Earthfall

by Joshua Guess

  I didn’t say anything, which caused everyone to look at me.

  “We’re definitely going to die,” I said. “Couldn’t have asked for better company.”

  There was a round of gentle slaps on helmets, a moment of pure and beautiful acknowledgment. For a few seconds we were all the same, just people doing something dangerous so other people didn’t have to live in fear. We all faced the same risks, and there was no rank dividing us. No nationality, no planet of origin. For that little slice of time, I was just a person dumb enough to put his neck on the chopping block like the rest of them.

  Then our makeshift boat floated on its bed of black Sand through the mouth of the monstrous wall, and we were swallowed by the shadows.

  Twenty-Six

  To my surprise, we made it almost entirely through the massive passageway without incident. Not that my ass wasn’t clenched the entire time, because it absolutely was. In the countless movies I had obsessed over, the time from one step of the plan to the next was always instant. We went into the tunnel and, according to the logic of stories, we would pop out the other side in moments.

  Instead it was two hours of tension and fear, plenty of time for more Gaethe to show up and smite the living hell out of us. The neurotoxin was designed to stick around for about a day before rapidly decomposing into inert material, but of course the enemy had sealed armor they could wear. That stuff was rated for space, which meant the toxin wouldn’t be a bother for them at all.

  This part of the plan relied on a lot of moving pieces to create as much chaos as possible. The huge volume of Sand being controlled by Jax lashed out down side corridors and into nooks where cameras and other equipment could be found. He destroyed all of it in a rolling wave, everything he could reach. That included utility lines, which made the darkness nearly absolute.

  The Gaethe elected not to send any soldiers against us, and it wasn’t hard to see why. They probably had no idea what the neurotoxin was, and that was bound to make them cautious. No race capable of travel between star systems lacked for bravery, but by the same token they knew how to manage risk. Assuming they knew about the Sand running through the middle of their city like black blood in a vein, I wasn’t surprised they kept their soldiers back. Attacking the flood would only melt small portions and was likely to cost a lot of lives.

  Of course, that was all after the fact. During the trip I went from being on the edge of my seat in anxious fear to hovering a few notches above normal. Human beings aren’t made to endure endless emotional highs—not even the ones made by other humans.

  When the Sand reared back in front of us like a startled animal, a few miles from the other side, a smattering of enemies in armor laid out in front of us, it was almost a relief.

  “Captain?” Williams said.

  Before Rinna could respond, a dozen wrists rose up and turned into miniature suns. Jax shielded us from the assault, piling a barrier up before the heat slagged our transport. I found myself wishing the damn thing had a top on it.

  “Look at the readings,” Durham said, seeing the same data I could. “Those suits are putting out way more power than I’ve ever seen.”

  The tactical overlay showed bluish shadows on the other side of the barrier, and even as Durham spoke, one of the attackers vanished in an intense flash of light and heat. His scream was a single truncated note; his torso vaporized as his suit overloaded.

  “Shit,” Rinna said. “Clear out and fire!”

  I jumped onto a hardened patch of Sand and sighted an enemy using the thin images of the tac display. Jax timed my shots, three-round bursts aimed with his help, to coincide perfectly with small gaps he made appear in the barrier. The second and third rounds in the burst were staggered behind the first to allow it to break through any molten sections of Sand that might interfere.

  My first volley hit home, destroying the focusing emitter of the closest particle beam. That Gaethe ceased to exist from the sternum over on his right side.

  “Do as Mars did and fire through the shield,” Jax said over the team channel. “I will open paths for your bullets.”

  I glanced over to see Williams and Reid trying to climb over the wall of Sand to get a clear shot, which had prompted Jax to say something. I was lucky; the crash course in combat I’d gotten since my arrival had integrated Jax at every step. They were learning it on the fly.

  It became clear after several bursts of shooting that this team had been sent to slow us down and was almost certainly a suicide mission. The readings from their suits were clearly that of overloaded power systems, as if an enemy soldier exploding all on his own didn’t give it away. There was no way they could have actually stopped us, barring a miracle. We had too many advantages.

  From start to finish the encounter took maybe a minute. In that time several tons of Sand were melted down to constituent elements. We loaded back into the transport and sped on.

  “Keep your weapons raised,” Rinna said. “Don’t relax for a second. I think we’ve probably got a welcoming committee out there waiting for us.”

  “Should probably do something about that, cap,” Williams said. “Once we’re in the open this is gonna get a lot more bloody.”

  “Jax, bring us to a stop five hundred feet short of the exit,” Rinna ordered.

  “Yes, Captain,” Jax replied. “Should I refrain from moving Sand outside? I can send undetectable amounts of sensor dust to gather information if you prefer.”

  “No,” Rinna said, and I could hear the grin on her face. “I want you to leave us here, but flood the area. We’re going to use one of our tricks a little early.”

  ***

  I ran through the massive bell-shaped exit and into the light, and my first thought was that no human being had ever made something so beautiful. The draas was different here, less utilitarian and more natural. If I didn’t already know it was a heavily modified analogue falling somewhere between coral and seashells, my first look at the massive seaside boulevard would have made it clear.

  The floor of it shone in dozens of colors like abalone, but across a wider spectrum. It was smooth and hard but not at all slippery, though that might be the Sand composing my feet. All around were benches and tables, even pieces of art, all scaled to fit Gaethe dimensions and appearing to grow right out of the ground.

  Fifty warriors composed of Sand swarmed around me, the tide of black running across the pristine structure failing to lessen its magnificence. If anything, the contrast only highlighted it.

  Of course, the small fleet of Gaethe gunboats parked on the draas with weapons trained on our point of egress managed to spoil it for me. Just a little.

  Blasts of energy lanced through the army of drones around me. I barely slowed as I leaped out of the way of one, then tucked myself into a ball and took a long dive. The end of my roll brought me within a baseball throw of a gunship, but its weapons were impotent in light of the pair of Gaethe soldiers right in front of me. I ducked between them and slithered around.

  My unwillingness to engage in a fight seemed to confuse them. Instead I ducked and weaved, almost dancing in my attempt to slap a hand onto the section of suited Gaethe containing the power source for their armor. I managed it on the fifth try, but the attempt cost me; the other soldier managed to blow off my right leg below the knee.

  I drew up more Sand to replace it and sprinted as fast as I could toward the gunship. I didn’t make it; one of the soldiers put an shot across my legs. I flopped onto the ground gracelessly, my shortened frame tumbling chaotically. In a last-ditch effort I threw a clump of Sand at the ship and was pleasantly surprised to see it splatter home, the missile beginning to work its way across the hull.

  I looked back just in time to see the Gaethe soldier I touched shout in surprise, trying to shove his partner away. Half a second later they both vanished in a familiar flash of orange light.

  “Works like a charm,” I said over the channel.

  Rinna chuckled. “Of course it does. Now get off your ass
and back to work.”

  “Yes ma’am,” I said.

  I didn’t have much faith I’d be able to do much before the gunship cut me down, but I tried anyway. I caught a glimpse of Williams on the edge of my HUD, the floating tag over his suit the only way I could tell it was him. He had three Gaethe soldiers wailing on him at once, and as I watched, two managed to grab hold of his suit’s massive arms. Given a second to plan and react, Jax probably would have dissolved parts of the suit to free him while doing something terribly violent in the process, but the teamwork of the trio was flawless. Even as the flanking soldiers grabbed Williams, the one in the center extended some kind of blade from his left gauntlet and rammed five feet of it straight into Williams’s center mass. Then the gunship shot me in the back, melting my entire body in an instant.

  Had I been in the suit at the time, it would have been a bad day.

  My perception skipped, seamlessly transferring me from here to there. The molten drone suit I had been piloting was still in the process of falling in on itself when I found myself looking at it from the outside. Jax ceded control of the drone to me after I reoriented myself, a handy way of keeping my sudden change in location from screwing up the attack.

  “This is so weird,” Williams said. “I’m here but I’m not.”

  Durham laughed. “Now you sound like me! It’s no different than what we always do, except now we’re doing it remotely. Try to keep up, big fella.”

  Every survival suit had a neural band integrated into it, and since Jax was essentially his own mobile network, giving the team the ability to control suits from a distance was simple. Easier, actually, because Jax didn’t have to deal with keeping a fragile human safe inside their suit.

  We were still back in the tunnel, safely cocooned in twenty meters of Sand.

  “I’ve already taken out two ships and six ground pounders,” Reid said. “You guys are never gonna catch up.”

  The tac display pinged at me just before a large explosion bloomed in the near distance, letting me know the bomb I’d thrown at the gunship had crawled to its target location and done its work. Bomb was maybe the wrong word, since they didn’t actually explode. They were modified dense plasma focuses, small versions of the device used to kick start fusion reactions. Even a tiny bead of gas, when charged and pinched in a magnetic field, could impart a ludicrous amount of energy onto a very small point.

  Though draas was engineered to absorb or reflect large quantities of energy depending on the circumstances, there were limits. Our weapons delivered the equivalent heat of a stellar interior in ten microseconds.

  Right in the batteries or power plant. Oh, that has to smart.

  If you’re going to pick a fight, it’s best to use concentrated x-ray bursts to melt a hole through your enemies. I think Carl Sagan said that.

  Gaethe soldiers exploded left and right as drones tagged them with DPF bombs—why not, it was a fun word—and a few of the gunships began to drift toward the sky upon seeing a mob of ebony drones lay waste to their friends.

  Rinna rushed forward, raising a drone hand to her side with the palm facing down. A rail gun emerged from the Sand, and in a single fluid motion she took up the weapon, knelt, and fired. There was the barest hesitation as she fired, though it was a purely psychological need. Jax was helping her manage the drone; the aim would be perfect. In the two hundred or so milliseconds Rinna took to decide to fire, Jax would have run the numbers a dozen times.

  She took down three gunships before a lucky shot slagged her drone, leaving one more in the air. I saw her tag pop up nearby and noted that Jax was moving another rail gun beneath the Sand. The ship drifted slowly back toward the sea, sunlight shattering on its hull as it did against the water stretching as far as I could see.

  I lobbed two more DPF bombs at it as I barreled toward the edge of the draas platform which ran, as far as I knew, the entire length of the east coast in one unbroken line. The gunners were on point, shooting my bombs out of the air with point defense guns, the projectiles spraying harmlessly through my drone body after destroying my weapons.

  Undeterred, I leaped off the edge and stretched out my borrowed body, latching onto the ship with spindly fingers two feet long and hauling myself atop it. The pilot, to his credit, didn’t panic. I’d seen it happen more than once, pilots losing their cool when something impacted their vessel. It wasn’t an unexpected reaction, just a normal behavior any rational flight program tried to train out of its members.

  The ship prioritized me as a threat, and rightly so. I could have more bombs on me, after all. I didn’t, but they didn’t know that. I’d used up the two handy weapons in my possession, and once disarmed chose to be the team player. The ship rolled and yawed, trying to shake me off. The point defense guns chased my armored form around, but the angle was bad. They weren’t meant to pick off something on the surface of the ship.

  Distracted by me, the crew momentarily forgot about Rinna. I watched her lift the new rail gun on my HUD, continuing my attack right until her shot broke through the hull and destroyed something important.

  Getting blown up was a new experience, one I wasn’t eager to repeat.

  Twenty-Seven

  The center of our destructive frenzy was located over what used to be a town called Charleston. Using the information Shuul handed over, we had known roughly where the other end of the tunnel would lead us, and how far from our eventual goal we would be. Two hundred miles and some change north of the warseed, with a sizable army between us and it.

  None of us had any expectation we could make it to Jacksonville out in the open. The feed from the other assault forces spread across the world made the impossibility of it clear. Our team consisted of five people and a few tons of gear. We were by far the smallest attack force, even counting the teams who didn’t make assault runs on the city walls. Casualty numbers rolled across him vision relentlessly, showing hundreds of soldiers, suited in Sand and not, dying every minute. The human race was making the Gaethe pay for every life lost, but people better trained than me and with more support were dying in bulk.

  Fortunately, we had zero intention of making an obvious run for it. The entire reason we had chosen this spot as a landing point was because it offered us other options.

  I formed a suit around me twice the height of the Titan template, a monstrous beast capable of grappling a gunship. I swept away some of the smoking debris on the shining abalone deck—unmarred by the small battle—and found a section with the barest hint of a seam. The thin spaces between sections formed a wavy, four-way flower shape, the lines radiating out from a central point.

  “Jax, the next part is all you,” I said once the space was clear.

  “Attempting override,” he replied.

  The access in the floor was massive, almost large enough to accommodate the suit melting away from my body. Jax transmitted our stolen access pattern on a Gaethe frequency, and it worked like a charm. Too many movies and television shows with secret bases housed in mountain bunkers created unrealistic expectations. There was no heavy grinding of ponderous mass, however. Instead the deck opened without a tremor or whisper, revealing a wide, long ramp downward.

  A flood of Sand poured down, carrying the transports with it. The flow of Sand from the hole in the city wall never stopped, creating ever-growing mountains of the stuff around us. The majority would remain behind, spreading out and wreaking havoc on as much defense infrastructure as possible.

  When Jax gave us the go-ahead, we moved into the undercity. The term was one of Shuul’s, and wasn’t technically correct. Gaethe had the means to essentially grow their own cities above ground, so for the most part they didn’t bother constructing sites requiring much digging. Instead they grew certain types of structures in the water, where the draas could absorb nutrients more quickly and efficiently.

  When I got to the bottom of the ramp I was again taken by surprise at how gorgeous Gaethe craftsmanship could be.

  We stood beneath the ocean
surface, the wide promenade fifty feet above us and a quarter kilometer behind. Ahead lay a wide, winding tunnel twenty meters wide. The floor was paved in black, the Sand showing us the way forward, but the rippling blue light filtering through the water shone through even that in places.

  The tunnel was composed of a mixture of different strains of draas, with four beams of the traditional white version spaced evenly as support structures running the length of it. Between were panes so clear that if it weren’t for the continual non-drowning I was experiencing, I might have thought they didn’t exist. Spaced at regular intervals down the length of the tunnel I could see before it curved off in the distance were round doorways, one of which led to our destination.

  The few Gaethe we saw as we hustled down the tunnel were bound with solidified bands of Sand. Shuul had urged us not to kill any engineers we found if it could be avoided, as most of them would be disinclined to fight even when threatened. None of us was bloodthirsty, after all, so it wasn’t a hard request to honor. Rigid caste systems were bound to work in our favor at some point.

  Outside I saw ocean life of all shapes and sizes swim by, the water made especially clear by the absorbent nature of the draas, the Atlantic Ocean cleared of floating particulates. Walking through a passageway buried in a sea of water gave me pangs of nostalgia for Ceres. Seeing the offshoot tunnels and what they held, less so.

  Like the stem of a giant leaf, the tunnel branched off with mathematical precision. The smaller branches extended out at right angles, long enough I couldn’t see where they ended. Pods of draas grew from them in various stages of development, from mere buds the size of a watermelon to almost fully grown hulls. When we passed the twentieth of these shipyard stalks with no end in sight, Durham spoke. It startled me a little, as no one had said a word since we moved into the tunnel.