by Tanya Huff
First in their part of the sky for a while.
Though three to one didn’t look good for the righteous.
The squad had seen smoke right after the EMT, but had been too far out to know whose planes had gone down. The sarge had sworn there’d been no pulse planned so the odds were high they’d lost some of their own. They’d still been speculating when they’d stumbled onto at least a platoon of the enemy and their personal shit had hit the fan.
“What the hell are they doing out here?” Jurrin demanded. “These ruins were supposed to have been cleared!”
“A tenday ago,” Deena reminded him.
“Yeah, well, maybe someone up there on surveillance should’ve have noticed a few dozen bad bad guys moving back in. Fucking Navy.”
Weapon hanging down her back, she switched fingertips and dragged a block out of the wall, making a firing hole. “Not arguing.”
The 774 had disappeared in the distance. Just before she lost the trio of black dots following it, one of them turned, and headed back.
Anything in the air now had been shielded from the pulse. With all tech outside the shielded areas of the camp taken out, the enemy pilot’s targeting computer would have nothing to lock onto except heat signatures. Well, not hers, not in a full combat skeleton, but the rest of the squad’s. Apparently, the species they faced did not read like Confederation Marine Corps Human, di’Taykan, or Krai. Or the Others’ air support had no problem blowing up their own people.
A grenade, belching purple smoke, landed on the stub of roof behind them.
“Or they could low ball it and use a chemical marker. Sarge! I could flame it!”
“No!” Sergeant Yarynin ducked as the Others laid down covering fire. “Heat could make it worse!”
Fine. But someone had to do something fast. Jumping off the ledge, she grabbed Jurrin’s combat vest, and ran for the wall, lifting him over her head as she moved. When he stopped swearing and planted his feet on her shoulders, she shifted her grip to his ankles and threw him toward the roof.
Scrambling for traction on shifting tiles, he kicked the grenade. It rolled past the shattered end of a massive beam and dropped into her hand.
She sucked at sports, she had always sucked at sports. During a wasted summer playing right field in her early teens, she’d never once hit the cut-off man. But, here and now, she didn’t need accuracy, just distance.
Here and now, as her father might say, she had an arm on her.
She returned the grenade, still belching purple smoke, just short of where she’d blown a hole in the enemy offense.
An instant later, the enemy fighter roared past.
An instant after that, the missile zeroed on the smoke.
The concussion wave slammed Deena back against the far wall of the building. Her skeleton absorbed most of the blow but, ears ringing, she spat a mouthful of blood past her jaw guard and wondered muzzily why her upper lip felt damp.
And where Jurrin had come from?
Wasn’t he on the roof?
His helmet was gone and the side of his face looked like he’d been rubbing it against a Ciptran—given that he was a di’Taykan and the di’Taykan were the most sexually undiscriminating species in the universe, Deena wouldn’t put it past him although she doubted the big bugs had the right parts to play.
Then Jurrin was gone and Chris Beaton was there and someone was screaming but she didn’t think it was Chris. Or Jurrin. It didn’t sound like Jurrin.
Chris had his thumb against the edge of her jaw guard. He’d pushed her scanner up. Why was he pulling her mouth open? She tried to lift her arm to push him away but it weighed a fukking ton and... Sah? She had to swallow or drown as he squeezed the pouch but that shit was illegal for Humans. Cup of coffee for the Krai, sure, but for other species it was like...
It was like...
It was like having a rubber band snapped against your brain.
She blinked, actually felt her eyelids go up and down, then ambient sound rushed in to fill the spaces the missile had left as her aural augmentation came back on line and she managed to expand her focus out from Chris’ face. The rest of the roof had come down and the fallen wall they’d been using for cover had been rearranged into new patterns of debris. She couldn’t see any of the squad moving through the smoke and the settling stone dust. The screaming had stopped.
Which was when she realized that Chris had hold of her chest cage, attempting to haul her up onto her feet. “Deena! Damn it, come on! We need you!”
She carefully broke his grip, having to think about managing her strength in a way she hadn’t since the early days of training. Nothing seemed damaged, but bits of wetware were taking their own sweet time to come become functional. “Need me for what?”
“The Sarge is pinned!” Chris took two steps back, then one forward again. He reminded her a bit of her family’s old dog. “Kaeden and the medkit were buried! Huang’s still out and Ghailian needs help!”
“Okay...” Most people didn’t have think about standing, managing each micro-movement. The “new” parameters of her body hadn’t been new for years, she shouldn’t have to...
Then things started working properly and she didn’t.
A block of concrete tumbled past her arm. Deena danced aside, realizing she’d dislodged it as she stood. What she’d been thinking of as pressure against her shoulder had probably weighed about a hundred kilos. A cascade of broken stone followed it.
“You took out what was left of the east wall,” Chris added, stepping back. “With your ass!”
“Feels more like I used my head,” she muttered, falling into step behind him. Chris didn’t get to talk about her ass anymore. They had a rule.
If Sergeant Yarynin had been doing the screaming, she wasn’t now. Twisted up on her side, one long leg under the broken beam and a pile of stone—the bottom slab lying disturbingly close to the ground—she looked dead. The di’Taykan were never that still. Even her hair had collapsed to wrap her skull in a turquoise cap. Because di’Taykan hair wasn’t actually hair but filament sensors, that was bad. Really bad.
“She’s still alive.” This was where Jurrin had gone. He knelt beside the sergeant, long fingers pressed against her throat.
“When I tried to lever the beam, it shifted,” Roupen Ghailian, the squad’s other surviving heavy gunner, explained beckoning Deena forward. “We’ve got to lift straight up. Sarge can regrow a leg if we don’t pancake the rest of her.”
“And Kaeden?” Deena asked, taking her place on the opposite side of the beam.
“He’s under smaller pieces. Doesn’t need us to dig him out.”
She checked to be sure she had gripping surfaces up. “Fastest to lift and throw.”
Ghailian shook his head. “Can’t throw it far enough for the enemy not to zero on the impact.”
“I think they already know where we are.” They weren’t shooting, but then they’d just taken a missile strike from one of their own planes. The sergeant and Kaeden kept Deena from feeling smug about that. “On three...”
The beam and four big slabs tossed aside, Deena crouched by the last slab and met Ghailian’s eyes. “If we take the pressure off, she could bleed out.”
“She could be bleeding out anyway.”
“Her combats would seal.”
“Pulse took uniform tech off line,” Jurrin reminded them. Hair blown out in a pink aurora, he lifted his head, and bellowed, “Kirrt! How much longer? We need that med kit!”
“Nearly there!” Kirrt bellowed back from behind a masking pile of debris. “Just a few more fuk, fuk, fuk! Med kit’s toast!”
“So’s Kaeden!” called another voice. Deena thought it was Hania Wojtowicz. This was her first dirt drop and it sounded to Deena as though training was only barely beating out puking.
“What do we do?” Kaeden was their medic. If anyone was going to improvise a medical miracle, it’d be him.
“Okay. All right.” Sitting back on his heels, Jurrin popped
the tube of sealant off his vest. Even with her scanner up, Deena could see his hand shaking. “We clear it, cut it clean, and seal it. Rou!”
Ghailian tossed his sealant over.
“Dee?”
“I used mine on Serri. And the sarge used hers on Norris.” Serri was fine. Norris had died away.
“We’ve got enough.” Jurrin took a deep breath and pulled his blade. “Go.”
“Can you get through bone with that?”
“Just get the fukking wall off her!”
Turned out he could cut through bone with that. By the time the ruin of the sergeant’s leg had been tossed in a body bag and reduced to ash, the rest of the squad had gathered.
There’d been thirteen of them when they’d left camp at dawn, three fireteams and the sergeant. Their orders, check on a mining town cleared then abandoned in the onward push of battle. The destruction of the road up to the town meant they’d had to leave their APC locked and booby trapped at the bottom of the hill. Jurrin—the designated driver—had protested but been overruled. Norris’ team had been on point when the Others opened fire. Ben Eckland, the heavy, had died instantly. So had Anne McDonald. A piece of Ben’s skeleton had nicked Norris’ throat and he’d lost so much blood that sealing the wound had made piss all difference. With the sergeant calling for air support, they’d turned back to the APC only to see it blown by a mortar round.
The pulse happened before the last of the debris hit dirt.
Enemy artillery had driven them up the hill and into the fire of the waiting platoon, but the ruins and the loss of targeting computers had given the squad a chance. The three remaining heavies had been throwing cover together when a lucky shot had ricocheted off Karen Huang’s shoulder and up under her head-plates.
Nine surviving.
Huang and the sergeant unconscious.
Seven standing.
“They know where we are,” Wojtowicz muttered, keeping a white knuckled grip on her weapon. “They’ll come get us.”
“You talking about our guys or theirs?” Chris wondered.
Kirrt glanced across at the significantly flatter debris on the other side of the plaza and his nostril ridges flared. “They’re dead.”
“All of them?” Ghailian snorted. “Looked like they were digging in when we got here. If any of them are still alive, they’re going to be pissed.”
Jurrin still knelt by the sergeant, Serri beside him. Di’Taykan needed touch. “We have to get out of here.”
Deena spread her hands. “How?”
In the silence, something—someone—yelled in the distance. And was answered.
Chris brought his weapon across his body. “They’re not all dead.”
Sarge was out and McDonald had been next senior. Deena had her second hook, so did Chris. Jurrin had his, then lost it almost immediately. Who the hell was in charge?
“Okay.” Jurrin took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “The APC is toast. We’re still off-line. Dee, you or Ghailian could run for help...”
“We’re not faster, just stronger. Bigger guns. Better looking.”
“We can walk out,” Ghailian suggested. “Carrying the sarge and Huang.”
“Took us six hours to get out this far in the APC and I had it pushing full out as often as the roads allowed. Carrying wounded, under fire, it’d take us days to get back on foot. Sarg’d never make it.” Jurrin leaned into Serri, their hands linked. “And Huang...”
Huang had dropped like a load of bricks. Tiny entrance wound in beside her eye but no exit wound when they got the head-plates off. Her heart kept beating, but she didn’t wake up. Wetware was off-line; maybe permanently.
“It’s a mining town, right?” Scanner on full magnification, Deena stepped up on a block and peered into the town. “It wasn’t entirely flattened so maybe a vehicle of some kind survived. Something simple. Something mechanical.”
Jurrin nodded, hair moving against the motion. “If we find it, I can drive it.”
Two teams—her and Chris and Jurrin. Ghailian, Kirrt and Wojtowicz. Deena set aural augmentation on maximum and told Ghailian to do the same.
“So I can hear you if you yell?”
“Got a better idea?”
He didn’t.
They were almost at the mine when Chris spotted the ramp. A ramp meant wheels. The building had taken a hit but at least half of the underground garage was rubble free. Over in the far corner was a big, blue rectangle. They left Chris by the ramp and a closer examination found the rectangle had caterpillar tracks and a flared front and a three meter long drill.
“It’s a borer,” Jurrin whispered. “From the mine.”
“Looks sturdy.”
“Yeah, well, it bores out mines. Also, it looks brain dead.”
“You better check.” Deena laid her hand against the front shielding. “Maybe this place is deep enough and this thing is solid enough that it didn’t get pulsed out.”
It had.
“Brain dead,” Jurrin repeated, reappearing in the open hatch.
The borer had been abandoned when the town came under attack. They’d probably thought it too slow to be of much use in the evacuation. “Just brain dead?”
“Far as I can tell, but...”
“Is there room for everyone in it?”
His hair started to rise. “Tight, but yeah.”
“Has it got power?”
“It’s fully powered but you’re not listening, Dee.” He slapped the side of machine where the enamel had been scraped off and the metal had started to rust. She flinched at the noise. “Sorry. No brain, no movement. No movement, no use to us.”
Sarge wasn’t going to last much longer.
Maybe if they got Huang to a doctor she could be rebooted or something.
They couldn’t walk out. They couldn’t stay.
Deena stroked a pitted curve, metal whispering against metal. “I’ll be its brain.”
Jurrin’s eyes darkened, the pink disappearing into black as the light receptors snapped open. “You’ll what?”
“Plug it in and I’ll wear it out.”
He stared at her for a moment, then folded his arms. “No.”
“What? You think it’d make me look fat?”
He didn’t laugh. “I said, no, Dee.”
Deena spread her fingers, switched to sensor tips, and felt the cold of the machine in flesh. “There’s no other way.”
Outside, as though they’d been cued, the Others opened fire. They clearly still had one working mortar.
Eyes on Jurrin, Deena dialed her ears back and yelled, “Chris, go get them. This one’ll do.”
Jurrin held her gaze as Chris ran off, closed his eyes as Chris’ footsteps faded in the distance, opened them again, and looked everywhere but at her. “I’ll have to cannibalize your skeleton to make this work.”
“I know.” She set her weapon carefully aside, then popped the contacts on her left arm, teeth gritted against the flush of cold as the jacks pulled free. The techs on Ventris Station said the cold was all in her head, that everyone felt the neural connection differently, but that no one really felt anything. The techs on Ventris weren’t jacked in though, so what did they know. She pulled her hand free, flexing her fingers and staring past flesh at the unresponsive metal. Right arm. Left leg. Right leg. “About time the Corps ungraded me anyway. I hear the new skeletons come in colors.”
“Any color you want as long as it’s black.”
When she straightened, Jurrin had gone back into the vehicle. She locked the shoulder pieces in place, switched off visual augmentation, detached the jaw guard, then raised her hands to her temples. Only full combat skeletons came with head-plates and parliament was, once again, fighting the Corps about it. The Confederation’s Elder Races, the ones too evolved to fight back when the Others swarmed into Confederation space, the ones happy to sit back while the less evolved fought and died to protect them, they didn’t much like the idea of the head-plates. Said it blurred the edge between f
lesh and machine. Jacking in to extremities was fine. Jacking right in to the central processor stepped over the line. The Elder Races had a stick up their collective asses about technical augmentation.
She shivered as the temple jacks released and slowly pulled the side plates away from her skin. When she could duck her head without touching the metal, she cracked the chest cage and stepped out of the skeleton.
The head, the hands, and the feet held the most definition in metal—although the head came without a face. The rest of it was glossy black strapping with the same smart fabric used for regular Marine combats completing the physical integrity. Standing empty, it looked like an insect had shed its skin. A really big, bipedal insect.
Given the variety of species in known space, Deena wasn’t ruling out finding on.
Her hand and arm looked pale and soft and slightly damp as she unhooked the tool kit from the skeleton’s thigh.
“I always forget how small you are without that thing.”
“Eight centimeters difference.” Deena handed him the tool kit. “I’m still shorter than your average di’Taykan.”
“It’s all about the presence, shechar.”
“Still not your darling.” But she bumped her shoulder against his as she moved over to pick up her weapon, more than happy to put it down again a moment later inside the borer. The heavy part of heavy gunner was entirely accurate.
The inside of the borer looked a little like an APC; operator’s area at the front with two seats, the control panel and half a dozen dark screens. No seats or weapons racks in the big empty box at the back, but the differences were minimal. Of course, she’d never heard of anyone trying this kind of hook up with an APC either so the similarity didn’t add much weight to the success side of success or failure.
The floor felt cold under her bare feet. Jurrin had opened the control panel between the two seats.
