Fragments

by Dan Wells

  “A new assault,” said the guard, apparently recovered from his forced silence. He stepped forward to tap a small console of his own, glancing at the holovid map. “Inside the city this time.”

  “An assault here?” asked Woolf. He reached for his waist, grasping at something that wasn’t there, and Marcus found himself doing the same—reflexively reaching for a weapon. If an army of Partials attacked, their band of humans was trapped in the middle without so much as a pointy stick.

  And they still haven’t told us who is attacking, thought Marcus. Knowing that they were covering something up scared him more than anything else.

  “This isn’t supposed to happen,” said Trimble, her eyes only half-focused on the charts and videos that filled the wall before her. “None of this is supposed to happen.”

  “You have to help us!” said Woolf. “We have to help each other!”

  “Leave me,” said Trimble, and suddenly the Partials were walking for the door, grabbing Woolf and Marcus as they went. Their grips were like iron, and they pulled the humans outside as if they were children; Woolf and Marcus fought back, shouting all the way, but it was useless. The guard closed the door solidly behind them, and Marcus saw now that Vinci was panting for breath, flexing his empty hands and staring at the floor; Marcus couldn’t tell if it was anger, exertion, or something else. Hatred? Shame?

  “I’m sorry,” said Vinci. “I’d hoped . . . I’m sorry. I warned you, but still. I’d hoped for something more.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  “Let us back in!” Woolf snarled.

  “We’re in the middle of a war,” said Vinci. “There’s fighting in the city—if things go poorly, there’ll be fighting here, in this building. She doesn’t have time to talk to you.”

  “But she’s not doing anything,” said Marcus. He looked around at the others, and the Partials didn’t meet his eyes. “We all saw her, it was textbook traumatic stress. She’s unfocused, she’s acting by rote, half the time she didn’t even seem aware of her surroundings. That can’t be who you have leading your armies.”

  The Partials were silent.

  “She said she was human,” said Woolf. “Worse than that, she said she used to be human. What does that mean? I thought she was a Partial general.”

  “Except all the Partial generals are men,” said Marcus, remembering Samm’s explanation of the caste system. “Each model was grown for its ideal job. The older Partial women were all doctors.”

  “This was not a Partial woman,” said Woolf. “She was human, or . . . she used to be.” He had fire in his eyes. “Tell us what’s going on.”

  “I’m sorry we pulled you out,” said Vinci. “There was nothing we could do.”

  “You could disobey,” said Woolf.

  “No, they couldn’t,” said Marcus, realization dawning. “She used the link. She told them to leave and they were compelled to do it, whether they wanted to or not.”

  Woolf frowned. “What kind of human woman becomes a Partial general and has access to the pheromonal link?” He looked at the two Partials. “What is going on?”

  When Vinci answered, the other soldier put a hand on his arm to stop him; Vinci ignored him and spoke anyway. “She’s been like this for a while now. We’ve been fighting Morgan for years, mostly just little skirmishes, all stemming from one fundamental disagreement: what to do with you humans on Long Island. Whether or not your existence is a threat, or a necessity. Whether we had the right to exterminate your race, or leave you alone and let you live or die as best you could, or whether it would be in our best interest to keep a population alive . . . But when the expiration date kicked in and people started dying, it got worse. Morgan wanted to start using the humans as test subjects, experimenting on them, and Trimble didn’t think it was right. Or, at least, didn’t think it was the right time. But while Morgan’s been getting stronger, rallying more Partials to her cause and becoming more violent in her methods, Trimble has been refusing to act. When she says anything, she says she doesn’t want to condone a course of action that could lead to the eradication of the human species. But she is offering no alternative, no course of action whatsoever, and with more Partials expiring every day, Trimble’s caution has begun to look more like fear and indecision. We’ve been losing soldiers to Morgan’s faction in a massive flood, and still she does nothing to stem it.” He looked at Marcus. “We want to help you—we’ve sent as many teams as we can to harry Morgan’s rear flank, to disrupt her and avoid the elimination of the last of the human population, but without any real leadership from Trimble . . .” His voice trailed off, and Marcus heard an explosion in the distance.

  “Who are you fighting here, though?” asked Marcus. “It can’t be Morgan’s company, and you’ve already confirmed as much.”

  “They’re fighting themselves,” said Woolf softly. Marcus looked at him, surprised, then looked at Vinci and the other soldier. They didn’t answer, only looked at the floor.

  “Your faction is fighting itself?” asked Marcus. The implications frightened him—he remembered the riots in East Meadow when the fight between the Senate and the Voice finally came to a head. He remembered how vicious it became when friends suddenly turned on one another, incensed by ideological differences. “The battlefront that’s coming,” he said, “that’s a revolution? Soldiers from your company who now support Morgan? This city’s going to tear itself apart.”

  “We should be safe in here,” said Vinci, then hesitated. “We might be safe in here. Everyone in this building is a loyal to General Trimble.”

  Woolf frowned. “Why? Even if you disagree with Morgan . . . Trimble’s useless.”

  “We’re loyal because that’s how they made us,” said Vinci. “Because it’s who we are.”

  The building rumbled from another explosion, and Vinci and the guard both fell into a ready posture Marcus had come to recognize as communication: They were scanning the link for news of what had happened. Marcus heard distant pops of gunfire.

  “The fighting’s getting close,” said Vinci. “Get back to your men, I need to talk to the building’s defensive force.”

  They hurried back down the spartan hall. “We can help,” said Woolf. “I have ten trained soldiers in there—”

  “Please,” said Vinci, “this is a Partial battle. You’d only get in the way.”

  He led them back through the double doors to the waiting area and left them there, racing deeper into the complex. Trimble’s guard closed the doors behind them, locking the doors tightly. Only one of Woolf’s soldiers was in the waiting area, standing by the door of their sleeping quarters; when he saw them he waved them over, shouting urgently. “Hurry, Commander, you’ve got to see this.” Woolf and Marcus ran toward him and he led them inside; the other soldiers were clustered around the outer window like children, watching the city in awed silence.

  “Get away from there,” said Woolf, “there’s a battle going on. . . .” His voice drifted off as the soldiers cleared a spot for him, and he saw what they’d been watching. Thousands of Partials, seemingly with no battle line, running and shooting and killing one another in the city below—in the streets, on the rooftops. Their window was fifteen stories up, well above the majority of the fighting, which gave them a terrifying sense of the scale of the battle: Literally as far as they could discern through the city, battle was raging.

  More frightening than the size of the battle, though, was the nature of it. Even the smallest, wounded, most ill-equipped Partial soldier was performing feats that would make any human the unquestioned hero of the Grid. Marcus watched in shock as an infantryman ran lightly along the roof of the building beyond, firing his rifle one-handed as he did and picking off snipers on the next roof over. When he reached the edge he leapt to another building, clearing the thirty-foot gap and landing in a machine-gun nest that was firing in another direction. More impressive still were the people he was shooting at, who despite his unerring accuracy were able to step to the side with inhuman
speed, dodging the bullets by millimeters and returning fire almost casually. The machine-gun nest where the runner had landed became a swirling cauldron of knives and bayonets, each wielded with a controlled fury that made Marcus pale at the sight of it, and each blow turned aside with almost contemptuous ease. It was a war of supermen, every one of them too accurate to miss, and too fast to be hit.

  Marcus pointed at the fliers that hovered and darted through the city, single-pilot fighters and five-man gunships, swarming like angry bees. “They have Rotors?” He hadn’t seen a flying vehicle since before the Break.

  “This city is just one horrible revelation after another,” said Woolf. As if to prove his point, another Rotor hovered into view around a tall building, much bigger than the others. “That one’s a transport,” he said, backing away from the window. “It’s coming this way—they must be coming for General Trimble.” The soldiers dropped out of the window’s field of view and backed away. A stray bullet cracked a hole in the window and shattered the wall above Marcus’s head, and he threw himself prone on the floor. “Up and out,” said Woolf. “We’ve got to get to the center of the building—into the waiting room.” The soldiers ran through the door in practiced formation, staying low and finding cover with a trained fluidity that used to make Marcus feel safe, but now only seemed like a pale imitation of the Partials’ superior precision. He followed them through, staying close to Woolf, wishing he had a gun and knowing it wouldn’t do him any good.

  A small Rotor darted over the skylight, machine guns firing, and Marcus heard an explosion as either it or its target went down. He had no idea which, or even which team was which. The coloring on the vehicles all seemed the same to him. He heard another explosion, from a different part of the city, and the sounds of gun and artillery fire ebbed and flowed in the background. It made Marcus feel blind and helpless, crouching behind a low bench, knowing that something was happening, without knowing who was shooting at what, or why, or where any of them were.

  Another light Rotor flew past the skylight. A gunship followed moments later, in a perpendicular path. A dark shadow fell over the waiting room, and a deep thrum above them vibrated powerfully through the building.

  “We don’t want to be here,” said Woolf.

  The big transport Rotor hovered into view, filling the skylight, and too late Marcus realized that it was coming down, hard and fast through the center of it. The metal hull shattered the skylight in the same instant that the far doors flew open and the building’s defenders flooded in. A turret gun on the transport unleashed a hail of fire on the defenders, but they had already moved to the side half a second earlier. Gull ports in the sides of the transport swung open before the hull even touched the floor, and armored Partials leapt out, guns blazing.

  “Get down!” Woolf shouted, and the soldiers dove to the floor behind couches and tables, trying to make it back to the room they’d just exited. Marcus saw a moment of confusion in the attackers, a brief pause as they took stock of the new situation, and somehow, for some reason, they seemed to identify the fleeing humans as threats. A half second later they turned on the humans, gunning them down with cold ferocity. The humans shook and screamed as the attack ripped through their ranks, and Marcus closed his eyes as his companions’ bodies fell to the ground around him.

  More reinforcements arrived from deeper in the building, and Partials poured out of the transport in a seemingly endless wave. Marcus peeked up at the raging battle, quailed at the sight of it, and hid his head again, hoping he could just lie still and play dead until the fighting was over. The noise in the room was deafening, dozens of automatic weapons all firing at once, and he worried that he might lose his hearing permanently. A hand grabbed his leg, and he couldn’t help the scream of terror that leapt from his lips. He rolled over in a flurry to see who it was, and recognized Commander Woolf. The man was talking, but Marcus couldn’t hear it. Behind him were two more human soldiers, all crouched low behind the dubious cover of a waiting room couch. Woolf said something else, then gestured for Marcus to follow him and started crawling for the nearest door. The soldiers went after him, and Marcus started to follow. A bullet struck the soldier in front of him, dropping the soldier like a bag of meat, and Marcus scrambled forward in reckless fear, desperate to reach the open door. He felt a sharp sting in his arm, and then he was through, gasping and panting as Woolf and the last soldier threw the door shut behind them.

  Woolf said something else, inaudible through the ringing in Marcus’s ears. They kept low to the ground and crouched against a wall, hoping to put as many barriers between them and the gunfight as possible. Marcus couldn’t use his right arm, and when he examined it he found a long groove in the meat of his triceps—a gunshot wound that had scraped the surface, shredding the muscle but too shallow to damage the bone. He stood up in a daze, headed to look for a first aid kit, but Woolf pulled him back down, yelling something Marcus could almost hear. Marcus shook his head, pointing at his ears to let Woolf know he couldn’t hear anything; the commander frowned, puzzled, then shouted something obviously angry and dug in his breast pocket, pulling out a pair of orange foam earplugs and pressing them into Marcus’s hand. Woolf and the last remaining soldier, a man named Galen, conferred with each other over something, and Marcus pushed the plugs into his ears.

  We’re going to die, he thought. There’s no way out of here—it doesn’t matter who wins the fight in the waiting room, the entire city is a war zone. Marcus considered again what they were up against: an army of the perfect soldiers. Humans are less agile, they have slower reaction times, they’re less coordinated, they’re not on the link—

  “We’re not on the link!” Marcus shouted, grabbing Woolf’s arm. Woolf looked at him, confused, and Marcus explained his realization; his own voice sounded distant and muted through his ringing ears. “The link—the pheromonal system they use to communicate—they’re all reading each other’s minds. One guy picks up his gun to shoot, and on a battlefield he just shoots and the other guy dies, but in these tight quarters, the other guy’s close enough to pick up the first guy’s link data, so he knows he’s going to shoot, and he gets out of the way. That’s why none of them can hit each other.”

  Woolf said something in response, but Marcus still couldn’t hear it. He pushed on anyway. “The Partials use the link to track each other, so when they want to hide, they wear gas masks. If you can’t link with them, you can’t defend against them. In the land of the Partials, we’re like . . . stealth fighters.”

  Realization dawned in Woolf’s eyes, and he turned back to Galen, speaking rapidly. Marcus couldn’t hear him, but he could tell that at least some of his hearing was returning; the dull roar that had previously sounded like white noise had resolved into a chorus of gunfire, echoes from the battle in the other room. He hunkered down, trying to think of some way to use the lack of link to their advantage and escape. Samm had said that the link was so ingrained in the Partials that they’d forgotten, after twelve years, how to fight an enemy that didn’t have it. There has to be a way. . . .

  Woolf grabbed Marcus by his undamaged arm and gestured toward the equipment on the other side of the room. Marcus leaned toward, offering his ear, and Woolf shouted in it. “We have some shovels in our survival gear—we’re going to try to hack through the side wall.”

  “What’s on the other side?” asked Marcus.

  Woolf sketched on the carpet with his finger, making an impression that looked vaguely like the waiting room and the surrounding doors. “If I’ve calculated it right, we’re only two rooms away from Trimble’s hallway. Cutting through is the quickest way out of the building.”

  Marcus nodded. “What if the walls are reinforced?”

  “Then we think of something else.”

  The three men ran in a low crouch to their gear. The small survival shovels were some of the only gear they’d been allowed to keep; they couldn’t hurt Partials with them, but they could certainly do some damage to the walls. The bat
tle continued to rage in the room beyond, and Woolf used its cacophony to hide his assault on the wall.

  “Here goes nothing.” He slammed the shovel into the wall . . .

  . . . and it cleaved through easily.

  “It’s just Sheetrock,” said Woolf. He pulled his shovel back out, aimed another strike, and hacked out a chunk of the wall. Inside was a layer of pink insulation, and beyond that another Sheetrock wall. Woolf said something Marcus couldn’t hear, presumably triumphant and vulgar, and handed spare shovels to Galen and Marcus. No one was coming through the door to stop them; the Partials were too preoccupied to follow them, and without the link to give them away, they could work with impunity. Marcus got to work on the wall, and soon the three men had opened a man-size hole they could squirm through into the next room.

  The new room was empty, untouched except for a chaotic series of bullet holes in the wall where the Partials’ battle had punched through. They ran to the far side and went to work on that wall, opening a ragged gap that Woolf peered through. He grinned. “It’s the hallway, and it’s empty. Move!” They tore into the wall with everything they had, Marcus hacking awkwardly with his left hand, his right still hanging uselessly—and painfully—at his side. He wanted to stop and patch it up, to at least give himself a shot of painkillers, but there was no time. He chopped at the wall as if he were escaping from hell itself, with all the devils behind him.

  They crawled into the hallway and ran toward Trimble’s room, gripping their shovels like axes. The noise of the battle was loud behind them. Vinci stood at the end of the hall, tucked behind an armored corner, and called out as they approached.