Zero Rogue

by Matthew S. Cox

  The cyborg fell over backward, stiff as a statue.

  On the A3V, the turret gunner opened up with the 30mm. Considering the elevation and the turret’s inability to shoot down at such a harsh angle, the man’s only motivation had to be making noise to summon aid.

  With a heavy grunt, Aaron rolled the A3V over, upside down. Shouts came from the distance, but against the blasts from the heavy cannon, sounded indecipherable. One man slipped out of the center hatch, dangling and kicking. Distant clanks and tiny explosions rang out from wherever 30mm slugs struck one of the incomplete starship hulks. A great, groaning creak of metal preceded a heavy crash and a massive plume of dust off to the west.

  Once he’d lifted the A3V some thirty feet off the ground, Aaron let go. After a hasty breath, all the strength he’d used to raise it shifted to downward force. Sixteen some odd tons of armored vehicle smashed into the ground, cutting off the endless machine-gunning with a deafening hollow boom. A wall of silt and concussion knocked Aaron and Anna on their backs and coated them with a thick layer of light brown. He found the dirt comfortable in the post-exertive euphoria that came with releasing such a burden from his mind.

  “Well, that’s subtle.” Anna coughed. “Did you intend to drop that thing on the borg, or was that luck?”

  He reached up and wiped clean smears in the dirt over his eyes. “Luv, I made a career out of putting metal things exactly where I wanted them to go.”

  She appeared to be in no hurry to stand either. “You realize you drove two goaltenders into the bottle, one to the looney bin, and one quit, believing himself incompetent.”

  Aaron sat up. “He played for Man U. He was incompetent.”

  A tiny spark hit him in the left ear, about as hard as a finger flick.

  “Ow! Cripes, woman.”

  She zapped him again. “Don’t call me ‘woman.’”

  “Right, bitch.” He rubbed his ear.

  Her hard face lasted only seconds before she cracked up laughing. “Not very fancy, is it?”

  “I’m telekinetic. I pick things up and put them down.”

  Clouds of dust billowed off to the left in the breeze, revealing the blown-out shell of the upside-down A3V. Wobbling walls gave it the impression of a stepped-on synthbeer canister where the ends had popped off. Metal creaked. Anna sat up. Another metallic screech came from the hull, echoing out of what had become a huge resonance chamber. Aaron cringed at the sound.

  “Aaron…” Anna scrambled to her feet. “So do cyborgs.”

  The nose-end of the smashed transport groaned upward. A pair of mauled corpses slid out the back, tumbling to a halt in the dirt mounding by the rear door. Aaron stared in disbelief at the roaring ruin that had once been a gleaming chrome cyborg. Skeletal plastisteel struts peeked out from split Myofiber bundles. Armor plates dangled on loose wires. Both of its eyes glowed red-orange, brighter with the lack of a faceplate. Human teeth rendered in metal lent it a menace that would linger in Aaron’s nightmares for months to come. It heaved and groaned, shuddering as it struggled to lift the A3V off the ground. Whatever it attempted to say came out as a series of digitized warbles and white noise. Already damaged synthetic muscles frayed and snapped.

  Anna stared at the A3V. Electrical arcs swarmed the outer hull, crawling toward the front and down the cyborg’s arms. Aaron yanked its legs out from under it with a telekinetic pull at the same instant an intense white arc peeled away from the wreck, nailing it in the chest. The cyborg slapped into the ground on its back and burst into flames a split second before the A3V fell on it for the second time.

  “That boy had to be a Manchester fan. Keeps trying even though he knows it’s futile.”

  Anna drew in a breath to fire back, but wound up just giving him a sad look.

  Aaron’s mirth drained. He glanced to the right, in the direction of distant shouting. “Aye. I suppose that makes me a Man U fan after all. Come on, then. Let’s get this over with.”

  He trudged down a huge road formed by clear space between rows of colossal construction stations. If enormous lumbering starships had wheels, they could’ve driven the route without touching the stacks of machinery and debris on either side. Aurora’s information placed Talis in the command and control building at the southeast corner of the facility. Metal hulks groaned in the wind all around him. Anna looked up every few paces as if to say something, but changed her mind each time. After a hundred yards, the road ended at an empty berth. Spanning struts crisscrossed the upper reaches of the cavernous trench, bedecked with rotting automatic welders and lifters. Crude totemic fetishes hung by rope and wire in places, twice the size of a man, twisting in the wind.

  A smaller walkway, only as wide as a two-lane highway, continued left from there, past a forest of pipes as thick as his torso connecting a globe-shaped tank to the metal ground. He ducked among them for cover from the source of several voices up ahead.

  Nine figures, five men and four women, wearing piecemeal armor and modern clothing, stood in the open with vacant stares. All gaped at the sky as if the act of breathing had become the most fascinating thing in their world. Aaron levitated a rifle away from one of the women and brought it close enough to grab. She didn’t react.

  One by one, he disarmed the others, sending their weapons floating up to a catwalk ringing the top of the globe tank, well out of reach. After a moment’s hesitation, he emerged from his hiding place and jogged past them. None paid him any mind.

  Twenty meters and a right turn later, he glanced at Anna. “That was… eerie. What do you think she did to them?”

  Anna looked away from him, studying the old machinery. “I’m not sure what she did to them. I’m not a suggestive. I’ve no idea how it works or what it’s capable of.”

  “What about your boy, Archon?”

  “Yes, he’s quite skilled.”

  “How skilled?”

  “Enough to make a snobby bitch of a doctor ‘waste’ her time on a povvy piece of street trash.” She kicked a golf-ball sized hex nut rolling. “Bitch didn’t think I was worth her time since I was on the dole. He made her detox me and enjoy doing it.”

  “I see.” Aaron stared at the back of her head for a moment, wondering how else Archon might’ve tinkered. What Mikhail said about the pyro repeated in his thoughts. His mind stalled with momentary paralysis at a conflict between seeking vengeance for a dead woman and rescuing a live one.

  Someone fired at them from overhead, snapping him out of his mental quandary. Rifles protruded from the windows of an elevated walkway, forty feet up, spanning between two control stations of adjacent build-berths. At least six mercenaries angled to get shots. Two more popped up from behind a mass of scrap metal on the ground, one raised a pistol while the other clutched a small remote control in his hand.

  Aaron’s first instinct sent him running to the right for the nearest cover. He dove and slid on his side, skidding to a halt behind more pipes. Sparks and bell-like rings filled the air as Talis’s personal army unloaded on him. Fortunately, the industrial construction consisted of plastisteel at least an inch thick. Incoming rounds pierced one side, but not the second; eerie whizzing spirals buzzed as the pipe trapped slugs.

  He tucked himself up against the fattest one, fumbling with his purloined assault rifle, not used to a weapon that large, heavy, or ballistic. Anna seemed to have frozen in panic, standing out in the open without moving. By some miracle, not one of the mercenaries fired at her.

  “Anna, get down!” he yelled.

  She ignored him.

  Screaming her name again, he dragged her off her feet and sent her flying into him. Without realizing it, he put an arm around her and rolled on top to shield her.

  “Gah!” she yelled. “What the hell was that for?”

  He hefted the rifle. “You were just standing out in―”

  When the assault rifle fired, it knocked him flat on his back and into the open. He held on for dear life, triggering at the crosswalk without bothering to aim for a sp
ecific person. His ‘fish in a barrel’ technique caused the incoming attack to stall. Anna flipped over and crawled under a low, horizontal pipe. She propped herself up on one knee, releasing a series of lightning bolts at the two men on the ground.

  The one with the pistol howled, but weathered the attack. His return fire made her dive, chest flat to the dirt.

  “I was forcing them not to see me, twit.”

  Aaron shifted aim, still on his back, firing twice at the man shooting at her. He missed, but came close enough to make the guy duck. Amid a temporary reprieve from incoming bullets, he scrambled around to his knees and scurried up against the nearest protective metal tube.

  “Damn, this suit is ruined.” He clicked off another shot or two into the floor of the overhead walkway.

  That time, someone screamed.

  “Telepathic invisibility,” she said. “I was fine.”

  “Oh.” Aaron snapped off a shot at a moving shadow by the ground-level junk pile. “Maybe I just wanted to hold you then.”

  She laughed, sounding unaware of the truth in what he’d said. Aaron caught himself feeling drawn to her, and forced the emotion away. Fate had decided to be cruel all over again. Why bother trying to fool himself?

  Too soon. Too dangerous. Too spoken for.

  A clank rang off a nearby pipe right before Anna shrieked. Blood ran down the left side of her head. She hit the ground in a ball, shouting obscenities. Aaron leapt up, holding down the trigger at the guy she had electrocuted. The massive rifle overpowered him and bucked around wild until he used a little telekinesis to help hold it steady. At least three rounds hit the man in the chest, spraying the struts and narrow pipes behind him red. Blood seeped out of his mouth, and he slumped forward over the debris.

  “Anna!” yelled Aaron.

  “I’m fine.” She pressed one hand into her head, in front of her left ear, pointing with her right at a gouge in the pipe. “Shrapnel graze. Shallow, but it hurts like a bastard.”

  He grabbed her arm and hauled her upright, eyeing the now-abandoned walkway. “Come on, we’re clear.”

  “Where’d they go?” She muttered.

  “No bloody idea.” He knocked a few grimy windows out with brief telekinetic jabs to get a better view inside. “No one’s in that tunnel now.”

  They moved out from the nest of pipes in the direction of the control house. Anna snarled and swung her arm out. Aaron looked toward her as a lightning arc connected her hand to a man hiding behind a mass of scrap metal on the opposite side, holding a little boxy device. Her left cheek glistened red from an inch-long cut between her ear and eye.

  “Sons of bitches,” shrieked Anna, as she added more power to the bolt.

  Coppery ozone settled on Aaron’s tongue as the aura of energy surrounding her intensified. Aaron cringed a step away and winced at the sight of the man at the wrong end of her lightning. Froth bubbled out of the man’s mouth, his eyes burst into a spray of liquid, and the small device in his hand erupted in a shower of sparks.

  No sooner did that happen than a series of eight tiny explosions went off overhead, rippling from one end of the walkway to the other. Aaron looked up as shrapnel and fire blew out from both ends of the crumbling observation platform. Stressed metal groaned in protest for a second; it came loose with an ear-splitting wail of rending plastisteel and fell straight toward them.

  Anna stared at it like a deer in the face of oncoming traffic.

  He screamed and gathered a telekinetic surge before slamming it into the oncoming mass. The falling corridor buckled and twisted; debris fell from both ends. Effort sent him to one knee. Plummeting slowed to gliding, then to hovering. The forty-meter long span stalled about twelve feet off the ground over them.

  “Holy shit.” Anna gasped, backing up. “Aaron…”

  Six mercenaries, some bloody, some limping, came out of a concealed stairway among the machinery a short distance ahead and to the right. They jockeyed around pipes, rifles and pistols aimed. The sight of the flying wreckage stalled them in their tracks. Aaron’s face burned. Blood thrummed within the veins in his forehead; spittle seeped from his lips. Blur crept into the periphery of his vision, darkening to black. The tunnel narrowed. I gotta ditch this bastarding thing before it falls on us. I can’t hold it… much… longer.

  Aaron snarled, shoving his arms forward as he launched the massive length of scrap, halfheartedly aiming for the mercenaries. The groaning mass smashed into the tangle of struts and pipes, shredding plastisteel like paper. Dust and fragments flew everywhere. If any of the mercs screamed, no one could have heard it over the horrid screeching of metal.

  He sagged to his knees and went forward onto all fours, panting, dizzy.

  “Aaron…” Anna patted him on the back. “Are you okay?”

  “Touch of a migraine, luv.”

  She squatted, rubbing his back. “I… I don’t think Archon could’ve even caught that thing.”

  Aaron laughed out a tendril of blood and spittle. “Didn’t he say he ‘dabbled’ at TK?”

  “He’s got a right odd definition of ‘dabble.’”

  “Anna?” He sat back on his heels. Any hope of preserving his suit was long gone. “Do me a favor?”

  She nodded.

  “If we see another man with a detonator, please don’t throw lightning at him.”

  Her eyebrows scrunched together. “Sorry… startle reaction. Didn’t rightly think.”

  He pulled his pink silk handkerchief out of his breast pocket and dabbed at her wound. “We should’ve brought a couple of stimpaks, shouldn’t we?”

  “I wasn’t expecting this chaff to be much of an issue.” She cringed each time he touched her cut.

  “I’ve saved your life twice.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Still not getting into my knickers. Call it even for ruining my life while you cheated. So many miserable afternoons.”

  “Hey, lookie what I found,” said a baritone voice behind them.

  They whirled. The deep pitch sounded nothing like what anyone would have expected from the figure standing there. A scrawny man with a thick black beard and a green military soft cap bearing silver captain’s bars held a shiny white rifle up to them, sideways as if to show it off. Under a loose, open camouflage shirt, a black tee bore an image of Mars with a middle finger over it. Fatigue pants and boots said ex-military, though his utter lack of muscle tone proved otherwise.

  “This was the best I could find,” said the man, with a trace of a British accent. “I’ve never played with a laser rifle before. Starpoint too, someone’s got credits to burn. Should be fun.”

  Anna and Aaron exchanged glances.

  “Aurora.” They spoke simultaneously.

  “See, now you’re getting good at this,” chirped the man before adding a giggle that made Aaron’s skin crawl. “Oh, here, luv.” He tossed Anna a stimpak from a belt case.

  Aurora, wearing the mercenary, took point, leading the way to the edge of a deep pit used to test the hull integrity of new ship chassis with water. Only the last ten of the sixty-meter deep hole still held liquid. Whatever substance lined the bottom of the chamber could no longer be termed water in any sense of the word. Its color varied from seaweed to loam and clusters of trash and possible biological matter drifted about. The dead snakes and rats didn’t do much for the fragrance. Even from fifty meters above, it stank.

  Aurora fired over it at a few straggling mercenaries rushing along grated walkways, sending bright green streaks across the chasm. In the waning daylight, they lingered for a few seconds as retina burn. Molten plastisteel sprayed out of her misses, glowing orange beads sizzled on the sand. Of course, the stark visibility of her weapon drew return fire like moths to a candle. The Captain took a ricochet to the shin and fell. He, rather she, laughed as though playing with a laser rifle was the highlight of the decade.

  “That way,” he said. “Go past the tank and round to the right through the engine test vent. It leads right to the observation deck o
f the control house.”

  “Just leave you here?” asked Aaron.

  “Oh, I’ll be fine. I haven’t been killed in a couple of weeks.” Her next shot caught a running man in the chin, splitting his head in half and lighting it on fire. He dropped without screaming. “Now I’ve got the hang of this thing… don’t have to lead targets. It goes wherever I point.”

  “You need help,” muttered Anna.

  “No, I think I can hold them back.” She fired again, the laser slicing a pipe with only a mild delay in penetration. An armored, muscular woman hit the ground screaming with half an arm and a face full of molten metal.

  “Not that kind of help.” Anna pulled on Aaron. “Come on.”

  Aaron stepped off the narrow ladder onto a rusty metal surface, and reached for Anna, though she ignored his offer of assistance. They had climbed down into an engine test bed, a two-hundred-meter-long trench, ten deep, that ended with a curve intended to direct exhaust forces into the sky. Down here, they had protection from crossfire. An elevated observation bay overlooked the pad at the far end where the ship undergoing testing would’ve been. All of the windows were broken, creating a strip of twinkling glass on an overhang. Aaron thought it resembled the head of a giant robot embedded in the ground.

  Small lizards scurried out of their way as they moved at a jog along the trench. Scorch marks on the metal walls varied from blue to purple in bands, progressively blackening as they got closer. At the approximate halfway point of their journey, a dark-skinned woman with straw-blonde dreadlocks appeared in the window. She raised a long, scoped rifle in their direction. Aaron stared at her, shaking. She had the bearing of African royalty, high cheekbones and an imperious set to her brow. Distance muddled her features, but Aaron didn’t need to see her up close to know the shape of every pore on her too-perfect face.

  Talis.