“Well, we can take any chicken, no matter how big. Frankly, the idea of a chicken on the fire sounds good right about now,” Mira said.
“Okay. I’ll open, you get ready then.” We filed out into the splashing debris of the hallway where countless battles between beetles were winding down. They were full of salamander, and the room was drying out. Already, I could smell a hint of insect musk in the air. It wasn’t unpleasant. It was disgusting.
“Ready,” Chloe said, her gun level and steady.
“Opening,” I replied, putting everything I had into the hatch handle. It didn’t move, then it did, if only in a motion so small I wasn’t sure it happened. I took another deep breath, rolled my shoulders, and tried again.
“You need a hand, tough guy?” Andi asked.
“I’m—good,” I grunted, the handle moving with a sudden jerk as the bolts were thrown and I felt the pressure of water begin to force the door open. In a tremendous leap, I threw myself to the side, pulling up among the girls as we watched the water begin to flood what had been a muddy mess only seconds before. The beetles were ecstatic. The salamanders, not so much, but then again, being dead has a significant effect on your enthusiasm for swimming.
“If a giant momma salamander comes in through that door, I’m screaming,” Silk said.
“Me too. After I shoot the fucker,” Mira added. “I don’t like wiggly things. Or slimy things.”
“And when they’re wiggly and slimy,” Chloe said, shaking her head dramatically. “No way.”
“That explains a lot about how you are in bed,” I told Chloe, who casually punched my arm without letting go of the cable.
“You weren’t complaining, and you might not get the chance to complain again,” Chloe said with an ominous tilt of her head.
“Usually, I would find that a threat, but if there’s a big momma salamander coming through the door and she’s available,” I said, leering at Chloe and the world in general.
“He’s all yours,” Chloe told the other women, her lips pulled down in a mock frown of disgust. “I don’t see your special lady coming over the spillway, do you?”
I watched the flood with interest. There was a lot of water, but it didn’t seem as chaotic as the previous flowage when I opened the other hatch. “I don’t even see any waterbugs, unless they can move freely back and forth between chambers in the hall?”
“I don’t think so, unless there’s a flooded cable run or pipe, and even then they would get clogged up. Not much room for error. There might just be a natural break in the walls after all these years, and the animals are using it like a highway,” Andi said, looking around for something obvious like a giant crack. There was nothing of the sort, so she turned her attention back to the water.
“I’m going in,” I said, jumping down into the thigh-deep swirling mass. We were wasting time, despite doing something that needed to be done. Nothing bit me, or injected me, or tried to drag me under. “So far so—okay, salamander here.” I cut viciously into the water, beneath the surface. My blade parted the salamander’s body, and the circle of life began playing out around me yet again as waterbugs swept in like tourists at a crab leg buffet. “I think we’re good to go, once the drains keep working.”
“Power is stable now. We can verify the weps and go back upstairs to rest and refit. Some food and a nap might go a long way toward getting us ready for Rowan,” Andi said.
“You think the Vampires are secure?” I wondered aloud.
“We’ll know in a minute, won’t we?” Andi asked. She waited for me to step into the final section of hallway, still draining vigorously. “Can you clear that drain first?”
“Can and will,” I said. I pushed into the water, still wary but more confident, until my boot tapped the drain cover with a metallic ring. I scraped the mat of trash to one side, and the drain began to vibrate as water sluiced down and away from the flooded area, leaving debris and stains on the walls as a calling card of a long submergence. “I think this one filled up a long time ago. Seems like the water’s had time to work.”
“Go to the double door. We need eyes on those softwings,” Andi said, her voice urgent with worry.
“Here?” I asked a moment later. The secondary pumps were humming, and the hall drained faster than a bathtub. The residue was muck, leaves, a variety of beetle shells, and the bones of more unfortunate amphibians who lost the cannibalism game with their beefier cousins. Everything was layered according to density in a kind of time capsule for how life in the flooded hallway had been over the years. It wasn’t pretty.
“Right.” Andi ran a hand over the dripping doorway, the metal cool to her touch. “Seal looks good. Ready?”
“Ready,” I answered. I took the handle and pulled, my legs straining against the door as my ‘bots began to shriek their way through my blood and muscle. “No joy.”
“Let me—oh, okay.” Andi swept her fingers over the tablet, and I heard a distant click. “Emergency locks. Try now.”
I jerked the handle down, skinning my knuckles on the door with a muffled curse. “Well, it’s open.” I rubbed at my hand absently, the door still closed. “Weapons up. If there’s outside access, I expect company in here.”
The door came open, and my breath left me.
“Jack. You okay?” Silk asked.
I bathed in the glory of it all. There were no monsters. There were no roving bands of wannabe dictators or shakedown artists or even old-fashioned criminals. There were only weapons; beautiful, perfect weapons, and the best ones of all had wings.
“It’s glorious. That’s the word. Glorious,” I said. I felt like I was looking at a new baby or an unopened present on Christmas morning. It was all of those feelings and more.
Mira moved alongside me, patting my shoulder. “Easy, big guy, it’s just—oh, yessss.”
I turned my head to regard her face. She was in a moment of rapture. “See? Told you.”
“We can fucking fly?” Mira asked, her voice an awed whisper.
“Fly and shoot and dodge, too. They’re nimble, fly forever, and they can land on a square meter of ground if they have to,” Andi said, her voice ringing with pride.
We all filed in the room, weapons up but at half-mast, too taken by all the wonders around us. If the first armory had been useful, this one was just plain badass. Everything in the military equivalent of King Tutt’s tomb: untouched, perfect, and valuable beyond imagining.
“We have to protect this place,” I heard myself say.
“And we will,” Andi agreed. She looked past me, scanning the smooth floor. “Seems dry. The animals haven’t punched through the outer exit yet. It goes out that way. The entire wall comes away; slides back in two doors to that flat place we passed when we came in.”
“That would give us access to the remains of the road, too,” I said, thinking of everyone we left behind. This facility belonged to the future, and that meant my people. The Oasis.
“Pumps are humming, and we have control of the main boards,” Andi said.
“We don’t control the rats and scorpions, though.” Chloe’s answer was true, if a downer in the midst of such technological beauty.
“She’s not wrong, but I have an idea. Back up to the CC. We can discuss it there, and then we eat, rest, and start using what we have. By the time Rowan actually gets here, it might not matter,” I said, and with a reluctant look, I closed the door to the armory behind us, vowing to fly a Vampire myself if I survived the oncoming battle.
21
The CC was bright and alive with the main screen showing a slow-motion invasion. The three squads of fighters were in new positions, but as expected, not so close as to make me think they were charging in headlong. That was bad.
What was good was the number of people in squad A. “How many bodies there?” I asked Andi, who stared up at the screen. Both Condors were sending back data, though one of them would be landing in thirty minutes, it’s flight time consumed by the lazy eights we’d programmed i
t to fly.
Andi’s lips moved in silence as she considered the scene. “I’d say they had an accident. Or two. Looks like that squad took a beating. Might only be a dozen people left, tops.”
“Send the Condor after that squad first. They’re closest to us, and they’re the weakest. Take out as many as you can in one pass, then send the Condor home. We’ll recharge them while we get ready. Unless Rowan develops the ability to fly, we have at least twelve hours until squad B gets within effective distance of Mira’s gun,” I said.
“Say no more,” Andi replied, her fingers moving in a blur. “Single pass, coming in from the east. They don’t see us.” On the screen, none of the figures moved. The Condor was quiet.
“Is that—oh. Oh, yes,” Chloe said with near sexual satisfaction. The squad separated and ran, but one by one, they fell to the small, vicious guns of the drone. As the Condor wheeled for home, no one was standing. “Got all of the fuckers?”
“All of them. Might have killed some of them twice,” Andi remarked, sending the Condor into an automated return path. “That’s it.”
I exhaled through my nose, thinking. Even though I wanted the invaders dead, killing them had been so mechanical and distant. I felt a knot of uncertainty for the first time since we’d made our plans to fight. “We have to keep these weapons in our hands. At all costs.”
“I know what you mean,” Silk said. And she did. It was one of the reasons I knew she would be with me to the end. She understood the flaws everyone carried, and she knew how to avoid letting them become the end of what we were starting.
“Who’s next?” I asked, tracing a line of approach across the display with my gaze. “B has a hard road, too, but C is hanging back. I think that’s Rowan, now that I look at his approach. He’s letting the others run in with blood in their eyes, and he plans on sweeping up the gold after they soften us up.”
“Exactly. Cannon fodder,” Andi said.
“When the drones are ready again, we send two. One pass each, then hold them in high positions for a reserve run if we need it. Okay, listen up. We have some time, and we need to go into this with our eyes open, but I need you all to play a part,” I said.
They all watched me, listening. It made me think we might survive.
“Good. Here’s how it goes down.”
22
“Sleeping?” I asked Andi.
She ran her hands through hair that gleamed with sweat. “Like babies, except for Silk. She’s just . . . there. She sleeps likes she’s waiting for something.”
“High sense of self-preservation. It’s an occupational tool for her.”
“Sounds about right,” Andi said. We were in the CC, watching the screen while everyone slept. We’d eaten, checked the levels for movement by scorpions or rats, and then settled in to let ourselves enjoy some quiet hours before the storm of battle. Her eyes grew soft as she pulled them away from the screen, and when she looked at me, something was moving in the shadows of her gaze. “Can you kill all of those fighters? If the drones can’t?”
I gave the moment its due, then nodded. “I can. If I don’t, it won’t matter very much.”
“Because we’ll be dead?”
I exhaled through my nose, deflated by a possible outcome that was too much to consider. “Among other things. So will our future. We need this place. We need you. The Vampires. The guns. The reactors. All of it.”
“You mean you need it,” Andi said. There was no judgment in her tone, just a statement of fact.
I was surprised, but not overly. It might seem I was busy building a kingdom, but that wasn’t true. Not even close. “No, I mean we. I won’t be an emperor. I don’t even want to be a—general, or whatever it is I’m doing.”
“And that’s why you’ll be good at it. Ruling, I mean,” Andi said.
“Ruling?” I laughed, and it even sounded bitter to me. “Odd language for a woman from my time.”
“There were kings when we lived. Mostly figureheads, but there was something in our cultural DNA that made them hard to get rid of. I’m not saying I like the idea of a single ruler, but if it’s what humanity needs to push past the stage where we’re barely hanging on, then I’m all for it,” she said. “So are they.” She pointed in the direction of the sleeping women with her bottom lip, then smiled. “You know what the ‘bots actually do? They make you better, not immortal. They—accentuate. The things in you that are good. That’s what they’re made for. You’re good at fighting, but you also make good decisions. So do I. The ‘bots weren’t given to just anyone. Mostly, it was proven officers, people of worth, or even people with skills that were too important to lose. That’s where you came in. I’m sure the military saw something in your profile worth saving, and now, here we are.”
“Not much of a here, but I understand. I never would have seen it in myself, though,” I admitted.
“Someone did. I know I do,” she said. Her eyes twinkled with mischief. “Think you can stay quiet?”
I looked at the lifted brow, the half smile, and the lean of her hungry body. She liked the danger of it all. “For you, I can be quiet as a stone.”
“I only need part of you hard as rock. The rest, I just need to be quiet,” she said in my ear. With a final look over her shoulder, she undid my belt and shoved my pants down in a decisive tug, then spread her legs in a pyramid, bent over, and took me in her mouth, all in one hot, frenzied motion.
I sprang to life in her mouth, every sense on fire as it dawned on me that if I died later that day, it would be with this memory close to the surface. When her tongue swirled, I thought it wasn’t a bad way to go, but then she pulled her own pants off like a magician on stage, spread her legs in an impossible angle, and slid down my length like she was made to be there.
“Small movements. Gotta keep me quiet, right?” she rasped in my ear, her words warm and thick.
“Small movement. Big finish,” I told her, then kissed her with the curiosity of an explorer. I wanted to remember this. All of it.
We moved. Up, down, slowly, together. She wrapped her arms around me, then drew my head into the nape of her neck. She smelled like an undiscovered place I’d been told about before, familiar and wild all at once. In a series of tiny shocks, she began to come, her own pleasure triggering me like artillery. I came with her, all without pulling apart more than an inch because we both knew that a repeat was not guaranteed.
“That’s worth fighting for,” I said, smiling into her hair.
When she finished kissing me for the last time, I watched her make a map of my face, looking at the details. We would carry this second with us, and if we lived, we could compare it to the next time. If we died, we died with more than we had before. It was a compromise between physical need and reality, and it was, for the moment, enough.
23
“All things considered, it’s not a bad way to attack. They’re coming in through that small gully. The storm left some debris, but not too much,” Andi said. She gave me a secret smile, which Silk saw. I’m sure Silk knew that we’d been busy while everyone slept, but she made no mention of it, being a consummate professional.
I began removing my blades and anything that would slow me down, earning a curious look from everyone except Andi. “I know we have a plan, but I’m making a change. That squad,” and I pointed to the screen, where the soldiers crept along in the pre-dawn light, “is about to meet the local wildlife.”
“Rowan is still two hours out, winding his way up the path to the north. He circled all the way around, and he’s going to let his people soak up rifle fire. Quite the hero,” Andi said with disgust.
“So why go out to meet that group, Jack? Why did we install those guns if not to let them do some of the dirty work?” Silk asked. She was right, but she didn’t know my new wrinkle.
“Because I’m thinking for the future, and I want to secure this facility and kill Rowan’s people in one move, if we can. I think I have a way to do it, but it’s. . . an unusual method,�
� I said. I had a pistol, one sword, and no bag. I was as mobile as I could be.
“What are you doing?” Silk asked in a soft voice.
I looked toward the stairwell, flexing my hands. “I’m going to cause a stampede.”
“There aren’t any cattle here, Jack,” Mira snapped.
“Who said I was going to use cattle?” I said. “Be right back. If you hear a lot of noise, you know what to do. Run,” I told everyone.
“Where?” Chloe asked in confusion.
“Anywhere but the scorpion tunnel exit they made on their nightly hunts. Go into the CC and lock it up. I’ll be headed outside at all speed, but in the event this goes sideways, that’s what you do,” I said.
Silk looked doubtful, but she nodded, so everyone else did. They deferred to her without knowing it. The scorpion tunnel was barely large enough to fit through, but it would work, as long as you weren’t under attack by the scorpions. It wasn’t flawless, but it would work. Maybe.
“You’re going to lead the rats into the tunnel?” Mira asked, seeing a possible connection.
“Sort of. I’m leading one rat, anyway. Be right back,” I said, striding out of the hallway into the stairwell. I had no idea if my plan would work, because I know nothing about rats except that they like food.
I didn’t say it was a complicated plan. Just a plan.
With soft steps, I ascended levels until the glare of the first floor hit me, trash and bones and signs of the long-term war between species all around. There were no rats visible, but there weren’t any scorpions around, either, which meant their evening hunt was over. I knew they would emerge due to hunger at some point, and fixing the reactor was the same thing as ringing a dinner bell. The smell of fresh rat droppings hung in the air, an unpleasant note that made the hallway smell somewhere between a barnyard and a swamp. The rats and scorpions had been out for the night. I could sense it.
Future Reborn Box Set Page 41
