Borderlander

by Joshua Guess

  It was fair to say the mercenary didn’t, either.

  29

  “Coming in hot, guys,” Crash’s voice thundered over the ship-wide comm. Batta didn’t have to look up at any of the monitors around him to get the particulars. Unlike the rest of the crew, who wore emergency pressure suits in case they were badly hit, Batta wore the standard gear for any professional ship’s engineer: a mech suit. One part EVA suit, one part strength-assisting powered armor, the thing fed him streams of data in the HUD lens sitting in front of his eye.

  At that exact moment, Batta was using the full capabilities of the suit to free up a jam in the port torpedo magazine. One of the casings had split—that was the last time he let the captain buy secondhand ordinance—and in the hellacious firefight had become wedged in the feed mechanism of the magazine.

  “I need those torpedoes now, Batta!” the captain shouted over the comm.

  With a grunt of effort, he yanked the mangled section of casing free and tossed it onto the damaged torpedo laying crooked across the hallway. He tapped a control inside one of his armored gloves to initialize the magazine, then brought up the comm. “Try it now. I’m gonna make sure Crash gets in safe.”

  The captain double-clicked the mic to acknowledge, too busy now that he had his weapons again to bother with speech. Batta didn’t mind. The navy knocked the ego out of you early, or you didn’t last. It was simply the way things were: when the fighting happened, engineers were afterthoughts. At least until you needed them to fix something.

  This was a lesson Dex had internalized at once, Batta recalled. Then he shoved the thought aside. No time to think about the kid.

  Instead he focused his HUD on the Ravager as it tried unsuccessfully to dock on the belly of the ship. The telemetry streaming in was mostly red lights. The power plant wasn’t compromised, thank the gods, but nearly every other system was. The upgraded engine was in emergency standby mode, the vents were bleeding heat at full capacity. The environmental system was throwing back no returns at all. It just looked...gone.

  Moving toward the belly airlock, Batta switched camera feeds to get a better look at the tiny ship. He gasped in shock, a rare reaction from him, as he took in the damage. The short wings were riddled with holes from PDC rounds. The cockpit itself had a few. Unless he missed his guess, the environmental management system might have actually been shot to pieces by one of them. It was housed just in front of the rear bulkhead in the cockpit.

  “You still alive in there, girl?” Batta asked over a private channel.

  “I hate it when you call me a girl,” Crash replied, more amused than annoyed. “I’m good. Got real goddamn lucky, though. Gonna need to visit the med bay when I get inside.”

  Batta grunted over the channel, the hands-free mic picking up the noncommittal noise and deciding it qualified as speech. For Batta, those sounds usually did carry some meaning. “I can grab the ship, but you’re gonna have to float into the airlock. Your mating seal is completely busted. It’s so bad, the auto-grab can’t latch on. I’ll hook it manually and open the outer door.”

  There was a pause. “Okay. Just hang on. I’m a little...” The words trailed off suddenly.

  “Crash?” Batta said. “You there?”

  There was no response.

  “Shit,” Batta muttered as he ran toward the airlock. Tripping the comm—any would do—he spoke to Iona. “Did you catch all that? I’m assuming you did since you are my ship right now.”

  “I heard,” Iona said. “I assume you’re about to go on an EVA?”

  Batta triggered the closure protocol for his helmet, which unfolded from the wide collar of his suit and snapped into place. “What gave it away? Can you grab the Ravager or are you too busy?” The question came out a little more crossly than he intended. He’d meant it as an honest inquiry but instead it just came out bitchy.

  “I think I can manage,” Iona replied dryly. “Don’t forget your tether.”

  Batta grabbed the end of the tether and attached it to his suit. He found himself surprised at how calm he felt. Sure, going onto the skin of the ship was something he did more days than not, but this should have been different. There were stakes. One of his oldest friends needed him.

  “Blow it,” he said, knowing Iona would hear him.

  Batta let the air whoosh past him as the door cycled open, the tether keeping him firmly in place. He activated the suit thrusters, carefully feeding out the line along with the drift.

  Crash’s own suit was sending telemetry. Vitals were a little erratic. There was a sealed tear in the leg. The sealant would have temporarily slowed or even stopped the flow of blood from whatever wound she’d received, but he still needed to work fast. Falling unconscious was never a good sign.

  Batta made his way to the Ravager, working around the two thin, segmented limbs holding the small ship still relative to the Seraphim’s bulk. He slapped a hand on the emergency release to no effect. The small airlock was dead. Almost as an afterthought, he tried sending a command override to the Ravager, also with no effect.

  “Fuck,” Batta cursed to himself. “Come on, think...”

  The airlock itself was too rugged to attack with anything short of his welding rig, but doing so would not only take longer than he suspected Crash had, but would also potentially harm her in the process. Instead he reached over and put a pair of mechanically enhanced fingers in one of the bullet holes pocking the skin of the ship.

  Cranking the power up to full, he flexed those fingers. The thin outer layer peeled away easily, revealing the stronger armor beneath. The plates interlocked to form a rigid shell, a common design feature in most PA naval vessels. Batta knew ships, however. Their strengths and their weaknesses. There was no way he could pull apart any two of the plates normally, but the PDC rounds had luckily struck in a diagonal line that intersected two seams. The armor had done its best, but was too thin to shrug off the insane velocity of a point defense round. Deformed and slightly buckled, one of the seams was split open down nearly half its length.

  That, he could work with.

  Batta locked his fingers in place, planted his feet, and used the full power of the suit’s core to pull. For him there was only moderate effort; the mechanical systems ramped up their share of the work to compensate. The grind of strained motors vibrated his digits as the system pushed the finger actuators past their design specs, but Batta didn’t let up. The suit was built to tear itself apart if that was what the engineer wanted. Sometimes that was what it took to do the job, and when the job meant saving the lives of a ship’s entire crew, there was little point in limiting what your tools could do.

  The interior of the suit grew warm, then hot, as Batta slowly parted the layer of armor. With a jarring snap that would have thrown him clear if not for magnetic boots, most of the plate in his grip sheared away. The opening was small, perhaps half a meter, but it would work.

  He took a knee over the hole and wasted no time breaking through the fragile inner shell of wires and components. There she was, face pale behind the visor of her helmet.

  “I see her,” Iona said over the comm. “I’m linked into your suit’s camera. Move aside.”

  Batta did as he was told and cleared away from the ragged wound in the ship. One of the arms let go of the Ravager and snaked gracefully inside. It pulled Crash through seconds later, its thin tip secured around her wrist.

  “I may have broken something in her arm,” Iona said apologetically. “This thing isn’t meant for human bodies. Get her inside quickly; we’re about to do some maneuvering.”

  Batta wrapped Crash in his arms and triggered the tether’s recall. As they slid backward through space together, he had a few seconds to take in the sight in front of him. Ships venting gas and spears of flickering light where PDC rounds caught and reflected random photons. Streaks of blue exhaust from flying torpedoes. The red-hot glow of rail gun slugs cutting across the sky. Any one of them could have taken him from the universe in less time than it to
ok for a neuron to fire. Crash, too, for that matter. What amazed him wasn’t the scene itself or even his unlikely place in it. Nor was his wonder reserved for the vast and lovely blackness containing the all too familiar scene.

  It was for the ship drawing all that fire. A new arrival.

  Child Blue had arrived on scene.

  Batta saluted the enormous ship and the consciousness housed within it. His hands tightened around Crash as they slammed into the inner door of the airlock. Unnerving as he might find the Children, even one pledged to help the human race instead of exterminating it, he couldn’t help feeling gratitude with an intensity bordering on fanatical.

  “I won’t lose you too,” Batta said to Crash’s still form.

  30

  Fatima blurred forward, appearing from the brush like forest spirit. Her armor, like all of the defenders by now, was festooned with greenery to allow her to blend in with her surroundings. The mercenary was the last in his unit and was looking in the opposite direction when she struck. Dex provided that distraction, popping out from behind a tree long enough to be seen.

  He saw Fatima tackle the merc and rushed forward to assist if needed. It was a genuine but ultimately needless gesture; she had it covered. One hand held his weapon away from her, his years of conditioning no match for her enhanced strength. Dex saw panic well up in the mercenary’s eyes as Fatima straddled his prone body, grabbing at the wrist trying to fend her off with her free hand. She snapped it like a whip, yanking the wrist down and away with a speed Dex had a hard time believing. A brutal twisting motion halfway through caused a constellation of bones to break beneath the poor bastard’s combat armor. He screamed, all conscious thought stripped away by the unbelievable agony visited on him by the small woman.

  Fatima’s hand released the ruined arm and struck at the weak neck joint in the armor. Three dizzying blows later, and the helmet was loosed enough to tear away.

  The injured soldier tried to curl up, a futile protective instinct to delay the inevitable. “Don’t kill me,” he said, his voice raw from screaming. “I was just doing my job. Please, man, don’t let her kill me. Just take me prisoner.”

  “You took money to come down to a planet and kill people, no questions asked,” Dex said. “Even if I wanted to—and I don’t—I’m not in charge of her.” He said it coldly. Factually. There was no other way for the words to come out.

  Fatima knocked the guy out with another hard strike, then finished the job. Dex was a little surprised by the mercy. Though he didn’t so much as twitch an eyebrow at her, Fatima still grimaced at him as she rose to her feet, signaling the prisoners hidden around the clearing to come forward and strip the dead man of his gear. “I felt a little sorry for him. No reason to put him through more pain and terror if I could help it.”

  “Just a little surprised, I guess,” Dex said, feeling as tired as Fatima looked. The constant use of their enhancements took a heavy toll on the body, the constant need to kill a worse one on the heart and mind. The exhaustion would catch up to them eventually, but its cause was not purely the guerrilla war being fought every hour of the day.

  While Dex’s physical gifts were always there to a certain extent—you can’t cause muscle to magically grow more or less dense in the span of seconds, after all—the degree had shifted. Not much at first. In fact, the change was so gradual that he might not have noticed it without a lifetime of learning to listen to his body in order to manage those gifts.

  His strength was increasing little by little. The other Blessings seemed unaffected, with no obvious changes to his vision or hearing, even his coordination remained the same. That fit with his theory on why the experiment was being conducted in the first place. If you were working toward a subtle pathogen meant to drive a population into a self-destructive violent mob, there was no reason to do more than increase their base ability to kill.

  Yet the changes, incremental though they were, came at a cost. More muscle mass came with higher caloric needs, and that was ignoring the energy requirements for creating that mass in the first place. Their small army grew smaller by the day as attrition from fighting took its toll, but a few people had actually voiced what all of them were thinking.

  Less mouths to feed. For an increasingly hungry population, every bite mattered. Oh, they had a group of fighters whose entire job was to hunt for the group. That had been one of the first orders given when their command structure officially came together. But the easy prey was gone. The lizard monsters might be dim, but they weren’t so stupid they would hang around when a plague of apex predators started slaughtering them wholesale.

  Fourteen days since the kid gloves came off. Two weeks, or what passed for weeks on this planet, of constant fighting, running, and hiding. It couldn’t last, and everyone knew it.

  “I can almost hear what you’re thinking,” Fatima said as they moved deeper into the woods. As far as they had been able to discern, this had been the last group of soldiers in the valley. The enemy wised up after the first week, using more caution against the prisoners. The lack of them should have been a cause for celebration, but Erin and Fatima knew just as well as he did that the sudden lack of enemies was probably a bad sign.

  “They’re going to run out of men if they keep this up,” Dex said, voicing the thought. “We’ve thinned them down enough that the ones still alive are probably refusing to come back in here. This was supposed to be an easy payday.”

  Fatima snorted, every ounce of compassion she’d shown the dead man now gone. “Serves them right for not asking questions when a fat bag of credits was dangled in front of them. Me? I’d have wanted to know why me and my buddies were supposed to use fucking swords for this job. If you’re not smart enough to question the parameters of a job, you reap the whirlwind.”

  Dex nodded along. They’d had this conversation before. It was in fact the only safe conversation to have. Few of the prisoners had spoken about their lives before being taken prior to the invasion of mercenaries; now none of them did. It was a semi-conscious defense mechanism. You didn’t want to know the guy who just had a hole blown through his face was leaving behind orphan children who might never know what happened to their father.

  “I think this means they’re finally tired of us,” Dex said. “If they can’t field enough men to hunt us down, they’re almost certainly going to go with plan B.”

  Fatima’s eyebrows bobbed up for a moment. “Ah, yes. Mass destruction. The choice of assholes and dictators since the dawn of time. What do you think? Nuclear? Kinetic strike? Or maybe since your people fancy biology so much, it’ll be chemical or biological.”

  Dex shook his head. “Probably not the last two. If they just wanted us dead in the first place with no more experimentation on new subjects, they’d have bombed us from orbit. No, they want to keep on using this area. Which means no potential contaminants that might screw with their results. Probably rules out a nuclear strike as well. As for kinetic, well, that’s an option. So is a strafing run of pretty much anything else capable of leveling or burning down this forest. Doesn’t really matter what it is. The result is the same. What we have to do to survive doesn’t change.”

  Fatima’s mouth curved into a frown. “We have to leave. I know. But if we retreat and they decide to send more people after us...”

  “It’s a risk,” Dex said. “But do you really think they’re going to wait long? They know we’re in this part of the valley. A couple kinetic strikes will create a pressure wave that will kill anything in the caves, no matter how deep our people go. It’d be like accelerating in a ship without the gravitational array to cancel out the inertia. Splattered against the wall into a fine liquid.”

  “You’re so gross,” Fatima said. “Are all physicists like you?”

  Dex chuckled. “If I ever meet another one, I’ll let you know.”

  Erin met them as the pair reached the small camp their unit shared. It wasn’t much. Less refined, even, than the one they’d left behind back on the dunes. He
re the thicker foliage on the ground was sheared away, the larger leafy plants arcing over the ground left in place with stalks tied together to create a makeshift canopy a meter tall. It was the first roof any of them had over their heads since arriving on the planet.

  “We leaving?” Erin asked without preamble.

  Fatima sighed, defeated. “Yes. We were right. That last group was just a distraction to pull their people all the way out of the valley and up the hill. It probably won’t be more than a few hours. How long will it take to mobilize everyone? We’ll need to spread the word.”

  Erin, usually so serious and as haggard as any other prisoner, actually grew sheepish. “Well, see, here’s the thing.”

  “You already sent them,” Fatima guessed. “After I asked you not to.”

  Erin nodded. “Well, yeah. I understand the logistics aren’t great for us, but hear me out. See, I think it’s better to be hungry and maybe a little spread out rather than accidentally get caught in the blast radius of a nuclear warhead. Call me crazy.”

  “We discounted nukes,” Dex said helpfully.

  Erin rolled her eyes. “The point, Dex, is that we’ve got a head start. It’s a little messy, but the people you brought back with you, and us? We’re the last ones here.” She gestured toward a row of packs, and Dex noticed for the first time that all their gear was gone.

  “You packed for us,” Dex said. “How sweet. I guess that makes up for going ahead without asking either of us.”

  Erin opened her mouth and took a breath—a sure sign she was about to climb onto a high horse, however justified that lofty position might or might not be—but Fatima raised a hand. “It’s fine. The people are safe. You were right, we should have listened.” She waved at the small unit standing at the edge of their little camp, waving them on. “You guys go ahead. Head down the valley toward the rendezvous. We’ll take rear guard in case any guests decide to drop in.”