Men of Stone (The Faded Earth Book 3)

by Joshua Guess

  Against that, no real preparation was possible any more than you could plan how to fight a rabid dog backed into a corner.

  Lucia took a deep breath and moved up the stairs toward her team and an uncertain future.

  30

  The team was a blunt instrument. Ascending the Spire took no subtlety beyond the work Beck did in controlling the various systems within it. The trick with the lights stopped working after the first time. Whoever Keene was using for overwatch was smart enough to have worked out a solution on the fly. Beck acknowledged grudging respect for the nameless opponent even as her team fought for every inch of ground.

  Nor were Keene’s men idiots. Rather than die in small groups to slow down the team, they abandoned useless floors and clustered together to defend critical points.

  “Almost there,” Beck gasped as she stepped over the bodies of three dead enemies. “I can override the drones from the control room at the end of the hall.”

  “I’m empty,” Eshton said, tossing his grenade launcher aside. “Six rounds gone to take out five of them. My instructors would kill me for being that inefficient.”

  Jeremy, whose supply of drones was now exhausted, laughed tiredly over the channel. “We’re alive, so I’m not complaining.”

  “We’re only on the seventh floor,” Jen noted. “Lot more to go and no way of knowing how many of them are between us and the rest of our people.”

  Beck tried not to think about it. There was no communication with the other Deathwatch agents in the building. Purely based on statistics, she could not accept it was because they were dead. Her people were fighters first and always. There were too many fortified locations and easily defensible positions for Keene to have killed them all. It had to be some kind of communication blackout, but she couldn’t waste energy trying to work out how such a thing was put in place. The job at hand was far more important.

  “They have to have people inside that room,” Tala said. “Five out here as guards means there are probably at least as many behind the door. We’re not going to do a frontal assault without taking losses.” If she was particularly upset by this fact, it didn’t come through in her voice. “Anyone got any idea how we get Beck in front of that computer?”

  Beck had been wondering the same thing herself. It seemed obvious now that whoever had altered the drone control system had done so from here. There were several divisions of the civilian government that used one or more species of the things, yet all of the drones in the Rez were actively seeking targets. Balance of probability said the enemy would have used the one override on the island capable of wrenching control of them, especially because it was located in a building they were already attacking.

  “Do we actually need to take back control of the drones?” Jen asked. “Can’t we just break something?”

  “No, obviously not,” Beck said. “See, the thing is…hmm.”

  Jen, crouched down behind her shield a dozen paces from the door behind which a large number of enemies probably waited, turned her head and shoulders to look at Beck in a way that screamed impatience. “Hmm? Hmm what?”

  “I think you’re right,” Beck said. “It would take a monstrously complicated software update to reprogram each drone to work autonomously. If it were me, I’d just implement a hotfix. That way as long as you’re sending a signal, you can command them to view anything moving as a target. It’s a fast and easy way of raising an army.”

  Eshton grunted. “So what you’re saying is we can knock out the system and the drones won’t go after people?”

  Beck nodded. “Probably.”

  “That simplifies things a bit, then,” Tala said. She raised her shield to cover her face, trusting the handful of cameras embedded in its front to give her a feed of what lay ahead. Without further comment she carefully stepped in front of the group and holstered her weapon.

  “What are you doing?” Beck hissed over the comm. “Get back here!”

  “I got this,” Tala said.

  Beck let out a frustrated groan. “Fate of the world on the line and none of you assholes can follow orders for shit.”

  Tala responded only with a chuckle as she made her way to the door. The men inside couldn’t see her—Beck had taken out the cameras in the surrounding area just to make sure the enemy had as little advantage as possible. They might have heard her tromping around nearby, but they didn’t open the portal to find out.

  This was no blast door, though it wasn’t lightweight by any means. An inch of solid steel stood between Tala and certain death.

  As Beck watched, Tala stepped to one side of the door and reached into one of the compartments on her leg. She removed a thermite grenade and slapped it against the door at head height. She must have set it to minimum radius, because the flash of light was accompanied by almost no spread of the material.

  The steel plate began to glow red within a handful of seconds. As it did, the whole section vanished in a cloud of bullets from inside the room.

  “Son of a bitch,” Beck growled as she ducked further behind her own shield. Tala laughed in a satisfied way over the comm.

  “Thanks for making the hole for me, shitheads,” she said.

  As the torrent of bullets ebbed, she reached into the same compartment to produce a can of foam explosive. Beck watched her click the button that turned it from a dispenser into a handy bomb.

  Then she reached up and popped it through the ragged, molten hole.

  “Ten seconds,” Tala calmly said as she stepped further away from the door. “Might want to duck into one of those offices.”

  *

  Thankfully, the deeply recessed doorways offered plenty of cover from the blast. Beck was rocked by the pressure wave as it filled the space, but not the pieces of the door itself as they shrieked down the hall.

  No one needed to be told what to do. As one, the team stepped back into the hall and fired from around their shields.

  The thinning smoke made it clear there was no need.

  “Holy shit,” Jen breathed as they got a look inside the control room.

  The half dozen armored forms inside were twisted wrecks. The space itself was small, divided into a stone-walled office where the soldiers had been clustered and a separate room where the servers were secured. The explosion was magnified in the small space, one Beck hadn’t been in before. The force of it was enough to pick up the armored forms and smash them into walls like a child crushing bugs.

  The carnage was total, yet the servers themselves were still operable.

  “What the hell did you guys just do?” Lucia asked over the comm. “I’m a couple floors down and it felt like the building was about to collapse.”

  “You’ll see when you get up here,” Tala said.

  “You may regret the decision,” Jeremy added, his voice wavering.

  Beck hustled into the server room by the expedient path of shooting the lock several times. She considered the best way to cut them off from the transmitters controlling the drones and settled on the simplest solution which would also be the hardest to fix in the near term, short of destroying them outright. With help from Eshton, they cut the power. Literally, since they severed the cables with their blades after disconnecting them. There were spares somewhere, but even she had no idea what storage room they were kept in. If she didn’t know, a random enemy definitely wouldn’t.

  Lucia joined them just as Beck was sliding her blade back into place. She saw the death and destruction, popped her helmet off, and vomited noisily.

  Once she composed herself, Lucia put her helmet back on and opened a private channel with Beck. “It’s done. The thing you sent me to do.”

  “I know,” Beck said. “I got the notification from the building’s main system as soon as Sunder went active. Thank you for that, and for distracting the drones. I know it had to be dangerous out there.”

  “Not so much,” Lucia said. “It was strange. Once I lost the ones following me, everywhere was virtually deserted.”


  Beck mused on that for a few seconds, then shrugged. “Probably searching for other targets. Or maybe they were sent to give backup to one of Keene’s teams. Doesn’t matter now.” She switched back to the team channel and waved for the others to follow. “Come on. Miles to go before we sleep.”

  They formed up again, Lucia at the rear as she lacked a shield or firearm. Seeing this, Beck cursed herself for not reminding her to stop at the armory. Beck had the others pass Lucia spare grenades and other sundries, giving her an arsenal of weapons to lob from behind the bulwark formed by Beck, Jen, and Tala as they moved through the building.

  The next two floors were empty. They only got a few yards onto the third above the wrecked control room when Eshton shouted for everyone to stop.

  “What is it?” Beck asked, scanning the camera feeds littering her HUD for a sign of movement. “I don’t see anything.”

  Eshton stepped forward and put a hand on her shoulder. “Look for what you don’t see. There are six doors in this hallway. Three on either side.”

  Beck frowned. “Yeah, I can—oh. Only five camera feeds.”

  The last door on the left was blank. No sensor data of any kind coming from that room. She took a few deep breaths to calm her racing heart. She’d almost walked them right past it. The constant stress was wearing her down. Making her miss things.

  She spoke to the group. “Suggestions? If there’s an ambush waiting in there, walking past it really isn’t an option.”

  “Can’t shoot through the door,” Jeremy noted. “It’s steel core. The rounds will go through but they’ll lose too much velocity on the way.”

  “Could just be the room isn’t used,” Eshton said. “Or the system in there went down before the attack.”

  Tala snorted. “You want to risk it?”

  While everyone else debated the best way forward, Beck made a decision. “Okay, shut it. Standard entry, me first. Cover me.”

  Rather than give them time to argue the point, Beck unlocked her shield from the others and moved forward. She made sure there were no trip lines or sensors near the door, nothing that might trigger a weapon. Thankfully it didn’t look like Keene’s people had the resources to manufacture automated turrets, or today would have been a very short war.

  She gave no warning before backing up to the other side of the wall and commanding her armor forward at maximum acceleration. The others rushed in behind her.

  “Deathwatch! Surrender!” Beck commanded with the volume turned all the way up.

  The single figure crouched in the corner of the room raised its hands, if barely. The armor was cracked in half a dozen places, scored with burns and two nasty bullet holes in one shoulder. The suit struggled to move as the ragged metal fingers slowly touched the helmet and removed it with a hiss.

  “I give up,” Stein said with a sardonic grin.

  31

  “I mean, it’s great you’re here but we’re kind of fucked,” Stein said.

  Tala had always liked that about the High Commander. She didn’t mince words or play around. She had a lot less experience with Bowers than Beck, but her impression of Stein’s predecessor was that he was more politician than Watchman. Not at the end, of course. The old man went out dragging Keene with him, or so everyone thought at the time.

  Beck stood with hands on her hips. “How bad is it?”

  “Keene is here with about fifty more guys on the upper levels. The strikes against other Rezzes were a distraction. Timed it so we’d start sending out what reinforcements we could spare just before they hit us here. They don’t have control of the system yet, but it’s only a matter of time. They took my office half an hour ago.”

  “Shit,” Tala said, eyeing Stein’s armor. “How the hell did you get down here?”

  Rather than be offended at the lack of respect for the chain of command, Stein shot Tala a wink. “There’s a reason this room is dark. It’s where the emergency lift in my office lets out.” The humor drained out of her in a sudden rush, leaving the Commander looking deflated—even defeated. “Ten of us held them off for almost six hours. That room is a goddamn vault, but they eventually cut a hole. Once the last of our ammo and grenades ran out, we were fighting them hand to hand. My assistant managed to key the lift and shove me in it. His suit was in better shape than mine.”

  Tala almost asked why Stein hadn’t just gone back up the lift but caught herself before the words could leave her mouth. That was her way. She didn’t give into the impulse to yammer before two neurons had the chance to chat about the idea like Jen. She didn’t throw herself into any fight without sparing half a second to assess the situation like Beck. The thinning scars on her face were proof that even her own judgment was sometimes wrong or at least lacking the fullness time would give it. Unlike nearly all of the team, Tala had recognized the first and most important flaw in herself early on and worked every day to make sure it was not a fatal one.

  She understood that she was imperfect. That her ability to observe and plan and act would always be a work in progress. It was why she so often remained quiet and watched, learning from others who were better at some things than she, worse at others. Even their failures were instructional.

  “Does the lift still work?” Beck asked.

  Stein fixed her with an appraising look. “Yeah, but I wouldn’t recommend getting on it. It goes exactly one place and as soon as you open the door you’re gonna get killed to death.”

  Beck pulled off her helmet and detached her gauntlets. Tala was shocked to see how haggard she looked. It was easy to dehumanize people when they were in the armor. It kept you moving, made you look strong no matter how tired or weak you might be. It was a small thing to forget the fragile bodies within when they weren’t yours.

  Hell, sometimes the suit kept you going so well you forgot you were human, too.

  “I know that look, boss,” Tala said quietly. It didn’t matter. The system transformed her voice into the lifeless monotone of all Watchmen.

  “What look is that?” Beck asked.

  Tala removed her own helmet—fuck it, if someone attacked, they attacked—and tried not to look as tired as her leader. “The one that says you’re about to do something brave and dumb. Probably suicidally so.”

  Beck shook her head. “I don’t plan on dying, but I’m going.”

  “No one plans on dying,” Stein said. “Well, okay. Bowers did, but he was a weird guy. What exactly are you going to do?”

  Beck met her eyes and Tala saw at once that Beck was not going to back down. “I’m going to use Sunder.”

  Tala had no idea what that meant, but Stein apparently did. The other woman’s eyebrows shot up. “You clever bitch. You know how dangerous that is, right?”

  “Yeah, but I have an idea,” Beck said. “It might work.”

  Stein ran a hand through her matted, sweaty hair. “If you’re in the system, you don’t need to go up there to do it, you know. You can activate it from here. Hell, you could have done it any time.” Stein’s expression grew stern bordering on angry. “You didn’t. Why?”

  Beck didn’t whither beneath the stare. Tala respected the hell out of her for that. It wasn’t easy to be as capable as the boss but also know what your limitations were. The stress pulling you between the obligation you felt from knowing you can probably do the best job and the worry you’ll get overconfident or just plain fuck up was incredible. Tala learned that one the hard way back when she was a civilian. Management didn’t suit her, she discovered. Better to join the Watch and be satisfied taking orders.

  So she dedicated herself to being the best subordinate she could.

  Beck smiled sadly. “Because it’s not just about beating him today. It’s about beating the ideas he stands for, and everyone who might come after him who wants to use them as a cause.”

  She locked the helmet back onto her head and slid her gauntlets back on. “I’m going. Here’s what I want you to do…”

  *

  Tala followed Eshton’s
lead as the team, sans Beck, moved back the way they’d come. They watched the feeds to make sure there were no ugly surprises. Stein tried to go back and join Beck in the lift just after they set off, but Tala put a hand on the arm of her suit and kept her moving the right direction.

  Stein complied, but only because her damaged armor and weaponless state represented approximately zero threat to Tala.

  “Hell of a way to treat your boss,” Stein said.

  Tala laughed. “What do you mean? I’m doing what she told me.”

  “Real fucking cute,” Stein said, but there was no heat in the words. Even through the voice filter, that much was obvious. “So you’re obeying her over me?”

  “Technically, no,” Tala pointed out. “You haven’t ordered me to let you go. For now I suppose you could say I’m following the orders I was given. Doesn’t hurt that you’ve treated her like an equal since Bowers died.”

  They trudged along in silence for a little while, slowly wending their way toward the stairs leading down. “I wonder what would happen if I did give you that order, Sentinel?”

  Tala shrugged. “It’s an interesting theoretical, as Lin would say. I guess you should give it a shot if you want to find out. Just as an unrelated observation, though? I think good leaders recognize when a retreat is the smart move. You know, so both of the people who have access to the important stuff us Sentinels can only dream of don’t get their faces shot off. Just a thought.”

  Stein laughed bitterly. “Shit. I see why she keeps you around. You’ll be leading your own team in a year.”

  “No, ma’am,” Tala said. “Not my speed. I’m a grunt.”

  Stein managed to put a surprising amount of authority into the low sound she made in her throat. “We’ll see about that.”