vest, her weapon and magazines, her skin and hair, all were a stark, brittle blue-white.
Schweitzer yanked Sharon down to the floor, rolling aside and covering her with his body. The Gold overshot them, hurtling headlong into the cloud of freezing gas, shrieking in frustration as it went. Schweitzer could hear the dull tinkling like shattering glass, Kristine’s remains breaking apart as the monster slammed into her. He could hear the scrabbling of its claws as it spun around, got back to its feet, the high creaking as the cloud of spraying coolant began to overcome the suppleness of its dead flesh, pushing the temperature down below what even the glycerol in the monster’s veins could handle.
It might move fast enough to get out before it froze, but Schweitzer couldn’t worry about that now. He rose to meet the next Gold he knew was surely coming.
Reeves’ carbine barked, three shots in quick succession. Schweitzer saw the vaguely gray shape of a Gold stumble. Its knee was ripped and ragged, the joint separated, no longer able to support the Gold’s weight. Reeves had put three rounds in a row dead center into the creature’s kneecap, a target less than two inches square. The man was good.
Sharon kicked away from Schweitzer, her eyes locked on his face, dinner-plate wide. Reeves and Cort already knew what was behind the mask. Not Sharon.
“I know,” Schweitzer said, leaping to his feet. “But trust me, I’m on your side.”
He reached the Gold in a few steps and swung the buzz saw back and forth, taking first the head, then a good portion of the shoulders, then the top of the thing’s chest. By the time the fourth stroke swept back to split its ribcage, it had stopped fighting and Schweitzer gratefully glimpsed the corridor behind it, empty for now.
He whirled. Reeves, Cort, and Sharon were already on their feet, stepping back a few paces to avoid the spreading liquid nitrogen cloud.
The Gold that had leapt over him had managed to crawl nearly all the way back out of the corridor before freezing solid. It was on its hands and knees, one clawed hand extended, mouth pulled back in a hungry snarl. Glycerol icicles hung from cuts in its hands, gouged by the fragments of what had once been Kristine.
At last, the coolant supply spent itself, or maybe their enemies assumed they were all finished and it was no longer necessary. The spray stopped, leaving the cloud of freezing gas to settle into a dirty rime on the corridor’s walls and floor.
Schweitzer could see that the frozen corridor let out into another T intersection. This time, he led the way, dancing nimbly around the frozen Gold and the shattered fragments of the frozen human, and emerged crouched, saw spun up and ready. Empty. No Golds. No heat signatures.
To the right, a code-locked door opened onto what Schweitzer knew was an access corridor to what Schweitzer assumed were offices, judging by the lack of freeze and burn nozzles on the sections of wall he could see through a narrow window cut into the door. The control room was somewhere back there. Useless to them now that the Golds were already out.
To the left was a larger set of double doors, even bigger than the building’s entrance. Behind them, Schweitzer could see a long, narrow hallway. It went on for about thirty feet before suddenly widening out into a huge space blocked by an enormous plastic curtain, clear but thick enough that Schweitzer couldn’t see through it.
“Clear!” he shouted back to Reeves. “Come on!”
Reeves, Cort, and Sharon cleared the corridor and came shivering out into the T intersection as Schweitzer raced to the double doors and wrenched one off its hinges.
“Maybe try the handle first?” Cort winced at the scream of the metal and the clanging as Schweitzer tossed the door aside.
“I promise you, it was locked,” Schweitzer said, moving through.
The team followed as Schweitzer ran the length of the hallway and pushed through the plastic. There was a faint pattering of bare feet behind them, more Golds, but not close. Yet.
“Status?” Ghaznavi’s voice buzzed in his ear. “Ernest, what the hell is going on down there?”
“Working on an exit. QRF is welcome any fucking time,” Reeves answered as Schweitzer swept the plastic aside, bringing his spinning saw blade up.
A broad concrete pad stretched before him. Six helicopters crouched on it, two giant Chinooks and two Little Birds, all limbered, rotors tightly bound and wheels chocked. A modified Black Hawk was also limbered, draped under camouflage netting.
A solitary Little Bird stood ready to go, toward the bay’s wide mouth, open to the sky and washed with the colors of the setting sun. Schweitzer could hear a heartbeat, sketch the vague outline of a heat signature, a man crouching inside the cabin.
“One contact inside!” He pointed at the helo.
Schweitzer heard a curse, and a man leaned out of the helo’s cockpit, leveling a pistol. He was dressed in jeans and a button-down work shirt, a baseball cap with a curved brim. Not all that different from how Cort and Reeves had looked when they’d first answered Ghaznavi’s call. The Cell and SAD probably dipped in the same pool and had recruited them from the Army’s Special Operations Aviation Regiment as soon as they’d gotten out.
The pistol cracked, the round punching a neat hole in Schweitzer’s saw blade, missing the motor housing by inches. The guy was a good shot and knew precisely what he was up against, else he would have put the bullet in Schweitzer’s forehead instead of his saw. Schweitzer heard gunshots as the SAD operators returned fire, but the man with the pistol was already disappearing back into the helo cabin. Schweitzer heard a rising whine as the helo’s air intakes began to spin up.
“They’re going to take off,” Schweitzer said into the commlink. “That thing’s our ticket out. Can anybody fly—”
“I can,” Sharon answered. “I’m qualled on that platform.”
“Good. Keep him alive if you can,” Schweitzer said. “Intel.”
He launched himself at the helo cabin and was rewarded with three rounds slamming into the chest cells of his STF armor. The cells did their job and the bullets didn’t penetrate, but impact sent him skidding on his back and away from the fight.
Schweitzer could hear the scrabbling of claws and slapping of bare feet. More Golds behind them and closing. Sharon and Reeves were up on their sights, walking slowly toward the helo, ready to put a bullet in anything that moved. Cort was looking at Schweitzer, eyes fixed on the smoking dents in his armor.
“Dude! I’m already dead,” Schweitzer shouted at him, propping himself up on his elbows. “Get in the fucking fight!”
Cort looked embarrassed, got back on his sights, and moved to the helo.
Schweitzer leapt to his feet, but Reeves was already shouting, “Drop your weapon!” The command was followed by three short pops.
“He’s down,” Reeves said over the commlink.
/> “Not out of the woods,” Schweitzer said into the commlink. “Multiple contacts inbound.”
“Living or dead?” asked Reeves.
Schweitzer positioned himself between the hangar entrance and the helo, the air intakes whining louder as the rotors slowly spun up. “Dead. Here in a minute.”
“Shit,” Reeves said. Schweitzer could hear the clicking of switches and the popping of buttons in the background as Sharon worked the helo’s controls.
“No time for flight checks,” she said. “Get on the bird, Schweitzer.”
“No time for that, either,” Schweitzer said, spinning up his buzz saw as the first Gold tore the plastic sheeting aside and burst into the room. It paused for a half second, taking in Schweitzer before focusing on the heartbeats coming from inside the helo.
Schweitzer could hear those hearts too, their rapid beating the only indicator of the team’s stress that managed to penetrate their professional exterior. The rhythm was overlaid by something else, a dull whining and a churning roar, louder than the helo rotors. It was followed by a clinking sound, like links of chain being dragged over a bed of nails.
Or rounds sliding through a magazine well. “Get the fuck out of the way!” Sharon yelled.
Schweitzer dove aside as the helo’s .50-cal cannon’s electrical motor engaged and the barrels spun out two thousand rounds a minute into the hangar’s entrance. Schweitzer felt the bullet contrails skim past the soles of his boots, and then he was rolling to safety. The Gold was caught mid-stride, shredded by the metal storm that swept left and right as Sharon swiveled the gun’s three rotating barrels. Schweitzer heard metal whining off concrete as the bullets ricocheted off the walls and floor, turning the corridor into a blender on puree. There might have been other Golds behind the first one, or there might have not. It didn’t matter. Nothing in that space bigger than a mouse could have escaped.
The sound of the rotors shifted as Sharon pulled on the collective, forcing the blades to take weight and pull the helo skyward. The cannon kept up a steady stream of fire, spinning barrels arcing gracefully downward as it rose. Sharon wasn’t taking any chances, and Schweitzer knew she wouldn’t land for him. He gathered the magical strength in his legs and leapt, shooting into the air higher and faster than the most gifted basketball player in history.
