by Steve Rzasa
“Maybe not.” He indicated the module inserted into the skulljack of one dead zombie with the point of his Armada. “Take these out of all of them, even the dead ones. Crush them, then bind the wrists of the survivors. They’ll be harmless so long as that machine bitch can’t get to them. But don’t be fooled, Sergeant: She’s not going to show us any mercy.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Paunovic, help the sergeant, then both of you rejoin us. The rest of you, follow me. Let’s see what’s up with Bravo.”
Even with the comms live, it was terrifying, this operating in the dark. It was almost like trying to fight blind. Normally, Tower would just have to glance at his display to see the status of every member of Bravo Team, now he had to actually go and see for himself what had happened.
“Bravo, this is Tower. Come in, Bravo. What is your sitrep?”
There was no response.
Running, their weapons at the ready, they turned the corner and saw the devastation that the explosion had wrought. A third of the way down the corridor, the left wall was simply gone, leaving only blackened, broken remnants near the floor and ceiling. A disruptor cell, he guessed, triggered by Cara, but put in position by that zombie who had been just sitting there doing nothing except wait for someone to get close enough to kill.
When he entered the room where the bomb had gone off, his fears were confirmed. The head of the dead dream junky, eyes closed but still smiling, was lying on its side; two slippered feet were his only other readily identifiable remains and they were clear on the other side of the room. Toprak had been closest and taken the brunt of the blast; despite his armor most of his upper torso looked as if he’d been shot by a slug-spreader at a range of about a meter. The other three men were down, but Tower couldn’t tell if they were dead or merely rendered unconscious from the shock of the concussion.
They were thirty decasecs in, he’d already slaughtered five dozen unarmed civvies and half his men were now dead or down. This was a disaster. This was an epic disaster.
“Are you willing to take my deal yet, Chief?” The screen on the far end of the room was cracked, but apparently its audio functionality had survived the explosion. “I think you’ll admit that you barely survived the first level of this little game.”
Tower was tempted to call the mission off. Extremely tempted. Judging by the size of the floors, she must have hundreds of more deadheads at her disposal, at least thirteen more power cells, and whatever weaponry St. James had managed to secrete about the place. He was just about to accept her offer when he realized why she was negotiating. They had taken her by surprise. She could duck out any time she liked, but St. James was another matter. She was desperate to get the man out of there before he could be killed, and she had to suspect, if she didn’t already know for certain, that they had reinforcements on the way who would shoot down any vehicle lacking an MCID transponder that attempted to exit the building.
He glanced at his timer; in another eighty five seconds, the Marines would have the building surrounded on the ground, and their ground-to-air capabilities were second-to-none.
All he had to do was buy a little more time.
He glanced at the three men behind him and pointed to their fallen comrades. “Get them back to the landing zone, we’re going to evac them.” Then he turned back to the broken screen.
“All right, Cara, you win. I’m pulling my men back. You can fly St. James out once I’ve got my men out safely and I won’t interfere. I have to warn you, though, there is a Marine company on the way. They’ve got ground-to-air missiles with them and I’m going to need a little time to get them to stand down.”
“Deal,” she answered immediately, confirming his suspicions. “But I’m going to be listening in, Tower. Don’t try anything or I’ll know about it.”
Gotcha, he thought grimly to himself. He just hoped she’d actually take the bait.
“I’m not going to do anything at all,” he assured her. “I’m just going to pull back with my—”
“No, you’re going to stay right there, in that room, Chief, along with the other two men who just came in. The screen cam may be broken, but I can hear all of you perfectly well.”
“I have one dead here, Cara. My sergeant. You’re ex-military. Show him some professional respect.”
“Fine. When the three men come back, one of them can evac the body. The other two will stay with you as security until Nostro is safely away.”
“Roger,” Tower agreed absently. He had withdrawn a pen and a piece of paper from one of his leg pockets and was frantically writing a message for Baby as quietly as he could manage. At the top, in large letters, he scrawled: “ORDER: SHOW THIS TO AUGMENT IN STEYRER!” and circled it twice.
“I can see the first Marine elements approaching the building, Tower,” Cara informed him. “Call them off now or I drown you in dream freaks.”
Right, this would be the tricky part. If Zeuthen didn’t follow his lead, he might inadvertently warn Cara of the trap Tower had laid. He took a deep breath and opened the comm link to the major back at base. “Major, no questions, I repeat, no questions. This is Tower. Do you copy?”
“Zeuthen here. Sitrep.” Zeuthen replied immediately. To Tower’s immense relief, he didn’t say anything else.
“We got a real Charlie Foxtrot here, Major.” He glanced at the three men entering the room. Kilgannon held up two fingers, then made a thumbs up. “I’ve got four casualties, two fatal, and about fifty or sixty collaterals. Cara is willing to declare a ceasefire and let us evac our dead and wounded if we permit one vehicle with one passenger to safely exit the building without any interference from MCID or the 2nd Marine Recon Company.”
He knew the major’s antenna would be up after hearing him spell out the identity of the Marines, especially since he had carefully omitted any reference to the Navy squids or their orbital artillery. Zeuthen wisely said nothing.
“Major, can you confirm that the ceasefire will be honored by MCID and the Marines will stand down?”
“Affirmative, Tower.”
“Roger, sir. Tower out.” He breathed a sigh of relief then handed the piece of paper to Kilgannon. He put a finger over his lips and pointed to Toprak’s body. “Take him out and leave with him. The rest of us will wait here until St. James is clear.”
Kilgannon saluted and left, dragging Toprak’s mangled body with him, but not until he’d slipped his Armada from his shoulder and handed it, along with his spare charge packs, to DouPonce and North. Tower nodded approvingly. The Marines outside would help, of course, but there were 35 floors between them and their reinforcements. Not all of them would be full of zombies, but even if only five floors were populated with dream junkies or other skulljacked individuals, that would be somewhere between five hundred and a thousand mindless puppet-soldiers in the hands of a ruthless puppeteer.
He slapped the men on their shoulders and praised them for holding it together in face of the horror in the hallway. Schalt was doing his best to be brave, like an officer should be, but he was trying a little too hard after his performance in the hallway. DouPonce was calm; he was a veteran killer and a hard man. He could blow away a dozen men and sleep soundly that night. North looked hollow-eyed, and Tower had the feeling that the sight of the dead junkies piled in the corridor would haunt him for a long time. Paunovic just looked terrified and Tower couldn’t find it in his heart to blame the young man.
“I’m ready to send Nostro out now,” Cara informed him. “The vehicle is a red Thedra X465, departing from the east platform on the 22nd floor. Tell your major that if any of those Marines make any attempt to fire on him, I’ll unleash Hell and they’ll need a DNA sniffer to find any trace of your bodies. 60 decaseconds after he departs, you can leave, if you agree not to try following it.”
“We won’t follow the Thedra,” Tower promised sincerely. He passed on her instructions to Major Zeuthen, who after a brief pause confirmed that the captain commanding the Marine company had acknowled
ged them as well. “Marines are standing down.”
They waited in nervous silence. Tower opened his comm link, but held his tongue. Then he heard Baby’s voice for the first time in what seemed like hours; it felt like a lifeline. “I have the var. There is one male passenger on-board. Request confirmation.”
She relayed the image to his visor display and zoomed in the var as it sped away below the Steyrer. It looked as if it was St. James in the driver’s seat. Thin face, long, dirty blond hair. But it was hard to be certain.
Who else could it be?
“Confirmed,” he said.
The sky seemed to be torn in two as a bolt of deep blue struck from above. The red var didn’t explode so much as vanish in a flash that was blinding even via his visual link. The orbital cannons were designed to be capable of piercing three meters of solid plasteel. Using one on a passenger var was akin to swatting a small fly with a grav-powered sledgehammer.
“Two floors down, room three three four five alpha!” Baby shouted in his ear. “It was a decoy!”
“Liar!” Cara shrieked her outrage through every speaker on the thirty-fifth floor a moment later. “I warned you Tower! I warned you!”
But Tower wasn’t listening to her howling threats and curses. He was already sprinting toward the stairs, following the building plan that Baby dumped into his helmet’s memory before she retreated to the Steyrer and locked herself down again. His men were right behind him, even though he knew they desperately wanted to be running the other way, toward the remaining Volksaudi and safety. He wanted to be running that way himself. But they had no choice. Cara was far too dangerous to be allowed to roam free throughout the aether. They had to take out St. James while they could!
A door opened to the left and DouPonce sprayed it with ruby-red fire, his laser set on full-burst auto. Tower pushed through the door to the stairwell and hurled himself down it, desperate to reach room 3345A before St. James could escape. Cara erroneously expected them to run, not attack, because she was a creature of logic and by any rational standard this assault was insane enough to see them permanently installed here as residents if they survived it.
But even when taken by surprise, Cara was fast, inhumanly fast, and she was able to react literally faster than thought. Tower reached the thirty-third floor and flung the stairwell door open, just in time to be struck in the heart by a burst from a charged particle gun.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Throw off this ignoble world, and arise like a fire that burns all before it. For the man who forsakes all desires and abandons all pride of possession, and self, and even that of life, reaches the goal of peace supreme. How much more sublime the truth of the Way when we apply it to a people, a planet, or a universe entire! The truth is what I tell you; the Fifth Age will not begin until the Fourth Age ends. And the Fourth Age will end in the grasp of Agni’s fiery hand!
—3rd Sakra 19:5–8, The Mahavira
His armor saved him. The outer layer of the ablative armor exploded outward in a flare of green-blue light and the shock of the blow knocked him down. There was a series of five or six popping sounds as a pair of slug-throwers fired over his head and ricocheted dangerously inside the stairwell. But before his assailants could bring their weapons to bear on his prone body, exposed in the doorway, DouPonce and North were returning fire and Schalt was dragging him back into the relative protection of the stairwell.
One man fell, a resident armed with a cheap plasteel 7mm pistol of the sort teenagers printed out at home. But there were more men who were similarly armed, at least ten more, and this time they weren’t charging mindlessly at them. They were taking cover inside the doorways, then jumping out and taking a blind shot or two before ducking back inside. They were grinning and alternated between shouting insults and yelling instructions at each other.
Bloody gamers.
“Where did they get those poppers?” Schalt shouted angrily as he brought down a pistol-wielding idiot who rushed straight toward the stairwell.
“St. James must have bought a printer and made them here,” Tower said, pushing himself up and examining his armor. It was still viable, although another direct hit would ruin it. As silly as it seemed, the little guns were probably more dangerous to them than the CPB that was still firing at them.
A noise came from below; doors were opening above and below them and a mass of shrieking zombies entered the stairwell two floors up and three floors down. They were trapped. Tower tried banking a grenade down the stairwell, but it got stuck on a landing and exploded harmlessly above the climbing zombies. He thought for a moment, then, switched the laser for the Morris-Obsidian and dialed up a short-range, wide-spectrum burst at maximum. If the things plugged into the deadheads’ skulljacks worked the way he thought they did, the EMP blast should knock Cara right out their zoned-out heads.
With a pulse of that magnitude, the walls wouldn’t make much difference; the problem was that he couldn’t fire more than five or six such shots. But it would be worth it to try to save at least a few of the hapless zombies; whatever the EMP missed, the ASE would have to clean up. He fired to no immediate effect except a strange low frequency noise that seemed to fill the entire stairwell, but the shrieking above abruptly diminished and was replaced with the sickening thuds of bodies tumbling down plascrete stairs.
The shock of the pulse killing their connections had knocked them out, he realized, and so he fired again before rushing down past his men firing out into the corridor and firing two pulses below. The climbing zombies instantly crumpled to the ground, as if they were robots turned off by a massive, unseen switch.
“What the hell is that?” North shouted as he stepped back from the doorway and reloaded.
“We can’t stay here!” Tower shouted back. The zombies would revive soon and he didn’t know if their aetherlinks were fried for good or not. And he could hear more shrieks and footsteps coming from the higher floors; he’d bought them nothing more than a little time to regroup.
“Follow me!” he shouted and he charged out into the hallway, firing three pulses that dropped four grinning maniacs that he could see and presumably more than a few that he couldn’t. DouPonce and Paunovic ran past him, throwing thermo-plasma grenades into the rooms they passed as he racked the 808 and replaced it with the ASE, setting its charge to 75 percent. A pair of zombies popped out of one room they’d missed and one of them managed to get off a shot first, but the tiny slug zipped past his shoulder and his return volley not only transformed them into pink mist, but blew a two-meter hole in the wall behind them.
He ran down the corridor with the Benelli-Mossberg chewing massive chunks out of the walls, instantly killing anyone behind them and splattering the walls and ceilings with blood and body parts. A zombie leaped out of a doorway ahead when he was facing left, but before the possessed man could fire, North dropped him with a pair of laser bolts through the man’s torso. They methodically worked their way down the hall that way, room by room, either blasting their way in with the ASE, or if the doors were open, throwing in grenades then clearing the room.
The grenades proved to be their most effective weapon. A single Guar X20 thermo-plasma anti-personnel device was enough to vaporize a room, painting the bland crème-colored walls with vibrant scarlets and crimsons and leaving little other trace of its former inhabitants.
“Interior decorating!” shouted DouPonce with a maniacal grin on his face after another room vomited flames and blood from the entrance behind them. He was having entirely too much fun.
“What?” Tower shouted back.
“I’m painting the walls with their interiors, get it?”
And I’m the one who has to see the neurotherapist? Tower shrugged. It took all kinds. Paunovic had tears running down his face as he fired three bursts from his laser and it looked as if Schalt had gotten sick again, this time down the front of his tactical armor. But fierce or frightened, all four of them were fighting like mad dogs, with no more thought of retreat or quarte
r than the Cara-possessed zombies.
The problem was that they were rapidly running out of grenades.
When they reached the corner, Tower looked at the number on the last door to his left. 3384. That meant 3345A was down the long stretch ahead, and on the right. He hurled his second-to-last grenade around the corner and was greeted with an unexpected hail of laser fire from at least three weapons.
Behind him, Schalt cried out and fell to the ground. He’d been hit in the left leg by the first zombie emerging from the stairwell at the far end of the corridor behind them. Paunovic and North immediately whirled around, slid into opposite doorways and cut him down along with the other zombies emerging from the door. DouPonce pulled the wounded sergeant into the now-empty room on the right, out of immediate danger. Tower glanced back, unconcerned. The hallway was nearly forty meters long and the printed slug-poppers were hopelessly inaccurate at a quarter that range. Schalt had been unlucky, that was all. Tower was more worried about how to get down the long stretch that remained.
He checked his charges. He had three loads for the ASE remaining at full power, six if he dialed it back. He glanced at the room number and mentally calculated the number of rooms that remained. At full charge, it would be enough to get them there, barely. He shouted out commands to the others.
“Sergeant, Paunovic, hold your position and watch our six. Ghoster, you’re with me. North, you come too, but you watch our nine and six. Here’s my last grenade. You take all of them that anyone has left and clear the rooms on the left side of the hall while we go right.”
“What are we doing?” North shouted back.
“We’re going through the walls!”
“What?”
“Come on, you’ll see!”
Tower darted out and rushed across the corridor, trusting in his armor to save him from any inadvertent laser bolts, then leaped through the door way and clubbed down the first zombie with the butt of the Benelli-Mossberg. DouPonce and North were right behind them; they rapidly put lasers through the heads and torsos of the four other zombies before they could react. Tower fired at the wall, blowing a hole big enough for them to leap through if they ducked, and DouPonce was picking out the shocked zombies and shooting them down as soon as the dust cleared. North threw grenades into each room on the left side as they progressed, ensuring that their flank was secure.
