Men of Stone (The Faded Earth Book 3)

by Joshua Guess

  Beck frowned. “You’re leaving the citizens without protection?”

  “Yeah, I am,” Stein said. “You may have noticed they’re in a reinforced tunnel designed to serve as exactly the kind of protection they’re being used for right now. People are safe in the Loop system. Whereas here in Manhattan, we have a hundred people in those advanced suits of armor managing to pin down or just kill every one of us they get a bead on. Also they’re fucking with the Mesh here somehow, so the army of drones doing all kinds of manual labor are suddenly killer robots. Which is why I want you here specifically. If that’s okay with you, of course. Wouldn’t want to cause an inconvenience.”

  “Shit, okay,” Beck said defensively. “You’re bitchy when you hop in that suit.”

  “You’re remarkably stubborn when it comes to listening to someone with more experience and information than you,” Stein snapped back. “Especially when they’re at least supposed to be your superior. Get here as fast as you can. We’re short on computer experts with a lot of experience dealing with drones. I need you to keep my people from getting cut to ribbons.”

  “We’re on our way,” Beck confirmed as she entered a new destination into the console.

  Stein sighed. “Good to hear. I’ll make tea or something. See you soon.”

  The line went dead and Beck became aware the carriage was filled with the sort of total silence she thought of as pending. It was the quiet of breaths held upon the delivery of news which could go either way. The empty void between heartbeats when you couldn’t know if another would come.

  She touched Eshton’s hands and he pulled them away, immediately reading her intent. She spun on her stool and looked at the rest of the team.

  “What?” she asked. “You guys heard her. We’re going to Manhattan.”

  “Know that,” Lucia said, her voice controlled but still husky with constrained emotion. “We’re just going to ignore the other Rezzes being attacked? All those people?”

  Beck shrugged. “Ignore the Rezzes, yes. They’re probably a bunch of lost causes. Keene had years to make a hundred different plans for a hundred different scenarios. As for the people? No. We’re not ignoring them. I’ve been reading the numbers and it looks like the evacuation orders were sent on before the violence could spread past the infrastructure Keene’s people targeted. While his men struck factories that make our gadgets, the citizens were already dropping into the undercity and getting away. The people will be fine.”

  She hoped.

  “So,” Lucia said. “Now we go after Keene? He’s our target?”

  Beck saw her own rage reflected in those eyes. The sense of loss just at the idea that Wojcik had come so close to dying. Keene was everyone’s target if he was even in the Protectorate with his men, but Beck got the impression Lucia would hunt for him no matter her orders.

  27

  Jen knew something was wrong with Lucia. Or if not wrong, at least different in a way that was probably going to be bad for her health. None of them were prepared for the sort of attack Keene threw against the Protectorate. Scorched Earth was a popular theme among the thousands of movies her family brought through the Collapse safely, but no ancient cinema could prepare you for the real thing.

  She’d spent an entire childhood absorbed by those snapshots of a different culture. The Protectorate was a deliberate construct, a haven created for the hundreds of thousands of immune refugees from around the world. Those cultures, each and every one, were willfully given up by the survivors. It was the only way to ensure continuity of the species.

  Entertainment, art, philosophy—all these things were gone like smoke on the breeze. Jen understood this better than anyone else on the team thanks to the legal loopholes that allowed her ancestors to haul digital content through the bottleneck of history and into the more harsh future on the other side.

  Love stories. Comedies. Every kind of horror imaginable from the cheapest possible villain to world-killing hellspawn—Jen knew them all. Had watched them all just to catch glimpses of the world as it had been and to understand it through the art it produced. Her favorites were the ones with brave men and women in costumes standing in front of everyone else to fight the bad guys. She watched those films for the first time as a small child and fell into them completely.

  From age five, Jen knew she wanted to be in the Deathwatch. And because of all those hundreds of hours absorbing treatises on human behavior, she had a better idea of what effects trauma could wreak on even the most prepared psyche.

  Yes. Something was wrong with Lucia.

  Jen kept close to the other woman as they raced from the Manhattan Loop station nearest the Spire. There was a hidden station leading directly to its lower levels, but that was offline. Beck couldn’t even pull up video surveillance from it. Jen’s bet was that Keene had it destroyed to prevent easy escape. Or maybe to keep backup from pouring in.

  They moved up the steps of the station toward ground level, but Beck raised a fist to stop them. “Wait. Jeremy, drones please.”

  The modular pack attached to Jeremy’s suit opened and two small aerial drones zipped out while half a dozen ground versions dropped free and skittered up the stairs. The feeds went live on every HUD including Jen’s own. Not that they got much; the flying pair saw nothing and the ground drones were immediately destroyed by what looked like a swarm of recycling bots. These were the size of a large cat but held a metallic mesh bag on their back which would slowly fill as the maw on their front end located and ground up discarded technology and lesser trash.

  “Shit,” Jen said, putting a hand on Lucia’s back plate. “They know we’re here.”

  “They know someone is here,” Lucia said grimly. “I bet they’re not being piloted, though. I’ll meet you at the Spire.”

  Before Jen could process the words, Lucia was moving faster than any human could have unaided. She was up the stairs and onto the street by the time Jen began to chase after her. Eshton lurched into her way and blocked her. “No. We can’t keep losing people.”

  “Come back here,” Jen said into the channel. “Stop being an idiot just because Wojcik got hurt, you silly bitch.”

  There was no answer. Not the dread-inducing static of an offline radio, simply an unanswered ping. Lucia’s suit was still green on the tactical display. She was alive, well, and judging by the simplified map, running her ass off.

  “She gave us a distraction,” Beck said. “No gunshots, either, so we should be okay to move if we do it fast and find cover. The Spire is only a tenth of a mile from here. Aerials are showing the swarm chasing her instead of waiting for more targets. We need to hustle.”

  Jen pushed Eshton away. “Goddamn, you can be cold sometimes.”

  “Unfair,” Jeremy said. “She didn’t make Lucia run off.”

  “No, she just doesn’t think it’s worth it to go after her,” Jen said as they climbed the steps and raced across the street.

  “You make that sound like a bad thing,” Tala said, her voice hot.

  Jen swung her head as she scanned around for more drones. “Yeah, exactly. Wojcik got hurt and now we’re just letting Lucia go.”

  “Get the fuck over yourself,” Tala said.

  Beck cut in. “Tala.”

  “Nope. Sorry, boss, but this needs to be said. Squelch me if you want,” Tala insisted. “We’re about to walk into a fight Stein is having trouble with. I don’t want the princess here watching my back with a chip on her shoulder.”

  “Oh, fuck you,” Jen said as they slid beneath the awning of an ancient storefront whose design was more ornamental than the utilitarian designs found in later Rezzes.

  “Lucia chose to get the drones off our backs,” Tala said as they slipped inside the store after Jeremy kicked in its front door. “She wasn’t ordered to go. Not worth it is right. She made a call, good or bad, that lets the rest of us maybe get to the Spire and do some good. Beck didn’t order her to do it, and it’d be a waste to give up the tiny advantage she gave us just beca
use you feel shitty about not putting on a cape and playing hero. So get over it. Or stay here. I don’t really care.”

  The words hit her harder than they had any right to. Tala had watched those old films with her. She’d listened to the instructors during their training drill into their heads that there was no room for heroics in teams like Deathwatch squads.

  Tala’s words had truth in them. More than she knew. In the end Jen decided her anger might just be displaced guilt that when the moment came, she hadn’t been the one to make the heroic choice. Lucia had.

  *

  They copied enemy tactics by breaking through interior walls and working their way toward the Spire. Here it was much easier to do. The old buildings were just that: buildings. This close to the nerve center of the entire Protectorate, everything was old. These places were ancient wood and gypsum board instead of printed stone. Fragile as eggshells to a quarter ton of flesh and steel.

  It worked right until they reached the massive square in which the Spire and the division headquarters buildings around it sat. The ground ahead was clear. No cover at all. From their hiding place a few yards back from the windows of a restaurant facing the square, Jen could see two enemy soldiers on the ground. Both carried heavy firearms unlike anything she’d ever seen and prowled the space between them and the Spire.

  “Look at that,” Jeremy said. “Found a couple of their snipers.”

  Jen’s eyes flicked to the drone feed and sure enough, there they were. Black dots on top of two administration buildings, positioned to give the widest field of fire between them possible.

  She bit back a curse. “So which one of those do you need to get to so you can shut down the drones? Because I’m assuming you’d have done it already if you could.”

  “The Spire,” Beck answered at once. “At a guess I’d say Keene has soldiers at the master control stations for drones from every division of the civilian government. Those systems are designed to be gapped so they can’t be controlled over the Mesh. The only master control that trumps those is the one in the Spire. Our system can override them.”

  “Why hasn’t someone done that already?” Jeremy asked.

  Jen waved a hand at the soldiers ahead of them. “Is it really that hard to figure out? Stein is in the Spire. Fighting. Two plus two says Keene has people inside keeping ours from accessing it.”

  “Question is how do we get in?” Eshton asked. “The undercity has to be cut off. I can take shots at those two, but all that will do is put the snipers on alert and probably give away our position.”

  Jen had a moment of pure inspiration. Clapping her metal hands together lightly, she turned to Beck. “I have an idea.”

  *

  Two drones rolled into the square after they took the long way around. The idea was to draw the patrolling guards in a particular direction to put them perpendicular to the shop the team waited in. Eshton sat ready, gun out and locked on his targets with the computer fully engaged in the process. Tala controlled the ground drones. She was far from expert in their use, but that didn’t matter in that moment. Jeremy needed all his concentration.

  It took about ten minutes for Jeremy to recall his aerial drones and implement Jen’s idea. He had to backtrack through the line of broken walls to a place the enemy wouldn’t see him do it. He had begun piloting them again even as he made his way back to the team and settled in to work.

  Jen watched the drones circle wide around the square and gain altitude. There was no sound on the feed at present, but the shaking of the camera made clear the drone motors were working harder than usual.

  They spiraled around and up until they hovered a hundred feet above the waiting snipers. Her eyes darted to the feeds for the ground drones, which were almost visible to the enemy.

  Timing would be crucial.

  “Now,” Beck said as the guards noticed the drones and stomped toward them. Neither wore worry in their body language, and why would they? Recon drones weren’t dangerous unless someone packed them with explosives, and no volume they could carry would be dangerous at this range. The guards jogged toward the shifting metal spheres because they understood the value of gathering intelligence. They knew defenders were somewhere in the area and wanted to cut off the flow of information from the drones to them.

  It was a perfectly normal reaction. In this case, also a lethal one.

  As the pair crossed the invisible line Eshton preset into his targeting system, his gun spat four rounds in rapid succession. His hands and arms barely moved as the computer adjusted aim from one enemy to the other. All four bullets, heavy armor-piercing rounds made from depleted uranium, drilled home.

  At the same moment, both drones dropped out of the air. Their motors ceased functioning for a second and a half before snapping back on. As each arrested its fall they automatically corrected to remain locked on their targets, a process that took fractions of a second.

  Then they released the grenades. Halfway between drone belly and the central control stack located on the upper back of the enemy suits, the grenades popped to life. They rained down molten thermite designed to stick to anything it touched. The image was washed out at once by the flare of light.

  “Go, go, go!” Beck said, bursting through the door and sprinting toward the Spire. For once Jen felt no reluctance or urge to snark. The ingrained reaction to fear or stress was held in check by the overwhelming awareness that there might be other snipers they hadn’t seen, ready to pick them off with the same mechanical efficiency Eshton displayed.

  Luck was with them, however. She heard no shots as they cleared the square and crashed through the ground floor entrance to the Spire.

  The four enemy soldiers waiting inside the lobby were a less fortunate turn of events.

  28

  Eshton’s gun fired overhead as Beck, in what Parker would have called a baseball slide, barreled into the surprised guards. The four of them were all staring off in another direction when the team crashed through the door, and in that fraction of a second Beck realized they were looking at where their friends had fallen instead of keeping an eye on where the people who killed them might be.

  It was a basic element of situational awareness no rookie Sentinel would have failed at. Always look for the threat, not the victims. But then, these weren’t real Deathwatch. They were just assholes in stolen armor.

  She spread her arms and legs out as far as she could reach, letting her momentum knock the soldiers into a pile. Stabilizers could do a lot to right a suit, but they only went so far. The sharp blow did exactly what she hoped for.

  Two of them died before they hit the ground, Eshton’s combat computer finding the sweet spots in their helmets and doing its grim work. The others didn’t last much longer. Jeremy, Jen, and Tala descended on the pair ruthlessly. Jen killed one by slamming her blade down through the face plate three times in a second and a half. The third blow snapped the tip of the weapon off. It didn’t matter. The force of the hit against the cracked helmet let the truncated length of steel through.

  Jeremy and Tala took a more direct route. He kicked the last man’s gun away viciously enough to shatter the window it slammed against while she knelt on the prone soldier’s right arm and let the full weight of her suit pin him down. Then both of them were digging metal fingers beneath sections of armor and yanking them away from attachment points to reveal the soft sub layer below.

  After that it got…messy.

  Beck hauled herself to her feet and pulled up every schematic and control menu she could find for the spire.

  “We need to—” Eshton started to say, but she raised a hand.

  She flipped through menus as fast as she could, working out commands and contingencies faster than she could order the computer verbally. In less than a minute she set up half a dozen top-level commands only Stein would be able to override. Before exiting the building control framework, Beck flipped on two emergency protocols. The kind meant for truly worst-case scenarios.

  Eshton was
fairly humming with impatience by the time she finished and turned to him. “Okay, we can go now. They’re going to know four of their guys are dead.”

  “That’s what I was just about to say,” Eshton protested.

  “Yeah, I figured,” Beck replied. “I was doing something about it. Come on. There’s an armory on this floor. All of you are now green lit for firearms. I’ve enabled the targeting systems in your armor. If it doesn’t have a Deathwatch ID tag, you’re going to be firing kill shots whether you want to or not. Let’s arm up.”

  The usual chatter of reactions and protests was absent. There was a feeling in the air, a sense of grim determination Beck had never felt before. She had time on the Loop to think about what she would do once they reached this point. How they would climb a tower stacked with enemies and have even a fraction of a chance to survive. The armory was a first step. She had locked down every blast door on the ground floor to make sure no one could descend upon them while they looted it.

  Even Eshton was silent on this front. He knew better than all of them the danger they were about to unleash within the Spire. Assuming the enemy hadn’t already killed them, there were hundreds of support staff on site.

  Yet he too seemed taken by the strain of inescapable violence which infected the remainder of the team. Their training left no room for illusions when it came to combat. They all understood what waited for them past the blast doors. Beck had the added weight of knowing that if Keene employed a talented enough coder, he could have access to the vital functions of the entire Protectorate hours after he gained full control of the building.

  Functions which, for the moment, Beck had at her fingertips.

  Once in the armory, she let Eshton decide their loadout. He chose standard issue pistols for those with basic firearms certifications. These were the overlarge guns made to fit in gauntleted hands with enhanced strength. Each team member jettisoned the modular cargo pods on the leg matching their dominant hand and slapped on a new one that held a space for the weapon and spare ammunition. She hoped the auto reloading system was intuitive to use. They were all going to need it.