by K. Gorman
Before, with her normal human response, all she’d picked up during combat situations was adrenaline, panic, and blind fear.
Now, she morphed into a smooth, efficient killing machine.
She wiggled her fingers and rolled her shoulders, instinctively reaching for the dimensional fields, asserting her grip on them, and let out a slow, grounding breath as they connected.
Then, the countdown reached zero, and they were moving.
The farm’s inner lot raced by in a whisper, their boots silent as they ate up the distance. Karin checked her sprint as she came to the doors, reaching for her powers. Instead of the light that had answered her call for the last two decades, the very fabric of the universe rippled at her fingertips.
She tore through it like paper.
The doors ripped apart in three places, and they burst through in a shower of broken wood, dust, and splinters.
The five occupants of the room shouted in alarm and jumped up from where they’d been seated. Two of them went for their guns.
She shot an auto-turret under a support beam before it wound up, sinking three blaster rounds into its computer casing, and sliced the second and third in half with her powers―they split between worlds in a spray of sparks and briefly grinding machinery, their other halves vanishing from the normal world to clunk harmlessly to the floor in the Shadow world, a parallel dimension that ran close alongside theirs.
By the time she’d turned back to focus on the humans in the room, Jon had already shot the firing arm of one gun-wielder, and Nomiki was in the process of launching herself over a table at the other.
Her sister shoved the man hard into the wall. While he staggered, she grabbed his gun arm. He fought her, but she captured it in a steel grip and snapped it up, then down, breaking several bones.
He dropped the gun.
Then, she stepped away.
For a moment, the room went quiet. She glanced at the other three men. Jon was by them, instructing them to kneel, a few plastic bindings already in his hand to restrain them for the second fire team to deal with.
“Karin, you stay here. I’m going to check the other rooms.”
Nomiki gave a wave before vanishing down a small hallway to the left. According to the map, there was a kitchen and a bathroom back there, along with a few offices. The building had originally been a barn and still looked like one on the outside, but it clearly hadn’t functioned as one in a long time. Though it retained much of its original bones, such as the remnants of a hay loft and stalls, the interior façade now suggested more ‘metal shop’ than ‘farm animal.’ Tracks had been installed into the floor for moving heavy equipment, with a few mechanical rigs attached to the rafters. One stall had been retrofitted with plastic-glass barriers, a holoview training program―a VR headset, harness, and large, omnidirection treadmill used largely for training combat strategies―next to one of the barn’s main windows.
Whoever these people were, they clearly hadn’t been trying to hide very much.
“Clear.” Nomiki walked back out of the hallway. “I thought there were ten contacts. Reeve?”
“Lifescan picked up ten,” he confirmed over the comms. “Check for doors. Maybe they went under.”
They hadn’t found the entrance to the silo yet. Karin broke away, already sweeping the room with her gaze.
She wished she could take her helmet off. Right now, the suit was only inhibiting her senses, and current technology lacked the AI advancement to make up for it. It wasn’t like in a television show, where a HUD would simply tag a thermal print on a wall as a clue, or scan the air currents for changes to find a hidden door.
But then, perhaps they didn’t need to for this one.
“Found it, maybe. There’s a sub-room off the kitchen that leads into a tunnel.” Nomiki tagged it on the map.
Karin scanned it, frowned, and opened the door on her left, revealing a small laundry closet with another door grafted onto its other side.
Smart. They’d put it in the middle of the office area so that it wouldn’t be as obvious and so they would have multiple ways to enter in case of invasion.
“Another one here. Going in.”
A presence came up behind her, large and quiet―Jon, appearing somehow even bigger in the tight space. She crossed the room and opened the next door, finding Nomiki already down a small ladder and heading into a cramped tunnel.
She holstered her blaster on her thigh, gauged the distance, and jumped down. The suit negated the fall impact, spreading most of the force into its plates rather than into her bones. She moved out of the way for Jon, following Nomiki into the next tunnel.
It was a small, cramped affair, likely a secondary tunnel as she couldn’t see them moving much equipment from here. Jon didn’t have to hunch, but he did enter at an angle, the same way he went through doors in his armor.
Her suit registered a temperature drop of three degrees as they kept walking, the sounds of their steps echoing on the round, concrete walls. Two incandescent lights were all that lit the entire hundred meters, leaving most of it dim and dank. A door at the end led into a larger tunnel that angled down.
A whir sounded behind them, and their comms crackled.
“Wait for the drone,” Reeve said. “We’ll update maps and visuals.”
“More like give them a hundred-credit skeet disc to shoot at,” Nomiki said as it flew past her shoulder and banked into the next tunnel.
We could just port into the Shadow world. Do a quick exploration without shots firing at us, then come up in a place they won’t expect.
That was one of her main powers, now, porting things to and from the Shadow world. Even the way she phased between dimensions and sliced things in half was a subset of that power.
But, so far, neither Fallon nor the Alliance―nor Earth or Mars, for that matter, since technically, they were part of this mission, too―had found a way to patch comms signals between dimensions, and command liked to have eyes on the ground.
Or in the ground, as their current subterranean mission was shaping up.
She unholstered her blaster and picked up a jog, following Nomiki. For several minutes, they moved, their comms silent except for the occasional heavy breath that their suits neglected to mute. Reeve opened a view of the drone’s camera into the left of their feed. It had found the end of their tunnel and shot through a few rooms―old maintenance and engineering, by the looks of their rusty equipment―before encountering a closed door that it couldn’t pass.
How useful.
They caught up to it a minute later, and Nomiki tried the knob.
“Locked.” She stepped away. “Karin?”
Karin lifted a hand, touched the dimensional boundary, and sliced through its deadbolts. “Not anymore.”
Nomiki pushed it open, waited a beat while the drone shot through and their HUD feed showed the next hallway as clear―then stepped through.
Ten seconds later, they were stepping into the dim metal walks that ringed the silo, their steps echoing down the shaft.
You know, I didn’t think Australia had missile silos, Tia commented.
Maybe it’s new, she thought back.
It doesn’t look new, Tia pointed out.
She had a point. There was more rust on the walks than she cared to trust, and the bunker’s thick concrete walls showed distinct signs of age. She wasn’t sure what the weather was like year-round, but something had certainly leaked on the far wall. Though no missile sat in the circular hollow, she saw evidence that one could have been there. Several mobile walkways sat in their ‘up’ position on the other side, their ends clearly shaped with padding to come up close and personal to a missile tip―although, now that she thought of it, they could just as easily fit some of the newer-model rocket-ships Alliance was coming out with these days.
She veered toward the railing and peered down into the silo’s well. The walkways went down another twenty stories or so, before ending in a small, flat basin that she decided hadn’
t seen any large bursts of ignition fuel.
For good reason. I wouldn’t want to park here.
Don’t you call it ‘land’ or ‘dock’ when it’s a spaceship you’re flying, not ‘park’, what with you being a pilot and all that? Tia pointed out.
So long as it’s not ‘crash’, I’m happy, she replied back. Aloud, she said, “They have mech suits down there.”
“Mech suits and something with enough balls to cause a gravity anomaly,” Nomiki said dryly. “What fun.”
A shot streaked up from the mid-level and hit the ceiling above her. Blaster-fire.
“Turret,” she identified.
Nomiki sighed as another few rounds pelted into the metalwork above them and rained sparks of boltsplash onto their suits. “Jon?”
Without a word, he stepped up to the railing, located the turret, and started firing. The shots stopped a few seconds later, and something crashed loudly to the floor. Below, someone shouted. Different guns fired back, ballistic rounds this time.
Karin bit back a swear and phased, the platform shivering beneath her. “Guess they learned.”
“Guess they did.” Nomiki picked up a run. “Let’s go!”
The gunfire from below stopped soon after, their opponents likely realizing it was useless while they were still on top of the walkways. They met a second turret midway down, along with a second doorway. Karin sliced both the turret and the door, and Jon vanished down the hallway with his gun drawn. A third turret appeared under the nook of a fire suppression system, and she sliced through it before it could fire.
Three stories from the bottom, when the mech on the ground floor could sight them properly, the ballistic rounds started back up.
Metal screeched as shells thundered into the grating around them. Chunks of concrete spat from the wall, and pieces of sheered and smashed metal rained down on her suit. One round glanced off her thigh, the impact skimming the armor so hard, her entire right side vibrated with it. Nomiki sprinted forward and launched into a roll, tucking close to the wall.
Adrenaline slammed into her. Inside, something snapped.
For a second, her vision tunneled. Then, everything went crystal clear.
Before she knew what she was doing, she was moving.
She sliced a fire suppression tank on the next strut over, calculated a trajectory, jumped into a sprint, and launched herself over the rail.
The dimensional boundaries switched mid-air. One second, she was leaping into the line of fire, an open target, the cloud from the fire suppression unit only just beginning to spread…
Then, everything was quiet.
She twisted, executing a slow, controlled flip, accompanied only by the sound of her breath on the visor and the beep from her suit as it registered the disconnect.
For one long, quiet moment, she was alone, rotating in the air, with only the Shadows, beings from this side of the universe, to watch her.
Then, she pulled on her power, felt the world turn around her, and switched back.
She landed hard on top of the mech, nearly taking out its mounted gun.
The mech staggered back, off-balance. Hydraulics and machinery worked underneath her, loud and obnoxious. Pain shot up from the impact. The klemptas suits were extremely handy, and very good at what they did, but they weren’t heavy armor. She used her powers to slice a handhold into the mech to anchor her, then gave the mounting a savage kick.
It didn’t give right away, so she used her powers to slice through its base.
Below, she looked down into the angry face of the mech’s operator. Around them, the gas from the fire suppressant system was beginning to fill the silo, making the area thick with haze. She watched the pilot’s face twist below, then paused to notice the way the klemptas armor reflected in the window―she looked frighteningly anonymous, like an elite soldier from one of the Alliance’s more action-oriented netdramas, come to rain down terror. The pilot screamed something at her, and the mech’s hands and arms came up.
She glanced up, tilted her head, and watched as her powers peeled its metal fingers like a cheese slicer. Then, she reeled her elbow back and slammed her fist into the armored window of the mech’s cockpit.
The plastic-glass spider-webbed under her hit.
She smiled.
Though the klemptas armor absorbed most of the shock, several darts of pain snapped up from her knuckles―slamming normally-fragile finger bones into a thickly armored mech wasn’t usually a good idea, but the petrified shock on the pilot’s face satisfied something deep inside her.
She rocked backward, somewhat disappointed when the mech didn’t rock with her―in hindsight, a hundred and eighty pounds wasn’t all that much compared to a five-ton mech―then cut part of the mech’s foot off and rode it down when it fell, launching into a roll as it hit the ground.
She was on her feet a second later, spinning back to face it.
Either it had been designed poorly, or it was a much older model than she’d guessed. With both of its hands destroyed and one foot inoperable, it couldn’t get back up again. Even the gun components in its forearm weren’t working―she’d deliberately cut too far back for that. She shot the secondary component that came out before it could fire, the heat from her blast round making the edges of the metal hole glow.
“I’ve got a gunship over here,” Jon said over the comms. “Old, likely a counter-fed grav gen.”
Counter-fed gravity generator. Something even older than Tia, and something that was likely the cause of the gravitational anomaly the Courant had picked up in orbit.
Well, that answered some questions.
She straightened slowly. Around her, the extinguisher smoke continued to puff through the air, turning the silo into some hazy dreamscape.
“Bomb,” Nomiki said over the comms. “Sis, need you.”
She checked Nomiki’s HUD in the map―somehow, nothing had managed to shoot down the drone, though its feed was somewhat hampered by the gray clouds of fire suppressant gas―holstered her gun, and headed over.
Below the last catwalk, a large space had been carved out beyond the silo’s boundaries. The silhouette of a table grew out of the gloom, followed by countertops and a series of reflective discs on the back wall. Nomiki stood by a support pillar on the left. On the other side of the room, a man cowered against the wall, an arm over his mouth in an attempt to stop the cloud from flowing freely into his lungs. His other hand was raised, a small remote clutched tightly in it.
Dead man’s switch, Tia identified. If he lets go, the bomb will detonate.
Behind him, a large machine sat across two worktables, looking like a big, mechanical version of one of those lighter dumbbell sets fitness studios sometimes tried to market to women. It was white, with several clear plastic tubes curving out and back into it. Three cylinders of blue liquid stuck out of the stop, looking ready to sink in, like valves on a trumpet.
She pointed. “Is that it?”
It didn’t look like any bomb she’d ever seen, but what did she know?
“Yep. It’s an older model Calpex with a nuclear load.”
“Huh,” she said.
With a twist of her fingers, she ported it and the detonator into the Shadow world, taking the man’s hand at the wrist. He screamed, and she closed herself to the other dimension as it detonated―but not before she’d felt the shockwave ripple the boundary.
Remind me never to visit Shadow Melbourne without a rad suit, she thought to Tia as Nomiki darted forth to subdue the man.
It wasn’t hard. He was preoccupied with the bleeding stump of his wrist. She doubted he was hearing much of what Nomiki said. Already, she could see signs of shock clouding his mind.
And pain.
Oh, it might be all right, Tia replied. It’s over sixty kilometers away, and it detonated within a silo. Plus, there’s no wind in the Shadow world.
Still, I think I’ll be directing my Shadow Australia vacation to different parts of the country.
I
still find it hard to believe they have silos, Tia said. They didn’t when I was alive. Not overtly, anyway.
Karin shrugged. A lot can change in seventy years.
So it would seem.
“Is that the last of them?” she asked the comms.
Nomiki grunted. “You took out the mech?”
“Yes.” Karin glanced over. “He’s currently stuck in his cockpit, unable to roll the mech over.”
“Cool. Clear down here, then. Jon?”
“Clear,” came the answer. “There were seven in there.”
Which made two more than Reeve’s lifescan had picked up.
Oh well. It didn't matter. The place was clear, and the bomb dealt with.
“Good. Courant, we await your orders.”
A second later, their comms crackled. Not Reeve’s voice, this time, but General Crane’s.
“Good work. Stay there and await extraction. We’re sending a team down.”
Chapter Two
“Hold still,” Dr. Takahashi admonished. “This will only take a minute.”
Karin grimaced as he adjusted the diagnostics crown on her head, keenly aware of the sensor pads sliding against her scalp. Every tilt and movement made her skin itch―as if a hive of very active ants were crawling along her nerves―and her mind buzzed with restlessness.
She felt like she should be doing something. Like running. Or hitting things.
Instead, she clenched her hands into fists and flexed them again, taking deep, slow breaths to calm herself down.
The sun helped. Sort of.
She wasn’t sure if it was some small connection to her old Eos programming, which allowed her to absorb and manipulate light as if she were some complicated plant, but it helped.
Which was why Takahashi usually elected to do their checkups outside, as they were now.
Points to him.
She let out a slow breath, attempting to ground herself through the light’s touch. She’d been getting this way, lately. Antsy. Restless. Like both her brain and body had hard-wired into an unhealthy dose of Ritalin.
