Syndicate Wars: Fault Line (Seppukarian Book 3)

by Kyle Noe

  11

  Never Give Up

  Milo, Quinn, and the other fighters plunged through the fog and the fraying semi-darkness. Quinn tossed her launcher aside, clutching her rifle as they bulled forward, maneuvering around the detritus of what Quinn assumed now had been prior battles, the same ones that had somehow cost their own lives at some point in the past, she guessed.

  They dodged machinery filigreed with alien etchings that protruded from the ice lake, implying colossal superstructures hidden from view. The exposed material was weathered, etched by the wind and the conditions, making it look hundreds, maybe thousands of years old. Quinn struggled with the concept of time, unable to completely process the impact of seeing herself back under the ice. To the extent they’d been trapped in some kind of time loop, how long had they been fighting?

  Galloping alongside Milo, Quinn activated the applications housed in her battle helmet. Her display hummed to life, giving her 3-D situational awareness. There was integrated eye tracking and input from a variety of tiny cameras embedded in her armor, which was synced to her rifle. The helmet’s internal system detected Quinn’s head movements and sent the appropriate video feed to the HUD which allowed her to track and fire her gun simply by moving her eyes. And making a significant dent in enemy lines as she and the others fired away.

  Giovanni’s voice resonated over comms. “We’re winning,” he said. “We’re actually winning.”

  “Not quite,” Cody said from above. “There’re more coming.”

  Quinn’s eyes ranged ahead until she could see the silhouettes of the monstrous Syndicate drones, capering just over a ridgeline. Cuing her helmet’s directional audio, she listened to the heavy breathing of her fellow warriors, the clack of tactical boots on the lake, the hydraulic groans of the largest Syndicate drones, the Reapers, as they tensed, readying to do battle. The ice seemed to snatch up every sound and amplify it a thousand times. There was a moment when time and sound seemed to slow—a beautiful beat of silence. But reality snapped back in with the suddenness of a punch to the face. Quinn knew the enemy was close, she just prayed that they wouldn’t have to face the biomechanical monstrosities they’d battled back in jungle during the initial stage of the alien invasion.

  Suddenly, a figure jolted up in front of her. Some of the others gasped as a Reaper drone rose up to its full and terrible height, all fifteen plus feet of it emerging from a concealed hole in the ice fifty yards in front of the Marines. The drone just stood there, steam rising up off of its armor.

  “Russian front, 1943,” Milo said, to himself, catching his breath, waiting for the drone to move.

  Quinn traded a look with him. “Now is the not the time for a history lesson.”

  “The Germans were caught by a wave of heavy Russian armor. T-34 tanks, a shitload of them. Guess what they did?”

  “Lost, Milo. The Germans lost the friggin’ war. Hello,” said Quinn.

  He shook his head. “They lost the war, but won that battle. They attacked with satchel charges, grenades, and mines. They kept themselves small and ran right between the tanks.”

  “So you’re saying there’s a way we can win this battle?” she asked.

  “Precisely,” Milo replied.

  Quinn considered this. She looked up to see that the Reaper drone was changing colors, appearing matte-black, then whiter than sugar, its active camouflage engaging, the image of red fangs appearing on its nose for an instant. The machine began moving laterally, visible for an instant, flashing its armored body. This drone appeared to differ from the ones Quinn had seen back on the Syndicate command ship. It moved with greater precision and its bulky turret appeared to be grafted onto organic protrusions. She thought back on what Cody had said about the aliens sending down robots to remotely build weapons on the asteroid and wondered whether this was one of the newer creations. Maybe the goddamn things were somehow evolving.

  She studied the drone’s legs, which were as thick as a dinosaur’s, its hulking upper body sheathed with meta-material armor that protected an internal, AI-infused brain stem that allowed the machine to reason and hunt and fight like an intelligent animal depending on the battlefield conditions. She was shocked when the drone dropped down onto its haunches. The machine seemed to paw at the ice, and its arms telescoped from its sides as cannons and rocket launchers slowly emerged from its turret. The drone looked pissed off and ready to kill.

  It seemed to spot Quinn as it stared right through her. There was pure, unadulterated homicide in the yellow eyes of the two aliens that controlled the machine, seated safely inside the two raised bubbletops. Even though the drones operated largely by artificial intelligence, their energy had to be harnessed on occasion, like a jockey on the back of a racehorse. While she’d seen them function with only one controller on occasion (and often this controller was itself robotic), most of the drones operated just like the crew on an old Apache gunship: one navigator, one gunner, both aliens.

  The Marines and resistance fighters raised their rifles and fired all at once. Balls of directed energy and sabet rounds scythed across the ice, glowing tracers followed in their wake. The Reaper dodged left and came up on its feet, returning the fire with a barometric missile that exploded fifty feet above the Marines, and seemed to set the air on fire.

  Quinn dropped to the ice, watching the missile’s back-blast suck a resistance fighter off of his feet. The man was hurled fifty feet up into the air, his body breaking apart on the ice, leaving a greasy blood trail. Incensed by the killing, Quinn and others opened up again on the Reaper, riddling its exoskeleton with rifle-blasts, their rounds eventually finding the weak spots near the joints at and around the two bubbletops. They blasted apart its armor and killed the navigator as the machine collapsed onto the ice.

  The other gunner squirmed out of the drone wreckage, bringing around a flamethrower that he unleashed on the warriors. There was no oxygen on the asteroid, but plenty of chlorine, an exceptionally strong oxidizer, which meant that the balls of flames from the flamethrower were enormous. Huge clouds of fire barely missed Mackie and Hawkins who returned fire, killing the gunner. Hayden stripped the flame thrower from the dead alien and gave the order to continue the assault even as dozens more Reaper drones appeared behind the one they’d just taken down.

  Suppressive fire was laid down by Quinn and her fellow fighters, keeping the Reaper army at bay. The Marines had witnessed the drones in action before. They’d fought and trained with them. They knew that one of the few, and maybe only, weaknesses the Reapers possessed lay in the conflict between the machine’s artificial intelligence and the survival instincts of the alien controllers.

  That is, the machine didn’t give a fuck if it lived or died, but most of the controllers did. If faced with a precarious situation, survival instinct would kick in and the controllers would likely go one way and the A.I. the other. Milo knew this and prayed that he’d be able to exploit it. His goal was to lay down some fire on the left flank of the drones, opening up the lake, making it dangerous for the controllers to maneuver their killing machines across. In so doing, he hoped to sow some confusion and use it as cover to attack.

  Milo keyed up his HUD and ordered a focused attack on the left flank instead of spreading out the fire. Quinn used hand signals to gesture to Mackie, Hawkins, and Mira who broke off from the Marine assault. They swung out to the left and dropped to the ice, deploying Hafnium launchers and a mini-Gatling-gun-like plasma rifle that Hawkins unfurled from a backpack which began spitting darts of molten uranium, melting whole sections of the lake, setting several rows of Reapers ablaze. The Reapers were caught off guard, seemingly disoriented by the attack.

  The line of drones broke for an instant just as Milo hoped they would. The Reapers were bottled up and they soon found themselves unable to effectively operate because of the holes in the ice. Several more were firing wildly, shooting down their own, the huge machines crashing into the ice, making it difficult for the others to track and fire at the Marines
and resistance fighters.

  Sensing an opportunity to use the confusion to their advantage, Quinn signaled for everyone to head straight at the monsters. The assault force ran full-bore, struggling to reach the ground directly in and around the Reapers, making it difficult for the machines to track and fire at them.

  Soon the fighting was at close-quarters. Milo, Quinn, Hayden, and Mira were in the thick of it, firing out their guns, tossing ballistic grenades, listening to the sound of metal grinding against metal as the ruined machines collapsed on the ice, spraying machine oil and ropes of yellow blood.

  Quinn was with Milo, the duo barreling forward, running between the mighty legs of one Reaper after another. Being the smallest, Mira and Renner weaved between the Reapers with the practiced grace of trained dancers, fingering tiny sticky-bombs as they slid. Mira flipped a pair of sticky-bombs to Renner who ducked low and flung them onto the legs of a pair of Reapers, bringing them down with controlled explosions that allowed the other Marines to finish them off with rifle blasts.

  Quinn and Hayden led the fighters ahead, the Reaper drones spinning in all directions, firing erratically. Geysers of debris and chunks of ice filled the air as mini-rockets from the drones shrieked up and detonated across the lake.

  Quinn dropped and slid between the legs of an approaching drone, firing up into the machine’s belly. She swung around and came up in a defensive crouch. She aimed at the drone’s bubbletop and riddled the navigator and gunner inside. The navigator slumped over the controls, sending the drone into berserker mode. Like a monster in an old horror movie, the drone rampaged wildly before falling into a hole in the lake.

  Quinn turned to see another drone storming toward Mira and Renner. The Reaper swung out an arm that hit Mira hard enough to lift her off her feet. She hit the ground hard and slid across the ice, out of breath, but uninjured.

  Quinn fired at the drone to buy Mira some time and it spun toward her. The monstrosity’s arm distended and out came a metal war hammer that was shaped like an axe head. The Reaper swung the hammer so violently it split the asteroid’s dense fog.

  WHAM!

  The war hammer grazed Quinn’s helmet and pistoned into the ice, opening a huge hole that nearly sucked Quinn in. She felt the edges of the hole giving way and dove to her right, spearing the barrel of her rifle into the ice, pulling herself away from the frozen liquid.

  Elbowing herself up, she saw the drone leaping over the hole—

  BOOM!

  Landing on the other side. The Reaper turned toward her and—

  THWACK! THWACK! THWACK!

  A flurry of fire pounded it from behind.

  Quinn rose to see Eli driving his smaller drone forward, slamming into the Reaper, knocking it back. The Reaper staggered like a boxer taking a hit, and then regained its footing. Its cannons roared, ripping pieces from Eli’s drone, taking out its legs. Eli’s drone fell to the ice, leaking fluids. The Reaper rose up over it, readying to bring its war hammer down on the bubbletop where Eli was visible and cowering.

  Realizing she had seconds to act, Quinn signaled to Hayden who tossed her a bulldog pistol, a wide-barreled hand-cannon fitted with thirty high-explosive rounds. She commenced firing. Her shots slammed into the Reaper, drawing it away from Eli who was trying to extract himself from the wreckage of the downed drone.

  Quinn fired out her pistol, blowing out a hydraulic cable on the Reaper’s leg. Crippled, the metal monster, now down to one leg, became like a wounded animal, swinging its war hammer at anything that moved. Defenseless, the machine pirouetted as Quinn ran forward and grabbed onto a section of metal rudders on the back of its turret. The drone bucked, the alien navigator and gunner fighting the controls, struggling to toss Quinn off the machine. She white-knuckled her handholds and pulled her pistol around, realizing she only had a handful of rounds left. With one final surge of adrenaline she brought the pistol around and aimed and fired, point-blank, at the drone’s brain stem.

  A great gout of yellow liquid followed by a furious cloud of friction sparks. The drone began smoking, jerking wildly, the alien controllers inside unable to control the Reaper’s forward movement. Quinn was terrified to see that the Reaper was staggering toward the hole in the ice.

  “SHIT!” Quinn screamed.

  She could sense the drone losing its grip on the ice and then it was falling forward. Quinn rode the drone down toward the black opening in the ice.

  At the last second, she planted her feet and launched herself into the air.

  She slammed onto the ice at the edge of the hole as Hawkins and Mackie dove and grabbed her wrists, pulling her to safety. Quinn crouched on the frozen lake, chest heaving. Hayden pulled her up as they assessed the battlefield. They had lost several fighters, but the Syndicate had lost much more.

  There were dozens of destroyed drones lying smoking and strewn across the ice. The silhouettes of Syndicate soldiers and drones could be seen in the distance, but for the moment, the Marines and resistance fighters were in the clear.

  Milo helped Eli out of the destroyed drone, then blew imaginary smoke from his rifle.

  Quinn allowed herself a moment to savor the victory. Her joy was tempered, however, by the fact that they’d lost several of their own while only putting a small dent in the Syndicate forces that were guarding Hygiea. Undoubtedly, there would be dozens, maybe hundreds, of additional drones sent out to hunt them down. Still, they’d made it this far and that was something … the smallest of victories, but a victory still. She exhaled and looked up as Milo moved toward her.

  “We did it,” Milo said. “Even if only for the moment, we beat the bastards.”

  He took another step and then the ice disappeared under his feet.

  12

  Under

  Without thinking, Quinn dove into the opening in the lake that Milo had fallen into. Even with her armor, the water was incredibly frigid and dense, like diving down into a pool of plasma. The weight of the armor and helmet sucked her down into the lake’s watery depths. She was mindful of the oxygen reservoir in her armor, cognizant of the fact that this much pressure could reduce her overall oxygen levels.

  The micro-generator in her armor worked by taking in the asteroid’s abundant chlorine dioxide, and isolating its oxygen atom. The oxygen atom was then combined with a de minimis amount of carbon dioxide to make oxygen, which was then recirculated through the armor and helmet via a nearly imperceptible network of nano-tubes. While this worked well on land, Quinn knew that her supply of breathable air underwater was limited.

  The water swirled down below her as she scissored her legs, fighting for any sign of Milo. The farther down she descended, the denser the darkness became, and soon Quinn could only see a few feet in front of her. She was terrified that at additional depths her helmet, which had always proven air tight before, might be compromised. She twisted her body and looked back up. The light from the opening grew smaller and smaller. She worked to cue her HUD, but the device wasn’t functioning properly. If she had any hope of finding Milo, she’d have to risk everything and dive down on her own.

  Back on the lake’s surface, the Marines and resistance fighters were on the lip of the hole, peering down into the water. Hayden watched the edges of the hole slowly beginning to close up, the liquid refreezing before his eyes.

  “Get the goddamn flamethrower!” Hayden shouted.

  Hawkins grabbed the Syndicate weapon and brought it over.

  Hayden fumbled with the weapon, trying to ascertain how to power on the two tanks and trigger the ignition system. He pressed the flat surface of the weapon and a blue flame appeared at the end of the flamethrower’s nozzle, igniting some of the chlorine in the air, casting off tongues of flame.

  “GET BACK!” Hayden shouted.

  The others did and he triggered the device, launching a ball of burning fuel into the still open hole. The effect was almost instantaneous and Giovanni and the others cheered as the ice melted and the hole reopened. Hayden eased back on the f
lamethrower’s trigger, hoping like hell that Quinn would resurface before he had to melt the ice again.

  With the risk of compromising her equipment and oxygen reservoir, Quinn dove blindly down and caught sight of something shimmering in the gloom. It was a fragment of light bouncing off a set of Syndicate armor. For a moment Quinn believed it might be a soldier who’d fallen through the ice at some point in the past, but then she saw a hand waving at her. Kicking her feet, she swam down to see Milo wedged, arm-first, in a fissure in a mountainous wall of ice.

  She hovered alongside him, grabbing his arm, trying to free it from the gap in the ice. Milo worked with her so that, the two pulling together, freed him. Quinn turned and pointed toward the surface, but realized it was too late. Her best educated guess was that they were down to less than thirty seconds worth of oxygen and the hole in the ice was so far away.

  She gripped Milo’s hand and she could tell by his movements, by the way that he just bobbed alongside her, that he also had realized they had no chance. But then he reached down and pointed at his boots and Quinn remembered the compressed nitrogen gas cartridges. She had no idea whether the gas would function at all given the conditions, but it was something. It was a chance! She signaled to Milo, gesturing at their boots and he nodded.

  The two struck the backs of their boots against the wall of ice, over and over, struggling to activate the canisters and then—