“Absolutely not,” I answered honestly.
“Ten seconds, Lieutenant Ryder,” Annabelle said, her tone taking on a louder and concrete timber.
“Why?” Mina asked.
I grimaced, but I didn’t hurry her up in any way. She knew we were in crunch time. If she thought this conversation was worth the few seconds we had left before these horrors got to us, I wasn’t in any place to disagree with her.
“Because it’s not worth anything without your consent,” I explained. “I don’t want another damn suit. I don’t want a second pair of arms and another chest of weapons. I want you. I want Mina John, the best damn Marine I’ve ever had the pleasure of serving with. I want her to do what she does best, and I want her to do it with me.”
“Three seconds,” Annabelle said, and I could hear the roaring footsteps of the Centi-walkers nearing. They moved fast, so fast that I was afraid they would be here in less than three seconds.
“Okay,” Mina said, nodding at me firmly. “Let’s do this.” She stepped toward me, grabbing my hand, even though the physical contact wasn’t necessary to initiate taking her over. Her gaze locked with mine. “Mark Ryder, I want you to get inside me.”
18
Without a literal second to lose, I shouted. “Annabelle, initiate remote takeover protocol!”
Then, without even waiting for her to respond, I spun around, jumping into action. The horde was nearly upon us now.
They were bigger than I imagined they’d be, bigger than they looked in either the aerial surveillance or the recon footage we’d studied of the species before we departed. At least eight feet tall by Earth standards, they were grey and burly. Their antennae, smaller than on any other ground species I had come into contact with before, jutted from perfectly rounded heads. Their elongated torsos were studded with fifty pairs of small (well, small for them) arms. In fact, even the legs that supported their massive frames were nothing more than glorified tiny arms. They would have looked laughable if they weren’t so damn terrifying.
As was always the case, nameplate popped above each Centi, marking their classification as Acburian Centi-walker and the ever-helpful dancing gold numbers of their Alliance Bounty Rating. Only a clean thousand coins apiece, far less than the danger of fighting them. Guess they weren’t highly valued due to their normally passive nature.
“Warhammer!” I screamed as I leaped into the air, holding my arms up in the position to hold it once it materialized in my hand.
“Affirmative, Lieutenant Ryder,” Annabelle said. I could hear the wheels in my suit turn, preparing itself for the larger scale task of taking over Mina’s operating system. It would take a few seconds, and during that time, I could show these ridiculous bugs who was boss.
Taking stock of what I was looking at, which was basically a shit ton of bugs with a shit ton of arms, I studied my opposition and decided the best way to proceed was something I liked to call the ‘swing first, ask questions later’ approach.
Everything around me wanted me dead. It was the way of the Acburian. They hated us above all things and though the Centi-walkers were certainly less abrasive and ready to fight, what Mina and I had done had changed that.
Normally, strobe lights would have a mesmerizing effect on the bugs, at least those who had never been exposed to it before, hence why strobe lights were standard add-ons to Alliance ships and Marine armor. For this particular subspecies, though, the strobe light, still blinking wildly overhead, not only drew them toward us, but it pissed them the hell off as well. These lights brought out their bloodlust. They pushed the quiet and reserved part of these things back, replacing them with mindless and angry warriors.
That might seem ridiculous and maybe even a little cruel. What we were doing was basically taking creatures that were more than happy to mind their own business and shaping them into murderous lambs bent toward the slaughter. In truth, I wouldn’t blame anyone who thought that way. Things like this certainly led credence to the people like our traitorous pilot, who thought we were the true enemies in all of this and that the bugs were just trying to live in peace.
That crap didn’t matter though. War was hell. You didn’t follow rules in hell, especially if you were trying to escape it.
My Warhammer appeared in my hand as I was midair. The heavy sledge with the well-worn grip conformed perfectly to my hands like an old friend. It felt like home as I swung it forward, landing my weapon hard against the perfect sphere of the first walker’s head.
Knowing I’d go in for close range, Mina fell into the perfect complimentary tactics for that approach, materializing her psionic bow and stacking on the same repeater mod that Jill had used but combining it with the ever-beloved Frosty the Deadbug cryonics modification. My charge was accompanied by a cavalry of cryokinetic bolts, freezing some of the Centis solid and slowing down another three or four,
The satisfying crunch of my first blow echoed throughout the land, and the thing fell. If we could keep this up, me playing whack-a-mole with these bugs from a safe distance while Mina slowed and disrupted them, we might actually have a chance. The problem with that was that even the slightest of mistakes, letting even one Centi get within punching range, and one of us was dead. Despite what the newsfeeds would tell you, even Mina John, even Mark Ryder can make a slip-up.
So, while that was a solid strategy, I had another one in mind, one that would work even better and be safer, but would require the nanosecond precision of our linked suits.
Looping up and away, I performed my next part of our battle dance, Mina punctuating my hit with one overcharged cryo-arrow that landed right where I had been, the burst of cold energy freezing the Centis that had been charging in on me to the ground. Landing on the ground in the dead center of the stuck horde, I swung my hammer in a circle, thrusters firing and servos winning as I smashed away the nearest Centis.
“Thor me, Annabelle!”
The wheels in my suit kept spinning, and I felt a rush of warmth, knowing that I was ready to overtake Mina’s operating system. No doubt the voice in her head was informing her of its imminent submission to Annabelle, so Mina dropped the bow, drawing her daggers to begin carving through the immobile walkers to get to me.
“Affirmative, Lieutenant Ryder,” Annabelle said.
The heat I felt was instantly overtaken by the crackle of electricity. What I was asking for wasn’t actually called the ‘Thor.’ In the Alliance Store, it was called the Super Sparkster, which was horribly stupid. I called it Thor because of some Norse god I grew up reading about. He was a badass motherfucker with a cool hammer. Me, I fit that bill to a T, which meant I might as well do what Thor would do in my current situation.
The crackling electric energy flowed through not only the hammer but my entire suit as well. That was the thing. Whereas before, my Warhammer would have been able to deal with this much energy (if not easily), now my brand spanking new suit could help ease the tension, and the result was devastating to the walkers around me.
I slammed my Warhammer against the ground, sending a shockwave of electricity through the earth and into the feet of the walkers closest to me. It was an intense blast, so strong that it fried them where they stood. They dropped, bugs too close to the zapper. Still, there were a lot more coming, crawling past their fallen brethren without given their brothers-in-arms a second look. The strobe light still shone overhead, turning them into bloodthirsty monsters.
Then again, so was I. Blood was what I needed, and I was going to take as much of it as my suit could carry. So, which one of us was really the monster?
Ever present in the corner of my HUD was the constant pop-ups of kills and coins. I was way past the point where I got that endorphin rush from seeing flashing numbers, but I was still happy to see the coins pop up. They were what kept a Marine alive, after all.
I pulled my Warhammer back up onto my shoulder. It would take a few seconds for it to power up after that much energy had been expanded. They were seconds I didn’t have, bu
t they were also seconds I didn’t need.
I felt the connection take over in my head as Annabelle set herself as administrator of Mina’s suit and operating system. The ensuing shock was almost enough to stop me in my tracks, to make me as useless as a wet parachute.
All of it came rushing into my head. In one instant, the same instant it took for the walkers to reach me, Mina’s entire consciousness downloaded into my head. I felt all of her, all her fears, all her hopes, all her wants, yearnings, and desires. Whatever walls existed between us were torn down. I knew her as she knew herself. I knew how much she hated chicken noodle soup, how much she loved it when I smacked her ass, and how, in the deepest darkest parts of her mind, she knew she’d never go home again.
I wondered if it was the same for her, if she could sense me the same way I could sense her. Something told me she couldn’t, that Annabelle had used her superior status to protect my secrets and my brain from Mina. Something about that seemed wrong. It wasn’t exactly fair, but we were in the thick of war right now, fighting for our lives. Fair hardly had any place in that.
“My God,” I heard Mina say directly into my head, the same place where Annabelle usually sat.
I would have answered her. After all, it would have only taken a thought, but I didn’t have time to think. The bugs were all over us, and it was time for me to show them who was boss.
Hand after hand collided with me, a thousand small stabs meant to take me down. They had expected Mark Ryder though. Instead, they found themselves tangling with the god of thunder.
Electricity, lightning running through the very core of my suit, was there to meet their punches. It was less intense than the power which flew from my hammer. That would have killed them where they stood. This degree of electricity tossed them backward and gave them a good shock, which was all I wanted, enough to force a hole in the horde. Mina was close, still fighting, just about to cut down a Centi to get to me.
Now normally, with the losses they had sustained, the Centi would have retreated, but the strobe light was still pushing them forward, still egging them on.
Just in time for Mina to see with her own eyes, I spun my Warhammer, still charged with electricity, and threw it sidelong. Mentally engaging the guided gravitics package I had gotten along with this latest suit upgrade, the hammer spiraled out from me, an arc of lightning still tethering it to my suit, slamming like a guided missile through the half-dozen closest Centis.
“How the hell are you doing that?” Mina asked in my head. It was a fair question. With my old suit, I couldn’t have done this, channeled this much power and maintained so many high-energy upgrades and weapons all at once.
I didn’t have to look at her to know what she was doing. I could feel it, just as I could feel the envy and titillation she felt as she watched me take out walker after walker.
No. With a thought, I directed energy to Mina’s lower thrusters, sending her into the air.
“Goddamn it, Ryder!” she screamed as she left the ground. “Put me down.”
“In a second,” I answered, right into her head. “I just need you to do something for me.”
I called for my Warhammer. It flew to my hand, and I raised it into the air. Electric blue sparks crackled around it and pulled more energy from the atmosphere, from the sky above.
“What?” Mina asked.
Another thought turned on her Alpha camouflage, the same package I had, but only the electromagnetic warping field. I wasn’t going to use it to make her invisible though. It wasn’t light she was going to be deflecting.
“All extra power to shields,” I said, though I wasn’t talking to my own suit.
“What’s going on?” Mina asked as she felt her shields charged up higher.
She didn’t have time to wonder too much. A bolt of lightning drove from the sky and careened into her. She screamed, but the Alpha camo field deflected the lightning, turning it over the faceted field as the single bolt split into a spiraling sphere of electric death.
From there, the lightning found the walkers, moving to each and every one of them in fractured echoes. See, a lot of people forget that visible light is just another wavelength on the electromagnetic spectrum alongside, you guessed it, electricity. The e-mag warping field could do more than distort light; it could twist and split lightning just as easily.
In an instant, the remaining Centi that we hadn’t already butchered were flash-fried, lying all around us in a swath of destruction as I held my Warhammer up to the sky.
Badass motherfucker.
“That,” I said, breathing heavy. “That’s what’s going on.”
19
“How do we do this?” I asked Claire as we looked down at Rayne, still lying on the floor of the cave where we’d left her and the rest of the Artemis Squad.
The doctor had effectively slept through all of it; the trouble with the Bullet ship, the treacherous pilot trying to kill us all, the crash landing, and the army of walkers we worked our way through. For all she knew, this had been a peaceful ride and an easy go of things.
The rest of us knew better, of course. We had lived through all of this. Though hopefully, since Mina and I were chock full of collected walker blood, the easy part was right around the bend. With Rayne awake, all we’d have to do was get her to the correct spot on this God forsaken moon and let her do her thing. After that, we could leave, and I’d collect number 51 on the Mission Complete! Leaderboard.
Of course, we’d have to wake her first and hope that we didn’t get new orders down from on high. As soon as we had this underway, I was going to try to contact Alliance Hall once more.
“Do we just, like, inject her with it or something?” I continued.
“You’re not serious, are you?” Claire scoffed, looking at me with narrowed eyes. “Oh, God. You are.” She shook her head. “No. You don’t inject the poor woman with pure Acburian blood. That would kill her or worse.”
“I guess that’s why I’m not a medic,” I mused, pushing the idea of what could be worse than death away for a minute. “So, what do we need to do?”
“I need the blood.” Claire got up and walked to the far end of the cave, where a makeshift hole had been dug. Some sort of slug lay in the bottom of it. “It needs to cook. It needs to mix with the other ingredients, all of which I had on me, and it needs to set. After that, and only after that, I’ll inject her with it.” She cleared her throat and continued. “The effect should be immediate. So, after it goes down, we should be able to get moving again.”
“How long will it take?” Jill asked, arms crossed over her chest and purple hair in her eyes.
Claire mulled it over for a moment. “A few hours.” She pointed to a lit torch perched right beside the hole. “As long as it has direct heat near it.”
“Okay,” I said. “We can’t make a move until the morning anyway, so that’ll be fine.”
“We couldn’t,” Jill said, shaking her head at me. She walked forward, purple eyes shining against the firelight and a grin on her face I hadn’t seen anywhere outside of the bedroom. “But all of that’s changed.”
“What are you talking about?” Mina called out. Unlike the rest of us, she hadn’t moved to the far end of the cave. She was still over Rayne, standing guard.
Jill spun with delight. “You know how I told you, back in the Halls, that I had been working on something?”
“Vaguely,” Mina answered, her tone droll and even.
“Well, I took some time when you guys were out there fighting to finish it.” She shrugged. “It’s not like babysitting an unconscious person was particularly trying, especially considering the fact that I had help.”
Claire looked over at her peer with confusion. “That’s what you were doing?”
“Of course,” Jill beamed. “What did you think I was doing?”
“Who knows?” our medic scoffed. “You’re always puttering around with something.”
Jill nodded. “That’s true, but this is different. Thi
s is what the kids call a game changer.”
“A little less talk, a little more action,” I barked, looking between the two of them. “Tell me what you’ve got.”
“Right away!” Jill turned, rushing toward a blackened corner of the cave. She disappeared into shadows and, blinking, I watched as a bright light appeared in the corner she’d run to.
Shielding my eyes, I looked in disbelief at the glowing orb of light sitting Jill’s hand. Her entire body seemed to glow, purple hair, purple eyes; the whole shebang. ”What the hell is that?” I asked, swallowing hard.
“A portable, self-sustaining energy module with luminescent properties.” She chuckled. “I call it a pocket sun.”
“You created a sun?” Mina’s attention perked up, finally moving from Rayne over to where we were. I guess the idea of a handball of fusion death was just too much for her to pass up.
“Not exactly,” Jill corrected. “The sun is a star, a continual, self-sustaining fusion reaction. It creates heat and lots of it. While this thing sustains itself in its own way, it strictly produces light. It pulls energy from surrounding sources and uses that to light itself.”
As she spoke, the flame from the torch near Claire dissipated into glowing embers and thrust itself toward the orb, glowing as the chemical and thermal energy entered it.
“Sorry about that,” Jill said, smirking. “It gets hungry sometimes, I guess.”
“That’s alright,” Claire shrugged. “I’ll just torch the solution directly. It’ll probably be a little quicker that way.”
My attention was still focused on Jill. “This is insane.”
“I know,” she beamed. “Do you have any idea how much something like this will help us?”
“Oh, I have a pretty decent idea,” I responded. “They came up with something similar a couple of hundred years ago. It’s called it a flashlight.”
Jill’s entire body jerked with surprised. “What?”
“You come at me with a giant fucking flashlight, and you ask me to pretend it’s something spectacular.” I shook my head. “I get that you worked hard on it, and maybe it doesn’t need batteries or whatever, but what the fuck good do you think this thing will do that the floodlights that come standard on every one of our suits can’t?” I huffed loudly. “What’s next? You gonna walk in here with a ham sandwich and tell me you’ve reinvented lunch?”
A Space Adventure [Bug Wars] Page 9
