They were capable of so much destruction in such a short amount of time because of their peculiar limbs. Take our shields for instance. Usually, it would take a hell of a fight for a ground walker to whittle down my shield energy. Centis though, they were able to hit a target one hundred times a second, a barrage of dagger fists all hitting a Marine’s shields at once. It could tear through a standard Marine’s suit in the blink of an eye. It was devastating to hear about the Centis, and now we were going to have to face them.
“There are Centis in this region?” I crossed my arms over my chest. “Are you sure about that?”
“Pretty sure,” Claire nodded. “I ran a diagnostic scan of the earth particles here and found trace elements of Centi DNA. “
“Which is far from conclusive evidence,” Mina murmured. “It only means they’re on this moon, which we already knew. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a lot of ground to cover here. We were on it for a long time before, much longer than we expected, and we never saw a hint of a Centi.”
That didn’t surprise me. Centis were nocturnal, dangerous and, most of all, under the radar. In fact, these recent studies showed that Centis are so opposed to attention and confrontation that they aren’t likely to attack unless they feel threatened; a real rarity in the Acburian world.
Unfortunately, the crux of this plan rested on us not only finds Centis but making them feel very threatened.
“There are ways to draw them out,” I said, nodding at Mina. “They’re nocturnal, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t drawn to light, specifically strobe lighting.”
“Of course, they are.” Mina sighed loudly. “So, if I’m right, you expect us not only to sit out in one of the most dangerous places in the whole of the universe, but you also expect us to do some cattle call for some of the deadliest creatures that have ever existed.”
“No.” I shook my head as I stared at Mina. “I expect me to do it. You’re going to take Rayne to safety.”
“The hell I am,” Mina growled, her eyes and face every bit as steely as the suit she was wrapped in right now. “I’m not a babysitter, Mark.”
“I didn’t say you were,” I answered, punctuating it with a sigh. “In case you didn’t notice, this isn’t exactly some run of the mill individual. She might very well be the most important person in the universe.”
Mina looked uneasily over at Claire. “Leave us.”
“Is that necessary?” I asked.
“More than you know.” She crossed her arms over her chest, mirroring my stance.
Claire grimaced but did as she was told.
“What the hell are you doing?” Mina asked as soon as Claire got out of earshot. “You know that neither she or Jill are privy to that information. Rayne’s identity as well as what she’s doing here is highly classified. Didn’t you hear that douchebag Reynolds?”
“I couldn’t give a fuck about Reynolds or what is and isn’t classified,” I barked. “You know how I feel about this kind of stuff. If someone is going to risk their lives for a mission, they damn well deserve to know what that mission is about.”
“Easy for you to say,” Mina retorted quickly.
“Is it?” I asked, honestly confused.
“You’re untouchable, Mark,” she shot back. “You’re a goddamn deity in the Halls.”
“A deity that almost got killed alongside the rest of you,” I pointed out.
“But you didn’t, and the reason you didn’t is just more proof of how above it all you are. If I had my suit with me at all times, I could have snapped out of that pod just as easily as you did.”
“You think that was easy for me?” I dropped my arms and moving closer to her. The heat of this conversation was starting to get to me, and as I neared Mina, I could feel the heat of her as well. It practically radiated off her body as she stared at me, fire bouncing from her eyes. “I about near shook my organs right out of my body.”
Mina dropped her stance as well before poking me in the chest with a gauntleted hand. “Well, maybe that’s because you didn’t do it right.”
“And you would?”
“Does that surprise you?” Mina scoffed. “I can’t imagine you’ve forgotten just how well I can control my body.”
Heat rose in my face, and I swallowed hard, images of the nights we had spent together running through my mind. She was right. She was a damn magician when it came to controlling her body. I had slept with a lot of people, including more than one Olympic level gymnast. None of them held a candle to the woman in front of me right now.
“I definitely have not,” I conceded, “though you might remember that I’m no slouch either.”
Mina swallowed hard. “I’m staying. Send Jill and Claire deeper into the cave system with Rayne. They can watch over her almost as well as you and I could. We need to collect the blood of the Centi-walkers, a boatload of it in order to wake this woman up. I’ll help you collect it, and if we have to wait a bit before the monsters find us, I can think of a few things that’ll keep us busy in the dark.”
Her hand slipped from my chest all the way down to my crotch and squeezed. My body lit up and stood to attention. She leaned in.
“I definitely do remember. Now send those girls away, Mark. You and I are about to go to work.”
16
After securing Claire and Jill deeper into the caves, close enough to the entrance to be accessible and concealed enough to be safe from the hordes we were about to call over us, Mina and I camped out by the wreckage of our ship. We broke out our camp kits, and she reminded me just how skilled she was in all aspects of her life.
When we were finished having our way with each other, Mina lay next to me, uncharacteristically quiet.
“What’s going on?” I asked, looking over at her and nudging her with my shoulder.
Given the fact that neither one of us was a touch-happy teenager, we had taken up enough of the time before the Centis should start to show with fun that we needed to throw our suits back on pretty much immediately after.
“Just thinking,” she murmured, her voice low and almost silent.
“Thoughts are more dangerous than the bugs.”
She shook her head. “They have been lately.”
I sat forward, sighing loudly as the strobe light I had placed on the top of our ship’s wreckage went off, a beacon for the walkers.
“All right, soldier,” I started, clearing my throat. “I don’t like where your head is. Tell me what’s up.”
“Nothing,” she responded.
“Bullshit, it’s nothing,” I snorted back. “It’s dangerous, is what it is. You know how these things go, Mina. Lord knows you’ve been through enough of them. If you’re not one hundred percent out here, I need to know that, and what’s more, I need to know why so that I can maybe help pull you out of it.”
“I’m always one hundred percent, Mark,” she shot back.
“You have been so far, and maybe you could even argue that your less-than-maximum is better than most people’s half-assing, but if you keep up dwelling on whatever this is, we’re in trouble. So be straight with me, Mina.”
She sighed loudly and pulled away from me a little. “It’s stupid,” she admitted, looking at the ground.
“Maybe, maybe not. But, if it’s important enough to be on your mind, then it’s worth talking about, whichever it is.”
Nearly a full minute passed before she turned back to me, so long that I almost reached out to her again. ”My sister had a baby,” she said, pursing her lips together as though this one little fact explained everything.
“Congratulations?” I answered, confused. “Is that a problem for you?”
“No,” she shot back. “I mean, at least not in the cliché way you probably think it is. I know what my life is, Mark. I’m not some gushy woman whose biological clock is pushing her to have a baby above all else.” She nodded firmly. “I’m happy for my sister, but she’s not me. That’s not who I am, and it’s not what my life is ever going
to look like. The truth is, I don’t think I want it to.”
“So, what’s the problem then?”
“It’s what my life does look like, Mark. It’s what it will look like. That’s the problem.” She ran gauntleted hands over her faceplate. “She sent me pictures of the baby, a little girl. She was adorable, Mark. The cutest thing in the world, probably in any world, but more than that, she was pure. And I thought, why am I missing this? I might not want the kids myself, but why don’t I get to be there for that? That little girl is growing to grow up, and the only thing she’s going to know about me is a picture in a frame or some bullshit story she hears in history class. Why? Why is that okay?”
“It’s not,” I sighed, honestly surprised, not at what I heard so much as who I heard it from. These existential questions always existed in one form or another. They plagued the back of your mind and sometimes even tickled at the front, but they never spilled out; at least not once you got as far and went on as long as Mina and I had.
This sort of question was more likely to come out of the mouth of a grassfed who had just figured out what they had gotten themselves into. The fact that Mina was asking it meant she was tired, and that was more troubling than anything I could have imagined. I needed to help her. I couldn’t refresh her, but with any luck, I could feed her the kind of garbage that allows you to let yourself forget the truth of what your life is.
“There’s a reason, Mina,” I began, trying to stay as honest as I could while lying just enough to make it passable. “Your niece, beautiful as she is, needs a safe world to live in. She deserves that. Everyone’s niece does. We’re fighting to give that to them and, with any luck, we’ll get it done. It’s not a great reason, but it’s all we’ve got.”
“It’s a joke,” Mina sighed with derision. “It’s a fairy tale we tell children to convince them to throw themselves into this horrible machine.” She shook her head. “Do you really think this will end with anything outside of disappointment?”
I grunted. “Rayne has a – “
“Who doesn’t?” she growled, cutting me off. “You’ve been around the block, Mark. You’ve seen people bounce the idea of a miracle around before.”
“You’re tired, Mina,” I said, showing my full hand now. “I get that. I understand it better than you know, but this is different. I’ve talked to Rayne. I know the kind of person she is.”
Mina’s eyes narrowed. “How pussy struck are you? Some blonde doctor opened her legs for you, and suddenly she’s the smartest woman who ever lived?” She waited for a beat. “Or are you tired too, Mark?” She chuckled bitterly. “It’s that, isn’t it? That’s the only thing that makes sense. That’s the reason you’re willing to believe this bullshit when you know how ridiculous it is.”
“It’s not, Mina,” I tried to explain, seeking to stay calm and level, even if there was a kernel of truth in it. “This is different.”
“It’s different because you’re different. For whatever reason, you’re not the same as you were either. You have a niece too, Ryder?”
“Don’t be stupid,” I scoffed.
“Stupidity is contagious.” She shook her head slightly. “I guess changes of perspective are too.”
“We are where we are, Mina, and where we are is not in the best place to have these kinds of thoughts. You know the drill. Push it down, bottle it up. Get it done.”
“I’ll get it done,” Mina proclaimed, pushing herself off the ground and looking down at me. She was a vision in the quickly disappearing light. “My girls are on the line, and so are you. I’m just not sure how many more of these I have left in me. It might be time to hang up the old suit after this run, Ryder.”
“I get it.” I sat up on my elbows. “I can’t say I blame you. I’ve thought about settling down back on the family farm more than once now; grabbing myself a wife, growing kids alongside corn.”
“Sounds like a decent life. Is that an offer?”
“It might be,” I replied, “if I thought there was a chance in hell you’d actually take it.”
She smiled. “You know me too well, but I know you too. Farms, kids, fucking corn; you could never be satisfied with that. There’s not enough blood, not enough danger, not enough glory.”
I set my jaw. “I told you thinking was dangerous.”
A loud beeping sounded throughout my mind, and I knew what it was. Annabelle had detected the Centi-walkers. A map of the area appeared in front of my line of sight. They were almost here, and there were plenty of them.
“Not the most dangerous thing out here, is it?” Mina asked, obviously having been given the same information as me. “You ready for this?”
I stood up, shoulder to shoulder with one of the greatest women I had ever known. “Let’s do it.”
17
“Annabelle, how long do we have before the horde gets here?” I asked, watching the Centi-walkers approach from the aerial surveillance Annabelle was providing for me, plucked from Alliance spy drones orbiting overhead. The fact we were getting those feeds now gave me hope I’d be able to get through to Della soon.
From the looks of things, there was at least two dozen of them, all marching toward the still blinking strobe light overhead. Though I wasn’t sure how much blood was needed to pull Rayne from her medically induced coma, I had to think that maybe our bait had worked too well.
Centi-walkers were tough customers from every report I had read and given the fact that Mina and I were on our own here, the idea that we would both make it out of a fight with nearly thirty of them seemed ridiculous. Still, dying would be a small price to pay if it meant unleashing a virus that might kill the Acburian threat.
“Approximately one and a half minutes until they reach striking distance of you,” Annabelle reported.
“What did she say?” Mina asked, looking over at me. There was no panic in her voice, not even any uneasiness. Those thoughts of hers, dangerous as they were, were stuffed away, put down just like I knew she would do after our talk. If there was one thing Mina John was, it was dedicated to her girls, her hand-picked squad.
“Not long enough,” I frowned, enough uneasiness in my tone for the both of us. “We’re going to have to work together if we’re going to make it out of this.”
“I can think we can manage that,” she nodded. “It wouldn’t exactly be the first time.”
“It wouldn’t, but given the odds stacked against us, I’m thinking we’re going to have to be more in tandem than normal teammates.”
Mina looked at me quizzically. “I’m not sure I understand what you’re talking about.”
Of course, she didn’t. There was no reason she should know what I meant. What I was about to suggest would have been impossible a few weeks ago. Before my little upgrade, it would have been unimaginable. Things were different now though, and the impossible was practically ordinary.
“Let me inside of you,” I said plainly.
Mina blinked at me. “I … I think we’ve covered that base more than once at this point.”
I grinned. “That’s not what I meant. Your operating system, it’s a level below mine.”
“A fact you are constantly reminding me of.”
“Because it’s always important. I couldn’t have given you access to your suits if not for this Second Battalion tech, and I couldn’t do what I’m suggesting now without it.”
“Which is what exactly?” she asked me, biting her lower lip.
“My system has the ability to override yours. I can put Annabelle in control of your suit and, theoretically, it would allow us to move as one. It would let us work like we were the same person.”
Mina glared at me. I knew what I was asking her was no small request. For people like Mina and I, the voices in our heads weren’t surface things. They were a piece of us. Mina’s operating system was every bit as important to her as Annabelle was to me. Asking her to give that up, to give up what amounted to the driver’s seat in her own suit, was like asking her to give up her e
yes, to give up her arms, to give up her name.
But we had our backs up against the wall. I couldn’t afford to lose this fight, and I definitely didn’t want to lose her. As far as I could tell, this was the most likely way to ensure that.
Still, I knew it wouldn’t be easy for her.
“You don’t need it, do you?” she asked, swallowing hard.
“Thirty seconds, Lieutenant Ryder,” Annabelle said into my headspace.
My body tensed as I replied to her question with one of my own, “Need what?”
“Your suit, your operating system; it’s strong enough to overtake mine without my consent, isn’t it?” She didn’t need to ask because we both knew the answer.
“It is,” I confirmed, nodding and giving her the time she needed to process that, even though we didn’t really have it to spare.
It must have been strange for her, and more than a little hurtful, to understand that even after all she had been through in her uber illustrious career, she was still second fiddle when it came to the Alliance.
She had given so much of her life to this cause. She had missed so much, including the birth of her niece. She thought of herself as the best at what she did, and to her credit, she might have been. She was every bit as good as me. She was even more of a team player than I had ever been, and Lord knows I wouldn’t have been able to move past the death of a spouse and continue the way she had.
Still, I was the one with fifty completed missions, the top of the leaderboards there. More importantly, I was the one who had been given the upgrades before any other Infinity Marine, the sole member of the Second Brigade. Whether right or wrong, no matter who was truly the best, I was the one that had been chosen for that honor.
“And would you?” She glanced over at me, looking for the truth in my eyes. “If I said no to you right now, would you take my operating system over anyway?”
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