by Rick Partlow
They'd only made it about three kilometers from the ambush site and they were still in a highly industrial area, but the construction here looked different and Cal could see what looked like the Tahni equivalent of apartment blocks on the upper floors of factories that stretched twenty stories above them. He searched for the movement the Marines had spotted, scanning from the rooftops of those buildings downward; he spotted the motion up ahead, where the street curved to follow the contours of a large building.
A lone Tahni was watching them, trying to hide in the shadows of an awning but blatantly visible on thermal and infrared. He was short and looked like an adolescent, judging by his style of clothing.
"Want me to take him out, Sergeant?" one of the enlisted men asked, the servomotors of his Gatling laser mount whining as the barrel traversed.
"Negative," Gutierrez answered immediately. "He's unarmed." The NCO turned his armor toward Holly slightly. "Ma'am, I hate to ask, but..."
"I'll do it," Cal said, trying not to let the exasperation leak into his voice. Gutierrez had to be at least as scared as...
Cal nearly froze when he felt that thought complete itself.
As scared as I am. When the hell had that happened?
Cal moved further into the shadows, falling into a crouch at the edge of the elevated pedestrian walkway and hesitating there for a moment to take another look at the Tahni lookout. The male still hadn't moved and still seemed to be fixed on the Marines, not even noticing when Cal began to skitter forward on hands and knees. The ghostlights that ran along the bottom of the walkway had been smashed, and broken shards of brittle polymer littered the edge of the street like it had been put there by design to give him away. Cal managed to avoid stepping on it, his augmented senses working through his headcomp to make his hands and feet move to just the right spots to make the least amount of noise and motion.
Between his computer-guided movements and the chameleon camouflage of his Reflex armor, Cal was able to get within meters of the lookout without being spotted. It was a kid, just like he'd thought; barely an adolescent, only a year or so past the ceremony that marked the end of childhood for a Tahni, when the females left their homes and the males began to train for adult life. Certainly not old enough to be out here on his own.
Cal slowed his advance to a crawl, moving a centimeter at a time and watching the young male out of the periphery of his vision, giving weight to the old soldier's superstition and not looking at him directly. The kid was frightened, his hands shaking and sweat beading on his high forehead, and he looked as if he wanted to run but was more afraid of what would happen to him if he did. Cal moved a few centimeters closer and then struck, leaping forward and upward to where the young Tahni was perched at the edge of the pedestrian walk.
One hand snaked around the boy's throat while the other slipped under his arm and clapped a hand over his mouth, then Cal yanked him away from the corner and back down into the shadows of the street below the elevated sidewalk in one smooth, violent motion. The kid tried to struggle, kicking at Cal futilely and trying to bite his hand. Cal whispered silently to his headcomp and his talons slid out of their sockets in his forearms, extending from his wrists and hovering in front of the adolescent's eyes. Those eyes went wide and the struggles abruptly ceased.
Cal walked the boy back to where Holly and the Marines waited, stopping just in front of Sgt. Gutierrez.
"What's waiting for us around the corner?" Cal asked the youth harshly in Tahni.
"I don't know," the boy insisted, teeth bared in panic. "I was just looking at the giants..." He nodded at the Marine battlesuits.
"You're a liar," Cal snapped, touching the tip of a talon against the boy's chin just hard enough to draw a single drop of blood. "I saw you...you were as scared as a newborn quori that's lost its mother. Someone put you there as a lookout and threatened you if you ran. What is waiting for us?"
"They said they would have someone watching my family," the boy squeaked helplessly. "They'll kill them if I run..."
"Do you really think," Holly cut in, "that they wouldn't throw everyone they had at us? That they would hold back a warrior just to intimidate your family when just the threat would do?"
The boy seemed to consider it, then he spoke again. "They didn't tell me all they had, but I know the road is blocked with cars and there are many of them, some with weapons."
"Are they wearing armor?" Cal asked. "The black armor that makes them hard to see?"
"No," the boy nearly tossed his head in negation but then seemed to realize that wouldn't be a good idea with talons to his throat. "None have armor."
"How much farther up the road is the block?" Holly wanted to know.
"Just up around the corner," he motioned, then gave a distance that translated to about eighty meters.
Cal looked to Holly and she nodded. He sheathed his talons, then pushed the boy away roughly, back the way they'd come.
"Go," he said forcefully. "Go home to your family and don't come back this way."
The boy looked at them doubtfully, but fear won over doubt and he sprinted away down the street, quickly disappearing into the night.
"Another fucking roadblock," Gutierrez rumbled, his voice sounding metallic through his suit speakers. "What do we do, ma'am?"
"The last major intersection was two klicks back," Holly said, scratching at the new, pink skin that had been re-grown by her nanites where her hair had been burned off the side of her head. "Then another three klicks before we box back to our route."
"Shit," one of the Marines---the woman, Lee, Cal thought it was--muttered, perhaps unaware she'd left her microphone hot. "That's another hour at the rate we're going."
"Last time we tried to crash a roadblock, we got three people killed," Cal reminded Holly. "If you want my opinion, we should double back."
"Honestly sir," Gutierrez interjected, "I'd rather push through. We got limited ammo and the longer we're out here, the more chances we have of using it up. I don't wanna' be stuck out here with just my swinging dick."
"Your call, Holly," Cal said with a shrug. "They'll notice the kid's gone pretty soon, though."
Holly Morai squinted thoughtfully as she looked down at the corner ahead and Cal had to restrain himself from reminding her again that they were pressed for time.
"Maybe you should scout around the bend and see how bad it is," she said to Caleb.
"Holly, I..." He was about to argue with her about wasting any more time when he heard it. An engine; not an electric motor either, something old and internal combustion, and big. And coming from behind them. "We got incoming," he said, moving towards the edge of the street. "Sergeant, get your men into position!"
Cal didn't wait to see if they obeyed; he was across the street and up on the pedestrian walk, crouching with his sidearm in his hand. The Marines moved in ponderous, bounding strides like oversized ice-skaters, scattering to either side of the street to nestle in alcoves beside doorways, taking what cover was available.
"It's a cargo truck," Gutierrez said from ten meters ahead of Cal's position, where he was down on one knee next to the pedestrian walk, laser aimed down the street, like some absurdly enlarged vision of an old-time infantry soldier. "Old one. Lee, when it rounds the corner, give it the EMP, see if we can take out the engine."
Cal saw Lee's laser swing upward into storage position as a silvery device unfolded from a compartment in her armor's backpack, forming into a dish shape and mounting itself above her left shoulder. The engine noise was louder now, and in seconds the truck came around the last corner and into view. It was old, as Gutierrez had said, slapped together from spare parts sometime after the war if Cal had to guess. Probably ran on distilled alcohol, he figured. It had a flatbed trailer with several young males hanging onto handholds at the cab and something big in a shipping container behind them.
The device on Corporal Lee's shoulder began to hum and crackle and the air between her and the approaching truck seemed to shimmer with el
ectrostatic energy. The truck's engine sputtered and then died as the EMP fried the electronics that kept it going, and the vehicle coasted to a stop nearly fifty meters away.
"Marmon, hit 'em with the sonics!" Gutierrez ordered, his words echoing off the buildings across the street.
The other enlisted Marine extended the crowd control weapon from his backpack and fired a wave of focused sound waves at the Tahni males even as they began to climb out of the bed of the stopped truck, hands filled with what looked to Cal to be slug-shooters. Even from fifteen meters in front of him and pointing the opposite direction, the sonic stunner's banshee screech was enough to make Cal's temples throb; the effect it had on the Tahni was rather more drastic. There were five of them in all, including the one who had exited the cab; four went down screaming, hands clasped futilely over their ears as they writhed on the ground. One---the lucky one, in Cal's opinion---passed out immediately, face down on the pavement. The last fell onto his butt, leaned forward and began vomiting uncontrollably. Nonlethal didn't mean pleasant.
"What about the container..." Holly was asking when whatever was inside it detonated.
Cal had already been in a low crouch; the explosion blasted him onto his back on the pedestrian walk, and the street around him glowed with white fire that stretched up to blot out the stars. He could see very clearly a large piece of the truck's engine passing only a meter above him before slamming into the side of the building in a spray of dust and masonry chunks. He stayed on his back for a half second, evaluating himself to make sure there were no new injuries to add to the total before he rolled over to balance on his left palm and the balls of his feet.
All that was left of the truck was a twisted metal frame engulfed in a furious blue-white conflagration; of the Tahni insurgents who'd arrived in it he saw no sign other than the dozens of bits of burning debris that were scattered for a hundred meters in all directions and splattered against the pocked and cratered sides of the buildings. Two of the Marines were still standing, their armor smoking and covered in soot and ash and splashes of flaming fuel; Marmon, who had been closest to the blast, was down with a large piece of jagged metal embedded in his leg.
He didn't see Holly at first and began to feel a pit in his gut until he finally noticed movement in the shadows of a doorway across the street. Holly rose unsteadily to her feet and Caleb let out the breath he'd been holding, but still felt a surge of anger in his gut. They were both sitting targets thanks to Commander Del Toro's stupidity, and he couldn't even take it out on her because she was already dead.
He jumped to his feet, hopped off the pedestrian walk into the street and ran over to where Sgt Gutierrez was standing over Corporal Marmon.
"How bad is it?" Cal asked, his own voice sounding distant in his battered ears.
"Marmon's okay," the NCO told him, irritation in his tone, "but this suit ain't going anywhere on its own without a couple days in the repair bay."
Looking at the damage, Cal had to nod agreement. A jagged section of engine block about twenty centimeters long had wedged itself into the hip joint of the battlesuit and he could still see the smoke coming from the servomotor where it had been smashed by the impact.
"Get him out of it," Holly ordered, her voice sounding gravelly and strained to Cal. "We don't have the time or the luxury to carry the suit."
"Yes, ma'am," Gutierrez responded, obedient but, from his tone, not very happy about it.
There was a pneumatic hiss and a grinding hum of servomotors as the helmet and neck piece of Marmon's suit separated from the chest plate and swung backwards, revealing the shaved head and pale skin of the man inside. Marmon was breathing hard, his eyes darting around furtively as he pushed the chest plate out and climbed from beneath it, his dull grey fatigues nearly the same color as the exterior armor. He unplugged the contacts from the 'face jacks set in his temples, then scrambled out of the armor quickly.
He seemed almost in a panic as he yanked at a compartment in the side of its backpack, pulling out a compact pulse carbine and a bandoleer of spare magazines. The weapon in his hand seemed to calm him down slightly and he stepped back next to Cal as a gush of white smoke began pouring from the interior of the armor.
"You gotta' trigger the self-destruct while you're still inside," Marmon explained to Cal, looking a bit abashed by his behavior. "Never done that before."
Cal didn't respond, just turned to Sergeant Gutierrez, trying to keep the anger and impatience he felt off his face. "We have to move," he said emphatically. "They heard that explosion, they know..."
"Incoming!" The yell from Corporal Lee was a microsecond later than the warning Cal's augment sensors had given him, and he was already in motion without thought, sprinting forward into the threat.
The missiles weren't guided: they couldn't be with all the signal jamming being laid down over the city. Cal figured they were probably heat-seekers configured to search for the signature of Marine battlesuits, otherwise they wouldn't have ignored the truck fire. The two remaining battlesuits opened up on them automatically, without asking leave of the Marines inside. Gatling laser fire flashed through the air, hunting for the warheads, but Cal knew that with just two suits operational, it wouldn't be enough.
There were detonations above him and many behind him, but Cal couldn't see what had been hit; his headcomp had slipped into Combat Mode and set him on the most likely course for both survival and victory. He was running headlong into the enemy at somewhere north of thirty kilometers an hour, so fast the buildings on either side of the street had turned into a blur in his peripheral vision.
Caleb could see every second of it as if he were experiencing the whole thing via some Virtual Reality program and seemed to have even less control than he would have hooked into a ViRdrama. The insurgents were standing in the middle of the street behind a makeshift roadblock consisting of a half dozen groundcars and cargo trucks stacked two deep between the sidewalks. Their man-portable missile launchers were still at their shoulders while others reloaded them, muscling the decades-obsolete projectiles into place to fire another fusillade.
They never got the chance. Cal leaped toward the right-hand sidewalk with enough momentum that he took three steps up onto the wall of the building to that side before coming back to the surface. Then he was around the roadblock and leaping into the middle of the insurgents, who had still not noticed him.
There were seventeen of them in all; not a huge number to man a roadblock, but this one was probably a hasty fighting position put up at the last minute as word of their direction of travel had spread. None wore armor to speak of, aside from a couple in makeshift jackets fashioned from firefighting gear or industrial protective suits; nothing, certainly, that would stop a shot from his pulse pistol. He took out the missile-shooters first, one brief burst to the head then another to the firing mechanism.
That had emptied his first magazine and he didn't bother reloading; he was too close now anyway. His pistol was holstered and his talons extended before the first body had hit the ground. They didn't have night vision and the street lights were sabotaged, not to mention the damage the flashes from the laser had done to their unprotected eyes; they never saw him coming.
He tried to shut out the way it felt when his paired sixteen-centimeter plastalloy blades sliced through flesh, tried not to taste the hot, iron tang of blood when it splashed his face. He didn't want to feel it again. But the cold cybernetic senses of his headcomp relayed the data dutifully to its biological symbiote and every single sensation was amplified a thousand times in the telling.
The last few Tahni were screaming in terror, dropping their weapons and trying to run. They didn't make it far: Holly had joined him now and she mopped them up with her bare hands, conserving her ammo. They fell with legs and arms and necks bent at impossible angles, and those that didn't die from the first strike received a heel to the throat that left them choking on their own blood.
Cal slowed to a stop, nearly stumbling with his first walki
ng step as he looked around. The street was as silent as death and nothing was standing except Holly and himself; she was splattered with the blood of others and he knew he mirrored her.
Less than a minute had passed.
"Where are the others?" he asked her.
Her visage hardened in response. "There are no others, Cal."
"Shit." He closed his eyes, feeling the breath go out of him like he'd been kicked in the stomach. When he opened them, he saw Holly walking towards one of the groundcars that made up the roadblock. "You think we can get one of those working?" he asked her, fighting against the emotional inertia that tried to anchor him to the pavement and moving to join her.
"I doubt they had time to seriously disable them," she said, yanking open the gull-wing door and pulling it up. She leaned inside and scanned the controls for a moment before touching a pad in the center of the console. An electric motor hummed to life. She pulled out and looked back to him. "Do you want to chance it?"
Cal looked back down the street. He couldn't see the dead who lie there, but he felt them. They hung over him like a sword, like some demon that had chased him for the last twenty years and just wouldn't be shaken. It would feel so much better to get in the car and drive as fast as it would go, but...
"It would just make us a bigger target," he decided, shaking his head. "It's dark and most of them don't have night vision." He waved out into the night. "We'll go on foot."
"All right," she agreed with a shrug, pushing the car door shut. "So what's the plan?"
He snorted a humorless laugh. "We run...just as fast as we can."
Chapter Nine
Deke Conner wiped his hands on his pant legs to clean the blood off of them before he pulled open the door of the hopper and climbed inside. On the ground just a few meters away, the Tahni infiltrator moaned and writhed, staring in shock at the stumps where his arms used to be. He was bleeding out fast, but Deke figured he had at least a couple more minutes before the Heartbreaker charge detonated.
