Corrosion (The Corroding Empire Book 1)

by Johan Kalsi

  “I've been waiting forever for you two!”

  Charlie cleared his throat. “We had a little trouble in the mission.”

  “New job. New target. You guys are perfect.”

  Randolph's neck crackled as he stretched it from side to side. “We just got back. I haven't slept in two days. This has to be a mix up.”

  “Must be, but I'm not going through the hassle of getting it straightened out. This'll be quick and dirty. You'll be back in bed in an hour.” Purvis tapped the mobile and turned the display to face the partners.

  It looked like a little Oufflandic school house.

  “Animals,” grunted Hoarfyr. His stomach was turning a bit at the scene, even though he knew that the image he was seeing had likely nothing to do with the real target. “They billet in a school?”

  “No, no, no,” said Purvis, stifling a smile. “The target is the school. Specifically, her.”

  A blue, green and golden babushka swaddling a round alabaster face appeared on the screen.

  Ouffland galacticist.

  Glimmering eyes.

  A child.

  Hoarfyr’s mouth dropped. “The hell?” His eyes darted back to Purvis, scanning the humorless man for signs of a joke.

  “What?” said Purvis. “Scruples?”

  Hoarfyr tapped his VEO off to see what the target really was.

  “Don’t do that,” said Purvis. “That’s why you keep glitching, fiddling with it like that.”

  Hoarfyr ignored him. Looking at the real Purvis (an unmuscled, tail-less, dumpy bureaucratic looking man) and the real image on his mobile, Hoarfyr could tell that their real target looked to be a pile of rocks on the side of a hill.

  Charlie shifted his feet, holding up a hand to Hoarfyr. “I think, I think, Purvis, there's – uhm – maybe you should check the image again?”

  Purvis rolled his eyes, his tail flicking. His jaw jutted. “Am I actually being asked a question?”

  Charlie swallowed hard behind his veil. “Mm-hm. Please. Check it?”

  In shock, Purvis absently glanced at the mobile, uncertain. His eyes widened.

  “Oh, dear! Guys, look, I’m sorry. We’ve been having some disturbing VEO images come up lately. I’ll try to get this one fixed.”

  “Here’s an idea,” said Hoarfyr. “How about you shut our VEO off completely, and let us just go after this stupid pile of rocks without having to feel like a child murderer!”

  “It isn’t a pile of rocks that you are going after, it is a military asset. You aren’t going to kill the girl, you are going to – uh, rescue her. But of course I can’t shut of the VEO. Despite the unpleasant optics on this one, you have to accept that you are fully VEO dependent.”

  Purvis’ tail and muscles were back. Hoarfyr clenched his fists.

  ~+~

  Corona squad debriefed simply. While on a patrol exercise, they had seen what the Spire had seen on their portable monitor, two crazed nomads sacking the camp and packing explosives under the truck. By the time they were halfway back, they'd gotten the orders to return.

  The other two squads had reported in remotely. They had not found the two enemy units, but in a patrol north of the camp at the edge of the wastes, they had found high-speed land tracks heading into the desert. Though they continued to search, it appeared most likely that the pair had fled after the sacking of Camp Corona.

  Mauk commended them, noting their only major error was not boobytrapping the dummy camp. Because of wildlife and the occasional nomad, this was a dangerous practice to implement, but, in light of several recent attacks on unmanned camps, a necessary one. It would be strictly followed, an order, not just a guideline anymore. Other than that, however, the squad knew less than the Spire staff.

  “Nomads don't do this. Any indication that they could be Holocronian?”

  Corona squad members shrugged or shook their heads, but Kollodis referred to a thin stack of steelpaper. He dismissed the cover note, crumpling it and tossing it deftly to the recycler where it would be stretched and overwritten with the next transmission.

  “There were two other attacks from the wastes near our twin Spires,” said Kollodis. “Same sort of crazy tactics. The first one was dismissed as desert mad nomads – a pair came just inside the forest fringe and nearly killed themselves trying to light it on fire.”

  “I thought the snipers neutralized those guys.”

  “No. That was the second attack, a few weeks later, the one we had the briefing on. Those guys just charged the tower itself and the sniper picked them both off in succession. But it wasn't until the cops investigated the bodies did anything get connected to the two arsonists in the hospital, apparently. This sheet was the first I heard of it, and it came in just yesterday. It is only the because of the second attack that the first was indeed possibly connected to Holocrone. They all are an entirely different race, different world of people. But the two attackers might have been Multinational, too. It isn't just the Sentina Exportiate that's involved.”

  “How big is this? Much of Holocrone is in upheaval. Money's tight, and we certainly are no threat to them. Do you think they are actually sending spies and saboteurs sixty days in space just to sabotage our...trees? One camp? Some tires? That's...one hell of an expense.”

  “Especially considering that if they wanted anything from us, they could either ask or ignite a total invasion. They'd probably want to establish a lunar base or two here to do the latter, but either approach would make more sense than these half-measures. Are we sure it isn't some nomad thing where they are pretending to be Holocronian for one odd reason or the other?”

  A steel sheet came in and while the others discussed the unlikelihood of a ruse from the nomads, a people so reclusive as to be considered by some Oufflanders to be entirely legendary, Major Kollodis retrieved it.

  “Damn,” he said.

  Everyone fell silent.

  “Air Support. Turns out we now know what the extra drones have been doing today. Less than one thousand “looks” north and east of here, they have discovered a new and sizable base.”

  “It has been identified as Holocronian.”

  Major Mauk looked at his counterpart, and their concerns mirrored one another.

  “Get our families into the bunker below. Now.”

  The dim, gray architecture of School Number Twelve echoed with laughter. Kids were at play everywhere. Charlie and Hoarfyr concealed themselves in the grove to the north of the side parking lot, which was small enough for the director's armored wagon, a small group transport, and a handful of other vehicles. Hoarfyr dared not turn the VEO off during an operation. Purvis wasn’t lying that frequent shut-offs could cause some spectacular debilitations.

  “What did you tell him to look up?” said Randolph.

  “The file. It obviously didn't look right.”

  “It looked right to Purvis until you started signaling him like a spaceport ground crewman on fire.”

  “He's a bureaucrat. He looks at account numbers and assignment lists. He couldn't tell the difference between a surgical glove and a surgical strike, and wouldn't care if he could.”

  “A little girl? He didn't notice that we've been sicced on a little girl?”

  “We are Kill Squad. We don't ask questions. Questions are for the higher order thinkers.”

  “We are Kill Squad. We kill bad people and terrorize their friends. We don't take out kids.”

  Charlie sighed hard, looked away, and mumbled something.

  “Pardon?” said Randolph, cocking his head.

  “'Says who?' I said.”

  “Me.” Hoarfyr scanned the mobile for clues. Nothing. Just the target's picture, location and name: Elena Elizervetta Ivanova. “What kind of military asset do you think she is really supposed to be?”

  “I don’t know. A tank. Secret plans. Who cares?”

  “Well, I do. If they just told us what it was, we could just go look for that actual thing instead of going crazy on the VEO.”

  �
��Hey, maybe they can’t do that, have you ever thought of that? Maybe none of them know how. Maybe none of them even know what asset we are looking for.”

  They crawled passed the vehicles in the lot. The VEO was full-sensory, so Hoarfyr could “touch” the virtual image of the car tire, and it would feel like a car tire. His old full-body suit had grown worn in a few patches, and there was a spot on his left elbow that, if he rubbed it against the surface of the virtual object, he could feel the real thing, or if there was no real thing at all. As he crawled, his elbow told him that they were not even on a hard surface, but something spongy, like a grassland.

  “These VEO situations aren’t even close to the real thing anymore.”

  “Shut up and focus.”

  A bell rang, and kids returned indoors.

  They snuck through a rear entrance where the door was off the hinges, presumably for repairs, but the watermarks inside the entry indicated those repairs had been a long time coming. The ancient, fireproofing-lined tiles had brown fissures in them.

  From the cacophony of voices and the mass creaking of chairs, Hoarfyr deduced there was an assembly being held in the great room at the end of the hall. He crept up to a barred door with a small dirty window set into it.

  “Hundreds of them,” he said.

  He carefully scanned the rows, looking for the face from the picture. Babushkas dotted the crowd.

  “See her?”

  “Yeah. Southern aisle, eighth row.”

  Charlie took a deep, meditative breath and balled his fists, driving them rhythmically into his thighs.

  “No, no, no. Not yet, not here. We need to wait for her to get back to class. Smaller numbers, fewer variables.”

  Hoarfyr used to think that Charlie's pre-fight ritual was psychological, something to psyche himself up in order to unleash the relentless chaos of his attack. He now knew it was more than that: a physical necessity. In the target environment, Charlie had strange habits, labored breathing, an aversion to water. It took him as many as twenty minutes of labored ritual to build up the energy for his otherwise relentless killing style. This world did not agree with Charlie any more than it agreed with Hoarfyr. They just coped with it in very different ways.

  “We don't have that sort of time,” said Charlie, punctuating his words with whispered chants.

  A burst of applause roared through the hall, and students were dismissed to their classes. Hoarfyr peeked into the corner of the window. The students filed out. Zervetta bounced, hand in hand with a girl who was obviously her very best friend in the world.

  “Okay, far west wing,” said Randolph. “We should be able to recon outside, safely scan the windows till we isolate her room. Then we do what we've got to do.”

  Finding the room was easy. Crawling, unseen, to a place just below Zervetta's class window, was less easy. Charlie's shoulders heaved, and he struggled to keep his breath.

  “Periscope?” said Hoarfyr.

  Charlie fumbled in his pack, and handed him the cylinder. Randolph twisted the eyepiece so he could see up and over his own head, carefully placing the lens at the corner of the window. The teacher efficiently passed between the rows, a large, engaging grin on her face. In the front row, far corner, sat Elena.

  Charlie had fallen completely silent, his legs crossed, and, aside from his clenched fists, he assumed a Lotus position. There was no breeze, but the strands of Charlie's camouflage trembled.

  The door burst open in the classroom, and children screamed. Hoarfyr dropped the periscope and stood up, turning to the window. A pair of soldiers burst in one wielding a trench knife with a skull-crusher pommel, the other a spiked censer dribbling red gas.

  The one with the knife had small snakes slithering through his thin blonde hair.

  Randolph punched the window sash, turning a quarter of the wall to ice, which shattered when he pulled on it. He leaped through the new doorway, vaulting a desk and a gangly boy. Desks scattered as he caught snake-hair by the nape, and turned the flesh blue. Their momentum carried them into the blackboard, snapping a fissure in the man's neck and shocking Randolph's lungs.

  He pivoted just as the leaking censer of the second soldier struck him in the jaw. He sat down, hard.

  The VEO glitched. Hoarfyr was disoriented completely, as his body could feel the artificial artifacts of school desks around him, but his vision was flashing images of the real world: he was in a cave. There were blue shards of glass everywhere. Regular-looking, normal Ouffland soldiers were shooting at him at close range.

  Hoarfyr fell to the ground and rolled. He bashed into the leg of a desk. The VEO had come back on, and brought the desks with it.

  His nearest attacker had a man's face that appeared to be neatly split in two, with an inch strip of featureless flesh running down from his forehead to his chin. Randolph grabbed the knife from the floor and jabbed it into split-face's hip, lunging forward.

  With his other hand, he turned the man's thigh to ice, and snapped it clean off. More desks toppled. Children gushed out the hole in the wall. Randolph drove the knife through his enemy's throat, to the hilt, pinning the spine to the floor.

  He couldn't see out of one eye, which stung like acid.

  Zervetta stood near the remains of the pre-historic cave wall drawing board, quivering.

  “It's okay, you're okay,” said Randolph, tentatively holding his hands up in what he hoped was a universal sign for 'I'm not a child murderer.' A wave of exhaustion passed over him. He realized he was probably trying to calm down a locked file cabinet or something. The censer’s gas had made him weak as a kitten.

  Two more creatures came through the door, smoke pouring from gills in their necks.

  Randolph held up a hand, swirled in ice vapor. “You aren't getting the girl.”

  The bigger of the two monsters snorted a laugh. “We aren't here for a girl.”

  His voice a gentle whine, the smaller said “Just step away from that robot.”

  Then Charlie burst in, battle madness upon him.

  The small monster shrugged and threw a squealing array of black, cylindrical darts at Charlie, knocking him to the far wall. His hood fell back, exposing the face of a weathered old man, most certainly once handsome. Charlie tumbled to the floor, bleeding from a dozen wounds, instantly dead. One bloody dart had gone straight through and impaled a bulletin board with faded photographs on it. The blood was a pale gray.

  “Surrender, soldier. Put your hands up!”

  Zervetta slipped her small hand into his large mechanical one.

  Her faced turned up to him and her eyes shone. “Turn off the VEO, human. Turn it off completely.”

  Randolph flipped off the VEO. The desks and monsters disappeared. The cave was back. Hoarfyr was holding the hand of an antique-looking robot who appeared to be re-coding Hoarfyr’s mechanical hand. Charlie was dead on the cave floor. Two Ouffland militia soldiers were on the floor, writhing slightly and still breathing.

  The other soldiers had him surrounded.

  “Gentlemen, I am a trained medical robot with functioning sensors. Unfortunately, your target has an explosives vest and will be using it if you detain him. This will destroy both him and you completely. And me, of course, in the event that is of concern to you. I highly recommend that you allow him to escape with me as his hostage. This is the best chance we all have of survival.”

  In the cave, Corporal Yotten paced back and forth in front of Major Mauk, a nervous wreck. He hadn’t once fired his weapon.

  “We’ve got to kill that guy. Sir? Don’t we need to kill that guy?”

  Mauk ignored him, studying his maps intently. “Why didn’t this cave show up? How did these foreign dogs sniff it out? It’s in my territory!”

  Sergeant Upton of Astro Squad took an innocuous glance at Mauk’s map.

  “Thoughts, Sergeant?”

  “We’re trailing him, sir. It isn’t that difficult. That robot is heavy. Slows down his aircraft considerably.”

  “The cave.
The cave. Do you have any thoughts on the cave? This is your quadrant!”

  “No sir, except that we tracked those first two visually the entire time...until right before they found the cave. Then they disappeared. It just looked like those two trees outside the mouth, with nothing behind them. That is, until we were right on top of the opening, taking fire.”

  Mauk ordered the men to drag the dead man outside. He went back over to the shattered glass wall. The shards weren’t sharp. They were bluish, and in the daylight streaming through the opening, pretty. They looked like old-fashioned machine polymers that his grandpa had mentioned when he told the stories of his father and the unreal life his people used to live on, – allegedly – some planet other than Holocrone.

  The robot had been cased behind the glass, and the two Holocronian soldiers had dragged it out of its hiding place.

  Near the recess where the attackers had dragged the machine from, Mauk noticed a small box. He lifted it off the ground, and it was weightier in his hand than he would have guessed on sight.

  “Hey, is that technician still looking outside for devices? I think I found one.”

  The technician and his aide came into the cave just as Mauk was asking for him.

  “Look, Major. We found two of these outside!”

  He held a small grimy box that nonetheless looked identical to the one Mauk had found.

  “I think they are some kind of cloak technology, sir! That’s why we have never mapped this cave.”

  “Call it in.”

  The technician nodded, explaining to the command center how they’d been in a firefight, how the enemy unit who survived smashed open a secret wall and dragged out the old robot, how Major Mauk and he had found the cloaks, and so on. He had to wait on the line for a minute as the people he was answering changed.

  “Okay,” he said. He described some markings on the robot as best as he could remember, and then asked for someone to xograph the little boxes. There was no circuiting out here, so they’d have to get back to the Spire before wiring the photos back in.