Borderlander
Page 8
She was a slight woman with light brown skin and a gently curved nose. Her lustrous brown eyes and mane of black curls were dulled by this place and her condition. Dex saw the transition between sleep and waking—she sat bolt upright, eyes wide and terrified, fury etched in the lines of her face. Part of it was the fact that the mild, sleepy confusion everyone sometimes felt upon waking was magnified and twisted by the disease.
Erin had warned him about this. The daylight hours were generally the safest and most calm, but mornings could be a nightmare for this very reason.
Which was why Dex had begun taking these walks. He wanted to catch this exact moment, add it to the data points he was trying to connect, however much in vain the effort might be.
What he wasn’t prepared for was the reality. The woman zeroed in on him instantly, features Dex was certain were gentle by nature forced into an enraged snarl by her illness. When she launched herself at him, it was with a sharp suddenness that left him momentarily stunned. Her first blow caught him along the edge of his jaw.
And oh gods it hurt. She must have been a boxer in her old life, because the blow felt as if it nearly took his head off.
Dex let his Blessings take over, pumping his body full of extra strength. He focused his awareness in the way he’d been taught, using the temporary surge of energy in perfect harmony with his other physical enhancements.
He caught the woman’s wrists and held them steady, fingers as gentle as he could make them while not allowing her to pull free. When she brought up a knee, Dex shifted his body accordingly, sweeping her legs out from under her and lowering her to the ground. From there it wasn’t terribly difficult to out-think the madly flailing woman, using leverage and the judicious application of his strength to hold her in place until she began to calm. It took longer than he expected, but when the fire did finally die from her eyes and Dex could begin to pay attention to what was going on around him, he noticed a lot of onlookers with stony faces.
*
There was nothing like a town square in the camp, that much should be made clear. At best the place was a collection of people with lifetimes of convenience and relative luxury behind them. They made the best out of what was available, but the result was poor by any standard. There was, however, a communal gathering space. Not much more than an empty circle with stones arrayed around it for sitting, Dex found himself in the uncomfortable position of being at the center of that circle a few minutes later.
“How did you do that?” Erin asked. She had taken the lead, being the person who brought Dex in. “You told me you weren’t a soldier, but you moved like one.”
Dex scratched at the lengthening stubble on his face. “I’m not. It’s complicated, okay? I’ve got a little experience fighting.”
Fatima, the woman who attacked him, absently massaged her wrist. “It was more than that. You’re strong. Too strong. You’re different from the rest of us. It takes us months to gain that much strength.”
There was a rustle of unease through the crowd, as if she’d said something offensive. Dex blinked. “Wait, are you telling me one of the symptoms is increased strength? Why wouldn’t you have mentioned this before?”
Fatima grimaced. “That’s none of your business. Who sent you here? What’s your mission?”
Her eyes narrowed, face growing tense. The muscles in her neck tightened and stood out as the rest of her body wound up like a spring about to release. A large man with ice blue eyes put an arm around her shoulder, gripping tight enough to make her notice. “You’re escalating. Take a breath,” he said.
Dex put his hands up in surrender. “Okay, look. Normally I wouldn’t be telling you this, but given how any dodging on my part is going to be seen as suspicious, I’ll level with you. I’m from Threnody. Is there anyone here who doesn’t know what that means?”
“Oh, holy shit,” Erin said before anyone could answer. “You’re genetically modified. Stronger, faster, better coordination. That’s what the rumors say.”
Dex nodded. “They’re right. We call them Blessings. So yeah, I’m all those things. Also a few other modifications, and they’re all more complicated than you make it sound. Point is, I’m not a spy or a plant or whatever you might think. I’m just a refugee who was on vacation at the wrong place in the wrong time.”
Fatima still glared at him suspiciously. “Is that why you haven’t felt the effects yet? Are you immune?”
“I’ve only been here a week,” Dex said. “Not to mention you’re just assuming I was exposed. We only have the pattern to go on.”
Erin shook her head. “You told me you were hit with a decontamination spray, but that wasn’t what it was. None of the people from the clean camp went through it. You’ve been exposed, no question. Even if you aren’t feeling the mental effects, you should at least be getting some of the physical ones. No one gets away from that.”
Dex ran through his mental catalog of symptoms. Nearly everyone began getting a fever within a few days, though the duration and severity ran a wide spectrum. Most people in the camp got them off and on, for that matter, and the average temperature ran hot in between. Dex had none of the skin conditions, running from discolorations to a strangely rough texture to obvious lesions. None of the muscle pains, bone aches, lack of coordination, or anything else.
He felt normal, or as close to it as he ever got.
“My immune system is augmented,” Dex pointed out. “But you’re right. I don’t have any symptoms. It might take me longer to develop them, or I might just be fighting it off.”
“Maybe you should go live in the clean camp,” Erin suggested quietly. “If you’re not sick, you don’t want to stay here. This place is just getting worse as we do. It’s not safe.”
Dex considered it. The violence didn’t hold much fear for him, not past the immediate sense. Like anyone, he reacted with the same lizard brain when confronted with danger. His upbringing made dealing with a sword constantly dangling over his head as natural as breathing. The concept didn’t take root in the darker parts of his brain. Over the last week he’d seen plenty of scuffles and fights, people stepping in to prevent the worst of them from becoming lethal. Yet he had no trouble sleeping at night. He didn’t live in fear of what these people might do to him. Mostly he just felt sorry for them.
Putting that aside, he had a pretty compelling reason not to join the clean camp. “Just because I’m not sick yet doesn’t mean I won’t be, eventually. I might be a carrier even if I resist it myself. If I do manage to avoid it, then at least you’ll have one person here with a clear head at all times who can watch out for you.”
A few people grew immediately suspicious at the words, but that was to be expected. Rationality was a fading thing as whatever contagion was at work rewired parts of their brains.
Dex had another reason for staying, one which wasn’t obvious to the rest of the group thanks to that same crumbling rationality. He was certain almost past doubt that what he was seeing wasn’t an illness.
The symptoms were a result of their bodies, their very DNA, being rewritten.
Into what, he could only guess.
12
Fen didn’t have a problem with enclosed spaces, and that was a plus considering her circumstances. Thanks to a middle evolution spent living in caves and dens, no Gitk suffered from claustrophobia. It was a small but occasionally useful genetic quirk.
As the cargo container she and her team were hidden in clanked into position and locked into place with a powerful jolt, she sent the ready signal. The HUD inside her helmet returned all green lights.
This was a risky mission, but one she had argued strongly for. The Red Hand ships they’d taken down in the weeks since peeling the Caspian off from their fleet had universally scrubbed their data before anyone could stop them. Fen’s idea was as old as the myth of the Trojan Horse, but the classics achieve that status for a reason. They work. It helped that she and her team had been in the container for a solid two days, much longer than
any reasonable person would expect a hidden enemy to camp out while waiting to strike. Their combat armor was rated for seventy two hours of closed survival, but Fen took no chances. Backup batteries and supplies inside the container gave them a week at least.
Not that they’d need it. The bait was taken—literally. The container was stolen from a ship hired by Captain Stone explicitly for this purpose. Smugglers would try almost anything for the right money. Scans would reveal a heavily shielded metal box, which would serve to underline in the minds of the Red Hand that their intelligence was spot-on.
They thought they were getting a stolen shipment of exotic matter held in magnetic containment, stolen from a naval production facility and almost priceless on the black market.
Basic sensors embedded in the container fed her a real-time stream of data about the outside world, including two video feeds. Sensor nodes wouldn’t raise suspicion since the supposed cargo would be held inside a complicated vault which would need information about external conditions to ensure containment. The cameras would raise questions if they were found, but as small as they were, Fen wasn’t overly worried.
“Get ready,” she breathed into her comm. More green lights sprang up on the board. One came slower than the others. Fen led a team of nine seasoned operators, but this mission required a plus one.
The edges of the container’s doors cracked and hissed as the gas inside equalized with the pressure in the cargo bay. The Red Hand pirates opening the heavy doors would be expecting to see the inner surface of the shielded vault. What the pair of surprised faces got instead were the barrels of ten weapons pointed at their faces.
Johnson and Kidd were crouched in the front of the small space and fired first. The only sound was a faint whine as magnetically propelled objects the size of a thumb crossed the space at several hundred meters per second. They had a long, technical name, but most people in the business called them crasher rounds. The name came from the fact that when one of them hit you and latched its prongs into your skin, you hit the deck like a stone and stayed there until its batteries ran out. They were rated for an hour each, and the pair of pirates got three apiece. Crashers were smart weapons, and networked with each other. They’d make the most of their battery capacity as they fed our disruptive pulses through the enemy’s nervous systems.
“Go,” Fen transmitted.
They went.
Fen brought up the rear, not a position she would normally be in but for her orders to protect the eleventh person on her team. She kept one eye on the group tactical display in her HUD, watching her men split off into trios to cover the cargo bay. The low whine of crasher rounds speeding through the space became a constant hum as the other seven people in the bay went down.
Fen fired off a pair of rounds herself as she rocketed forward through the bay. The schematics for this particular make of cargo ship were widely available, and the complex systems in her suit could have led her to the control room in total darkness. The room itself was only a dozen meters from their container, its sole occupant unaware of the silent coup happening on the other side of the small window. Fen could tell because the person inside was facing away from the thick glass.
The hatch was open, and as the woman seated within the control room looked up in mild surprise, Fen fired three crashers into her chest at point-blank range.
“Your turn,” she said to her companion.
The armored figure spoke, and the voice that came across the comm belonged to Iona. “I’m already in their wireless network. I’ll access the hard lines, too. Three minutes at the outside.”
Fen clicked acknowledgment over the comm but wasn’t sure Iona knew the shorthand. She turned and crouched between the sim and the inner hatch leading to the rest of the ship. If her men did their job right, and they always did, the emergency hatches into the bay would be sealed shut. The only means of ingress was right in front of Fen. Which meant even when the others finished their sweep and moved in, she would be the first in danger should the enemy realize what was going on.
Just the way it should be.
*
Ninety seconds later, things got interesting.
“Shit,” Iona said.
“Not what I want to hear,” Fen said flatly. “What’s up?”
Iona sent a data feed through a private link in their helmets. Which wasn’t a thing that should have been possible, but then Iona was capable of mentally integrating with computer systems. On the small feed was an internal view of the ship which showed a group of heavily armed and armored commandos moving down a corridor. Fen had a good idea where they were going.
“How did they know?” Fen asked mildly. She expected every mission to go sideways at some point, so she was less surprised than irritated.
Iona grunted. “Dedicated internal security officer. They’ve got live video running through all the public spaces here. That’s more disciplined than I expected.”
Fen agreed with the assessment, but didn’t voice the opinion. “How much more time do you need? And how deeply are you integrated into the system?”
When Iona replied, the smile was clear in her voice. “Oh, I’m all the way in. Right now it’s just a matter of copying their files, which I’m about halfway through. I have total control of the ship. I can crack their life support, shut down the engines, kill the reactor, whatever you want. What I can’t do is physically stop those guys from shooting through that door and coming in here.”
Fen’s fingers tightened on her weapon. “Do you need to be in this room to maintain your connection?”
“No,” Iona said. “I can be in the bay itself. The network is pretty robust.”
Fen nodded. “Okay, go out there, then. If they don’t know you’re in the system, I want to keep it that way for now. I’ll send orders over the link, but stay quiet unless there’s something critical you think I need to know.”
Iona ducked her head and darted out of the room. Fen signaled Johnson, Kidd, and Patel to join her.
When the three of them entered the room, she gestured toward the door. “Seal it. Patel and I will cover. Iona, please give us a live feed from the camera in the corridor so we’ll know if these assholes are about to fire.”
“You think they’ll risk holing their own ship?” Patel asked as she took position next to her commanding officer.
“They know their ship better than we do,” Fen said. “And even I know that directly behind us is a cargo door meant to stand up to a lot more kinetic energy than their rounds will be able to put out. If positions were reversed, I’d risk shooting through the door to hit us. I’m assuming they’re also getting a live feed, but they won’t be able to hear what we’re saying across comms so we have a slight advantage. They don’t know we’re in their system.”
Contrary to what the dramas implied, few soldiers enjoyed being shot at and none of the people under Fen’s command were among them. Johnson and Kidd worked with quick efficiency as they placed welding patches over the hatch seams, staying away from the center of the doorway as much as possible. Their armor was designed to take the impact of the sort of rounds typically used aboard ship, and anything that spent the energy to travel through a steel sheet would probably not have enough left to penetrate that protection. They stayed cautious regardless, because that was what Fen expected of them.
It saved their lives.
From outside of the field of view the video feed provided, someone fired at the door. The shot went through the manual lock with incredible force, shattering the mechanism into a burst of metallic confetti. The round smacked in the control board between Fen and Patel.
Johnson and Kidd ducked away from the door and drew their weapons, angling themselves for maximum coverage. Their own guns were dual purpose, with the lower barrel firing the large crasher rounds while a variety of multipurpose ammunition could be launched by the rail gun above it.
Fen gave the signal across the tactical link and squeezed her own trigger. This was no time to play nice.
Her tactical computer and suit worked in unison with the video feed and the others to create an ideal firing solution. The first three rounds fired in a tight burst with tiny changes in aim managed by the gun itself to put a hole the size of a fist through the door. This would have been a huge problem had the men in the corridor beyond any time to capitalize on it, but they did not. Whoever had fired the first shot did so from a distance and clearly not expecting such a fast response, because a second never came from whatever heavy weapon the hidden shooter was using.
Instead, the advancing defenders stopped in unison as a hail of rail gun shots popped through the hatch and into their armor. Many of the rounds were fragments when they hit, energy spent, but a few did serious damage.
Fen suspected the idea was to shoot through the lock and kick open the hatch, which just showed that these people were amateurs in comparison no matter how fancy their gear.
In the five seconds it took the penetrator rounds to give pause to the pirates, Patel raised her weapon and fired her own special round. Fen saw the target lock as the human woman aimed directly at the hole and got a good trajectory report from the computer as it cleared the barrier with a few millimeters to spare on either side.
Fen’s team cleared the space in front of the door in the two seconds it took the canister of high explosive to detonate. It might not be enough to kill the men beyond, but it would certainly do a lot of damage in the small space.
The hatch deformed slightly, but most of the blast followed the path of least resistance and channeled its shock wave toward the far end of the corridor.