by Richard Fox
“Sir, got a distress signal. Thirty-seven kilohertz,” Roland said. “Simple code. SOS.”
“That’s not a freq we use.” Gideon stopped. “But SOS…”
“It’s an Ibarran freq,” Roland said. “I’m in the same womb that I was picked up in back on Balmaseda. Some of the settings are still in use. I didn’t realize it until the alert went off.”
As Gideon turned his helm to Roland, the lieutenant’s gauss cannons slowly did too, but stopped short of aiming right at him.
“There’s an Ibarran armor distress signal in here?” Gideon asked. “Can you get a bearing?”
“To the northeast.” Roland pointed at a branch farther down the hallway. “Distance is coming back irregular. The walls must be attenuating the signal.”
“Any other Ibarran surprises in your armor?” Aignar asked.
“The maintenance teams must not have dumped the emergency protocols,” Roland said. “That’s not standard procedure anyway. If they—”
“Full-system purge once we get back on the Scipio,” Gideon said. “Let’s move.”
Roland felt his cheeks flush with embarrassment inside his womb. It was hard enough to shake the stigma of having fought beside the Ibarrans to save their colony on Balmaseda, though no one seemed to hold that same act against the Rangers who manned the defenses beside Ibarra legionnaires during the Kesaht attack. His armor suddenly detecting Ibarrans nearby carried an air of suspicion with it, no matter how valid Roland’s explanation.
They turned the corner and the hallway opened into a wider space with a curved dome on the far side. A set of doors had been torn away and lay strewn across the ground. Roland looked down at a scuff on the floor, then back at the near side walls. Bullet holes stitched across the wall, each surrounded by a spiderweb of cracks.
“The caliber matches gauss shells.” Aignar tapped the side of his forearm cannon. “There was a firefight.”
“Against what?” Roland asked. “It’s not like armor—ours or theirs—to miss.”
“The Qa’Resh left a security system?” Aignar asked.
“Not likely,” Gideon said. “Sending a sensor pod ahead.” He reached behind his back and pulled a small metal ball off the back of his ammunition housing. The ball pulsed in his hand and he tossed it into the breached doorway.
Roland felt vibrations through the floor and he readied his cannons.
What came charging out the door bore a faint resemblance to armor—twelve feet tall and bipedal, with long arms that ended in irregular hands like the end of a tree branch. Its shell looked like it was made of thick cables wound tightly over a wire diagram of a squat, wide-shouldered creature. The head was a simple dome with open metal jaws.
If there’d been an atmosphere, Roland was sure he would have heard it screaming.
He fired off both barrels and struck the attacker in the chest, his salvo hitting simultaneously with Gideon’s and Aignar’s. Cables split and air hissed out of the wounds, but the thing kept coming.
It sprang forward on both hands and pounced at Gideon. The lieutenant swung an uppercut into the attacker that struck just beneath the chin, arcing its head up. Gideon fired a single round from his forearm cannon and blew the dome apart. Viscera splattered across his armor, steaming and popping in the vacuum.
Three more emerged from the other room, snapping and swiping at each other as they all charged toward Aignar.
“Ah…great.” Aignar backpedaled, firing his gauss cannons and bringing his rotary weapon up and into action. The gauss shells broke through the enemy’s outer shell but didn’t slow them down. Though the gauss cannon churned through an entire magazine, the bullets bounced off the enemy with no effect.
Roland hit one of the attackers in the hip, causing it to stumble. As his cannons reloaded, he ran forward and snagged it by the ankle before it could leap at Aignar. The enemy’s arms snapped backwards, rearticulating as it pulled back. Grasping claws clamped down on Roland’s arm and its head snapped around in a complete one-eighty.
It scrambled up Roland’s arm as he swung a cross into the side of the dome. The blow seemed to stun the attacker and it fell to one side. It rolled over, still holding on to his arm, the blades on its fingertips scouring Roland’s paint. It snapped back into action and scrambled up the underside of his arm. Its mouth bit into the ammunition line feeding into his forearm cannons and ripped it open.
“Oh no you don’t.” Roland kicked his feet up and used the artificial gravity to slam into the attacker and pin it against the ground. Talons popped out of its feet and it braced the new weapons against Roland’s chest. Its feet ripped across his breastplate, leaving deep gouges in the armor.
Alerts blared across Roland’s HUD and his ears. Another attack like that would kill him.
He brought his other arm around and delivered a weak punch to the dome. Instead of pulling back for another strike, his fist recessed into the forearm housing and a spike plunged through the thing’s head. It went still, black blood sizzling as it emerged from the edges of the puncture.
Roland got back up and found Gideon wrestling with the new type of armor, one already dead at his feet. Roland checked that he had two rounds in the chamber, but the melee was so fast and furious, he risked hitting the lieutenant.
One of the attackers sailed across the room and into a wall.
“Sir!” Roland detached his sword and tossed it to Gideon. The weapon unsnapped as it flew and Gideon caught it in the middle of the blade. He stabbed it into his attacker’s chest and it backed off him. Gideon grasped the blade by the handle, yanked it out, and slashed the enemy armor across the throat. Its head popped off and bounced against the ceiling.
Roland fired on the enemy that hit the wall, ripping its mouth off and hitting it in the throat. Two more shots from Aignar blew its head off.
Aignar picked his left arm off the ground and looked at where his arm ended at the elbow.
“What the hell are these?” Aignar asked.
“Toth?” Gideon asked Roland.
“No. These aren’t like the Toth I fought on Balmaseda,” Roland said.
Gideon wiped a hand through a black streak and pulled a sticky clump off his shoulder. A laser on the side of his helmet swept over the sample.
“Brain matter,” the lieutenant said. “Reads as Rakka.”
“Kesaht want their own armor.” Aignar kicked a corpse on the floor. “But there’s no way a Rakka can fit in this…”
“They plugged a Rakka brain into the suit,” Roland said as he looked down at the bloody stump that was once a Kesaht armor’s head.
“Sounds like something the Toth would do.” Gideon flicked the viscera off his hand and tossed the sword back to Roland.
“No weapons, just savagery,” Aignar said. “I think these are prototypes, early generation.”
“We need to get these back to Earth,” Gideon said. “Let our engineers find a weakness.”
“Bullets to the dome work well enough,” Aignar said. “For now.”
“The distress signal…” Roland hurried to the doorway, realizing that his gauss cannons were empty. He held his sword at the ready, hilt at his hip and blade angled away from his centerline.
Inside was a crystalline dais. Bullet strikes and claw marks marred the surface. There was no sign of any power in the room. Roland went to the dais, and on the other side, propped up in a sitting position, was a mangled suit of armor. The head and limbs lay in a pile against the far wall. Crude glyphs had been carved into the breastplate, but beneath all the damage was a Templar cross.
“It was a trap,” Aignar said. “The Kesaht must have heard the same distress call, left those uglies to kill anyone who showed up.”
“And the Kesaht didn’t care about recovering their armor,” Gideon said.
“Who is it?” Aignar asked.
“Check for life signs,” Gideon said.
Roland reached for the armor, but Gideon pulled him back.
“Aignar. You do it.”
Gideon guided Roland away and pointed at the door. Roland stepped away, seething. Again, Gideon didn’t trust him.
Probes extended from Aignar’s forearms and plugged into the fallen armor at the base of the neck.
“Got a pulse and brain activity,” Aignar said. “Womb sent her into an induced coma to stop a redline…nine hours ago. She should pull through, but we need to get her out of here.”
“Her?” Roland asked.
“Biometrics data says her name is Morrigan.”
As Roland’s sword tip dipped to the floor, Gideon’s hands balled into fists and gauss shells cycled into his cannons.
“No! Don’t—” Roland stepped away from the door and raised his sword.
Gideon’s cannon arm snapped toward Roland.
“Don’t what?” Gideon asked as Roland stopped. “Don’t kill this traitor right here and now?” His cannons swung toward Morrigan’s armor.
“Sir,” Roland lowered his sword, “I know she was in your lance before…before what happened. I know there’s—”
“You know nothing!” Gideon snapped his cannon arm up at the elbow. “You have no idea how long I’ve waited for this, Roland. For justice. And a summary execution is not justice, is it?”
“No.” Roland shook his helm.
“Aignar, unplug,” Gideon said. “I’m taking Morrigan back to Mars in chains.”
Chapter 3
Roland paced along a catwalk over the Scipio’s cargo bay. Below, armor technicians worked around the beaten-up torso of Morrigan’s armor while a medical team and ship’s armsmen waited nearby.
An extraction from damaged armor was a dangerous procedure, but Chief Henrique and his mechanics had been maintaining armor since before the Ember War ended. There was no better crew in the fleet to safely remove Morrigan…but Roland was ill at ease.
Leaning his hands against the railing, he said a silent prayer, which was interrupted by the clomp of clumsy metal feet against the catwalk.
“Aignar,” Roland said.
“I can’t sneak up on anyone, can I?” Aignar said, his voice tinny as it came from a speaker embedded in his throat. Working prosthetic knuckles against his jaw, Aignar snapped it back into place. He’d lost his arms below the elbows and legs below the knees to a Vishrakath grenade years ago. The same grenade took much of his face as well. A genetic disorder prevented him from grafting cloned organs to his body, and outside his armor, he seemed less human than when he donned his suit.
“She didn’t say anything to you?” Roland asked him.
“She was down for the count.” Aignar shook his head. “Lucky her suit took her off-line when it did. Losing limbs is a bitch of a neural spike.” He bent his left arm, the same one that had been ripped off his armor on the moon. “You lose it outside your armor, it’s an altogether different experience. You don’t redline, but you’ll probably bleed to death. Or die of shock.”
Roland looked at Aignar’s metal fist and bumped it with his.
“I’m trying to make you feel bad,” Aignar said. “Is it working?”
“No,” Roland said, motioning to the work being done on Morrigan. “I’m just trying to…to not…”
“You know her,” Aignar said.
“I do. She trained me while I was a guest of the Ibarras. Vouched for me when I volunteered to—never mind. Where is Cha’ril?”
“You’re a filthy traitor. It’s the noose or the firing squad—pick one.” Aignar nudged Roland with his shoulder.
“There’s no way to sugarcoat this, is there? I care about Morrigan, which makes me an Ibarran sympathizer, but if I turn my nose up at her, what does that say about me?” Roland brushed his fingertips over the Templar patch on his right shoulder.
“Did you really think Gideon was going to kill her?” Aignar asked.
“He hates her.” Roland stood and crossed his arms across his chest. “Hates Nicodemus. Hates all the Ibarrans. We are armor. We are fury. We are not…not ones for forgiveness or restraint.”
“There was a moment,” Aignar said. “A moment I thought he was about to do it.”
“At least we were both wrong,” Roland said.
“How did I know I would find Roland up here?” Cha’ril asked as she came around a corner.
“He’s obviously planning to help his Ibarran confederate escape Terran custody,” Aignar said.
Roland slowly turned to look at Aignar. “You’re not helping. One hundred percent not helping.”
“I’m bitter you got to go kill Kesaht with the Ibarrans while I had to officiate the Dotari equivalent of a shotgun wedding,” Aignar said. “Did I tell you I got spat on?”
“He will not stop squawking about that,” Cha’ril said.
“Twice.” Aignar ran the back of his prosthetic hands down his chest. “Two giant loogies square in the chest.”
“It was a compliment,” Cha’ril said.
“They’re almost done,” Roland said, leaning over the handrail as Henrique and his techs stepped away from Morrigan’s armor. A robot arm lifted the breastplate open and amniosis fluid gushed out of the womb and onto the deck, sloshing against absorbent booms circling the work area.
The womb cracked open on one side and lifted up slowly. Inside, a red-haired woman wearing a skinsuit lay curled in a fetal position.
“Wake up…please,” Roland said.
A medic climbed up onto the workstation and reached a scanner toward Morrigan. Her arm snatched up and grabbed the medic by the wrist, who yelped in fear.
Armsmen rushed the womb, shock batons and gauss rifles ready.
Morrigan blinked fluid away from her eyes and let the medic go. She rolled over and looked from side to side at the Terran navy personnel around her. Her midsection heaved and she vomited amniosis into the bottom of the womb.
“I hate that part,” Aignar said.
Armsmen slapped cuffs onto her wrists and dragged her away from the armor.
“She’s not ugly. By human standards,” Cha’ril said.
“I fought by her side,” Roland said. “Her looks had nothing to do with it. You’ve been with human armor for a while, Cha’ril. Can you understand my concern for her?”
“I would have killed as many Ibarrans as necessary to rescue you,” Cha’ril said.
“She’s developed such a loving attitude since she got married,” Aignar said.
“Joined,” she said, wagging a finger in the air.
“Since her pheromones caused a riot on the Ardennes.”
“A few minor injuries amongst suitors was hardly a riot,” she said.
Gideon and Commander Tagawa walked into the cargo bay. The armsmen parted and Morrigan locked eyes with Gideon. She leaned to one side and spat on the deck.
Tagawa marched forward and gave commands to the armsmen that Roland couldn’t make out. They strapped Morrigan down to a backboard and took her away, followed by the medics.
“Gideon and the Ibarran have a history?” Cha’ril asked.
“And not a pleasant one,” Roland said.
Gideon touched his forearm screen. “Lance,” the lieutenant’s voice sounded in their earpieces. “Get down here and do post-action maintenance. I want all armor fully mission capable before we make Crucible jump. Which is four hours from now.”
“I’m collocated with the others,” Cha’ril said into a mic on her screen. “Moving.”
“So much for eating and sleeping.” Aignar beat his fists against the handrail.
Roland watched as Morrigan was carried around a corner. Looking back at Gideon, he found his lieutenant staring daggers at him.
****
Roland twisted a wrench against a bolt and cursed as the tool refused to budge. Stepping back from where his armor’s right arm sat on top of a workbench, he wiped sweat from his brow, shook his arms out, and tried again.
“I’m always wobbly when I come out of my armor,” Aignar said. He had a toolbox pressed between his metal palms, which he brought next to Roland, his gait unsteady.
/> “It takes hours before our nervous system can fully switch over from armor to—careful!” Roland bent forward as the toolbox slipped from Aignar’s grip. One corner landed on Aignar’s foot and the toolbox clattered open, spilling metal instruments across the deck.
“Sorry,” Aignar said as he reached down to pick up a rotary sander. His metal finger popped open and closed slowly around the tool, but it slipped away when he picked it up.
“I’ve got it.” Roland tossed the scattered items back into the toolbox.
“Chief Henrique is giving me the look,” Aignar said. “He’s cursing me out in Portuguese. I know it.”
“Let him. We’re picking up the slack while he and his pit crew get the suits turned around,” Roland said. “Where’s Cha’ril?”
“Sick bay.” Aignar looked down at his hands and lifted his fingers up and down one at a time. “Something about nausea.”
“That’s been happening a lot lately.” Roland reached under the workbench and grabbed a head bolt socket. “Every time she leaves her suit. Think it’s a Dotari problem?”
“Ask her about it,” Aignar said as he lifted up the ripped, loose end of the ammo belt and examined the tooth marks from the Kesaht armor. “See how quick she bites your face off.”
Roland snapped a bolt on to a power drill and whirled the head from side to side.
“She’s been weird since she got married. Or joined? Almost married, whatever the Dotari call it?” He removed the nut bracing the ammo belt to the armor and handed it to Aignar.
“Yeah, there’s that and the phage that’s killing off all the Dotari on their home world,” Aignar said. “Her parents are there. The Dotari military’s quarantined the whole system. Who knows how the Dotari are dealing with that. Remember when we came back to Earth and the Xaros had wiped out the whole system?”
“I was a kid.” Roland removed another bolt. “Mom and Dad were in the service and were too busy to get emotional about things like that. I was prepped to live on one of Saturn’s moons, to never see any of my friends or family for years and years…I guess learning that they were all gone wasn’t much of a hurdle for me.”
