by Jean Johnson
Ducking, eyes squeezed shut and breath held tight against the dust filtering through the air, she fumbled the mask into place over nose and mouth, and taped it to her face, sealing it in place. Quick movements sealed the second one over the top of the first. Only then did she breathe. The metallic compounds being vaporized around her were dangerous to inhale in large quantities. They wouldn’t do her eyes much good, either. Then again, neither would the heat of the rock underfoot. Ia reached for the seals of her p-suit.
“What are you doing?” Baker asked her.
She ignored him, stripping out of the rubbery grey suit. Underneath, she wore nothing, not even underwear. For a pressure-suit to work at its most efficient, it had to cover as many pores on a wearer’s skin as possible. In an emergency, they could be pulled on over clothing, but preparing for battle usually meant having enough time to do things properly.
A couple of the others catcalled and whistled via their suit speakers, peering through the dust at what she was doing. Ia ignored them as well. Grabbing one of the rolls of bandaging in his medic kit, Ia balanced first on the toes of one foot, then the other, stripping off the booties for the suit and replacing them with wads of cotton gauze that she taped in place. It protected her bare skin somewhat from the heat of the rocks, but this was several meters away from those lasers.
Once she was safely balanced on her wrapped toes, she unlatched her wrist unit and held it up to the silver-faceplated sergeant. “Keep track of this for me!”
He accepted it reluctantly. Ia quickly wrapped her hands in gauze mittens and awkwardly taped them in place, then stored everything back in his full-mech thigh compartment.
D’kora made her way to Ia’s side. She flipped up her blast shield, though she kept her suit sealed. For the first time since Ia had met her, the other woman asked her an actual question. Demanded it, rather. “Corporal . . . what the hell are you doing?”
“Metal, sir! Those lasers are aiming at anything metal!” she shouted back. The heat was beginning to make her sweat, which made the dust cling to her skin. “Even a p-suit has metal on it! They might also have motion sensors, so I’m going to have to move very slowly. The scanners can’t tell much about what’s up ahead; the dust and heat are screwing up the sensors. But we do know the drill emplacements are about twenty meters up the corridor. Give me twenty minutes to get to them, and . . . I don’t know, another ten to figure out how to kill their power switches. If they don’t stop firing in half an hour, find another way in without me!”
“Corporal, you are currently bare-asteroid naked!” D’kora argued.
Glancing down at her torso, naked curves and muscles smudged in pulverized dust, Ia spread her taped hands, letting her rare sense of humor out to play. “Well, I guess I am. Enjoy the free show, sir! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go break this stalemate.”
Leaving the lieutenant to stare after her, Ia slipped between the other mechsuited soldiers. Some of them grinned, some of them rolled their eyes, and some kept their silvery grey blast plates down, their expressions hidden. She didn’t care. The closer she got to the corner where the lasers were still searing away, the hotter the floor and the air became.
This really was the only way in for the 2nd Platoon. Posing as merely a metallurgical refinery, the Oberon Consortium was actually a military contract facility. In a way, it was ironic, even poetic, that she should be the one to help keep its secrets out of the wrong hands, given how those secrets would eventually end up in hers.
Dropping to hands and toes, she flexed her muscles in a modified push-up stance. Slowly, carefully, as low as she could go without burning her bare skin on the floor, Ia crept around the corner. The laser drills were targeting anything above knee-high that moved or had metallic components. Unfortunately, nothing in a mechsuit, even half-mech, could hunker down that low.
Centimeter by slow centimeter, she worked her way around the corridor, stalking with the patience of a sloth. Oberon’s Rock, a mineral-rich, air-poor world, was only slightly heavier than Earth’s gravity, 1.14gs instead of 1.01. The slow movement was more of a strain on her patience than on her muscles. Eventually, she managed to get her whole body around the corner, and up the corridor by a full meter, beyond any safe viewing range by her fellow soldiers.
She took a moment to rest her body, still sprawled in a modified push-up position. Now it was time to let her mind go to work. Sweating muddy, metallic droplets, she pushed static energy out from her body. That caused the swirling dust clouds to shift and scatter, but it also obscured what little the others would be able to detect with their scanners. Then, she focused her thoughts forward, on the electrical pulses and programming guiding the lasers firing over her head.
“Ia! Are you still alive?” she heard Estes shout.
I am not here . . . I am not here . . . you do not see me . . . you do not detect me . . . there is nothing here, along the right-hand wall . . .
“Corporal, report!” That came from D’kora.
The trio of cannons shifted their fire ever so slightly, avoiding the right side of the corridor. Pushing upright, Ia sprinted forward, skimming along the narrow path she had cleared for herself. She wasn’t her biological father; she couldn’t take a laser beam as powerful as one of these drills and hope to survive.
Her goal wasn’t the drills or their controls. Yet. Ignoring them, Ia raced up the corridor, flinging herself down a side passage and up a long flight of stairs. Every turn, she already knew. Every step, she had already practiced in her mind.
Flinging herself into the third storage room on the left at the top of those stairs, she grabbed shoulders and snapped necks. Vertebrae crackled like broken kindling under her fingers. Two, three, five half-naked men died. The sixth managed to pull off of his victim and grab for his rifle. She grabbed his wrist just as he brought it around and slammed her other palm into his elbow, inverting the joint with a sickening crunch. Before he could do more than gasp at the pain, she broke his neck as well and dropped his half-naked body on top of the rest.
The battered, bloodied woman sprawled on the table tugged on the tape binding her wrists and knees to its corners. “Oh, God, I’m rescued! Help me! Get me free!”
Ia closed her eyes. As the brunette struggled to free herself, Ia probed the timestreams. Precious seconds ticked by while she searched for any other path. Any other way.
There was none.
It was a terrible choice to have to make . . . but not her first, and not the worst.
“Aren’t you going to free me? Get me off of this thing!” the woman demanded, shaking the table with her struggles. Ia sighed and peeled off first her hand wrappings, then the dustcaked double-masks.
“I’m sorry.” Approaching her side, Ia leaned over the woman. Met her wide, green stare. “But any children you have . . . any descendants . . . they will sabotage the future. You might or might not have been killed, had I not broken through . . . but I did, so that makes me responsible for anything you or your descendants do. I cannot allow them to exist. I’m sorry.”
The woman blinked up at her through her puffy, swollen eyelids. “What . . . ?”
Reaching down and in, Ia compressed two key arteries inside the woman’s mind. “Sleep,” she murmured. “Sleep.”
The woman struggled, then slowed. She slumped. Ia kept the pressure in place until she felt the other woman’s kinetic energy spike, then fade . . . in an eternal sleep.
“. . . Maybe heaven will let you know just how sorry I am.”
Mindful of the ticking of time, Ia turned away. Grimly, she grabbed the discarded shirt of one of the dead woman’s rapists and scrubbed the dust, sweat, and the threat of tears from her face. I don’t have time to cry. I can’t take the time. I have too much to do to waste my time on . . . on regrets . . . and choices.
I am damned for what I must do. I accepted that a long time ago. I had to.
Ia scrubbed as much of the dirt from her body as she could spare time for. Stripping two of the men t
o get the right sizes, she donned socks, boots, trousers, and a T-shirt. The lack of undergarments chafed a little, but it was better than the alternatives. Particularly since some of them had died messily as their muscles abruptly relaxed. Hurrying, she checked the time. She didn’t have her chrono with her, but she could and did dip into the timestreams.
I have . . . twelve minutes to spare, before I have to get back. Sorting through the weapons, she snatched up two laser pistols and a pair of knives. The pistols were over-clocked, illegal models jury-rigged to fire double-intensity beams in the infrared zone. They would hit almost as hard as a military rifle could, if at less than half the usable e-clip life. The focusing crystals in the pistols weren’t military quality . . . never mind Oberon quality.
Time to go wreak some havoc with the Lyebariko. Darting out the door, she headed up one more level and pelted down a long corridor. The hardest part, running full-tilt in such light gravity, was keeping herself from hitting the ceiling with each bounding stride. Most of the civilians had been rounded up and herded into the storage rooms she was passing, trussed hand and foot and locked inside. She didn’t dare take the time to free them just yet; if anyone who later survived noticed her at this point in time, comparisons might be made on just where and when she was located.
Using her momentum to half leap, half run up a wall next to a ladder way, she grabbed for the rungs and scrambled up through the open hatchway. This was an escape ladder, designed to take personnel from the biodome up above all the way down into the basement levels of the settlement. Flinging her mind ahead of her, she unlatched and opened each hatchway electrokinetically, saving the time needed to do it manually.
Even in such light gravity, she was nearly breathless by the time she reached the roof of the building she wanted. Sucking in deep lungfuls, Ia crouched on the grass-lined roof and pulled one of the pistols stuck into the waistband of her pants. Panting, she carefully braced it on the raised edge of the building and searched for her targets.
This wasn’t a military-calibrated rifle with a sniper scope. This was a jury-rigged handgun aimed by eye and mind. She would have just enough time for three crucial shots before having to run back. Off to the right, she could see plumes of smoke from where the tech raiders were holding off the 3rd Platoon at the edge of the dome. Both sides were trying to be careful about shooting too high; neither wanted to pierce the triple-layered, strut-latticed bubbles protecting them from the vacuum of space. The raiders, because they didn’t have any protective pressure-suits on hand, and her fellow Marines, because they knew the civilian hostages in this dome didn’t have any suits, either.
There! The reinforcements! The group responsible for this raid, certain members of an undergalactic crime organization calling itself the Lyebariko—which translated as Library in some half-forgotten Terran language—had prepared well for this siege. Their makeshift troops were hauling another trio of jury-rigged laser drills off to the right, visible intermittently between the office-like buildings and the trees of the biosphere’s central park. Scraping the butt of the pistol slightly along the roof edge, Ia aimed and pulled the trigger, spearing a bright yellow light down at that distant street.
And missed.
Swearing under her breath, she aimed at her second target, the first now obscured again by the park. Slowing her breath, she concentrated, firing between heartbeats. On to the third, letting the brief slash of orange light lance through the trees . . . and a dip into the timestreams, firing blindly through the foliage at her first target once more.
Success.
The laser drills were now damaged at critical points. Two had slagged power buttons, and the middle one had a damaged conduit socket. When they tried to plug it into a power source, the drill would explode. Sparing just enough time to use a bit of rumpled bandaging to erase evidence she had used the gun, Ia tossed it over the edge of the building and jumped back down the ladder way. Hands flying, feet flicking, slapping and tapping the rungs to control her descent, she “fell” all seven floors back down to ground level, then through the chute another four levels to the basement where she had entered.
Increasing each slap to a grab slowed her drop enough to land without hurting herself. From there, it was a sprint back down the long hallway, a leap down the stairs, two turns and another turn. Back into the heat and the dust . . . which she had forgotten about. Hastily hauling her borrowed shirt up over her nose and mouth, Ia squinted against the debris and aimed her second pistol at the middle drill, burning into the machinery’s housing with its over-clocked, clip-draining beam.
Too many damned things to keep track of, today . . . Whirling, she crouched, ducking a mere second below the flying debris as the drill’s crystal matrix cracked and shattered. The blast knocked her onto the overheated floor, but none of the parts slammed into her. The explosion also knocked the other two drills into the walls, damaging them. One spat sparks and smoke, but no more deadly beams. The other continued to fire, but now that it was wedged at an angle between floor and wall, it could no longer aim at anything.
“Corporal? . . . Corporal Ia, is that you?”
The mechsuit-amplified shout sounded a little tinny. It was also accompanied by a faint ringing. Rising, Ia shook her head and focused inward, on healing the damage from her ears. Within seconds, the tinnitus stopped, allowing her to shout back, “The drills have been disabled, Sergeant! You’re free to move up—and bring me my wrist unit! Someone also needs to shoot this last drill to shut it up. I’m out of juice.”
She flicked the safety on the laser pistol and tucked it back into her waistband. Unlike the other one, this one’s e-clip had started out nearly full, not nearly empty. There was still more good she could do with the confiscated weapon.
Sergeant Baker eased around the corner, followed by Estes. There was enough room for a full-mechsuit to move without worrying about anything but the occasional chunk of debris; the tilted, immobilized drill was busy trying to dig a new, shallow-angled path in the side of the stone corridor. Seeing the way was free, the pair moved up to her position. Ia retreated quickly, taking refuge behind Estes’ half-mechsuited bulk, in case anything else exploded. A steady shot from the permanent cannon mounted on the sergeant’s armor silenced the firing drill, then killed the one still spitting sparks on the other side.
Double-E and Harkins moved up and the four Marines quickly moved the remainder of the drills out of the way, allowing the others the room to approach. Baker offered Ia her wrist unit, clasped in the delicate tips of his servo hands. “You gonna crawl back into your armor, soldier?”
Ia shook her head. “I have dust in places I don’t even want to think about, Sergeant. I’d rather not grind it in deeper with the pressure of a p-suit, and I definitely don’t want to gunk up the gears if I put my mechsuit back on without one.” Clasping the unit onto her left forearm, she glanced briefly at her olive drab clothes and gave him a wry smile. “Besides, the few insurgents I saw while looking for a weapon, they were all wearing this army-surplus stuff, and not all of it was clean.
“Cover up my too-white hair with a hat or a handkerchief, and I figure I could blend in enough to do a little enemy infiltration. After all, they’re expecting the Marines to show up in ceristeel mech armor, guns blazing, not strolling along the streets in Army Greens,” Ia pointed out, plucking at her borrowed fatigues.
“Good idea, Corporal.” That came from Lt. D’kora, who had moved up between the haphazard ranks. “You must have done a little bit of scouting, to get that gun in your waistband. I’ll trust you also made sure no one reported your little foray to the rest of the enemy.”
“No, sir. I didn’t give them a chance for that, sir,” she promised.
“Good. Show us what you found.”
Nodding, Ia turned and headed up the passage at a trot. Behind her, the others followed, their mechsuited weight making the ground tremble. It wouldn’t take long to show them the first storage room and its plethora of bodies. Nor would it be all that
difficult to “hear” the stirrings of the trapped colonists in the other chambers. She knew D’kora would assign D Squad to give them escort back down the tunnel, sending the civilian researchers and workers back toward the other domed settlements scattered over a fifty kilometer radius on this corner of Oberon’s Rock.
Better for them to be well out of the way if and when the Lyebariko’s raiders decided to counterattack. Or grab more hostages to hold off the military. Things which Ia intended to prevent. Once the civilians in this sector were freed, she would be free as well. Free to head deeper through the dome city, and the heart of the problem occupying it.
Free to wreck yet another set of lives.
The trio of guards at the entrance to the office building eyed her warily when she jogged up. Hand pressed to her side, panting from what looked like a long run, she nodded at them. “Berrimoon. I need to report in. Kittrick got his hands on . . . a military unit. Figured the boss’d want to see it right away.”
The lead guard eyed her warily. She had liberated a long-sleeved shirt to cover up her arm unit, as well as a scrap of cloth to wrap around her distinctive, if gritty, hair. “I don’t think I know you.”
Ia lifted her chin, sassing back, “I don’t think I know you, either. This is the Fisk Building, on the corner of 5th and Pleiades, isn’t it?” she asked, still breathing hard. Or at least faking it. “If it is, this is where Kittrick told me to report . . . and I see the name Fisk on the front doors, there.”
“You’re supposed to report in person?” the female of the three guards countered. “Why not use our comms?”
“Because the damned Marines have tapped into our frequencies. Half of us got caught in a trap because of it. We got our hands on a military unit,” Ia explained patiently. “You know, and I know, that the boss would kill you to get her hands on it. Now, are you gonna let me through, or are you gonna at least send someone up to report our findings to the boss?” she asked, lifting her chin at the upper floors of the white-walled structure.
