by Rick Partlow
“Do you speak English?” he asked her, his voice dry and raspy. He needed a drink, and at this point, he’d even take water as a second choice.
“Some.” The word seem to wrestle its way out of her, like it hurt to say it.
She was, he decided from close range, one ugly mother, even for a Tahni.
“We gotta’ get out of here.” He motioned towards the distant hole in the garage door. “That’s the most direct way out, but the shit’s going down out there. And there’s your boy somewhere over there, too. But I’m going that way, so I’ll cover you. If you head back,” he explained, motioning up the hallway, “you might run into more of Jordi’s people, and I don’t know that you’ll find an open exit…and you’ll be on your own.”
She was silent for a second, and it seemed to be entirely too long of a second for Abel Freeman. His eyes darted back and forth, sure that Vala-Kel would spring out of the shadows any moment and lunge at him.
“I’ll go with you,” she decided finally.
“All right,” he sighed. He turned back towards the front, left side-on, revolver extended like an old-time duelist. “Follow close.”
The noises from outside were getting louder, closer, and he knew that meant the fighting was going to be in their laps soon. He sacrificed caution for speed and led the Matriarch up the left side of the garage, trying to use the two rovers parked end to end there for cover. He glanced beneath and inside each of them carefully as they passed, wary of an ambush, but there was none. Nothing moved, nothing but the eddies of smoke curling through the gap in the roll-up doors, and the shadows flickering in the light of the slowly-dying fire.
Then there was a sound, somewhere off to his right, the grinding hum of servomotors, and for a second, he thought that someone had remotely triggered the garage door, that it was about to open and expose them to the violence outside. But no, the door remained motionless; the sound was coming from somewhere closer than that, somewhere by the cargo truck…
A cold emptiness filled his gut as he saw the trollish bulk of the remaining suit of Tahni battle armor begin to shift on its massive, pillar legs.
“Run!” he yelled at the Matriarch, pushing her ahead of him roughly, ignoring her protests.
Her feet were invisible under the hem of her striped robes, but the material flapped in counterpoint with their movement; she could run much faster than he’d thought from looking at her. But not quite fast enough. The battlesuit ducked its shoulder and slammed the rear end of the cargo truck aside, metal crunching and tires squealing in anguished protest on the bare cement of the floor. It had the angle now; it would be on them long before they reached the giant, three-meter high rent in the door.
He stumbled and banged his left shoulder on the side of a rover as he stopped, and he saw the Matriarch look back at him with what might have been uncertainty.
“Go!” he urged her, waving at the exit. “Go, now!”
He steadied himself, then stepped out from behind the rover, levelled the revolver and fired off a round directly at the faceplate of the Tahni High Guard battlesuit. The round hit true, the blowtorch-hot plasma spear igniting right in the center of the opaque visor, leaving behind a dimpled pockmark, but failing to penetrate the thick transparent aluminum of the faceplate. The suit turned his way, the treads of its broad, circular foot pads scraping on the floor.
“Well, this sucks,” he muttered, trying to aim for the same spot again, hoping maybe he could weaken it enough that…
Whatever he was hoping, the powered armor moved faster than his trigger finger. The last thing Abel Freeman saw was a massive, metal fist swinging downward at his head, blotting out the light forever.
***
Kan-Ten nearly plowed his battlesuit into the pavement of the loading ramp as he stumbled through the jagged rent he’d made in the garage door, and it took him two or three stomping, jolting steps before he regained his balance. The picture the helmet was painting for him was abstract and difficult to read, and it was a long moment before his mind began to filter it through his senses in the old way, to make sense of the data input and translate it into an image he could interpret. It was well before dawn, but the glare of the security floodlights around him were brighter than mid-day, and they illuminated the finest detail of the line of La Sombra fighting positions on the defensive wall that guarded the Constabulary’s perimeter.
He was looking up at them from the bottom of the ramp; the garage entrance was sunken nearly a full story below ground level and steps led up another two meters to the fighting positions set in the ten-centimeter-thick duralloy reinforced concrete of the wall. There were two soldiers in each of them, armed with weapons stolen from his people, firing out at the forces Sandi and Ash had brought with them from the asteroid belt. He remembered that Jordi used to stress uniformity, professionalism, each soldier in the same khaki fatigues, carrying the same weapon. These troops were dressed in piecemeal bits of civilian clothes and old military uniforms and whatever else they’d come across that struck their fancy, like the criminal gang they were, rather than the army Jordi Abdullah had wanted them to be. If Kan-Ten had as much as a light KE-gun, he could have killed every one of them in minutes.
As Fontenot says, I guess we’ll have to do this the hard way.
The turbines screamed, loud and close enough that their vibration blurred his vision, and the armor bounced upward shoulder first, straight into the nearest fighting position. The suit slammed into the unyielding concrete of the wall hard enough to crack it, hard enough to bounce Kan-Ten’s head off of the padded lining inside the helmet, but between armored shoulder and reinforced wall was the fragile form of a human. Bones splintered and organs ruptured and what slid down off the edge of the platform was bent and folded in ways no human body ever should have. Kan-Ten couldn’t tell if the thing had been a male or female, could barely tell it had ever been alive.
The other cartel soldier in the fighting position was screaming, face covered in blood and contorted in horror, his KE-gun hanging forgotten in one hand. He tried to jump off the platform, desperate to get away from the leering metal golem, but Kan-Ten lashed out with instincts he’d forgotten he had, grabbing the human by the skull and catching him in mid-air, his legs dangling down, kicking helplessly. Kan-Ten squeezed his hand into a fist and the skull burst between his fingers. He let what was left of the human drop the two meters down to the pavement, not looking at it, grateful the suit didn’t pass actual sensations through the skin of the giant, metal fist, not because he feared it would fill him with revulsion…but because he feared it wouldn’t.
The suit teetered on the ledge of the fighting platform and Kan-Ten grabbed at the top of the wall, steadying himself as he looked out across the open fields between the Constabulary and the spaceport. He knew the mercenaries Ash and Sandi had brought in were out there, but he couldn’t pick them out on thermal or infrared, not even with the security floodlights blazing; whatever stealth armor they were using, it worked superbly. Their weapons were low signature as well, probably the Gauss rifles the Commonwealth Marines had used during the war; he heard the loud cracks of electromagnetically launched slugs smacking into the wall all around, but there was no trace of their source.
What he could see, jagged and angular and half-buried in a mound of plowed-up dirt, was the lander that had brought the mercenaries down from orbit. It lay twisted, and shattered, and inverted a hundred meters or so away from the wall, smoke roiling up from the tattered and shredded portside wing.
He was frozen with indecision for a moment. He knew that either Sandi or Ash would have insisted on flying the lander, which meant one of them could be out there, trapped inside the wrecked aerospacecraft. But he also knew that the mercenaries they’d brought in to take the fortress wouldn’t have a chance of making it past the wall without his help. He decided that Ash or Sandi, or whoever was flying the lander would have wanted him to put the success of the mission first. Though, he realized, if it was Ash in the lander, Sa
ndi would want Kan-Ten to rescue him, and vice versa.
Tahni didn’t have the same concept of profanity that humans did, but he’d picked it up from Fontenot over the last few years, and it felt very satisfying at times such as these.
“Shit.”
He knew what he was going to do: he’d take out the next two fighting positions, make a gap in the defenses the attackers could exploit, then he’d go check on the pilot while the defenders were occupied. That felt correct, ethically and tactically, like something Fontenot would do; he was flexing the knees of the suit, getting ready for a jump to the next platform over, when he glanced back down at the cargo ramp and froze in place.
The Matriarch was climbing through the hole he’d made in the garage door, clumsy and awkward, her robes catching on the jagged edges, everything about her face and her carriage speaking clearly of desperation and panic. Someone was chasing her.
“Shit,” he said again, this time trying to put the exasperated tone into it that he’d heard from Sandi. She was almost as good at profanity as Fontenot.
The old female pulled free of the door, leaving scraps of cloth from her robes hanging on the jagged edges, and ran up the ramp to the walkway that circled behind the wall, heading off to his left. Maybe, he thought, she would be okay. The cartel soldiers from that side would be coming towards the garage to meet the attack…
There was a sound like a lost soul crying out in despair as the metal of the garage door was torn and ripped like paper along the length of the hole, and the other battlesuit exploded through the gap, arms spread, blades extended. He didn’t have to guess who was inside it; no one else could use it, no one else would still have the control suit and be in a position to have access to the thing. It was Vala-Kel, and he was turning on his heel, poised to lurch off in pursuit of the Matriarch, and suddenly there was no doubt at all what Kan-Ten’s priorities should be.
He activated the helmet’s external speakers and bellowed loud enough to echo off the fortress walls and across the plains.
“Vala-Kel!”
The oversized caricature of a humanoid paused in mid-step, staring up at him in a stance that bespoke disbelief.
“Kan-Ten,” Vala-Kel’s amplified voice boomed upward, its tone almost jovial. “How appropriate.”
Kan-Ten extended the vibro-cutters from his armor’s wrists, then leapt off the ledge of the fighting platform to meet his old comrade one last time.
Chapter Nineteen
Korri Fontenot tasted metal and blood, and smelled burnt hair and flesh. Someone was carrying her, she realized, and she didn’t want to be carried; she thrashed and struck out, but something just as strong as her grabbed her arms and held fast, and lowered her gradually to her feet. She opened her eyes…well, her eye. The other one was “open” semi-permanently, but she’d been ignoring what it was telling her.
She was in a dimly-lit corridor somewhere inside the Constabulary, and Jagmeet Singh held her forearms tightly, concern in his dark eyes. His sideburns had been mostly singed away along with his eyebrows, and she could see a raw, open burn on his neck. His armored jacket had held up, but leather had been charred away from the duralloy lining beneath it all across his right shoulder.
“Jesus,” she mumbled, her mouth dry. “How bad do I look?”
“Well,” he allowed with a philosophical shrug, “you’re gonna’ need some new synthskin, but the parts of you that were flesh and blood are still pretty much flesh and blood, so I think you’ll be all right. As long as you don’t get a brain bleed from the concussion before we get you to an auto-doc.”
She pulled away from him and looked down at herself; the sleeves had been burned off both her arms, along with most of the synthskin that had covered her bionics. The bare, silvery metal seemed odd to her, somehow, despite the decades she’d had to grow used to it. Wearing the biomechanical cover over the cybernetics these last couple of years hadn’t just changed how she looked, it had changed how she thought about herself. The idea made her uncomfortable, and she shoved it aside, looking around for her Gauss pistol and not finding it.
“Where’s my gun?” she wondered aloud, then glanced around again at the featureless hallway. She felt momentarily dizzy, and only her bionics’ internal gyros kept her from stumbling. “And where the hell are we?” Another look behind them, and again in front; no one was in sight. “And where’s Kan-Ten and Freeman?”
“I don’t know,” Singh admitted. “After Jordi fired that fucking Tahni whatever-the-hell-it-was, the two of us were on one side of a bunch of burning shit, and they were on the other and I couldn’t find my gun, or your gun, or anything but you, and you were basically on fire.” He shook his head, seeming a bit embarrassed if she was any judge of men. “I got you the hell out of there, figured we could regroup when you were conscious again.”
She wanted to berate him for a coward, wanted to yell at him for abandoning her friends, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She didn’t know Singh all that well, but in all her experience, she’d never known him to show fear for his own safety. Which meant he’d been afraid for her, and that thought was so odd that she simply put it aside. She patted at her belt, was surprised to find her ‘link still there and still intact.
“I’m not synched with Freeman,” she explained, scrolling through screens until she found the right one, “but I should be able to tell where Kan-Ten is, assuming he didn’t damage or lose his ‘link.”
A map of the building and the area around it projected out of her ‘link and onto the wall, and she could see the green dot that represented the Tahni’s datalink; it was outside the building and moving…fast.
“The action’s out there,” she said, shutting off the projection. “And we should be, too.”
Singh grinned crookedly.
“Honest to God, Fontenot,” he said, “if it weren’t for all the shit where we were trying to kill each other for a couple years, I might kiss you.”
She grabbed him by the back of the neck and pulled him into a quick kiss, and he was too surprised to resist.
“I’ve lived a long time, Singh,” she told him, letting him go and heading down the hall. “If I ruled out everyone who’d tried to kill me, I’d never get a date.”
***
“God damn it, we can’t just sit here!” Sgt. Arkala muttered, ducking instinctively as another burst of tantalum needles tore up the sand and rock only a meter ahead of her.
She’d left her helmet comms on the command frequency and hadn’t realized it, Jacobson thought. Well, he was giving her the benefit of the doubt there; otherwise, she was showing poor discipline and judgement by whining in front of her platoon leader.
Slightly in front, he thought with a touch of irreverence, and a bit to the right.
Her squad, First, was arrayed in a broad arrowhead, with her at the center and him just behind, while Second was out to their right in another wedge-shaped formation. His Platoon Sergeant had gone with the other squads in the lander that was hitting the reactor, and he hoped the man was having an easier time of it than they were. He glanced back at the wreckage of the lander and winced. It was possible Commander Hollande was alive back there, but if he sent his people to get her out, they’d be cut to pieces.
“Sgt. Arkala,” Jacobson chided gently, aiming his Gauss rifle as he spoke, and carefully firing off a round that actually grazed the emitter of one of the cartel KE-guns, sending up a shower of sparks and making the man withdraw back beneath the rim of his firing position. “If we charge that wall willy-nilly, this stealth armor won’t do a damn bit of good; they’ll see us in two seconds and we’ll all be dead.”
It was a good thing Captain Alcala had the foresight and initiative to bring the Gauss rifles along in the Warlock’s armory; this mission was supposed to be all low-gravity or micro-gravity, which was why they’d gone with pulse carbines. Firing a high-signature weapon like that down here would have been like tacking a “Please shoot me” sign on their backs. When the Captain had told
him about the electromagnetic slug-shooters, Jacobson had felt like his birthday had come early.
“Second Squad,” he transmitted to Sgt. Petrucci, off to his right, “move up ten meters, maximum stealth speed.”
That wasn’t just a buzzword, it was a calculated speed of how fast these suits could move in certain light conditions without being seen. They were expensive, and uncomfortable, and not as effective as regular armor at actually protecting them from projectiles, but the light-bending, sensor-absorbent tech made it a trade-off he was happy to accept at the moment.
“Moving,” Petrucci confirmed.
“First, lay down covering fire,” he added.
Privately, he agreed with Arkala; this was taking way too long, and the longer it took, the more could go wrong. They didn’t have air cover anymore, and damn it, someone was supposed to break through that garage door and give them an opening…
Something moved on the wall, something big. Jacobson zoomed in with his helmet optics, focusing on the fighting position at their 12 o’clock, the one that had been pinning them down for minutes now. A gargoyle figure loomed over it, towering a meter above the edge of the parapet, grey and massive and splashed with patches of dark red fluid that might have been blood. It was, he realized with a sudden clenching of his gut, a Tahni High Guard battlesuit. He hadn’t seen one since the war, but it wasn’t something you’d forget.
Shit.
He kept the curse silent and private with a great deal of effort. If the cartel had scrounged up battlesuits, they were all as good as dead; the Gauss rifles wouldn’t even scratch their paint. He was about to order a general withdrawal, but paused as the powered armor suit shifted, raising its oversized left arm. Something dangled from the fist, jerking and thrashing wildly, something that looked very much like a person. Jacobson’s eyes went wide when he saw the blood squirt through the claw-like fingers, saw the dangling figure go still. The mechanical hand opened and Jacobson felt his mouth curl in a scowl of revulsion at what was left of the man’s head.
