by M. D. Cooper
The enemy was calling Tanis by name, which cemented Priscilla’s belief that Oris had been in on this attack, and that it had been intended to catch Tanis.
A far more devious plan than Priscilla would have credited the Nietzscheans for, from what she knew of them, though it fit perfectly with what Greer or the Caretaker were capable of.
Then an alert caught her attention.
Two shuttles had taken off from a nearby staging ground. One had been shot down, and the passenger, a Marauder captain, was found dead inside.
The other had crashed in the city, and search parties were already on the ground, hunting for survivors.
Captain Ayer…killed by a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
The Nietzscheans were taking prisoners in this fight, so the fact that the captain had taken her own life was a clue. A clue that pointed to her hiding information from the enemy.
The other pilots returned affirmation of her orders, and Priscilla drew a deep breath as the ships passed over the outskirts of Jersey City.
GONE TO GROUND
STELLAR DATE: 08.27.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Jersey City, Pyra
REGION: Albany System, Thebes, Septhian Alliance
Tanis crept along the rubble-strewn street, trying to avoid the debris while staying to the shadows, as the winds continued to whip around them. The storm was picking up, and dark clouds were rolling in from the sea.
Brandt was ahead of her, and Johnny was to the rear, watching for Niets, ready to signal for the group to freeze.
Twice now, they’d seen Nietzschean patrols, and once a small child had raced past, ducking behind a pile of rubble and disappearing from view.
Tanis resisted the urge to go after the kid—a little girl, from the looks of her. She knew that the child was safer away from them than with.
Brandt reached the next intersection and held a finger out, using nano on her glove to see around the corner of the building they were pressed against. Tanis stopped a few meters behind her, and Johnny stopped behind her.
No one moved; the city appeared still and dead. The only sound was the wind howling amongst the tall buildings. It sounded mournful, as though it feared that humans would never return to these shattered towers.
Then the howl changed, and Tanis wondered what the wind was blowing through to make that particular whistle, before realization struck her.
“Incoming!” she screamed.
She raced across the street, watching through her armor’s three-sixty vision as Brandt and Johnny followed after, each a second behind.
A streak of light flashed by on her right, then the wall behind them exploded.
Tanis was flung into the air, carried bodily across the street by the force of the blast, and through the glass windows of the storefront on the other side.
Her armor became rigid around her torso, protecting her organs, but still allowing her to tumble loosely through the air.
It felt like she was tossed around for a minute, before coming to rest, half-draped across a table.
Angela said, sounding almost panicked.
Tanis staggered to the front of the building and saw Johnny’s body a meter away.
His head was further back.
Brandt limped to Tanis’s side.
Tanis looked at Brandt’s dirt-and-blood-covered body, then down at her own. Their armor’s stealth systems were on low power, and unable to compensate for the grime.
They found some cloth nearby and quickly wiped one another as clean as they could, their stealth systems registering as seventy percent effective.
Tanis tossed a thermite grenade they’d taken from the crashed dropship at Johnny’s body, turning toward the rear of the story they were in so as not to watch the young man be burned to ash.
The two women exited the back of the store and worked their way down the alley, slowly moving behind the building where the rocket had likely been fired from.
Tanis debated going up and finding who had launched it at them—Brandt probably was, too, by the way the commandant kept glancing up at the high-rise.
They were almost at the end of the alley, when a squad of Niets raced by its mouth. The women tucked into the shadows, praying they hadn’t been seen.
Angela instructed the remaining flowmetal in Tanis’s left arm to form six small, spider-like bots. The bots leapt from her arm onto the wall and skittered around the corner, climbing the building and watching the street and surrounding structures.
Brandt nodded silently and slipped around the corner once the bots showed the road to be clear. They made their way west. They still had no better plan than to take another dropship.
Luckily, several had landed near the edge of the city only ten minutes before.
Tanis knew it was a shit plan, but maybe in the storm, they could lose any pursuers and get into space, where they could bluff their way onto some small ship and take it over.
Ahead, a plascrete barrier lay across the sidewalk and part of the road. A dozen bodies were strewn around it—the local police force, by their uniforms.
Brandt reached it first and crouched low, looking over the weapons laying on the ground. She seemed to find something she liked, then tossed a pulse rifle to Tanis.
Like a pulse rifle is going to stop heavily armored soldiers.
Tanis nodded and considered grabbing more weapons—like the flash grenades sitting in a case—but they’d just make her stand out more. Even the pulse rifle could be a giveaway, if she didn’t keep it out of sight.
The spiderbots showed no enemy action on the street level, though it was impossible to see into the thousands of windows stretching high into the night sky.
They covered two more blocks. Brandt was five meters ahead of Tanis, checking around a corner, when the heavens finally opened up, and sheets of rain joined the wind.
Their stealth systems dropped to only fifteen percent effective.
Brandt pulled back from the corner, but it was too late. A rail shot pierced her abdomen, spraying blood and bone out behind her. Another shot streaked through the night and hit Tanis in the leg, blowing a hole through her armor before exiting the back of her thigh.
Both women fell to the ground, and Tanis reached for Brandt, dragging her backward.
Behind them was an open archway, and Tanis pulled Brandt in with her as the commandant’s armor tried to seal the large hole and sto
p the bleeding.
“What…what I wouldn’t give for a simple can of biofoam,” Brandt wheezed, grinning at Tanis.
“Fuck!” Tanis screamed looking around for something, anything, to help her friend. If only she had some flowmetal left. That would seal Brandt’s wound back up without a problem.
Tanis’s own leg wound had been sealed by her flow armor, though instead of covering the hole, it flowed through it, sealing the wound, but leaving a clear view of the ground through her leg.
It felt surreal, and she said to Angela,
Brandt reached out, grasping Tanis’s shoulder. “Give me the ‘nades.”
“What?” Tanis gasped. “Brandt. No. It won’t end like this.”
Brandt nodded. “Not for you, Admiral, not for you. I’ll just slow you down. You always were a lone wolf, anyway.”
Tanis pursed her lips and handed Brandt the grenades. “I’ll come back.”
“Don’t, Tanis. Remember me like this. Tell my girls…tell them I’m proud of them, and that I’ll always love them.”
Tanis was glad her flow armor blocked tears, or they’d be clouding her vision.
“I will,” Tanis said hoarsely.
“And you give ‘em hell,” Brandt coughed. “All of them. Fucking Niets, Trisilieds, Orion, you crush them to dust.”
“I will,” Tanis whispered. “The Niets are going to pay for this.”
“They’re coming,” Brandt wheezed.
Tanis clenched her jaw and kept running.
It was just her and Angela now.
* * * * *
Rain sleeted off the sides of the buildings falling to the streets in solid sheets of water. As if that wasn’t enough, the storm was increasing in intensity.
Rika had heard of these coastal storms before. On Pyra, they called them ‘cyclones’, atmospheric monsters that could cover half a continent and drop decimeters of rain in a matter of hours.
Already, the city’s sewers were backing up, water pooling in the gutters.
Breaking her teams up into groups of only three felt risky, but they had several square kilometers of dense urban sprawl to cover. They’d never find Admiral Richards and General Mill if they stayed grouped up.
It would also make them an easy target for the Niets. She wasn’t sure if they’d drop starfire in the storm, but Rika didn’t want to give them a big target to hit.
Keli called back.
Keli led them for two blocks before they reached an arched entrance into a low building. Body parts were strewn all around the archway, rainwater running red as it rushed to the gutters.
Rika could make out Nietzschean armor, and then saw an arm covered with the matte grey flow armor the ISF Marines wore.
Rika pulled off a bit of flesh from the limb and stepped under the arch and into the building beyond. Out of the wind and rain, she slid the skin into a small slot on her arm and surveyed the building while the DNA test ran.
Keli came in a moment later, moving further back in the building while Kelly covered the entrance.
Rika considered passing the details to Priscilla and Colonel Smith, but she didn’t want to risk any broadcast comms until they knew who they were following.
DARKEST HOUR
STELLAR DATE: 08.27.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Jersey City, Pyra
REGION: Albany System, Thebes, Septhian Alliance
Tanis fired a pulse shot at another Niet before shifting back into cover behind the pile of rubble in the building’s atrium. She could see that the shot knocked him off his feet, but didn’t take him out.
A red light flashed on her rifle, and its small display read, ‘no charge’.
She rose from behind the rubble and tossed the rifle aside before sliding her lightwand out of her right thigh. She flicked her wrist, activating its new, meter-long, monofilament blade.
“Bring it, fuckers.”
The Nietzschean soldier struggled to his feet, and Tanis summoned the remains of her strength, let out a scream, and charged the man.
He brought his rifle to bear and fired a kinetic round as she closed the gap.
The shot struck her in the right side of her chest, and Tanis shrugged off the impact, though a warning flashed on her HUD that her armor’s kinetic resistance abilities were nearly dead. One more shot like that, and she’d be on heart number eight.
Then Tanis was upon the man and swung her glowing blue blade at his rifle, slicing it in half—along with his hand—and then cutting halfway through his neck.
Good enough, Tanis thought as he fell to the ground.
She saw movement from her left, and dove out of the way as a pulse blast rippled through the air where she’d stood. Her limbs leaden with fatigue, Tanis scrambled behind a pillar, waiting for the shooter to get closer.
With the meager few probes Tanis had left, she saw that it was a Nietzschean woman, tall and lithe. She moved into the atrium, advancing on Tanis’s cover.
Tanis slowly sucked in a deep breath and blew it out quietly, then ducked out from behind the column when the woman was three meters away, rolled over a fallen beam, and sliced into the woman’s left knee joint.
As the Nietzschean crashed to the ground, she fired a kinetic slug into the air, striking the windows at the far end of the atrium.
For a moment, Tanis thought the glass would hold; then the windows exploded inward, spraying fractured plates of glass across the atrium. Tanis turned her head as shards swept across her body, most bounding off, but some slicing into her where the flow armor had begun to fail.
One moment, the storm was outside, and then the next, its fury was all around her.
Tanis crashed to her knees, feeling the last of her energy ebb away, draining out of her through the hundred cuts across her body.
As she struggled to catch her breath, she realized that the storm sounded different, almost as though it was screaming at her. Tanis slowly raised her head and saw a dozen Nietzscheans surrounding her, their weapons drawn.
She opened her mouth to speak, but something felt wrong inside of her.
It was Angela. Angela was gone, her centuries-long presence snuffed out.
You said
we’d be together, that if this was our end, it would be our end together.
A boot lashed out and kicked Tanis in the head, and she fell to the ground.
Her vision swam, and then everything went black.
I am Angela, she thought.
And I am Tanis.
No. I am new.
She hadn’t opened her eyes, but she was staring at…at something. Was it the ground? It looked strange, it was so porous. Kilometers of transparent rock, and then beyond that, glowing, molten magma, caverns of hyper-dense carbon crystals, seething iron, falling chunks of crust, gently drifting to the planet’s core like leaves, creating rising magma flows…and then the crust of the world again, followed by sky, and space, ships, and stars.
What is this? She wondered, and pressed her hand against the world, only to have it pass through the ground.
She felt a moment of pure terror, fearing that she’d fall through the world and out the other side, or worse, be trapped in its core forever.
This new being concentrated and pressed its hand against the planet, and this time they met, and the planet moved away. No. She moved up. But the planet did also move away, if only a very little.
Sounds began to come back to her. She heard the storm—winds raging, lightning cracking, thunder rumbling.
The being looked up at the sky and saw right through it, into space. She felt like she might fall up forever; maybe she could catch hold of a starship, if she did.
Then something moved, pushing toward her.
The being, Tangel, she decided for now—though a better name would have to come—realized it was a pulse wave, a concussive blast rippling through the air toward her.
It was curious. Such a small amount of energy. She let it pass through her body, changing the composition of her form to vibrate in a way that posed no obstacle to the wave.
She looked up to see the people. Nietzscheans. Enemies.
One was holding a weapon, looking down at it as though something was wrong.
Tangel peered at the weapon, too. She saw all its components, its molecules, atoms, electrons…smaller things, too. She supposed they were all the bits Earnest was always playing with. Wimps, mesons, quarks, and the like.
