by Joel Dane
“Lampreys are attracted to population centers, so baiting them here is easier. And it’s some kind of Waypoint tech, I don’t know. Waypoint tech is tough to read.”
“It’s inscrutable,” I say.
“It cannot be scruted! Now ask why there’s nothing on the channels about lampreys.”
“Why?” I ask.
“The corpos are using technopaths to control the information.”
I tense when she mentions technopaths. “I thought they didn’t live that long.”
“They’re using kids,” she says. “I’m pretty sure. I’m ninety percent certain. It’s only a working theory. They’re probably using eleven- or twelve-year-old kids, which is before, you know . . .”
“Yeah.” Before they die screaming. “How many technopaths are there?”
“Two for every billion births?” She lenses me a shrug. “Most don’t live very long.”
“Yeah.”
“So I guess there’s only a few alive at any one time.”
“Which means there aren’t enough to screw with MYRAGE.”
“Except nothing else explains how they’re keeping a worldwide invasion of lampreys s-so-so qui-et-qui-qui-et-et-et—”
Our connection sputters and falls silent. A drakonfly drops to the ground at my feet, twitches once, and goes still. My lens reverts to default inputs and Cali curses.
“Well, this is suboptimal,” Sergeant Manager Li murmurs, her soft voice carrying along the ledge. “Our com systems are crashing.”
“Ting’ll fix it,” Voorhivey says.
“The problem is upstream,” Li tells him. “Nothing to do with lampreys.”
Basdaq scans his t-reader. “No signal interference apparent.”
“Sit tight and thank the Louvre we’re not in a firefight,” Sergeant Manager Li tells us. “Any half-decent insurgent crew would punch us in the spine before we came back online.”
A dull clank sounds and Ridehorse says, “Huh. My armor’s weird.”
“Oh, shit,” M’bari says. “She’s hit!”
“I’m not hit, dumbass.” Ridehorse slumps against the wall. “My armor’s just a little . . .”
A black line stretches across her stomach plate. For a second, I think it’s widening, and then I realize it’s seeping blood.
“Medic!” the Sergeant Manager shouts. “Rampart, rampart! We are under fire—lethal response—find cover!”
She’s never yelled before, and we react like we’ve been shocked. Basdaq fires twice, throwing ramparts in front of Ridehorse. Shells pock the walls around us. Without hesitation, without the slightest hint of nerves, Voorhivey scrambles beside Ridehorse, unpacking his medkit while the rest of us scatter behind columns.
Jag hustles Ting to cover. There’s a crack of contact and Jag shakes her arm. “I’m tagged, I’m hit! I’m—no. No, I’m okay!”
“C-contact is reported by Alfa P-Platoon,” Ting stammers, monitoring the paleo burst channel. “Snipers to the south and west, c-composition of hostiles unknown and we’re getting pulsed.”
A slug gouges the wall behind me and my mind explodes with outrage. Some asshole is shooting at me! I don’t remember switching to enhanced vision, but when I sweep the street I catch sight of faint shapes prone on an underway grate, half-hidden by ads and a sanitation station. Velocity blooms appear on my lens as they fire, and more thunks sound.
“I’m okay,” Jag repeats. “Deconfirm, I’m unhurt.”
“Hostiles twenty floors up,” I announce, in a strangely flat voice. I try to lens the location to my squad, but coms are still down and more blurred hostiles are slotting into formation. “Twenty floors overhead and fifteen degrees—”
Slugs pepper the walls and I lose track of what I’m saying. Pico bellows at Shakrabarti, and I almost fire a brane canister at the snipers before remembering I need standard ammo.
I feel the selector click in my palm and blast a triple-round across the street. When it hits the grate beneath the centermost shooter, liquammo splashes through. Four shooters shudder and two die, but a dozen more take aim from the boardwalks and maintenance structures.
Jag barks a frightened laugh when another round bounces off her armor, and I hit the next shooter, and Cali fires a fucking anti-armor grenade.
The entire underpass crumples with a whoomp and a shriek of alloy. Tons of rubble crash through two scooter bridges and a jut of warungs before littering a reinforced rail track. Sparks fly, cables whip. Fluid sluices from the sanitation station to splash beyond the yellowbeige-glowing lamprey bait below.
“Bang,” Cali says. “Handled.”
“That’s half our anti-armor cans, you splice,” Jag says, popping liquammo slugs.
“There’s three dozen more shooters across the street,” I tell Cali, marking another target and firing. “On the walkways and exterior—”
“We are advised of airborne incoming,” Ting sings out.
“No shit,” Pico says, blazing single shots southward down the street.
When I spin toward his targets, I barely believe my eyes.
A hundred hostiles are swooping at us on modified two-unit paraframes. One flies while the other fires. What is this? Who is this? We’re here to bag a lamprey, not suppress a riot. But this isn’t some spontaneous riot. This is something more serious, more deadly and—
“They’re patriots!” Voorhivey yells. “Insurgents!”
“They’re sitting ducks,” Pico replies. “Make them fall.”
“I want my meka,” Elfano grunts, raising her Boaz.
The ledges above us erupt into a firestorm as the other platoons throw cans downrange. The sizzle of liquammo crackles through the blocks and a hail of coil-rounds pounds us in return. They’re an old tech, gear from a generation ago . . . but the best gear from a generation ago, unfurling into wire-whips strong enough to slice alloy, like happened to Ridehorse.
And patriots is right. This isn’t a Freehold riot, this is an organized paramilitary army. They surrounded us and waited for a misstep. They would’ve slunk away if they hadn’t seen an opening—but when our coms crashed, they struck.
Why are they attacking? No idea. History, I guess. The corpos probably screwed them in one way or another—broke their independence movement, then relocated their families—and they’ve been waiting for revenge.
This is an opportunistic attack by a serious nativist force, and we’re loaded with brane cans that can’t hurt human soldiers.
I flick my Boaz from streams to rounds, conserving my ammunition. I kneel on the north side of a column as Cali hoses the opposite scraper. A hammer cracks against my helmet, but not hard enough to break my focus.
Paraframes glide toward me. What the gehenna kind of suicide strike is this, sailing slowly toward trained corpo soldiers? I acquire an airborne patriot with a shoulder-mounted weapon. He’s a passenger on a paraframe—no, on a sailframe. They’re attacking us with modified sporting equipment.
“Aim for the pilots,” Sergeant Manager Li says, barely louder than normal. “Conserve your cans.”
I shift my target and mark the pilot. Her face fills my vision. She’s younger than me, and her hair is a flapping braid. She looks scared and strong, a patriot willing to die for the cause. I know the expression, yet I still wonder: where does she find the courage to fly a recreational sailframe against four platoons of corporate infantry and a deathmarch Orit Gal?
This girl is a hero, but Ridehorse screams when Voorhivey sprays the loops of her intestine, so I pull the trigger.
CHAPTER 46
The parasail falls. Dozens of them fall, wheeling from the sky like wounded owls, crashing against walkways and canal stations.
Screams of shock and pain fill the air, along with the sizzle of squirtguns and the pop-clank of coils. An Orit Gal edges down between the towers, slowed by the bridges and tracks,
and starts picking off patriots with surgical precision. Looks like the gunship’s weapons systems are back online.
“Incoming, incoming,” Ting squeaks. “Inside the scraper, they’re inside the scraper!”
My lens flares to life and two files flash across the squad channel.
First, a message from Ting: “I raised coms within Anvil Squad but we are not linked to platoon or command. Repeat. Nobody’s seeing this but us.”
Second, she shows us two hundred red marks trickling upward inside the scraper, rising through the fifth and sixth floors to mass on the seventh. Two hundred hostiles are gathering on our floor, approaching our position, invisible to the other platoons.
“We locked down the lifts and stairwells,” Basdaq says.
“Disposal chutes,” I say.
I mean they’re climbing through deactivated chutes. Nobody understands except Ting—and in a horrified flash I understand that the snipers and the sailframes are distractions from the main force inside the building, who are tasked with taking us from behind. Sneaking into place behind the ledges and ending things quick.
“Sagrado,” I whisper. “We need—we need—”
We need to warn other squads. The patriots will chew through the tower from bottom to top. The other two squads of Dee Platoon on the seventh floor are first on their menu, but there’s no way to warn them. Send a runner? Wave the Orit Gal into earshot and—
“Form on me!” Sergeant Manager Li says, wasting no time on impossibilities. “Back inside. We stop them on seven. We stop them here.”
Cali and M’bari spin into the building, guns high and helmets swiveling. Pico and Voorhivey follow, pushing Ridehorse in a fieldcart.
“What about the other squads?” Elfano asks, but Li doesn’t answer.
Shakrabarti and I cover the retreat. We’re last on the ledge, half-assing suppression fire as we trot for the door—
A rasp tears through the clatter of assault weapons. The Orit Gal grinds lower, scraping a wall, crashing through a canal. Its intakes and blades are ganked with retardant foam from a patriot attack and its shattered shoulder turret sends a cascade of wreckage to the ground. A gash opens in the tower wall. One of the ship’s blades catches in an adboard and snaps, flinging through the air like a hatchet.
The Orit Gal tumbles, smashing through the walkways like a cannonball through a cobweb. As I pivot into the seventh floor, an explosion rocks the world outside. Disabled drakonflies crunch beneath my boot and Voorhivey steps away from Ridehorse, because Ridehorse is dead.
The Sergeant Manager tells Cali to take her extra cans, and Ting lights up the squad channels with fifty marks moving toward us through the building. Hundreds more gather beyond them. Thirty seconds away, maybe forty, and we’re trapped in the hallways. When we locked the residents in, we locked ourselves out. Unless someone knows how to pick locks . . .
“Ramparts, please,” Sergeant Manager Li tells Basdaq, while lensing positions to the squad.
“Smartwire.” I drop to a knee beside Pico. “I need smartwire.”
A rampart expands in front of us and Pico tells me, “Your hair looks fine.”
“We’re trapped like—” The red marks swarm closer on my lens. “I can get inside these doors without leaving a trace! I need smartwire! Does anyone have—”
“There’s a time for clever, Private Kaytu,” Li says, meaning this isn’t it.
Cali snorts a laugh at me. “Who’s thick now?”
The red marks stop and flicker, hidden from view around the corners of the corridor in front of us. They’re gathering courage—or firepower. Maybe both.
Nothing happens for a moment, except for Voorhivey crying silently over Ridehorse.
Sergeant Manager Li’s amplified voice booms down the hallway: “My mother wanted me to become a sanitation archaeologist. Times like this, I wonder if she was right.”
I almost turn to look at her. Everyone knows that authority-based riot control is counterproductive: making demands just gives a crowd something to hate. Still, I’m surprised at how gentle an angle Li is taking.
“And tomorrow,” she continues, “tomorrow is my daughter’s birthday. I’m not even lying. She’s turning seven. So I’m asking you please, do not approach. We’re carrying heavy munitions. I’m begging you, do not make me use them. This is not a fair fight. You are outgunned. You bloodied us hard. You are badass. Now take the victory and go home. I can’t promise much. I’m just a grunt; the corpos don’t care any more about me than they do about you. But I’ll promise you this. Tomorrow, at my girl’s birthday party? I’ll raise a slice of cake to you. That’s all I can offer you, except for begging. Please, please disperse.”
Silence falls. Around the corner, the red marks shift and squirm. A few birds chirp in cages, a few wings flutter.
Pico whistles low. “Another minute, Sarge, and you’d have me dispersing.”
“Apparently that was the time for clever,” I say.
“Except we aren’t carrying heavy munitions,” Cali mutters.
“That’s nothing,” Li tells her. “I don’t have a daughter.”
Jag laughs. “When I grow up, I want to be just like Sarge.”
A velocity bloom splashes onto my lens and two missiles streak toward us, which is a pretty straightforward answer to Li’s pleas.
Ting’s countermeasures fill the air and the warheads detonate fifty yards away. The shock wave blows through walls, punches a hole in the ceiling, and craters the floor. The ramparts absorb most of the impact and our suits dampen the rest, but there’s so much crap in the air that visibility is ten feet. Which doesn’t dull the howls of the patriots rushing toward us—
“Bend ’em,” Li says, lensing confirmations.
When Elfano triggers her launcher, the exhaust warms my side through my armor. Her pressure grenade takes flight, the heaviest munitions we can use. If we drop anti-armor grenades like Cali’s, we’re looking at a mass-casualty situation beneath a mountain of collapsed tower. A pressure grenade, on the other hand, only scratches the infrastructure . . . though it’s hard to appreciate the delicacy through the ruptured eardrums, seizures, incontinence, and vomiting. I know, because a soldier once cracked one at me in Vila Vela.
Four pressure grenades strike in a reinforcing pattern, as pretty as practice. They crack with enough force that my stomach flips behind all the protection. The screams are horrible and the forward momentum of the patriots turns into a staggering zombie shuffle through the dust cloud.
Li orders us to empty nonlethal munitions into the hostiles; she’s trying to break the attack without escalation. We’re not packing much nonlethal ordnance, though. We’re here for a lamprey, not an army. In a pause in the clamor, I hear sizzle from the street—or from other squads on the seventh floor—and then Voorhivey and M’bari and Pico methodically empty their Boazes of the kindergarten stuff, which drives the patriots back around the corners.
“Give me a can count,” Li lenses, and I send the specs of my remaining ammunition.
When I check the squad list, my stomach drops. Cali’s mostly empty, and Jag’s only holding brane cans, because she’s our best shot. Elfano and Basdaq and I weren’t equipped with backup nonlethal rounds by the quartermaster, which dispensed gear according to some unknowable algorithm.
We’re running low on everything except lamprey rounds.
Li reopens the public address amplification. “You know what you’re doing, I’ll give you that. So you know we’ve gone easy on you so far—” She stops when a new signal appears. Another rush of patriots, but . . . blurred. “Ting?” she murmurs.
“They’re behind film,” Ting says, after a moment. “That’s high-security film they’ve affixed to a frame, if affixed means attached or—”
Orders scroll as fast as thought. Li authorizes lethal force and Basdaq lays down two more ramparts in the corrid
or. He drops his empty rampart gun, upslings his Boaz, and braces to fire. I stutter-step to the forward rampart and brace beside Pico, feeling the rest of the squad slotting into place behind me.
“Now this, colleagues and genfolk,” Li says, “is what you trained for.”
The swarm of red marks surges toward us. Rounds slam into ramparts and whiz overhead. We wait for the order to engage. We wait, we wait . . . I think Sarge is letting the patriots approach so when we drop them, their bodies will act as obstacles, breaking up the advance of those in the rear. Either that or she wants to minimize their distance for when we resort to full-contact negotiation.
Jagzenka’s head snaps back when a round skims her helmet. She swears. “What the gehenna? Is anyone else getting hit?”
“Ridehorse,” Voorhivey says.
Li flashes a sign. “M’bari, you’re up.”
M’bari carries three lens-directed mini-spindles in a palm-sized shoulder-launcher. They’re a fragile tech, the size of toothpicks and redundant in the age of drones. Still, M’bari loves them on account of some MYRAGE war game of his childhood. We mocked him, but nobody’s jeering now. Three streaks flash away, weaving in response to his local-lensed commands as he tries to sneak them behind the patriots’ film.
There’s a blast and a shout, and M’bari grunts. “Two out of three.”
“The film’s torn but intact,” Ting reports. “I mean, it’s down but not out. It’s—”
“Keep it steady,” Li says, in her soft voice. “Make every pop count. Engage.”
She gives us the green and nine Boazes speak at once. The world vanishes in a blaze of liquammo.
I acquire a target.
Fire a round.
Acquire a target.
Fire a round.
It’s automatic, just another drill. We’ve practiced so many times that my body shifts into a relaxed readiness, like we’re on a training course and the enemy is a platoon we’ll trade insults with in the mess hall.
Except our ammo count keeps dropping . . . and the insurgents keep closing.
