Skyler did his best to keep still, tucked in shadow under a curled bit of torn fibrous metal his arrival had peeled from the floor just above. The creature above him bore an obvious resemblance to the Scipio Swarm that had destroyed the Chameleon, though it had fewer tentacles and a more streamlined body of much thinner profile. Made for atmospheric use, perhaps, its existence closer to a support apparatus, rather than the swarmers who lived out their lives in that lonely vigil at the edges of this solar system. Those had been dirty things, rugged and scarred. This was sleek in comparison, with a gleaming white skin or hull that looked almost like porcelain on its top half, covering the lower black and gray areas like a tortoise shell.
With a slight bob the Scipio came to a stop. Its four limbs stretched straight outward to where they grasped whatever support they could find with four-fingered mechanical hands. Much more elegant than the spike-tipped monstrosities their space-faring brethren favored, perhaps because to impale every surface they traversed here would be to damage their own home.
For a time it simply hung there, suspended, crying its odd lilting alarm. Skyler remained motionless, too, ready to unleash hell if noticed, happy to remain hidden if possible.
Another shadow appeared as a second Scipio lowered itself into the deep pit. It came to rest a few meters above the first. This one was slightly larger, and had markings along its side, like a bar code made of skewed and curved lines. Abruptly the shrill alarm stopped as the pair of robotic machines or vehicles—Skyler couldn’t be quite sure which—settled into position. He stared at those lines, the markings on the side of the recent arrival. They seemed to shimmer, then warp under his gaze. A trick of the light, perhaps, or just his rattled senses, but before he could puzzle it out the situation changed.
A section of the larger one’s belly suddenly extended downward, revealing an array of tubes and connective gear. A turret, his brain warned, and he shifted his aim toward it. Before he could shoot, though, the swivel-mounted cannon revealed its purpose. It swung with precision to one side and burped out a white cloud of foam. The material slapped wetly against one of the small fires licking out from a severed pipe on the wall of destruction. The blaze vanished under the thick goop, smothered instantly. Another quick swivel, another blast from the fire extinguisher. Skyler watched, mildly fascinated, as the machine or vehicle systematically doused each open flame. An alien firefighter, he thought. When those closest to Skyler, at the basin of his crash-pit, were out, the thing began to climb smoothly back up toward the top. Every meter or so its cannon would cough out more white mucus. Another flame would vanish.
He shifted focus back to the first Scipio to have arrived, the smaller one. It hadn’t moved since its big brother had shown up, and as of yet had not revealed its purpose here.
Skyler cursed himself. With everything else going on he hadn’t bothered to check his air levels, and if the air here was breathable. He scanned the information splayed across the corners of his visor, the system tracking his eye movements and thought patterns as a means of navigating the interface. He fumbled his way through the menus until he found what he needed: atmospheric analysis. A quick review told him the only thing he really needed to know: breathable to a human. There were indicators for the various gases present and in what quantity, but that meant little to him. Oxygen was the only one listed in orange, the rest green. Nothing red, so he’d count his blessings and worry about the side effects later.
Besides, the suit acted like a giant gill, from what Eve had said. It could pull the ingredients he would need. Already it had replenished his supply to nearly full—enough to last him twenty hours or so, assuming he left the atmosphere and it couldn’t pull in anything more. Still, it gave him some small reassurance to know that even in the event his suit tore, he could still breathe. The air, at least, wouldn’t be trying to kill him. Probably.
A brilliant light bored into his eyes, forcing his attention back to the visitors. Skyler raised one arm to shield against the sudden flare before his visor recognized the problem and tinted itself to compensate.
The Scipio, the one that had remained near him, had extended a belly pod of its own. Unlike its larger companion, this one screamed “sensor array.” Flickering lasers that swept across the ruined crash site in all directions, along with pulsing spotlights that shifted from one area to another. Several converged on him due to the movement of his arm.
“Shit,” he said, and fired without really thinking about it. His beam cannon annihilated the small vehicle in a shower of sparks and shrapnel, as if it had no armor at all. Definitely not built like the Swarm that had attacked the Chameleon, then.
For a moment Skyler just stood there, surprised at how easily the enemy had been destroyed, and shocked at how quickly he’d fired on it. Some part of him had assessed, in that instant, that his presence had been noticed. And more important, decided that the little Scipio vehicle was likely transmitting everything its flickering scanners saw in real-time back to some control room. He processed this himself only now, but his suit had reacted to the conclusion and his reflexive decision to fire well before he’d even consciously understood the choice himself. That, Skyler Luiken thought, is going to be a problem. The last thing he needed was this exotic alien armor going all trigger-happy in a moment where his battle-sense needed to be carefully dampened by more strategic needs.
A problem to resolve later when he had a moment to breathe. Right now, he had to get the hell out of here, before this place absolutely crawled with more of these emergency responders or, worse, the Scipio equivalent of a police force.
Back up the way he’d come? Skyler considered that. The air above had closed back in, unnervingly opaque after ten meters, utterly choked now by the smoky outpouring of the fire suppression efforts and the explosion he’d just caused.
No, he thought. Not up. As much as he wanted to be outside, to survey his surroundings, he could too easily imagine a whole horde of Scipios up there. This hole he’d made was, at the very least, probably seen as some kind of freak natural disaster. A meteor strike or whatever. They’d be all over it, swarming in to plug the hole and repair the damage.
Sideways, then. Flee the scene, get his bearings, find the others if he could.
Skyler pushed off from the wall and climbed up to the first open cavity above him. The ragged pit his arrival had dug looked like a fist that had punched down through a skyscraper, revealing the interior structure—a very Earth-like stack of floors. Their contents were hidden in darkness, unknowable, but that didn’t matter. It was a way to go, nothing more. So he jumped and flung himself into the first cavity, aware of several shadows descending into the pit from above and wanting nothing to do with them. Let the Scipios puzzle out the cause of the calamity if they didn’t already know.
With any luck, he’d get a few precious minutes’ head start before they realized they had a rat on the loose.
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Injection Burn Page 29
