by Rick Partlow
Me, I knew now that the Predecessors been chased out of the Cluster by whatever enemy had created the biological robots we’d seen “hatch” out of the seed pod thing on Thunderhead almost three years ago, and I’d found myself wondering if they’d wanted us to advance so we could come help them fight someday.
I guess we’d have to stop fighting ourselves before we could do that.
“It’s fucking freezing out here,” Vilberg complained, his voice quavering.
I looked over and saw him tightening the hood of the jacket we’d loaned him, hands going quickly back into the pockets.
“You’ve been here longer than us,” I reminded him. “Aren’t you used to the weather yet?”
“We never go out without our armor,” he said, a bit defensively. “It’s got heating coils.”
“Wimps,” Victor muttered from somewhere a dozen meters or so back.
I was walking point in our little formation, with Divya behind me, then Vilberg and Victor bringing up the rear. Bobbi had wanted to come, but I’d had to remind her that she was my XO and I needed her in reserve with the ship in case things went pear-shaped for us. Divya had to come to establish contact with the Council’s intelligence source, and I wanted Vilberg as a peace offering for the mercenary company; but for this operation, I was of the opinion the smaller, the better. Divya hadn’t argued, hadn’t said much at all, and I think she was a bit embarrassed by the whole business with us almost getting shot down.
She didn’t seem cold, though, and I thought that had to be a function of her fashionable field wear. Victor and I were wearing the same kind of heated jacket that we’d loaned Vilberg, but we were also wearing our armored tactical vests underneath it, which added a layer of insulation. A Gauss rifle would have made me feel all warm and fuzzy, too, but it probably would have attracted too much attention once we got into the city.
“Are we nearly there?” Divya finally spoke up. I’d been impressed she’d been able to keep up this pace in the dark, even with the enhanced optics in the glasses we’d given her, but it had been a damned long walk.
I reached my hand into my pocket and touched a control on my ‘link and the mapping software hooked to my contact lens displayed the distance and an overhead view of the terrain ahead. I pointed through the trees slightly to the left of the trail.
“You see that glow on the other side of the hill over there?” I asked her.
She seemed to squint at it before nodding.
“That’s the city. It’s about another kilometer.”
Vilberg let out a relieved breath, though he didn’t say anything, probably not wanting to get mocked again by Victor. I wasn’t sharing his feeling of relief; I had my pistol in my hand and was getting a tingling feeling on the back of my neck that only grew stronger the closer we got to the town. Victor had insisted on something bigger than a handgun, so I’d let him take a rocket carbine, which wouldn’t be as obtrusive as a Gauss rifle out here in the Pirate Worlds. He held it across his chest like a totem, and I noticed him walking backwards for two or three steps every few dozen meters just to check the trail behind us.
“Are there any sentries or checkpoints we need to be aware of?” I asked Vilberg. I’d gone over it with him before, but this close to the town, I wanted to make sure there was nothing I’d forgotten.
“Not that we’ve set up,” he insisted. “Like I told you, that’s the kind of thing the Sung Brothers might do on their own, but they didn’t give us an op plan or anything.” He looked around uncomfortably. “Man, I feel weird out here at night without a gun.”
“If the shit goes down,” Victor rumbled, “just get behind Divya. She’ll protect you.”
I snorted at that and even Divya cracked a smile.
“What did you do in the military, Vilberg?” I asked him. He didn’t have ‘face jacks, so I knew he hadn’t been a battlesuit Marine, and he didn’t strike me as the Recon type, though I’d been surprised before.
“I was in Fleet Security,” he told me, confirming what I’d thought. Then he surprised me. “Search and Rescue.”
The S&R Detachments worked in conjunction with the Marines, pulling out wounded troops and disabled battle armor in active combat. They were pretty hardcore, for Fleet types. I nodded in appreciation and mentally adjusted my judgement of the man’s fiber.
It was only a few minutes before the faint glow turned into a glare, drowning out the stars, and the buildings of the town began to throw shadows out into the forest hundreds of meters away. I’d audited Divya’s intelligence report on the place, generic as it had been, so I had a good idea of the layout. Originally, the city had been built according to a plan, with the bars, restaurants, hotels and casinos in the center, housing in the next layer out and industrial areas at the edge of town.
It was a sensible arrangement and, of course, it had only lasted until the next wave of settlers came and built their houses out of the cheapest available material wherever there was land no one else wanted, which was usually past the industrial district. Then those same people opened up their own shops or storefronts or warehouses and those were sometimes past the new layer of housing or sometimes wherever there was a gap between buildings that was in a handy spot.
So now, decades later, Shakak was a jumbled mess of everything mixed with everything else, cheap buildfoam mixed with cheaper local material, businesses next to homes next to storage buildings, and the only remaining constant was that the hotels and bars and casinos were still downtown. That was where the glare was coming from; everything else was dark, even apartment blocks and houses; I only knew what they were from the layout I’d loaded into my ‘link that was being projected over the view in my contact lens.
Most of the city was on what had been a grassy plain about a half a kilometer from the area’s largest river, a broad and deep and winding artery that cut through half the continent. We emerged from the forest on the side of a hill overlooking the edge of the city, the dark structures raising like the crenellations on a castle wall. I crouched down, more from instinct than anything else, my training rebelling at the thought of silhouetting myself.
“Which way?” I asked Divya.
She pulled out her ‘link and held it up so she could see the screen, then panned it back and forth until she saw an indicator light up red on the display.
“There,” she told me, pointing into the industrial district. She touched the screen of her ‘link and ‘cast the directions to mine and I saw a red halo glowing over one of the low-slung warehouses in the middle of a score of others just like it. “You can lead the way, Munroe.”
Her tone seemed subdued, and I noted that she had her compact pistol in her hand. She rarely carried a weapon. She was as nervous as I was. I tried to find that amusing or comforting, but it wasn’t. The city seemed…well, not dead, nor sleeping. It seemed huddled, hiding, afraid.
I shrugged. It wasn’t going to get any better by watching it. I motioned for the others to follow and headed down the other side of the hill.
Chapter Five
There wasn’t too much of a transition between the packed dirt of the trail down the hillside to the slightly harder packed dirt of the perimeter streets. At least there wasn’t much mud, which was a nice change from many of the Pirate Worlds we’d visited, but I figured that was because most of the free water was frozen. Icicles hung off of the eaves of houses and clung to the metal gutters off warehouse roofs, and where the wind touched my face it was still bitterly cold.
Wire fences surrounded some of the warehouses, three meters high and probably linked to security systems, the coating of ice on the chain links reflecting winks of light from deeper in the town. Nothing seemed to stir inside them, and I wondered if they were even in use. Passing through the outer layer of buildings, I began to see the effects of what was happening here. More warehouses or factories or whatever were in the next row, but half of them were in ruins, collapsed or burned or exploded, their wreckage scattered halfway into the road, the fences
ripped or cut. No smoke or dust rose above the remains, and from the look of the ice coating the chunks of stone and buildfoam and the splinters of wood, I thought the damage had to have been done at least several days ago.
Some of it had spilled over to the smaller row-houses squeezed in-between the industrial buildings and a few were totally burned out, blackened husks picked clean of anything useful. Others had just been damaged, a corner of a roof caved in or a window or door boarded up around sloppily-patched holes from bullets or rockets or fragments.
I caught a flicker of movement in a house that was half collapsed in on itself and I held up a fist and stepped farther into the shadows as I took a knee. The enhanced optics in my contact lens turned the interior of the ruined building from a blob of darkness to a blob of hazy green, which wasn’t very helpful. There simply wasn’t any detail to see, just a jumble of fallen rock and wood and buildfoam scraps. I watched it for a moment, hoping for clarification, but I saw nothing.
Maybe it had just been a trick of the shadows.
No. There.
It was just the briefest flash, the white of a light-skinned face barely visible under a dark, hooded jacket, but I saw it clearly. Maybe it was nothing; but then again, maybe it was the scout for an ambush. I motioned to get Victor’s attention, then signaled that I was going to take a look inside the building and I wanted him to wait there. He flashed the “okay” and waved at Divya and Vilberg to get back farther out of the street.
I held my pistol at low ready as I crept closer to the wreckage of the narrow, shabby, little house, trying to keep my eyes on it while also not losing sight of my surroundings. Rotten, half-burned wood creaked under the soles of my boots, and bits of concrete clattered away as I dragged my feet over the uneven surface, sacrificing stealth for stability. They knew I was here, whoever they were; they’d been watching me.
Things became clearer and more distinct inside the house as I ducked under an overhanging roof fragment and stepped over the threshold. What looked like it had been a hand-tooled wooden bedframe was broken and charred on the other side of a collapsed interior wall, whatever had made up the mattress burned to nothing. What might have been a table was resting on the stubs of two legs against an exterior wall, but no other furniture had survived whatever vultures had descended on this place…so there wasn’t really any place for the kid to hide.
He crouched in a corner, partially shielded by a fallen section of concrete block wall, hugging his knees to his chest. A blanket lay next to him, stretched out on the floor as a pallet, and beside it was a plastic bottle half full of water. I couldn’t see much under his heavy, dark-grey jacket except a sliver of his face through the hood. It was lean and grey-eyed and sharp-angled and maybe twelve years old at the oldest. A shock of red hair fell across his forehead and a look of utter, desperate hopelessness was fixed on that face.
I sighed out a breath and shoved my pistol back into its holster.
“Are you alone here?” I asked him.
He nodded jerkily, barely looking at me.
“Was your family in here when…” I trailed off, gesturing at what was left of the house.
Another nod. I felt a wrenching inside my gut, thinking of my own son back home, much younger than this boy, and what it would do to him if I didn’t come back. I reached into an interior pocket of my jacket and pulled out the protein bars I’d stuffed in there before we’d left. I didn’t know if he’d be afraid to take them from me, so I dropped them next to him. He looked at them, back at me, then back at the bars for an instant before he snatched them up, shoving two in his pocket before ripping open the third and devouring it in seconds. He only paused to take a sip from the bottle of water before finishing it off, then licking the inside of the wrapper.
“If you want to come with us,” I said hesitantly, “I’ll try to find someone who can take care of you.”
I didn’t know who the hell that would be, but I couldn’t just leave him here, not if I wanted to be able to look at myself in the damn mirror.
His eyes darted toward the street just a microsecond before I heard the engines. They were old, obsolete, probably alcohol-fueled and undoubtedly fabricated locally out of whatever scraps people could get their hands on. They were revving hard, not just cruising down the street to get from one place to another; the sound was angry, dangerous. I pulled my pistol and held my other palm up to the kid as I turned toward the exit.
“Stay here,” I told him. “Stay down.”
I hopped gingerly across the rubble, reaching the street just as the cargo trucks roared by me, their headlights dark, figures huddled in the open beds with what looked like rifles cradled in their arms. We were less than a hundred meters from our destination and I was hoping, nearly praying that they’d keep on going, but the trucks skidded to a halt nearly right in front of me with a squeal of poorly-maintained brakes. The rear loading gates slammed downward and the troops inside piled out with a heavy thud of boots on the packed dirt and a gleam of light reflected off the metal of bare, cybernetic arms and legs.
They were all cyborgs, and I knew what else they had to be: Skingangers. Evolutionists, they called themselves philosophically, but these guys were carrying too many guns to be philosophers. Evolutionists thought the future of humanity was in cybernetic enhancement and replacement; they rejected flesh in favor of the permanence of metal and circuitry. Skingangers financed that rejection via organized crime: dealing in drugs, illegal Virtual Reality, assassination and Ripjacking---kidnaping transients and selling off their organs for cheap transplants.
What the hell they were doing here in Shakak, I had no clue.
Once all of them had vacated the vehicles, the trucks roared to life again and aimed straight for the fence barricading one of the smaller warehouses. There wasn’t room enough to work up much speed, but they were heavy and powerful and they pounded into the chain link abreast and took it down with a screeching rip of metal. The Skingangers pressed in behind the trucks, squeezing through the gaps on either side where the fence had been torn away from the support poles, heading for the front loading dock, scrambling up the ramp to the cargo doors.
Those doors swung aside seconds before the Skingangers reached them, and a blinding, persistent flash erupted in a solid line of ionized air, chopping through the front line of cyborgs and blowing them backwards.
Gatling laser, I thought clinically. This is a trap.
They flowed backwards like a wave away from the incoming laser fire, some of them shooting back with their heavy rocket rifles as they retreated. The Gatling laser sliced through the cabs and engines of the cargo trucks, flares of burning fuel and vaporizing lubricants spraying from the fist-sized holes punched in the metal of the engine covers. The Skingangers ran behind the trucks for cover and when they did, the Gatling laser fell silent and the soldiers inside the warehouse poured out of the loading dock doors.
They were dressed in identical black armor and visored helmets, the front rank laying down suppressive fire with pulse carbines. I’d seen them before, on the moon of the gas giant; they were Savage/Slaughter mercenaries, Vilberg’s unit. More of the Skingangers fell to multiple hits from laser-fire, and others shrugged off blasts that caught them on their bionics, but a couple laid down covering fire from behind the trucks while the others fell back…right into us. A few ran down the edge of the street, while others were ducking between buildings, looking for better cover.
“Fall back!” I yelled at the others, seeing Victor staring at the scene wide-eyed like he didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.
The kid. I couldn’t leave the kid there. I dashed back inside the house just in time to see him disappearing through a door at the back of the building and I cursed under my breath. I clambered through the debris with desperate speed, nearly slamming my head into a sagging support beam, squeezing through the partially blocked doorway into the back room where I’d seen the boy disappear. The room was small and filled with ash and broken concrete, but one co
rner had collapsed and there was a narrow gap in the block wall there that led out into the darkness.
The boy thought he could get out the back safely, but there had been Skingangers heading that way, and if the mercenaries followed them… I really didn’t want to stick my head out through that hole with people shooting at anything that moved, but I also didn’t want to see that kid’s dead body lying on the ground.
“Shit,” I hissed.
I put my left arm through first, figuring that if it got blown off, I could still shoot back, and braced my hand against the rough, broken concrete of the exterior wall. I scraped the hell out of my shoulder, but I was able to use the leverage to pull my head and right arm through at the same time, pushing my gun out in front of me and kicking free to land on my side on the ground in back of the house.
Shattered fragments of concrete dug into my side and back, but I ignored the pain and rolled into a crouch just in time to almost have a Skinganger run straight into me. It happened fast and I think the only reason I didn’t get shot was that he was too close and I was able to grab the barrel of his carbine before he could shove it in my face. He was a tall man with a pair of glowing red, artificial eyes and a mouthful of sharpened, metal teeth and he was drawing back his hand to take a swipe at me when I shoved the barrel of my pistol under his chin and pulled the trigger.
His head didn’t jerk back, probably because of the cybernetic reinforcement to his spine, but the top of his skull exploded in a fountain of blood and brain matter and he stumbled backward a step before he toppled backwards and crashed like a felled redwood. I didn’t try to pry the carbine out of his hands; it would have taken too long and the cybernetic fingers wouldn’t loosen at all in death. I just took off down the alleyway to the left, figuring that was the way the boy would have run since it was away from the fighting.
