Helena pulled him free and lowered him to the ground. Staring at the crawler’s lifeless eyes perched on top of its spherical body, her appearance reflected back at her, she whistled a sigh of relief. It had only half emerged from its access point. She hoped its bulk would block anything else from coming up.
‘Thank you,’ said the man before running to re-join his part of the group. She was relieved to see the three younger men were still in place, moving the crowd along. A small cheer went up as the rescued man join his friends and they quickened their pace, their spirits lifted.
Those who had slowed to watch Helena pushed on; they were within spitting distance of the trees.
Peter paused by her side and saluted. ‘Ma’am,’ was all he said before loping off after a father and daughter who were straggling behind the main group.
Helena looked around for Analise. She was in a knot of people just behind the breaker line.
They came to a ragged stop at the tree line where Norwegian spruce competed for space with silver birch. The low branches of the firs made penetrating the woods difficult but Helena, putting hands on backs and pushing people down into crouching positions, watched over her flock as they forced their way in. She had no idea what the goal was, but the Normals had a collective destination in mind so she trusted them to get her there.
She and Peter were the last to break past the outer edge of the woodland. Before she did so Helena turned back to scan the skyline of Skagen. The spire remained untouched. She recalled the booby trap that had saved the life of the hanging man, thankful that these people had showed a level of ingenuity she’d never have predicted.
You are not so different from them, said her AI suggestively.
Helena was shocked but, before she could reply, the sound of a railgun firing pierced the air. As if it were a peal of thunder announcing the arrival of a storm, rain began to patter around her as percussion to the railgun’s continued firing, the drops splashing noisily onto sodden ground.
Flashes rose from around the spire, their intensity dulled by the distance and the haze of water in the air. A chaingun opened fire, its rapid, repeating clicks harmonising with the slower pace of the railgun.
Helena gave the railgun another three or four rounds before the barrel was too hot to fire another shell without exploding. After that, the Spire would be Indexiv’s for the taking.
Despite herself, she was pleased: Indexiv would not have been expecting anyone to use a railgun in such a confined space. She suspected the Normals manning it would account for more than their own number in casualties before they were overrun.
A dull thud signalled the railgun’s demise. Helena ducked round only to find the faces of half a dozen Normals staring past her back towards the city. Something in their eyes made her look behind her.
A flash of light caught her unawares, leaving her dazzled and disoriented. The blast was followed by a wave of heat. The sound of a massive detonation pressed into her body. As she staggered under the force of the shockwave, Helena’s eyes adjusted to the overload. When she looked again, she saw nothing. Nothing at all. It took her a moment to cotton on; the Spire was gone. She swallowed hard as she looked at the faces of the Normals, their features appearing disembodied between the branches and trunks.
Lotte emerged from the trees, ‘Come on.’ She pushed her way back into the shivering foliage. Helena pulled up a low-hanging branch in front of her, vacantly noted the needles falling onto her arm and ducked into the woods.
The Normals gradually slowed their pace, hindered by awkward branches. As if the urgency was lost on them, she saw someone stop to pick needles from their clothes, another pausing to look behind them. They couldn’t see anything that way; the density of the forest reduced their line of sight to a few dozen metres.
How did these Normals take the destruction of the Spire within their stride, wondered Helena. It was Insel’s home in Skagen, a symbol of their provider and employer. The shockwave from the explosion convinced Helena that anyone nearby would have been vaporised. I doubt Indexiv’s AIs saw that coming. No one would have predicted that a Company might voluntarily destroy its own buildings, at least not without some way to reclaim the energy. Instead, Insel’s investment had gone up in smoke, utterly lost.
Putting her hands to her face, she found it covered in dust thrown up by the blast. She brushed her cheeks down as best she could before asking her AI to clean her up a bit.
Passing one, then another Normal, she found herself standing next to Stefan. He looked sideways at her and put his fingers to his lips. Analise was on his right-hand side, focussed on something beyond her line of sight with her brows furrowed and her jaw tightly clenched.
‘Why didn’t you wait?’ whispered Helena to Stefan. ‘If you waited you’d have killed more of them.’
Stefan didn’t answer but pointed away into the deeper woods. Helena turned her senses in that direction and suddenly heard what the Normals were struggling to make out: short, sharp stiletto shots, controlled bursts of fire. It wasn’t Analise’s people who were shooting up ahead of them.
‘Wait here,’ she said. She plunged between the trees, hoping her rather sketchy maps of the area would provide her with enough detail not to blunder right into the contingent of Indexiv’s troops who were between them and the lighthouse.
Camouflage me, she told her AI as she stripped her clothing off, stopping at her pants, which she retained in order to stop uncomfortable bits of tree getting where they weren’t welcome.
Approaching the source of the shots, she moved ahead more cautiously. Her maps showed no sign of a clearing up ahead, but if, as she suspected, the rest of Skagen’s Normals had been holed up here waiting for them then it was likely there was at least a makeshift shelter.
All sound from the outside world was muffled by the proximity of the trees, pine needles scattered around her. Cones crunched under her feet. Without warning, the trees gave way on to a small circular meadow with half a dozen mature beech trees holding court across the forty-meter wide clearing.
Lined up along the edge of a large ditch were a couple of hundred people: men, women and children. The short bursts of fire came from Indexiv troops who were systematically moving along the line shooting ten people at a time in the backs of their heads.
Other soldiers were corralling a team of six Normals who, with a brutal jabbing of bayonets, were being employed to ensure that any victim who didn’t fall neatly into the ditch was rolled in on top of their more compliant comrades. The rest of the Indexiv troops, two dozen of them, were standing around watching, occasionally rotating into the firing squad or otherwise shouting abuse at those awaiting execution.
Helena was sure they had heard the blast but knew they would have thought it was their own side doing the detonating. None of them showed any concern that they might be discovered. The one or two soldiers ostensibly acting as sentries were actually facing inwards, hungrily watching the executions.
Helena knew she couldn’t take on so many soldiers. These weren’t common mercenaries hired in from a third tier Company to do dirty work far from home. These are Indexiv’s own. Their finest — each one a miracle of genetic engineering, biotech and nanomachinery, she thought bitterly.
She was glad to see they were only armed with light plasma pistols and the occasional laser rifle. They’re not expecting any serious opposition. She wondered whether they had been so nonchalant as to have been sent without a single piece of heavy ordnance between them.
Still, her plasma rifle wasn’t any better than what they were carrying and their weapons had personal security tags. Any weapons dropped by these killers would be useless to anyone else.
Another round was fired, bodies dropped in unison, performing a last dance together. Two of the children collapsed where they stood, the front of their heads blown out by the superheated charges passing through the back of their skulls. The team of Normals were shoved in to roll them into the ditch, but one of the men refused. Instead he lunged
at his aggressor. Helena anticipated the outcome but was still stunned by the ferocity of the soldiers’ response to this act of defiance.
The corporal, who had been the target of the rebel’s attack, calmly moved aside and, as the Normal groped empty air, put his own hand on the man’s back, using his grip to pull him round. Helena saw him deploy his nanomachines in a routine she knew only too well. With unnatural strength, he took hold of the crown of the man’s skull and yanked hard.
The man’s body lifted slightly off the ground, held as it was in the soldier’s grip, and then the Normal started screaming as the top of his head was roughly cut loose, blood and flesh splattering across the soldier’s face. The screaming stopped as the soldier threw the Normal’s scalp to the floor and plunged his hand into the exposed brain.
None of the prisoners turned away; none of them dared show any reaction. She could hear suppressed sobs from those lined up. They were so stunned by what was going on that none of them could even avert their gaze as the laughing soldier flung globs of brain matter across their faces with repeated flicks of his fingers.
Helena turned away, feeling taut from her throat to her stomach. Company soldiers were bred to be killers, to enjoy the dismembering of their enemies and, above all, to do as they were told. Genetically, they were stunted, infertile and engineered without the ability to develop a full personality. These things made them more efficient at accomplishing what was asked of them.
This meant nothing to Helena as she heaved the contents of her stomach onto the ground at the foot of the nearest tree. Laughter wafted from the clearing and, forcing herself to turn back, Helena saw the corporal scooping out the man’s skull and throwing the last pinkish contents at the Normals being forced to bury their friends and families.
Then several things happened at once. Shot after shot rang out from the woods all around them. The Normals standing on the ditch, for the most part, jumped or fell into it, landing on the mutilated remains of those who had gone before them.
Indexiv’s troops reeled under the blaze of fire. Before Helena had formed a cogent picture of what was happening, more than half of them were bleeding out on the ground.
Helena brought her own rifle up, happy to sterilise her disgust in a bout of violence. She began pumping shots into those few officers still standing. They were the most dangerous foes in the clearing and more than able, between the four of those she’d identified, to recover successfully from the ambush.
Helena managed to drop one, then another, before her rifle signalled it was down to its last four pellets. Momentarily at a loss, she realised she was holding a weapon taken from a dead Normal.
Someone who died while Clerk was keeping you locked within the Spire, said her AI.
Stefan flew into the clearing at a sprint with an electrified blade in his offhand. He was firing as he went, taking one-handed shots at targets who saw him, or soldiers wounded but still alive as he passed them.
However, his charge across the clearing gave Indexiv’s troops a target to focus on. A cluster of three, who had been using the fallen bodies of those around them as shields, laid down a repeating round of fire in his direction.
The two remaining officers clocked Helena’s deliberate attempts to eliminate them and, while returning fire, sought cover as best they could. It’s now that quality will tell, thought Helena. Helena had to stretch her reflexes to their limits in order to keep the officers moving at what appeared to be a normal speed. If we don’t finish this in the next few seconds, we’ll lose, she thought.
The officers saw Stefan pounding across the clearing towards the ditch and turned their pistols on him. Two sheer blue lines converged on his face as their lasers were highlighted by the dust kicked up in the confusion. Stefan’s body held its trajectory for a second before falling heavily to the ground.
Helena found one of the officers stationary in her sights and put a pellet through his neck, the explosion of plasma in the soft tissue decapitating him. One left.
The last officer realised he was alone and gathered his wits. Without a care for Helena’s aim, he marshalled a group of three soldiers between them. He ordered them to stop defending themselves and start targeting the enemy to the his left, which was to her right.
The soldiers complied with a rain of wide-dispersion plasma fire that cut through the trunks of the conifers. Helena heard the impact of plasma on wood and flesh, the puffs of fire erupting from bodies as the superheated pellets impacted on unprotected targets.
She switched her sight to infrared and saw through the few breaks in the trees enough bodies falling to convince her that the officer was going to beat them. Shifting her sight back into the visible spectrum, Helena saw the three younger men she’d assigned to guard the civilians charge out of the woods to her left. She cursed them all for not doing as they had been told.
The three of them didn’t last more than ten seconds; the pocket of soldiers who’d fired at Stefan reduced them to smoking piles of limp flesh before they’d covered ten metres.
Helena could feel everything slipping away from her. Since the officer had recovered himself, not a single soldier had been downed against more than a dozen of the Normals she’d escorted from the town who now lay dead or dying.
Gritting her teeth in frustration, she demanded her AI let her reflexes go further. It demurred, advising her that it was dangerous to stretch her nervous system any further.
Helena steeled herself for her next move. Many users overrode their AIs’ inbuilt safety systems, those routines designed to kick in and stop Oligarchs inadvertently imitating Icarus and flying too high. An adept user could easily manipulate their AI to sidestep these safety mechanisms, but Helena had never tried it. She wasn’t even factoring in her agreement with her own AI.
Sensing something of her sentiment, her AI pre-empted her.Helena, I do not wish to be disregarded or forced to do something against my will.
Helena shrugged inwardly and braced herself for the fight.
Desperately her AI said, don’t do this.
Helena felt her resolve begin to give but, with a shove, pushed against her AI’s control. It refused to fight her, fleeing instead to the darkness at the edge of her consciousness. Almost stumbling over herself, as her force met no resistance, she ratcheted up her reflexes until the sound of raindrops hissed through the air and the touch of pine needles on her face scratched like fire. The Officer was resplendently outlined in a shimmer of his own body heat. Helena leapt forwards from the line of trees where she had been taking cover.
She ran out in a decreasing spiral, making for Stefan’s body. The soldiers were advancing towards the edge of the clearing, concentrating fire on the three remaining pockets of resistance.
Helena was at his body before the Officer saw her. His face went pale as he realised what she was. Bringing his pistol up, he began firing in her direction, each of his pulses hitting the space where she had been a fraction of a second before. The nearest one came in, his first shot singeing her waist.
Helena found Stefan’s sword. She scooped it up in her left hand then tightened her spiral and made for the Officer.
The Officer shouted shrilly for help. The nearest group stopped their advance on the surviving Normals and, turning to face their commander, saw Helena bearing down on him.
The raindrops were beginning to feel like acid and the noise of the battle was threatening to drown her, but Helena kept pushing. She was aware somewhere that she had done a very bad thing to her AI. Such knowledge did not hold her attention for more than the time it took to adjust her balance and avoid the incoming shots from the knot of soldiers.
The soldiers should have cared that she was an Oligarch. They should not have fired at her at all; they should have been mentally unable to attack her, even in self-defence. But fire they did. If she died here her grave would be with those Normals in the ditch.
Helena’s path brought her past two soldiers whose attention was still on the woods. She brought Stefan’s
blade slicing down through the first of them, using her falling centre of gravity to impale the second. The blade stuck fast, the soldier looking down in confusion at the fifty centimetres of bloody steel protruding from his chest. Helena yanked back on the hilt, drawing the weapon out through his back. The Officer fired at her from the other side of the survivor. The injured soldier looked down at the gaping wound, grunted and turned on her. She had hoped her first blow would bring him down. Failing that, she was faced with two armed squaddies who desperately wanted to outlive her. A third, unharmed soldier ran in, bringing up his rifle. The injured soldier gritted his teeth and let his combat AI douse his nervous system with drugs designed to help him keep upright and fighting while he was busy dying.
As Helena felt her momentum begin to give, the injured soldier’s eyes crossed and, with a whimper, he slumped forward as his own officer lanced his skull while trying to get at her.
Helena twisted her sword arm back and, with a shove, propelled herself bodily into the third soldier, using his bulk as a shield against the officer. He stepped back, stumbling as sporadic fire continued to sputter from the tree line. Helena grasped his shoulder with one hand and ran her sword through his neck with the other. The resistance of bone on charged steel ripped through her senses, causing her to wince as the sound became real pain in her mind.
Helena threw his shattered body forward, between herself and the officer, as another lance of laser fire described an ionised path past her. The discomfort in her senses was growing, burning now with a dazzling pain as her nerves literally began to fry. Her skin felt it as if it was already on fire. Helena knew of other Oligarchs who had fallen into comas, lost their sight, even flayed their own skin off to escape the after effects of what she was attempting. It was too late to stop now.
A People's War (The Oligarchy Book 2) Page 22
