As he moved, he scanned the net wide-band to see if he could intercept any revvie communications. The net didn’t seem able to take the command, and he came up with nothing. With a gauntleted hand, he flipped up the lever on the shaft door and swung inside, setting his feet on the rung just below floor level and reaching back to close the door behind him.
Whhummmp!
The electronic scream of the net crashing ran through Trystin like a knife down his spine, and his fingers opened, half-deadened from the neural impact. Even with the implant cutouts dropping him off-line, Trystin stiffened and half slid down the three meters to the floor of the shaft, his hands barely breaking his fall with half-grasps of the metal rungs. He twisted off the ladder at the bottom, and his hip smashed into a side brace. Stars flashed across his eyes, and stabbing lines of pain lashed him.
Finally, he levered himself upright, feeling almost blind with all outside inputs to his implant cut off and the system down. He eased open the lower door a crack and looked into the maintenance room behind the vehicle garage—no revs in sight. The door to the garage was closed, as was the one to the lower-level main corridor. The station was dim, almost dark, with the power system off-line.
Slowly, he moved toward the corridor, his rifle ready. Underfoot he could feel vibrations, but couldn’t sense their source. Again, he cracked the next door and looked down the corridor, using his internal controls to step up his night vision.
Two more of the barely discernible ghost-suited figures crouched with their backs to him, as if looking around the corner and up the stairwell.
Three quick shots were enough, and Trystin hurried toward the bodies, even harder to see when the revs were not moving. He still hugged the wall, not trusting that they were indeed dead.
Ping! Ping! Ping! More shots came from the end of the corridor ahead.
Trystin skidded down behind the half-visible bodies and tried to scan the section of the hall that led to the lock to the garage and the vehicle door where the armor shield had jammed.
Ping! Ping!
Shells spanged and pinged off the inside of the outer station wall behind and to the left of Trystin. His own breathing sounded like an overloaded ventilator, and he forced himself to breathe more deliberately as he fired three shots down the dim corridor.
Ping! Spang!
Plastcrete fragments from the revs’ shots showered Trystin as he squeezed off two more rounds. He felt that there were only two revs crouched at the end of the corridor, but they had pushed in a turner blade for a shield—far more effective than the dead rev bodies he crouched behind.
Stifling a sigh, Trystin cranked up his reflexes to high and leaped sideways, then charged the revs. From a standing position, he had enough height to fire over the low turner blade—and sprayed the area in an effort to neutralize the revs he could see only as intermittent distortions.
Ping!
Only one shot came his way—one that creased his helmet.
He lowered his reflexes back to one notch above normal and crouched on his side of the turner blade, almost hyperventilating in an effort to relieve his oxygen debt, feeling both his overloaded suit and body straining.
“Shit …” he muttered. No system defenses, and who knew how many revs left. He could barely see the revs, and only if they moved. He was running through a stan’s worth of oxygen in half that time by upping his metabolism to stay alive.
He remained concealed, but could hear nothing through the suit’s limited “ears.”
He’d killed at least four revs, maybe six—but what had happened to the rest?
Slowly he eased around the turner blade and headed for the lock to the garage. As he expected, the big door had been blown open. One rev body lay sprawled by the door, visible only where a slash across the suit had turned back the armored and insulated fabric—probably caused by door shrapnel.
Peering from behind the heavy plastcrete pylon at the flat ground around the station, he saw nothing moving. Outside, the badlands looked the same, and so did the one side of the single reclamation tower in his vision field. What was different were the dozen bodies and the fragments of composite armor strewn beneath the station walls.
Trystin stood, chest heaving. He wasn’t thinking clearly, not at all, a sign of fatigue, and who knew what else. Fatigue? Idiot! He mentally tripped his reflexes and metabolism down to normal, and stood shaking. Step-up meant burning more energy, and he’d been in enhanced-reflex status for all too long. He almost slumped into a heap as fatigue washed over him.
He swallowed nearly all the Sustain in the suit’s helmet nipple, ignoring the chills and cold jolt he felt as it hit his guts.
How long he waited, he wasn’t sure, not until he checked his implant. With no movement for nearly a half stan, he doubted there were any revs left.
Then, picking up one heavy foot after another, he turned and headed back through the useless lock door to the tech section, and the emergency transmitter.
At the end of the corridor were two more bodies. One was a rev with the shoulder of his suit burned away; the other was Ryla.
“Shit …” Trystin swallowed; he was supposed to protect the tech.
He stepped slowly inside the tech section. The system console looked almost normal—the gray plastic dull as ever—except for the dead lights and the corner with the hole large enough for him to insert a gauntleted hand.
He levered open the shielded cover to the emergency transmitter, and the light winked green. With his implant working for short distances, he linked with the simple circuits.
“Perimeter Control, this is East Red Three, from Lieutenant Desoll. Station East Red Three is down. System is red. No station integrity. Rev attack neutralized—”
“Desoll, Major Alessandro here. How many revs? What’s your status?”
“I’m in armor using the emergency transmitter. There were two to three squads with backpacked heavy weapons. They’ve got new shielding, and you can only see them on the fringe scanner frequencies and only at about a third of a kay. The vehicle-door shield jammed, and some blew their way in. Ryla—the tech—killed one, but they got him. I got six or so after I got in armor.”
“Is the station secure?”
“It looks that way, but they blew a hole in the system controller. So I don’t know for sure. And their suits make them almost impossible to see.”
“Do you want to hole up?”
“That’s negative. You can’t tell what’s happening in the bolthole.”
“Can you try to use a scooter to get to East Red Two?”
“That’s affirmative.”
“If the scooter isn’t operational, let us know.”
“Stet. East Red Three out.” He off-linked and looked back around the tech office. Trystin had no real choices. Hanging on at the station for a tech cleanup team that could be days wasn’t a choice, not really, not with all the damaged stations on both perimeters. He’d head for East Red Two, slightly closer than East Red Four.
He shook his head and looked at the slug thrower, then walked down the corridor and up the stairs to the cabinet. He extracted all the spare clips, putting a full one in the rifle and carrying the others, before heading back down. Standing around a dead station doing nothing wasn’t exactly brilliant.
Then again, riding an unarmored scooter north for sixty kays wasn’t exactly brilliant either—assuming he had a working scooter.
Both scooters were untouched, and the fuel cells and motors on both checked out. Trystin took number two because it had full tanks, and stuffed two additional oxygen tanks inside with the spare clips. He took both ration kits from the scooter he was leaving. Although eating in armor was a pain, what was even less desirable was handling other metabolic processes.
After loading and checking the scooter, he hurried back to the emergency transmitter, still carrying the rifle. He looked down at Ryla’s body, and the open eyes. Finally, he went back into the workroom and found some plastic sheeting and slowly wrapped the te
ch’s figure into the plastic, then laid him out on the long workbench. What else he could do, he didn’t know, since the scooter would be cramped.
After that, he turned to the emergency transmitter.
“East Red Two, this is East Red Three.”
“Trystin, interrogative you headed our way?”
“That’s affirm. Me and my little scooter.”
“We’ll be watching.”
“Stet. East Red Three out.”
He closed off the transmitter and walked back to the loaded scooter, settling himself in the driver’s seat and plugging his armor into the scooter’s oxygen tank. He leaned the rifle where he could reach it almost instantly—at an angle across the narrow passenger seat. With a last look around the garage, he eased the vehicle through the ruined door. Once clear of the station, he followed the depressed and flattened ground of the shuttle track westward.
As he drove west, past where the turners had processed the soil, a darker earth had been mixed through the reddish surface cover and reset by the turners. Even so, Trystin could see the faint trace of the creepers beginning to grow over the combined mosaic of red and brown.
With each kay he headed westward, the low blue-green mottled creepers that looked like a cross between lichen and kudzu grew thicker, with less ground between the creepers and darker soil around them. As the bioengineered creepers grew, they slowly released the oxygen once bound into the soil eons ago. Already the free oxygen in the air was approaching five percent, but the total pressure was still half T-norm. Sometimes, looking westward across the creepered plains, he could almost see the gas rising. On a bright day around Klyseen, the gas from the most active creeper clusters cast wavering shadows.
The four-wheeled scooter bounced and jolted, without the air cushion of a shuttle or transport, and Trystin jolted and bounced with it. Scooters were not designed for longdistance travel. He also had to keep the scooter on the hard-packed soil of the track. If he bounced into the fine and gritty soil where the creepers grew, the scooter could easily dig in wheel-deep. More than a few turners had literally buried themselves in patches of ultrafine soil and sand.
By the time Trystin reached the north-south shuttle track and turned north toward East Red Two, the creepers grew almost calf-high in places.
As he drove, he continued to scan the terrain, now mostly mottled blue and green. The constant movement reminded him how much harder it was to check everything visually. His neck would be sore by the time he reached East Red Two. Even more sore, he corrected himself.
The scooter continued to bounce northward, and Trystin continued to scan the terrain, seeing only the endless kays of blue-green.
In time—after two uncomfortable stops, and four standard hours, he finally eased the scooter to a halt at the intersection of two shuttle tracks.
After looking at the track eastward and checking the small plot on the scooter console, Trystin turned the scooter toward Quentar’s station and linked to the scooter comm. “East Red Two, this is East Red Three.”
There was no response. Trystin shook his head. The scooter comms were supposed to be good for more than thirty kays on open terrain. He couldn’t have been more than five from East Red Two. Had the tanks all been full on the scooter he took because the comm system wasn’t that good?
As he headed eastward, the creepers became lower and more scattered.
After the scooter had covered another kay or so, and he could see most of the reclamation towers, Trystin tried the comm again. “East Red Two, this is East Red Three. I’m about three kays south.”
Nothing.
He tried the helmet comm, with no results, and the scooter rolled on toward East Red Two.
“Approaching scooter … if that’s you, Trystin … make a left turn, then a right, then a left back on your original heading. Then stop for a moment—the same number of times as your call number.”
Trystin followed Quentar’s directions, with three quick stops, trying not to mangle either creepers or the scooter, before resuming his course toward the station. He kept trying the comm intermittently.
Then he began trying the helmet link.
At about a kay, he got a response.
“You’re coming in weak, Trystin.”
“That’s helmet comm. I can read you, but the scooter transmitter’s shot.”
“Revvie casualty?”
“Negative. Maintenance casualty, I think.”
“Talk about it later. Natsugi is waiting for you.”
“Stet.”
Trystin guided the scooter toward the station. As he neared the garage entrance, both shields and door opened—in sequence. Trystin wondered if he or Ryla should have lowered the shields to East Red Three earlier. If he had, then maybe Ryla could have had time to repair the shield mechanism. Then again, maybe not. If the shield could have been repaired, they’d both paid for that oversight, Ryla far more than Trystin.
He swallowed again. It had still been his responsibility.
Natsugi waited at the vehicle door, a heavy rifle aimed at the scooter. He kept it aimed at Trystin until Trystin unhelmeted inside the station.
“Lieutenant Desoll, Natsugi.”
“Pleased to meet you, ser.” Natsugi didn’t look convinced, but Trystin had encountered the problem before—he looked like too many revs.
“Maybe you could help, Natsugi.” Trystin tried not to lean against the wall, but the armor was heavy, and he was exhausted. “The revs got Ryla. I couldn’t bring his body, but I wrapped him in sheeting and laid him out on the tech table. If you could let someone know …”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thank you. Quentar up in the center?”
“Yes, ser.”
Trystin slowly walked up the stairs. Quentar waved as he saw the other lieutenant and motioned to the hard chair next to the command seat.
Trystin sat on the hard chair and took a deep breath. East Red Two smelled like weedgrass and ammonia, but not so strongly as his station had.
“So what happened?” Quentar’s eyes remained glazed, indicating that his attention was on his screens.
“A lot of revs, with heavy backpacked weapons, with really good visual and heat shields that kept them off scanner until they were within a couple hundred meters. The lower vehicle-door shield jammed. A bunch of them got past the gattlings and rockets and blew their way in. Ryla got one; I got six, I think, but they got him.”
“You’re lucky to be alive. According to PerCon, you had all six squads targeting you.”
“I used a lot of rockets and almost all the gattlings. They still beat the armor to shreds.”
“Our super high-tech composite boron plastic armor?”
“The same stuff.”
“Did you think about the bolthole?” asked Quentar.
“Fine. I go down into that coffin and do what? Wait? Who’d ever come and get me? That’s for when you’re a basket case.”
“Yeah. I feel that way, too.” Quentar shook his head and pointed to the small console in the corner. “After you report to PerCon, you can use the off-watch cubicle and the shower. Let me know where they’re sending you.”
Trystin stood and trudged across to the console, linking into the system.
“Perimeter Control, Lieutenant Trystin Desoll, calling from East Red Two. Reporting status—”
“Desoll, this is Major Alessandro. Did you encounter any more revs?”
“No, ser.”
“Can the station be brought on-line quickly?”
“I don’t know. The upper right corner of the tech center got scorched with an HE round, but the rest seemed all right.”
“How did they get in?”
“The vehicle-door shield jammed open after Ryla returned from a repair run, and we never got it fixed before the revs showed up.”
“That’s been a problem. Do you have any idea how many revs assaulted your station?”
“No, ser. The scanners wouldn’t focus on their shielding right. I
couldn’t see anything either, not until I did a full-frequency scan, and that was only on the fringe, and they still seemed to flicker … .”
The questions seemed to go on and on. Trystin propped himself against the wall and kept answering.
Finally, Alessandro concluded, “ … if we need any more information, I’ll get back to you. There will be a tech team and a sweep team going in tomorrow, and they’ll send a carrier for you—around zero seven hundred. Later on, we’ll send out the rest of the station crew.”
Trystin logged off and walked back toward Quentar, slumping back into the hard chair.
“And?” asked Quentar.
“They’re sending a tech team out tomorrow, along with a sweep squad. They’ll pick me up.”
“Lucky you.” Quentar paused. “No one else was there?”
Trystin shook his head. “The attack the other day … well, the revs bent a door and shield frame enough that the station stunk. So Voren and the techs bailed out. Gerfel had leave, and her replacement wasn’t due until the late shuttle.”
“Makes you wonder.”
“Yeah,” Trystin snapped. “How did they manage to locate the one under-force station on the entire perimeter—from orbit yet—and the only one with bad shields—and still get wiped out?”
“A lot of bodies?”
“What’s a lot? I counted maybe a squad, but I didn’t go looking. They’re all still there.”
“They’re good for fertilizer, anyway. Except we’ve got to transport them.” Quentar laughed. “You know the one thing I like about this job?”
“What?” asked Trystin tiredly.
“Killing revs. It’d be better if I could be a pilot. That way I could scorch a bunch, but the gattlings do a real good job. You know,” Quentar said, his voice dropping to a more conversational level, “the revs aren’t really human. They’re part alien.”
“I hadn’t heard that.”
“Oh … the policy types on Perdya hushed that up. They said it makes people too excitable. How else do you explain it? Would you run right at a gattling, Trystin? Would anyone human? How else can you explain it?”
The Parafaith War Page 5
