Titan's Fall

by Zachary Brown

  I never felt safe unless I could see it as I lay still, waiting for sleep. Waiting for the drift.

  Amira started to snore.

  + + +

  A thudding sound. Armor moving around. I rolled out of bed. “Who’s that?”

  Ken sat up, groggy. “What?”

  Someone screamed. I jackknifed out of the bed and out to the door. In the bio-light, I saw a figure stagger forward. “Chef !” I yelled, recognizing Berkhardt. “Report.”

  Berkhardt raised his handgun and pointed it at me. I froze, suddenly unable to move. I’d been fighting with Berkhardt since Titan. Since what felt like forever.

  The utterly too-loud crack of a shot slammed through the corridor and Berkhardt’s brains blew out the front of his temple.

  “Chef !” I couldn’t help myself.

  One of the new members, Maria Lukin, stood behind Berkhardt’s body as it fell forward and hit the ground with a wet thump. Her hands were shaking as she lowered the handgun held in both hands to steady the shot.

  Then she moved forward as something slithered off Berkhardt’s back. Oily, scales, and pronged rear feet that scrabbled at the floor as it ran down the corridor toward Lukin. The pink tail whipped around for balance.

  Lukin fired twice, the corridor lighting up. I flinched each time. The driver flopped to its side.

  Her face was pale in the dark. “They said in training he’s already dead,” she said to me. “They said he’s already dead, right?”

  I unfroze. “Get in your armor!” I shouted. “Now!”

  Maria rabbited away, and I realized that was the first thing I should have done. Rockhopper rules. What the hell was I thinking?

  I spun back into the room and started backing into my armor. It wrapped itself shut around me, and there was the suddenly cool sensation of something slithering up my tailbone and neck. The suit linked itself directly to my brain.

  “What the fuck were you doing naked out there?” Ken shouted.

  I willed the helmet to pop up, and it slid up and over my head and slammed in tight.

  I looked left. Amira was in.

  “Rockhoppers, armor up!” I shouted, using the suit to amplify my voice. It was quavering. I hoped no one noticed. Chef had been staring right at me in the corridor, I thought. Chef had his brains blown out by one of us. That look on Maria Lukin’s face. I couldn’t shake it. “Don’t do anything but fucking armor up!”

  The public channel was packed with scared chatter.

  Ken calmly cut through the noise. “Quiet, all! Ping me if you’re armored and armed and then stay in your room and make sure no one’s naked.”

  “Are we under attack?” Amira asked.

  “There was a driver,” I told her and Ken on the command channel. The armored suits used quantum-entangled communications among the officers. The enemy wouldn’t be able to overhear anything here. “It got Chef. Lukin shot it. Him first. Then it.”

  “Chef ?” Ken sounded shaken.

  “She shot him, and then she shot it. Twice,” I repeated tonelessly. “Be ready for anything.”

  “I don’t hear anything about orbital defenses being breached,” Amira said. “HQ is silent.”

  “Let’s get out there and find out what’s happening,” Ken hissed.

  Amira had her EPC-1 slung over her back. A rocket launcher–looking tube with high-density battery running around every bit of spare space and cabling running down the back. The electromagnetic pulse it created stopped Crickets dead cold. Would have been useful on the flight back to Shangri-La.

  I looked out into the dark corridors, thinking back to Icarus Base and all the corpses we’d walked through back there. “Alpha squad, Sergeant Berkhardt isn’t with us. Smalley, you’re squad leader.”

  Lana Smalley. I could imagine her biting her lip as she processed that. Then a calm “Understood. Chaka, Zizi?”

  “We heard,” they said.

  “Let’s poke our heads out and take a look around,” I said.

  5

  Alpha squad was down its sergeant. But as we followed protocols and poured out of the tunnels and up toward the surface, a quick roll call revealed that no one else had gotten hit by a driver. Min Zhao had Bravo assembled and sweeping clear ahead of us. Erica Li, Jun Chen, and Greg Vorhis all had stations along the walls and zones of fire covered.

  The new additions clustered in the common room. Charlie and Delta hadn’t done any night raid drills yet.

  “Okay, our role is to protect one of the smaller artillery positions up on the hill,” Ken explained to them. “We’re going to head out across the basin. We don’t know what’s up there, so focus on getting to the rally point.”

  “Alpha takes lead,” I said. “Bravo on the rear. Yusef, you take our left flank, Tony, our right. Follow our pips and stay calm.”

  There was a ton of general chatter going on. Squads trying to figure out leadership on the open ground above us.

  “Devlin, you able to get to HQ and check in?” Ken asked.

  I was pinging but getting nothing back. “No,” I said. “Command’s gone silent. Amira?”

  “I’m crawling the network, but it’s chaos back there. If I know something, you’ll know it.”

  “Good.”

  “You think heading for the turret’s the best idea?” Ken asked.

  “Fall back on orders, assess, and then make a call. If they need us to be there and we aren’t . . .”

  “Rockhoppers,” Smalley called out on the common. “We’re moving.”

  “You think this is it?” Ken asked me as the platoon moved up the tunnel, Amira overriding the airlocks and blowing the air out so we could just run through and out onto the plain.

  I looked through the night gloom with the armor’s amped-up senses. The giant seed-shaped lump of the Pcholem at the center of the basin blocked most of my field of view, though I could see other squads popping up out of the ground.

  We’d come out looking for a fight. And it wasn’t here. And it didn’t seem about to drop on our heads, either. No matter how I scanned the sky, it came back dead. Though anything that could fly was scrambling up into the air and getting clear of the base.

  “You think they’re coming for Titan?” I asked. “I don’t see anything in the air that isn’t ours.”

  “Not yet,” Ken said with conviction. “But they’re coming.”

  I looked around. Nothing but CPF. And scoured rock. “Get on the artillery. Keep them together.”

  “Where are you going?” Ken asked. I was beginning to split off from the platoon.

  “HQ,” I told him.

  “Don’t go alone,” Ken said.

  I slowed. “Charlie squad, on me. Delta, you’re respon­sible for both flanks; stay in the middle and look both ways before crossing the street, got it? Everyone, keep alert for human hostiles.”

  There was a pause.

  “Human?” someone asked.

  “You saw what happened to Chef. I don’t think he’ll be the last, if this is something serious.”

  + + +

  Several bodies lay scattered around the tunnel entrance to HQ. Torn apart. Shot. Blood splattered on the walls. We slowed down as we approached, rifles up, nerves amped as we expected every shadow to jump at us.

  A suit of armor lay facedown in one of the airlocks we cycled through. Tendrils of smoke leaked from around the shattered helmet.

  “Direct RPG hit?” Patel asked.

  Kimmirut leaned over. “No blast marks on the outside.”

  “Eyes up,” I ordered, stepping over.

  A bullet smacked into my armor, making it ring inside. I flattened back against the bulkhead of the airlock. Just before I’d ducked back, I’d seen a mess of desks piled up against the HQ entrance in a hasty barricade.

  “Hello, the shooter,” I called out over t
he speakers on the suit.

  “Oh, thank god!” came the immediate response. “Is everyone else there with you able to talk?”

  “No drivers here,” I said. “Can we step out and approach?” I put my armored hands out in the air.

  “Please! We need help putting out the fires.”

  We vaulted the barricade, bouncing off the ceiling and coming down into the middle of a mess. Fires raged in three parts of the round command center, and the offices were all already gutted. Five people fought, but the smoke kept them back. Their CPF grays were charred at the arms. One of them had nasty burns on her hands.

  “Get the extinguishers from them and get into the middle of the fires. Yank out anything on fire and toss it down the north tunnel,” I ordered. “Clear the barricade.”

  “There might be more attacks . . .”

  “The fire will kill you now, attacks might come later. We can make a new one,” I said. “Why are you shucked down?”

  “We were off duty,” the woman with the burned hands said. She was trembling. Shock hitting her. Those hands looked bad. “The drivers hit officers’ rooms. There were a lot of officers out here. They cut us off, so we got handguns and retreated back here. Two of us got into armor, but the drivers . . . they can still get their tails through. All we could do was retreat to here and call for help, but it was already on fire. We decided to try and hold it.”

  I’d changed rooms. Given a squad my room. That driver in our hallway, it had been hunting me.

  Damn.

  “We just lost all our leadership in one strike,” I said. “Anyone have a first aid kit?”

  Someone was hunched over at one of the boards, trying to call out. Good thinking. “Anything?”

  “Needlepoint’s quiet,” he said. “I’m trying to figure out how to call up to orbit, but I’m not a comms specialist. I’m trying to figure out the interface.”

  Mohamed Cisse had flipped his helmet up and pulled me aside. “The woman with the burned hands needs a medical pod.”

  “We’re all staying right here for now, I’m sorry,” I said. This was all fucked up. I wanted to rub my forehead. “Get your helmet back up; we don’t know what’s happening.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Hey, I made contact with the ship!” the man on comms yelled.

  I strode over. “The Pcholem?”

  “Yeah. What do I tell it?”

  “Tell it to leave. We’re under attack.” If there truly were only four of them in the entire solar system, like Shriek had mentioned, then it was a big sitting duck.

  “Cancel that!” Someone in an armored suit with commander’s stripes on the shoulder walked down the tunnels at us. “We might need an evac.”

  “Sir,” I said. I started to give an update, but the commander ignored me and pushed aside the person at comms.

  The armored helmet snicked down. The commander had her hair pulled back in a ponytail that bobbed as she looked over. “Needlepoint has an automated call for general assistance going out,” she said, eyes flicking over the screen. “But all the satellites are up, all orbital defenses and weapons ready, and no breaches have been detected. I’m going to get a line up for instructions.”

  Gunfire started chattering from a level below us.

  The commander’s head snapped over to the HQ entrances leading downward. One of the fires inside still burned merrily, but Charlie squad had stomped, extinguished, and ripped out the other two. Her lips pressed tight, she twisted my way and I could see the name on her collar: CHARET. “It’s coming up from below,” she said. We’d been so focused on being hit from above. But the ghost sign that Amira found had been underground. “Deploy your team that way.”

  She pointed down, but I was already on it. “Charlie squad, we want to block the doors coming in from below.”

  “What about the fire?” Yusef asked.

  “Now!” I shouted. “I want weapons on those two doors!”

  + + +

  The next wave came. Hollow-eyed people running up the corridor at us. The Driven never spoke, but they had weapons. They used them. The hasty barricades of desks we shoved up toward the inner doors shattered under the onslaught of fire.

  There were too many. They just kept coming. Bodies, the drivers clutching their shoulders with clawed hands and blood running down the fronts of their shirts.

  “I’m out of ammo,” a shaken Patel said.

  “Punch anything that comes over the barricade,” I told him.

  Underneath us was an entire complex of contractors. The tens of thousands of civilians who slept assuming we were defending them.

  “They waited for the next round of command talent to organize here,” Commander Charet said. She had left comms and walked up behind us. She held a duffel bag, which she tossed forward. “I thought I was going to have to blow the airlocks leading out, not the ones leading down.”

  Patel grabbed the bag. “I’ve been trained to set explosives,” he said.

  “Let’s give him cover,” Charet ordered, and flipped her helmet down.

  A driver scrambled up and over the barricade and launched. I fired reflexively at it, trying to pick it out of the air. But it landed right on the back of someone’s armor. They flailed around, and the pink tail whipped up, and then down and in. Wriggling micro-tendrils sliding through normally impenetrable alloy until it reached skin. “Yusef !” Suqi screamed, running at him.

  He hit her, throwing her back several feet. His helmet slid open and Yusef, eyes wide, coughed blood. He grabbed a grenade off his waist, pulled the pin, and jammed it down his neck, and then his helmet snapped into place and he crouched down.

  There was a thud. His armor bowed out from the inside. The helmet cracked open and Yusef Obari fell forward onto the ground, smoke rising from the inside of the husk of his armor.

  “Holy fuck.”

  I could hear the sound of retching on the common channel.

  “Patel!” I shouted. “Move!” If we waited any longer, we’d be run over.

  Patel was over the barricade with the bag of explosives. Everyone opened up, picking off each body that tried to sprint its way across the corridor down to us. For several minutes, there was only calm breathing and gunshots. No one had to say anything.

  Patel didn’t even wait to get all the way back to us before hitting the remote detonator now in his hands. The explosion blew him through the barricade, knocked us all on our backs, and left me with a nosebleed.

  “Charlie squad, call out.”

  “Kimmirut here.”

  “Patel,” Patel groaned.

  “Cisse.”

  There was a lot of smoke. I swapped a few different filters over the helmet until I could peer through the smoke and see the way down choked in rubble. “That should hold them a while,” I said, my voice breaking slightly. I looked down. My armored hands shook, and I couldn’t force them to stop.

  Commander Charet grabbed my shoulder and spoke on the common channel. “Patel, is there enough to do a repeat?”

  “Yes,” he said, staggering to his feet and shoving a heavy desk off of him.

  “Anyone not in armor here in HQ can’t go outside. So, you take your squad and get out,” she ordered. “We’ll stay here, keep calling for backup, and get the assholes in orbit to see about lending us a hand. I’ll also see if I can link up with any soldiers stationed downstairs who’re not being Driven.”

  “You sure about that?” I asked. “We can keep your guard.”

  “Protect your team, Lieutenant,” she said. “Get to the hills, and watch your feet.”

  “What about yours?”

  She snorted bitterly. “I was taking a shit. Can you believe that? Pants down around my ankles when I heard the screaming. Officers’ quarters. I get there, anyone not in armor, they’re just bloodstains on the wall. This private’s running aro
und in armor, killing anything in sight, driver swinging from his back. Two shots. He goes down and it slithers off his back, but not before hitting me.”

  “In full armor?”

  “Four broken ribs. I’ve been coughing blood, my left arm doesn’t work, and there’s pain in my abdomen. Only reason I could walk over here was because I jammed myself full of painkillers and let the armor walk me. See where things stand? Get with your platoon, hold the hills, wait for orbital support to get down.”

  + + +

  We loped across the Shangri-La basin as the explosion died away behind us, sealing them into HQ.

  “Amira, status?”

  “Nice of you to check in. We’re locked in; what’s the state of HQ?”

  I filled her in as we ran.

  “Holy shit,” she said.

  “I know!”

  “No, I’m looking out over the basin. You need to run faster. They’re coming out of the tunnels into the open now.”

  A figure in armor lurched toward us. Suqi Kimmirut slowed down, pulled out a rocket launcher she hadn’t been able to use inside, and hit it midstride, knocking it back in a ball of fire.

  “Don’t slow down!” I shouted. Then back on my platoon command channel. “Amira, that gun we’re protecting. Can we turn it around to face down into the basin?”

  “I like it. We need more manpower.”

  “Then start recruiting,” I ordered.

  We hit the foothills. I dared a glance back and saw people only in surface suits, no armor, stumbling out into Titan’s atmosphere, compelled by the creatures dug into their backs. They fired weapons randomly. A wasteful wave of humanity tossed against anyone trying to get away.

  “Crickets,” Mohamed Cisse shouted. A cloud of the small Conglomerate mechanical insects blew out of one of the tunnels near the Pcholem and boiled across the ground toward the Pcholem’s open bays.

  “Well,” a voice said over the common channel. The Pcholem, Starswept, sounded very apologetic. “I’m very sorry to have to do this, but there is heavy Conglomerate weaponry coming online. I must take my leave. I wish you all the best of luck in your current battle.”