by Rick Partlow
"Not worth the risk that he'll figure out how to trigger his Heartbreaker," Kara said, shaking her head. "Janice, grab his weapon and ammo."
The enlisted woman looked at her curiously, but did as she was told, sweeping the power crystals back into the shoulder bag and slipping the strap over her head, then handing Kara back her sidearm and picking up the laser rifle.
"What do you want me to do with him?" Deke wondered, shrugging.
Kara's mouth thinned into a hard line. There wasn't much choice. She took a step toward the downed infiltrator, then slammed her heel down into the side of his neck, at a spot precisely designated by her headcomp's files on Tahni anatomy. The infiltrator's vertebrae crunched under the sole of her boot and she felt a twist in her stomach that she fought to suppress. His shoulders hunched and he gasped in a breath inside his helmet, and then he went still. Deke glanced up with a look of vague annoyance, then lifted his weight off the armored Tahni, rising to his feet.
"Ma'am!" Janice Claiborne gaped at her, eyes wide with horror. "What the hell are you doing?"
"We have a couple minutes before his heart stops," Kara said evenly, ignoring her reaction. "Run."
Chapter Six
"Oh, this is bad," Holly muttered, slowing to a halt.
Cal had to agree. They hadn't even made it a kilometer back through the streets of Tahn-Khandranda when they'd hit the roadblock. It was well placed, he thought with an expert's appreciation. They'd walked into an architectural bottleneck, funneled by twin blocks of ten-story tall wedges filled with low-income housing and large, communal workshops. The streets had been clearing even before they'd entered the---well, Cal thought he might as well label it an industrial neighborhood, since it was as close as the city came to one---and now they were empty and he felt very much like a bug on a plate.
The roadblock was as simple as it was effective: two massive excavators had been parked across the road, nose to nose, like the guardians of some ancient temple; the small gaps left between them had been jammed with stacked shipping containers, probably packed with sand or dirt to weigh them down. He couldn't see anyone manning the barricade, but that didn't mean they weren't under observation.
Behind them, he could hear the whining of servos as the three-meter tall battlesuits ground to a stop and Commander Del Toro stepped up between them, hands on her hips. She'd been fairly quiet up till now, but he could see that she was getting her confidence back after being rattled by the incident with the priest.
"Can your Marines blow a hole through that?" Holly asked her, gesturing at the roadblock.
Del Toro frowned, but shook her head. "They're mostly armed with anti-personnel and crowd-control weapons." She turned to the leader of the Marine squad. "Sergeant Gutierrez," she said, "have two of your people clear out those shipping containers and make a gap for us."
Cal felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise and was about to say something when Gutierrez responded over his public address speakers. "Ma'am," he objected, "they may have them booby-trapped."
"You have chem-scanners in your suits," Del Toro replied. "They'll detect any explosives."
"Commander," Cal spoke up, taking a step around the Intelligence officer to face her eye-to-eye, "there are ways to fool chem-scanners. They had to know we'd try to get past the roadblock; we shouldn't let them dictate our route."
"We should go back," Holly agreed. "Find a way around."
"That's crazy," Del Toro declared and Cal could again see the fear in her eyes that he'd noticed back at the priest's apartment. "They'll have a blocking force waiting for us." She turned back to Gutierrez. "Sergeant, you have your orders. Clear those containers and make us a passage."
The NCO stood stock-still for a moment, and Cal thought the man was considering telling her to go to hell, but finally he responded. "Aye, ma'am."
The system's primary was below the horizon now and the buildings that rose on either side of them threw the street into deep shadow that was barely relieved by the glow of the chemical streetlights that lined the pedestrian walkways. That didn't mean much practically when he and Holly and the Marines all had thermal and infrared vision, but psychologically it gave Cal even more of a sense of claustrophobia. And it surely made him feel even more trepidation when two of Sergeant Gutierrez's enlisted men lumbered toward the roadblock, while the others spread out to cover the perimeter.
"You're in command, ma'am," Cal said to the woman, trying not to let the scorn he felt make its way into his tone, "but there is no way in hell that barricade isn't being defended."
"Nothing a bunch of civilians have is going to touch those battlesuits," Del Toro declared with the confidence typical of someone who'd never had a shot fired at them.
"Did you not hear those fucking explosions?" Holly demanded, evidently not as worried about pissing the woman off as Cal was. "What d'you think they are, celebratory fucking fireworks?"
"Commander Morai," Del Toro clipped off with a frostiness that lowered the ambient temperature ten degrees, "you would do well to remember who is in charge of this investigation and these Marines."
Holly's shoulders began to bow almost imperceptibly, but Cal knew her well enough to tell when she was about to explode and he interceded with a hand on her arm. She glanced around quickly, seemingly alarmed at the contact, but then he felt the tension go out of her as she saw the look on his face.
"Forget it," he told her quietly. "It's going to happen no matter what we do. Just get ready."
Holly nodded, letting a breath go in a heavy sigh as she moved off to one side of the street and he headed for the other. Del Toro shot daggers at Holly with a glare, but then did the sensible thing and retreated from the center of the street, joining Cal by the wall, holding her sidearm in a low ready position.
He kept one eye on her as he watched the two armored Marines reach the section of the roadblock where the cylindrical shipping containers had been stacked three deep, right in the middle between the cabs of the excavators. The cabs themselves were open and empty, and their controls had been ripped apart to impair any attempt to move them apart; he could see the panels hanging open from over thirty meters away.
"This is way too involved," he murmured, half to himself. "There's no way they threw this together since Holly and I left the base."
One of the two Marines rotated his Gatling laser upward and back over his shoulder on its gimbal, freeing both three-fingered hands to grasp the cargo containers; while the other trooper scanned the roadblock, his weapon following the motion of his head.
"What are you saying?" Del Toro asked sharply, and he glanced back to see her staring at him with suspicion in her eyes.
The Marine used byomer muscle fibers to grasp the lowest of the cargo containers by its utility hooks, and isotope-powered servos whined with energy as they lifted the thing; the two above it shifted precipitously with almost-living groans of polymer and alloy.
"Who knew you were coming out here to arrest the priest?" he asked her.
"I passed the mission through the chain of command, of course," she said, shaking her head. "And I filed a copy of my op order with the commander of the Marine Battalion..."
"Why didn't you just put an announcement on the local datanet?" Cal said with an exasperated sigh.
The topmost of the three containers toppled off the stack with a plaintive scraping creak and the Marine on lookout stepped back quickly, getting out of the way before it slammed into the pavement. Cal tensed, half expecting the cargo container to explode on impact; but it landed with an anticlimactic thud, an inspection hatch breaking open on the side to let loose sand spill out of it onto the street.
In the fading light, the dark, volcanic sand looked a bit like a pool of blood, Cal thought.
With the top container gone, the battlesuited trooper was able to lift the other two with a grip on the side utility hooks, scraping the bottom along the pavement with a sound that set Cal's teeth on edge. As the containers moved away from the gap beneath the ca
bs of the excavators, they revealed something else in the shadow of the four meter tall front wheels...something boxy and black and totally invisible on thermal and infrared.
"What's..." Del Toro had time to say before Cal grabbed her around the waist and jumped just as far away from the roadblock as he could.
The night lit up like the primary had decided to rise again, throwing every shadow into sharp relief and giving everything an unreal clarity; Cal had a sense of timelessness, like he was suspended in mid-leap for hours rather than seconds. All that collapsed into nightmare reality when the shockwave hit, smacking him out of the air like a bug.
Cal managed to twist around and hit on his back and felt as if he'd been driven ten centimeters through the pavement; he wasn't sure if the thunderous reverberation was from the explosion or the roaring in his ears from the impact. He knew it was bad when he didn't feel anything for a long moment. His headcomp had turned off his pain receptors, and it didn't do that without a damned good reason.
And then he knew; his implant computer systems squirted a status report into his brain and it was as if he had known all along. Major concussion, because there was nothing all the bone reinforcement and support webbing for his organs could do to keep his brain from hitting the inside of his skull. Major contusions to both kidneys, collapsed lung, major bruising, a perforated eardrum. But nothing that couldn't be fixed on the run by his nanites. Thinking was hard, though...he felt a fog across his thoughts and he knew what was going to happen next.
Something clicked behind his eyes and he could feel The Machine surging to life, could feel his headcomp's tactical programming detect his impaired state and begin to take over his decision-making process. He turned to the side and saw Commander Del Toro lying next to him, her clothes torn and blackened and covered with blood where shrapnel had shredded her. Her head was twisted around to the back, and she was quite obviously dead. He grabbed her handgun and jumped to his feet, dimly aware that his outer clothing was ripped and burned away, revealing the black byomer Reflex armor suit he'd worn beneath. Smoke drifted off of him as he walked slowly, struggling for balance, a pistol in each hand.
The street was shrouded in billowing clouds of black smoke, and flames licked off the cabs of both excavators. Of the shipping containers there was no sign: they'd been blasted to shrapnel and a fine coating of black sand carpeted the street. The Marine who'd been clearing the roadblock was dead; he'd taken the full brunt of the explosion. The fact that his biphase carbide armor had absorbed the blast from what had to have been kilograms of hyperexplosives was the only reason Cal was still basically in one piece. The trooper's battlesuit had been peeled away in jagged strips and what was left inside was a mass of charred, unrecognizable tissue.
The other trooper at the roadblock was lying on his back a few meters further away, the front of his armor a solid, sooty black; for a moment, Cal thought he was dead as well, but then his arms started to move fitfully, trying to turn himself over.
Strong stuff, that armor, Cal thought with a giddiness brought on by the concussion.
The other four Marines were picking themselves up off the ground, their suit motors whining in protest; except for the squad leader---he had been propped up against a building wall and was staggering slightly as the suit tried to get its balance. That left...
"Holly!" Cal found himself shouting without intending to. He wondered whether he was just not thinking straight or if his headcomp had decided that shouting was the best strategy since their neurolink comms were being jammed. "Holly!"
"Here," he heard her croak from the opposite side of the street.
He followed the sound and saw her stumbling forward, strips of smoldering clothing hanging from her black Reflex armor, hair singed away on the back of her head but her pistol still in her hand.
She shook her head, her eyes looking glazed over. "Is that silly bitch dead?" she asked, waving at Del Toro's prone form.
"Yeah," Cal answered. "We will be too if we don't get out of here."
Not trusting his voice to hold up, Cal jogged over to Sgt. Gutierrez, who looked faceless and battered inside his scarred, seared, sand-covered armor. He was facing his dead trooper, and though Cal couldn't see through the bare alloy of his helmet, he imagined the man was staring at the corpse...because he would have been.
"Sergeant," Cal said, trying to get ahead of his tactical programming and pull himself together, "we have to move!"
There was a long, silent moment and he wondered if the NCO had slipped into shock.
"Yeah...yes, sir," the man's voice came over the armor's exterior speakers. He shuffled around to face the downed trooper, who had managed to roll over onto his belly and push himself halfway up. "Abdi," he called through the speakers, apparently not able to use the suit's radios with the jamming. "Is your suit operational?"
Abdi's exterior speakers must have been damaged by the explosion, because he didn't respond verbally, just raised a hand to wave. The hand was still up when three rockets slammed into him almost simultaneously, streaking downward from the roof of the building behind them.
Everything seemed to slow down for Cal and his consciousness stepped away, as if he were watching a movie about himself at half-speed. He turned and raised both pistols upwards, their muzzles tracking with his eyes towards the roof of the windowless wedge of building, searching on infrared and thermal because the clouds of smoke rising from the burning excavators still obscured everything on visual.
He saw...nothing. No sign of the heat signature of a living being or even of the rocket launcher. His headcomp processed the data and came to the same conclusion that he did, perhaps a half second later than his intuition: the enemy was wearing Stealth armor and using coldgas rocket launchers that didn't leave a thermal trace.
"Covering fire!" Sergeant Gutierrez bellowed, his amplified voice echoing between the buildings. "Target the roof!"
Gutierrez and the other three remaining troopers opened up with their Gatling lasers, raking the edge of the roof of the buildings on either side, hundreds of laser pulses slicing apart the night in a thunderstorm of unleashed energy. Sound and light assaulted Cal's senses, but his headcomp shut everything out as he and it consulted about the best way out of the ambush in a silent conference that took less than a second.
He had to get Gutierrez' attention, but radios were being jammed and he didn't feel like stepping in front of the Sergeant with his Gatling laser firing, so he whipped the pistol he'd taken off of Del Toro overhand and sent it banging off the armor over the NCO's face. Gutierrez' armor jerked in surprise, and for a moment Cal thought the Marine would shoot him by instinct, but the gimbal-mounted Gatling laser fell dark as he saw Cal make the hand motion to cease fire.
"That wall!" Cal told him, pointing at a spot of bare, beige stucco about ten meter in front of him. "Blow us a hole!"
Gutierrez didn't hesitate; he swung his weapon into line and opened up, pouring round after round into the wall in a solid stream of blinding, incandescent light. Stucco and rock vaporized explosively and Cal raised an arm to guard his face, trusting his Reflex armor to protect the rest of him. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Holly running across the street to take up a position behind him while the other three Marines continued to lay down covering fire at the rooftops.
There. Movement, in the flickering shadows of the excavator fire. Cal spun and raised his pistol, trying to acquire a target with no heat signature in impossible light and absolutely no time. He fired a long burst, hoping for a lucky hit, but the pulse discharge was swallowed up in multiple missiles shooting out of man-portable launchers. Three of them kicked free of their launchers on coldgas before their motors ignited; they flashed across his vision and he jerked his head around to see them detonate against the armor of the Marine furthest toward the opposite side of the street. The trooper was engulfed in a globe of fire as plasma from the shaped-charge warheads punched fist-sized holes through his chest armor and sent him toppling to the pavement, surroun
ded by a glowing wreath of toxic smoke. Cal emptied his pistol's magazine along the trajectory his headcomp had calculated for the missiles; then turned as he reloaded and yelled back at Gutierrez.
"Through the wall!"
"Lee, Marmon, with me!" Gutierrez bellowed to his last two surviving Marines, then he turned and slammed his shoulder into the blackened and crumbling section of wall and plowed through it in a spray of dust and ash.
Cal didn't wait to see if the troopers obeyed; he immediately ducked through the three-meter-tall hole the Sergeant's armor had broken through the wall, knowing Holly would follow him. Utter darkness greeted him, even his night vision eye mods not able to penetrate the clouds of dust and smoke inside the blasted room. The part of him that was still Cal hoped there hadn't been any innocent people in the room when Gutierrez opened fire through the wall; The Machine didn't give a damn.
Nothing living showed on thermal and nothing tried to attack him or the Sergeant, so he just put his left hand against the back of the man's armor and let him lead all of them out of the room, dragging his feet to avoid tripping over debris on the floor. Gutierrez put his shoulder down and crashed through the nearest doorway, enlarging it substantially as the flimsy interior wall crumbled on impact. The hallway was dimly lit and still hazy with smoke, but at least Cal could make out details on infrared. He glanced behind them and saw a dead end ten meters down the corridor, only one narrow door interrupting bare wall in that direction. Seeing anything the other way was difficult with the imposing bulk of Gutierrez' battlesuit blocking off most of the hallway, but he managed to catch a glimpse under the suit's upraised right arm of the corridor stretching into the distance farther than he could make out. Only ten meters down was a junction with another, larger passage that led off to the left.
