“Covering your ass!” I pick off the wobblie with a shot to the shoulder. He screams and falls into the mud.
Sarge takes position next to me. “Aziz said for me to cover the retreat!”
“I’m covering you covering the retreat!” I yell, and lift my visor. “I thought you needed a hand!”
“You’re freelancing?” Sarge says. “Aziz’s going to be piddled for sure!”
“I was trained by the best!” I yell over the scream of small arms fire. “Move up! I’ll cover this alley for ten seconds.”
Sarge shakes his head. “You’re going to catch hell for this later, Turtle.” Then sprints down the path after the crew.
Seconds later, two đibui appear, crouching low. They run up to the wobblie I popped in the shoulder and drag him to cover.
I let them retrieve their wounded.
Then a pack of wobblies breaks through the corner shack, firing at everything. The feral howl of their screams sends a chill down my back. I drop my visor, stand up, and let loose with my armalite.
Bullets grind up the ground in front of them, and they run straight into the hailstorm, the bullets chewing through their bare feet.
The first line of đibui falls. The second line falls over them. In a mad scramble of mud and blood, they go down, and the wobblies behind them trip on their bodies, cascading down like a rain of people.
“Eleven seconds have passed since the soldier named Sarge left this position,” Mimi says. “May I suggest that this would be an opportune moment to move, as well?”
“No, you cannot.”
“This would be an opportune moment to move, as well.”
“I told you, no suggestions!”
“Clarification,” Mimi says. “I asked if I may. You replied that I could not. Can and may are two separate verbs with similar but different meanings.”
I pop the clip and flip it over. Then burst fire into the ground to make the đibui think twice about charging again. “Can you please shut up?”
“Is that a request or an inquiry into my capabilities?”
“It’s an order! Shut up!”
“I do not accept orders,” Mimi says. “Only commands and requests.”
I scream out of frustration and fire once more, over the heads of the đibui, then take off after my davos through a labyrinth of twists and turns. For a moment, I think I’ve outrun them. I stop, breathing heard, and listen.
Not a sound.
“Brilliant,” I say, and start sprinting.
Until I turn a corner and wham!
I run right into Sarge’s butt.
“Watch it!” Sarge yells, and he catches his balance. “You almost fried me!”
Fried him? By hitting his butt? I get to my feet. “What’s wrong?” Before anyone replies, I see and hear the answer—an electrified fence five meters high, topped with concertina wire.
Dead end.
Man-made lighting arcs over the high chain-link fence. My davos stands an arm’s length away, except for Aziz, who has Charlotte over his shoulder. Every three meters, a huge red sign screams out a warning: DANGER! ELECTRIFIED! in three languages.
Sarge is right. I almost killed him. His symbiarmor couldn’t take that much juice without frying him to a crisp.
“Technically,” Mimi, “that many volts are incapable of frying human flesh.”
“But he would be dead.”
“Affirmative.”
“We’ve got to get higher,” I say, backing up to assess the situation.
“Why?” Aziz says.
“So we can get over the fence,” Vienne says, with an implied of course.
“Why?” Aziz and Pinch say simultaneously.
Sarge pushes past all of us. “Bloody hell, the signs are just dummies. I reckon the current’s just there for show. Who’d be fossiker enough to put an electric fence where any piker could latch on?” He grabs the chain fence and says, “See?”
For a second nothing happens, then zap! Current arcs through him, and he goes flying backward, as if a giant, invisible crowbar had cracked him in the mouth.
He lies in the mud, rigid as a corpse.
“Is he dead?” I ask Mimi.
“Negative,” she says. “I am detecting a persistent biosignature.”
Vienne and I walk over to Sarge. Look down at his soot-stained face.
“Piker or fossiker?” I ask.
“Both,” she says.
I cover Sarge’s open mouth to keep the rain out. “Now he knows how a cockroach in a zapper feels.”
Pinch pushes me aside. She kneels to examine Sarge, putting her head on his chest.
“He’s not dead,” Vienne says.
“Probably wishes he were,” I say.
“His heart’s beating,” Pinch says. “He’s breathing.”
“His armor absorbed most of the current,” I say.
Vienne nudges hard him with her boot. “Quit goldbricking, soldier.”
Sarge’s eyes pop open. He tries to lift his head. “Can’t. Ruddy. Move.”
“Because you shorted out your symbiarmor.” Aziz pushes us aside and squats next to Sarge. “The electric pulse scrambles the nanobots. You’ll be okay in a few minutes.” He stands and hands Charlotte over. “Pinch, guard the target while I look for a hole in this fence. You two, keep the đibui off our tail.”
As soon as he walks away, I give Vienne the look and whisper, “About that higher ground.”
She smirks. “Thought you’d never ask.”
A minute later. Vienne and I are sprinting past a line of shacks, headed toward the tower. In the distance, we hear shouts from the đibui as they try to scour the slum for us, but the same slapdash layout of the Warren that protects them also makes it carking hard to find us. That could search for an hour and still not find our location.
Our job, though, is to make sure we’re not here in an hour.
I point to a dilapidated telemetry tower like the one the Razor fired from. It’s covered with rickety platforms and haphazard stairways and planks that connect the small tarpaper shacks built on them. These make Krill’s shack look like an Orthocrat’s mansion.
“How about that one?” I ask. “High enough?”
“Looks dangerous.” She clucks her tongue. “It could collapse at any minute.”
“True.”
“Which makes it all the more fun.” She grabs my arm. “Come on.”
We cut across an open sewer trough and through a pile of debris. It should be garbage, but here it’s a cache of building material. We cut across an alley and climb onto the roof of a noodle house. We climb up a ladder. Out onto a platform. More ladders. Then a swinging bridge that leads to the rings around the tower.
I scan the fence using omnoculars. “See a break anywhere?”
“None,” she says. “But I do have a plan.” She points to a wire that runs from the tower over the electrified fence a few hundred meters away. The end of the wire is tied in to a junction box. “See what the wobblies are doing?”
“Crafty,” I say. “They’re using the juice from the fence to run current. Maybe we can use their hack to short out the fence.”
Vienne shakes her head. “That’s not what I had I mind.” She hunts around on the tower rings until she finds a scrap piece of cloth. Then throws it over the wire and kips her feet. “Last one to the ground’s a big chicken!”
“Wait!” I call.
But off she goes, rappelling down the wire. She swings her feet up as she reaches the concertina wire and, with a flip, lands on the opposite side of fence.
“She’s insane,” I say. “Beautiful and deadly but completely off her nut.”
Vienne gives me a wave, motioning for me to follow. I glance at the ground below and then, with my head spinning with vertigo, look back up at the flimsy wire.
A flimsy, live wire. In the rain.
I shake my head.
Vienne motions again.
I shake my head.
She mimics a chicken flapping
its arms.
I nod in agreement. “Call me chicken all you want, I’m not rappelling down a live wire.”
“Please define the term ‘chicken,’” Mimi says, “in the context are you are using it.”
“Chicken is slang for coward,” I explain. “I’m surprised you didn’t have that in your data banks.”
“I do now.”
Lucky me. I point to the junction box and motion for Vienne to disable it.
She gives me the roger hand signal, and I look for the best way down from the tower. With the juice off, we’ll be able cut through the chain link. If there’s time.
I spot Aziz walking the fence.
Behind him, wielding a machete and an RPG, is a wobblie with juggish ears and a unibrow.
“Krill?” I say. “I thought Vienne shot him.”
“She did,” Mimi says.
“No, I thought she killed him.”
“She did not.”
“Thank you for stating the obvious.”
“You are welcome.”
“I was being sarcastic, Mimi.”
“I realize that. I chose to overlook it.”
But there’s no ignoring the RPG in Krill’s hands as he stalks closer to Aziz, who is blissfully unaware of the đibui’s movements, even though he’s pausing to do the status checks. Not that Aziz is making mistakes. Everything he’s doing is by the book. That’s the problem. In urban combat, there is no book because your enemy has no rules.
“Jumalauti!” I say.
“I believe the correct phrase is ‘jumalauta,’” Mimi says. “I am now capable of correcting your profanity in seven different languages.”
“Oh, kuso.”
“Your usage and pronunciation were correct.”
Aziz is still testing the fence. Looking for a weak spot. Krill on his tail. Getting closer. Just a few meters away. Still blocked by scrap-heap piles.
A few more seconds, and Aziz will be a dead man. The crew will have no chief.
Can’t let that happen.
I grab the power line, and electricity shoots through my hands. “C-can’t believe I’m d-doing t-this!”
“Let go of the wire!” Mimi barks. “The voltage will overwhelm the nanobots!”
“F-fix!” I stammer, and swing my legs over, launching myself into space. “Yahhhhhhh!”
“Let go!” Mimi yells.
But I can’t. My hands are locked on the wire, power shooting through me, my back arching as my muscles all seize up. I jet toward the ground like a glowing human statue, the ground rising up to meet me. This is the end, I think as my jaws clench tight against my own scream, cutting it off.
“Let go!” Mimi screams. “Now!”
My fingers twitch, and even though I don’t will it, they open, and I can only watch as they both open, releasing the line, current arcing between them.
“Nuh!” I groan and feel myself plunging into space, outracing the falling rain to the Warren.
Whump!
With a thundering crash, I slam through a corrugated metal roof and land hard on an earthworks stove, collapsing the whole shack around me.
“Why,” Mimi says, “do you always have to be the cowboy?”
“I think I broke my back,” I say.
“Nothing is broken,” she says. “On you. The same cannot be said for the structure.”
I knock the debris off myself and crawl to my feet. “Think the wobblies heard me fall?”
“The probability is high.”
I push aside the shattered door and step into an alley. Orient myself toward Krill’s last bearing. Get to the next alley and grab a look-see.
A hundred meters ahead, Aziz stands stock-still, listening, waiting to see what comes of the commotion I made.
He definitely heard.
So did Krill, who is fifty meters ahead, halfway between me and the chief. The wobblie is hanging close to a shack, his mud-covered clothes camouflaging him in the rain. He presses the RPG against his leg.
Hiding.
Waiting for Aziz to let his guard down again.
Krill slips back down his alley. Going for a close-range shot. Make sure he gets the kill.
I tail him, moving faster, trying to gain ground, taking a chance that Krill is too focused on the target to notice the quick movements behind him.
Down another alley. Cutting across paths. Jumping an embankment swollen with runoff from the rain. The stream is angry with rust-colored mud and garbage from the Warren. I’ve got to cover ground—double-timing it, moving fast in the sucking mud—hoping the rain masks the sounds.
Almost on Krill, just five meters ahead, reaching for my combat knife, hoping for a quick and quiet end to this, then—
No!
Krill pushes into the shack.
Screams erupt from inside.
I wait for the screams to die. Then sprint around the shack into an alley lined with scrap metal.
Nothing here but junk.
Kuso!
Lost him.
Water dripping down my face. Rainfall and trash blocking my view. Can’t see a carking thing.
For a second, then three, then five.
“Mimi?”
“I detect the biosignature of the entity called Krill ten meters ahead,” Mimi says, “bearing at ten o’clock.”
“I could kiss you!”
“Please do not,” she says. “I know where your mouth has been.”
Krill breaks into the open . . . picking up the pace . . . raising the RPG to his shoulder . . . turning a corner . . . the fence in front . . . turning on Aziz, who I can’t see, but who, from Krill’s body language, is still crouched by the fence, waiting.
I raise my armalite. Sight Krill’s ear through the scope.
My finger tenses on the trigger.
“Wait for it,” I tell myself. “Wait.”
Then, with no warning, Krill whips the launcher around.
At me.
“Surprise!” he howls, and fires.
The RPG rams into my gut and explodes. The force blows me backward, slamming me through a shack and into the muddy path behind it. My body plows through the muck, almost burying me up to my face.
“Am I dead?” I ask, spitting out mud.
“Negative.”
“Good to know.” I struggle to my feet—shite! No armalite!—as Krill charges after me, raising the launcher like a club.
“I killed you!” he bellows.
“Surprise!”
Krill swings the launcher. I duck and pull my combat knife. Then sweep the blade across Krill’s cheek, splitting the flesh, spinning around to deliver a side kick. He sweeps my leg with the launcher, knocking the knife away. I roll to my feet as Krill screams and chucks the launcher at me.
I block it with a forearm, but Krill grabs my soaked coat, pulling the two of us face-to-face, our breath mixing. His savagery against my training. We punch each other, hammer each other, bite, scratch, and scream until we stand bloodied, bent at the waist, struggling for breath, exhausted.
My left eye is bruised and swollen shut, both my lips split now. Krill spits out three teeth, his nose rebroken, the gash in his face a mix of blood, mud, and bone.
Krill takes a rasping breath. All the savage is spent.
I have him now. “Don’t make me kill you.”
“Who’s making you?” he says. “Who . . . who told you to come to the Warren . . . in the first place?”
“Ask the Razor,” I say. “He’s the one who did the kidnapping.”
Krill laughs up blood. He wipes his mouth. “For a Regulator, you fight good.” He taps his head. “But you don’t use your noggin worth a damn.”
Boom!
A shot fires.
Krill drops.
I turn to see Aziz. An armalite is in his hands.
“Why kill him?” I ask. “He was done.”
“Returning the favor,” Aziz says. “He got the drop on me. If you hadn’t distracted him, I’d be dead.”
“Distracted
?” I say, looking at the blood on my hands. “You call this distracting an enemy?”
Aziz throws my arm over my shoulders. “Come on. Sidewinder’s got the electric fence offline, and Pinch is cutting us a hole.”
“That won’t stop the đibui,” I say.
“But it’ll buy us time,” Aziz says. “There’s an old guanite processing plant five hundred meters south. We’ll hole up there and wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“A rescue,” Aziz says. “It’s Plan B. You always need a Plan B. Remember that if you ever get your own davos.”
Chapter 7
Peligroso Factory
ANNOS MARTIS 238. 2. 3. 20:15
Our crew moves through underbrush, cutting a way through the overgrown area to the doors of the Peligroso guanite factory. Separated from the Warren by two kilometers and yet another electric fence, the plant looks like it’s been shuttered for at least a decade, but according to Aziz, it was still in use a year ago. That’s the way things go on Mars—stop using a thing, and the semitoxic atmosphere starts breaking it down, chewing through steel like an omnivorous bush hog.
“Sarge,” Aziz says, “take the target from Pinch. She needs a break.”
Sarge grouses but accepts Charlotte from Pinch. “What’s your problem, Pinchie? This bird weighs less than an empty sack.”
Pinch works her sore shoulders. “Say that in a hour, tough guy.”
The factory doors are locked and chained shut, with the words DANGER and DRÆU spray-painted across them. The windows are filthed over. A few are shattered.
“Hinky,” I say, and wipe dirt from a window as Pinch picks the locks. “There’s machinery inside. Equipment and metal, too. Makes no sense for the đibui not to live here or at least strip this place bare.”
The chain falls with a clank to the ground. Pinch starts on the deadbolts on the door.
Aziz points to the word painted over every door: DRÆU. “There’s your answer.”
“Drow?” I say.
“It’s pronounced dray-you,” Pinch says. “The wobblies are scared shitless of them.”
“Why?” I ask. “Didn’t think the đibui were afraid of anything.”
“Rumor says the Dræu are soldiers gone feral.”
“Wild animals, they are,” Sarge says. “They’d as soon kill you as look at you. And you better not run up on them when they’re hungry.”
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