Song of the Badlands

by Joshua Guess

  He didn’t expect enormous results. This was an imagination game he’d played in college, something a psych major he roomed with liked to tinker with. The trick was to give the other person just enough details and familiar concepts that they could fill in the rest on their own. It was meant to create a kind of synergy forcing sense memories to fire and alchemize into a brief flash that felt like a real memory. For Parker, it usually worked by smells. He would think of baking bread or the heavy smoke of a fresh campfire, and whatever scenario he worked on would—sometimes—burst to life behind his eyes.

  It wasn’t much more than a novel hack of the way the human brain worked, a way to trick perception into the liminal space some people fell into between waking and sleep. When properly executed, the flash could have the same feeling as those half-awake dreams.

  Almost as soon as he spoke the last words, he saw Remy’s eyes dart beneath her lids like she was looking at something. Her brows twitched slightly just before her eyes opened and she gave him a curious look. “For just a second there, it felt like a breeze hit me. I almost felt like I was there, but it was hard to…I don’t know, see the Rez that way, I guess.”

  “It doesn’t always work,” Parker said. “But maybe we’ll play with it a bit and see if we can’t do better.”

  She glanced at the tablet where the last picture in the series still sat. “What’s the point? Don’t get me wrong, it’s interesting, but I think I’d rather just hear your stories.”

  He nodded. “If that’s what you want, it’s no problem. I suppose I wanted to use what my world was like to give you a more tactile sense of what yours can be if we succeed. That world without walls and Rezzes you’re so keen on living in.”

  Remy smiled, this time sadly. “I think my experience is too far away from yours to make it come alive for me. But I’ll give it another shot if you want. Kind of surprised to hear you sound that serious about it, though.”

  Parker laughed, deeply and sincerely. “Really? I volunteered to put myself to sleep and probably die in the process just for the chance to fix all the things that were going wrong in my world. How is that not serious?”

  “Fair enough,” Remy said. “Now tell me a story about what your cities used to be like. Those are my favorites.”

  He did, falling into the more familiar pattern. All the while a nagging sense of homesickness crouched just out of sight, mourning for that lost world. If Parker was being honest about it, his desire to give Remy even a glimpse of what it had been like sprang from a need to share that burden. It wasn’t his most selfless act, but in the end was still understandable.

  After all, Parker was perhaps the last living person left from the old world who was not one of the Pales that destroyed it.

  4

  The team complained often, but never about Beck herself. Though none of them were in scout training with her, they still went out on every patrol. Stein—through their immediate superior, Guard Jill Hayes—explained the recent changes as new initiatives. From what Beck could tell, this much was true. Giving every Deathwatch Sentinel as broad an array of training and experience as possible was something the older members talked about often. It was one of the few points of consensus on where the organization was weak.

  So Beck did her ranging assignments, gradually extending the reach of her patrols to acclimate her to the badlands, and the others went with her. They accepted the rationale even if some of the orders given didn’t sit well.

  “At least we get to use our suit coolers this time,” Jeremy said as they reached the four mile mark northwest of Brighton.

  “He speaks!” Lucia said jokingly. “Where were your complaints last time? You barely said a word that day.”

  “Too busy trying not to sweat myself to death,” Jeremy said. “Bitching about it didn’t seem helpful.”

  “Still sweating even with ’em on now,” Wojcik groused.

  It was true enough. The heat outside was at a relative high for the season, and the cooling units could only handle so much. Add the practical reality that no matter how much assistance the armor gave, the bodies inside still had to do the basic work of moving, and getting hot and sweaty was unavoidable. Simple physical laws and thermodynamics demanded it.

  Beck let them go on. She had been more stern about complaints back in their training cohort, but life among other Watchmen brought a deeper understanding of how people coped. Team communication channels were a sacred space where small grievances could be voiced so the pressure never built too high to bear. Hearing seasoned veterans make the same gripes made it clear there was nothing wrong with her team’s discipline.

  In fact, she would have been worried without it. The low background hum of chatter, whining, teasing, and jokes was like muted buzz of a compressor in good working order or the ticking of gears. A signal that the parts worked together as they should, losing only a little energy in the form of the expected noise caused by friction.

  They were well past the ruins of the small town just outside of Brighton, moving toward a way station. Those posts were unmanned, of course, simple metal boxes twenty feet tall containing emergency supplies and a set of steps on the outside leading to a monitoring station.

  It was Tala who realized something was off.

  “We’re not getting a ping from the station,” she said, cutting through the conversation. There was not a drop of worry in her voice, which surprised no one. The woman was so laid back she was easy to ignore or even forget, but Beck had come to understand this as a side effect of her naturally observant nature. Jen talked and joked, acting as the social lubricant of the group. Tala was her opposite; she watched.

  Beck sent out a series of hailing pings along the general radio channel used by the Watch. The post should have responded immediately by populating its location on the map displayed on her HUD. It didn’t.

  “Well, shit,” Beck said. “Think we should call it in?”

  Jen cleared her throat. “Can we call it in? My sensors are telling me there’s a lot of dust between here and home.”

  Beck felt an unusual spike of concern. It was silly, of course. She had been out here often of late, and dealt with threats before. She had no rational reason for worry. Their Bricks were still mostly charged, their suit compartments stocked with weapons, food, and water.

  But the idea of being cut off from all help still chilled her. She thought back to Eshton’s story about the Pale attack all those months ago. No group that size had been spotted since, and even the majority of that one was hunted down and dealt with. There were only six of them, however. Even a dozen Pales would constitute a threat if they caught the team off guard.

  “Stop,” Beck ordered and was instantly obeyed. “Defensive circle around me. Weapons free.”

  Wojcik moved to obey faster than the rest, putting his large frame in front of Beck even as she knelt to the ground. She locked her suit in place so she didn’t have to bother with balancing while she worked.

  The channel opened—thank the Founders—but the connection was shit. Not good.

  “This is Sentinel 6311,” Beck said. “Watch post is down, we are currently a tenth of a mile away according to my map. Please advise.”

  A hissing, static-filled reply began to filter in, but Beck couldn’t make it out.

  “This is Sentinel 6311,” Beck said again. “Please repeat transmission. The signal is—”

  The signal dropped. Only for a second, but the dust between them was bad enough to completely block anything usable. The light went green again, but flickering. Annoyed, she decided to fall back on a much more reliable method.

  She tapped out a text message using the keypad mode of her gauntlets and set it to repeat. The smaller data requirement and staccato repetition raised the chances of it going through immensely.

  The reply came through the blowing cloud of metallic and ceramic dust less than twenty seconds later.

  Proceed as ordered.

  The locking gate at the bottom of the post’s steps w
as ripped off, bent and dangling by one hinge. Beck stared at it for what felt like a long time before sending the team to the top.

  She went up last. If something was waiting down here, hiding in the brown scrub brush valiantly working its way through the dust and nearly lifeless soil, she wanted it to come for her rather than her people.

  Her sensors running full blast, Beck slowly made her way up the stairs backward. From the lack of swearing and grunts over the channel, the team clearly hadn’t run into any surprises up above.

  Wojcik and Tala took point guarding the landing once she made it up. Jeremy waved her over to the instrument cluster perched on the west end of the roof. Or rather, where the cluster had been. Instead of the expected bundle of cameras, sensors, and antennae, she found a mass of bent and broken metal. Smoke still rose from the shorted wiring.

  It was this detail which saved their lives.

  “They’re coming,” Beck said over the comm. Her voice was not calm.

  Calm was a raging torrent of emotion compared to what she felt. In that instant of understanding, she knew what was about to happen. The facts crystallized into a perfectly crafted gem of realization. Pales were smart. The watched. They planned. Beck could see them in her mind’s eye, observing the armored figures as they checked the post twice a week. Working out the relationship between the instrument cluster and the arrival of the Sentinels. She saw the rudimentary logic—utterly accurate—in believing damage to the cluster would draw them all up onto the roof.

  Where they couldn’t get away.

  This flashed through her mind in a fraction of a second, and when the knowledge finished its transit from one lobe of her brain to the other, Beck was utterly and completely cold inside.

  There was no fear, no anger, no nerves. Other than a minor and transient blip as her heart sped up before dropping its pace back to normal, her readouts remained even. Her only thought was of the trap her people had fallen into. The danger they were now in.

  “Back away,” she said.

  “The fuck I will,” Wojcik said. “If we have incoming, you’re gonna want my big ass right here.”

  Beck kept her eyes on the scrub and dust below. The first stirrings of movement in the haze could just be seen. “I can’t order you. I’m not actually in charge here,” she said in a void empty of emotion. “You made me your leader, but I don’t need you to obey. Romeo one six three: single command override.”

  “Romeo one six three awaiting command,” Wojcik’s suit said in a pleasant female voice.

  “Two step retreat,” Beck said. “Execute.”

  “What the fuck?” Wojcik said as his armor moved on its own, taking him two steps back from the top of the steps. “How the hell did you—?”

  “The rest of you, get ready,” Beck said over him, ignoring his protests. “Jeremy and Jen, you’re behind me. Back up with spears at either shoulder. Wojcik, Tala, and Lucia, you’re working the edges. The rail won’t slow them much if they have ladders or logs or something and decide to ascend that way. All the bars do is keep us penned up here.”

  “Why don’t we just go down and try to get away?” Jen said as she took her place at Beck’s right shoulder.

  “Can’t,” Jeremy answered. “On open ground they’ll run us down in no time. We’re too slow. Up here we can at least defend.”

  “Where are they?” Tala asked. “I saw them move out there, then nothing.”

  Beck had lost sight as well. “If I had to guess, I’d say they’re gathering up in a group. The dust is getting thicker. Couldn’t have timed it better if they meant to.”

  Wojcik snorted. “How do we know they didn’t?”

  “That’s a pleasant thought,” Lucia added. “You have to be the least cheerful people I’ve ever been friends with. Always so negative.”

  “If we live through this,” Jeremy said, his tone joking, “you’re welcome to give me lessons in how to be more positive.”

  Lucia gave an exaggerated purr over the comm. “I don’t know if you could handle me.”

  “Oh, come on,” Beck said. “Are you guys seriously doing this right now?”

  There was a pause during which no one spoke, something like taking a synchronized breath. Then the rest of the team burst into laughter.

  “God, you’re such a prude,” Jen said.

  Beck kept scanning the thickening dust. “I am not a prude. I just think—”

  “I think you only get worked up when we joke about sex,” Jeremy said, surprising her. He was usually the one who had her back. “Besides, we better do it now. Might not have another chance.”

  As if his words were a command to the universe, eddies of dust began to swirl as bodies moved through the haze. Beck’s computer tracked five, then twelve, then twenty. Each was outlined in red as the threat assessment routines kicked into high alert.

  “Well, that sucks,” Tala said. “I have twenty-five on my scopes. Twenty-seven now.”

  Wojcik clicked his tongue. “We can count, Tala.”

  “We can count, big guy,” Jen said. “The rest of us aren’t so sure about you.”

  Beck laughed despite herself. She didn’t feel it. No amusement rippled through the cold place where her mind slid down into once again. Outside that void, the parts of her that could feel still reacted.

  “Thirty,” Jeremy said, the amusement in his tone dying. “This is bad.”

  “Ladders,” Lucia said. “They have ladders. One day we’re really going to have to figure out where they get those from.”

  Beck took a deep breath. There were many things she kept from the team. Her place inside the Movement—hell, the existence of it at all—and her related extracurricular activities chief among them. They knew she spent time working on gadgets and coding software, but none had any idea that her armor was more than gently modified—the sort of mods that were allowed by the Watch.

  If they were going to survive, Beck would have to break the secrecy Bowers has sworn her to.

  “I’m really glad I got to know you guys,” Beck said. “If I get booted out for this, please remember that.”

  Before any of them could respond to that, Beck gave her targeting systems the green light and the whole game changed.

  5

  It should be pointed out that the weapons systems Beck added to her armor did not break Tenet law regarding the creation, ownership, and use of firearms even if they pushed hard against the boundary. That particular law was one of the few exceptions to the requirement for an agent of the Deathwatch committing a crime to be judged by a panel of seven peers. Sentinels were never allowed to train or use guns—only Guards and above, and even that was rare.

  A glance at the HUD showed the rest of the team had their armor sealed, breathing canned air. That was protocol, and thankfully they followed it.

  She fired.

  The targeting system didn’t need to be hyper accurate, merely close enough to launch its small projectiles into the torsos of the incoming Pales. Though it was hard to make out through the dust, each of the initial six shots disintegrated in small puffs of vapor as they struck. The effect was immediate. Each of the Pales took another step or two before slowing, then stumbling as their bodies seized up.

  “Holy shit,” Jeremy breathed over the team channel. “What was that?”

  Beck’s suit loaded up the remaining six shots in the tubes nestled in her shoulder plates and acquired six more targets who went down just as quickly. The rapid fall of a dozen of their brothers caused the rest of the swarm to pause and reevaluate the danger.

  “Beck,” Jen said, uncharacteristically seriousness in her voice. “What did you do?”

  “Those were all my shots,” Beck said, choosing not to answer. Anything she said would only create more questions. Survival came first. She would have to sequester them if they got out of this alive, then see if Stein could help her come up with a cover story. “They won’t hesitate long once they realize I’m not taking any more of them out.”

  Indeed,
the first few Pales to have backed off were already looking up with those eerily intelligent eyes—human eyes but devoid of everything that set people apart from sharks. They began edging forward again, picking up speed with ladders in tow.

  “Later,” Beck said as the whole rest of the team started yammering at her at once. “Get ready.”

  Beck unlocked one of the compartments on her thigh and removed a device the team was familiar with; the first weapon she had designed approved for general use. A quick slap to her right forearm plate and the electromagnetic attachment point she had installed on it, and the Punch was locked in place. She took one of the shortened spears, a simple metal rod two feet long and tapered along its length, and loaded it into the waiting cradle on top of the Punch.

  The locks engaged just as the first Pale reached the steps. Others spread out around the watch post, ladders already rising into the air. She wanted tell the others what to do, urge them to be careful, but Beck had to trust they knew their jobs. On a logical level she knew they did. It was simply in her nature to want to control every aspect of a task.

  The Pale climbed the steps, its nude white body dusted with orange from the rising gale around them. Others followed it, slowly working their way up the steps. Predatory eyes never wavered from Beck, though they did sweep across her to focus on the spike jutting forward from the top of her forearm.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Beck said, letting her external speaker relay the words. “You want my friends, you’re gonna have to deal with me.”

  The Pale wasted no time when it got close enough to lunge at her. Beck had the high ground, only a slight advantage considering how much faster and more maneuverable the Pale was. The chalk-skinned monster couldn’t rely on the usual tactics its kind employed. There was no laying of traps beyond the larger one the team walked right into. No sneakiness or coming at her from all sides. All it could do was try to startle Beck with the speed and savagery of its attack, and she was having absolutely none of it.