by Rick Partlow
That was cutting it close, I observed silently, scanning carefully around us.
We were in a storage room, I could tell that from the tetragonal arrangement of what passed for shelves among the Tahni, stacked with plastic tubs of raw foodstuffs. There were freezer units off to the side as well, and I knew they kept their larders stocked with meat from local animals. I found it oddly fascinating that they could eat the same food we did, despite evolving on an entirely different planet. No one had been able to adequately explain that yet, though there was a lot of talk about the Predecessors having something to do with Tahni evolution.
I pushed through the door to the next room, the communal dining area; it was more than a cafeteria, and we knew that eating together had some religious significance to them, so it also served as a sort of worship center as well. Nothing about how the room was arranged made sense to my eyes and it seemed to have platforms and pits in haphazard places, but I knew it all meant something to them. At the moment, all it meant to me was that I was grateful they didn't go in for late-night snacking. The room was deserted and dark, but for a small flame burning in one of the pits on what they used for an altar, and the flare of the gas fire sent flickering shadows playing across the walls.
Spooky, Deke commented dryly.
I moved across the space, weaving between squat stools made by hand from local wood, watching for internal security cameras but not finding any. I wasn't surprised, since the Tahni were pretty anal about any recording of their religious ceremonies. The exit from the dining hall led to one of the enclosed walkways; I checked it carefully before I stepped through into it, but it also seemed to lack security sensors.
More hubris, I thought, but then reconsidered: it might have just been lack of experience. It wasn't as if they'd done much occupying of enemy worlds since the last war and precious little of it then. The first War with the Tahni had been a thing of stand-off space battles fought around jumpgates, of bombardments from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away meeting countermeasures in the space between planets. Things were much different now, for better or worse.
The walkway passed by in a heartbeat and we were confronted by another security lock and a solid-looking metal door with a surveillance camera tied to the keypad: it would activate the minute the entry pad was touched. I knew that like I knew my own name, but I also knew it was a report from my headcomp's files on Tahni security systems. The door was thick and soundproof and neither of us had any idea what was on the other side of it.
You pop the lock, I told Deke. I'll go in first.
I didn't wait for an acknowledgment, just secured my pulse carbine in place and let my talons slide out of their housings.
Why do you get to go in first? Deke asked absently, spraying a quick-degrade film over the camera input---it would blur the view for just a second before disappearing, just long enough for us to pass through.
Because I'm better at it, I told him in a tone that wasn't the slightest bit kidding.
He seemed to consider that as he took out the computer module to crack the door lock.
The door opened and then I was through a short, narrow entrance hall and in a brightly-lit control room with four Tahni males wearing uniforms in the pattern of technicians. Two of them died before they realized anyone was in the room with them, tumbling off their stools with their throats ripped out and their spines severed at the neck. I wish I could say that I didn’t really remember what happened, but I did. I felt the change in resistance when my talons had sliced all the way through the flesh and muscle and hit the bones of their necks. I could see their blood fountaining out to spatter the walls and the consoles in front of them, each droplet a single, self-contained packet of data recorded indelibly in my hardwired memory, ready to be called up whenever it decided I needed to see it again.
The next two had time to half-turn, realization or anger or maybe horror in their faces as they barely had time to see the shifting grey shadow and the dull matte of the talons. Then more resistance, more tearing flesh and cracking bone and more and more and ever more blood. I saw it all, felt it all, but the Machine that I was becoming didn’t feel any of it and didn’t care that I did.
None of them made a sound before they died, so all I could hear was the gentle thump of flesh hitting the tile floor and the splatter of the droplets landing where gravity and momentum took them. I stood in silence, listening intently for alarms or any approaching Tahni, but there was nothing. Deke stepped up behind me, a breath hissing out under his hood.
Yeah, he admitted, I guess you are better at that.
There wasn’t a bit of envy in his tone.
Can you access the system from here? I asked him, gesturing at the console. Its displays and readouts were in Tahni characters and arranged in ways that made my eyes slide off them uncomprehending, but my headcomp translated them for me. This was the Security Center.
Deke pulled a small module from a pouch on his belt, its connections looking like the suckers on the tentacles of some sea creature. He searched for a moment, then pushed the sucker-like attachment to the correct receptacle on the console, pausing first to wipe away the blood that coated it. I felt it activate and I monitored the progress through my neurolink as Deke used the connection to penetrate the Tahni systems with his headcomp and insert the Trojan that would shut down the perimeter sensors.
They keep improving their computer security, Deke grumbled. Tell Jenna and her buds in crypto they better not take any long vacations.
Security sensors are down, I mused, still looking around the room. They'll be kicking off the distraction attack in a minute.
And our job is done, Deke reminded me. Our orders are to report to the rendezvous and await extraction.
He said it like he was lecturing me, but I could sense the tone behind it, the slightly goading challenge. I looked at him as if I could see anything through the dull black and shaded grey of his hood. An explosion shook the walls, sending a puff of dust off the ceiling that wafted slowly to the floor, and an alarm began to wail. The Tahni alarm tone was a high-pitched keening, like someone mourning the dead, but I could still pick out shouts and pounding feet over its cry. I pulled my carbine around to the front and nestled it in my arms.
Let's do some damage, I decided.
***
The Tahni were well-drilled and efficient in their response to the alarm; but they’d also mostly been sleeping, and they’d trusted far too heavily in their sensor net and their fire superiority. Deke and I burst like breaching charges into one of the square, warehouse-sized buildings they used for warriors’ quarters, splitting up at the door and each taking a side of the huge, common barracks.
There were thirty-eight of them in there, pulling armor from lockers set into the wall, or slipping into their boots, or a very few who’d actually picked up their weapons first. It didn’t matter. My pulse carbine spoke in crackling counterpoint to the waling alarm and two of the soldiers who’d armed themselves fell with fist-sized holes burned through their chests; I could hear Deke firing as well and chaos was added to pandemonium. Some tried to run, some tried to grab at weapons, some stood fixed in place like statues. I ignored their actions and let the Machine I’d become think of them as nothing but targets.
I killed the ones running first, because if they lived they could join the fight outside. Laser pulses fed by hyperexplosive charges ripped apart air kept thick and moist by their humidifiers, artificial lightning bolts of static electricity snapping fitfully in their wake as they heated gas to plasma. The lightning touched them with dramatic intensity, but the damage was done by light invisible to the human eye, and they dropped like puppets with their strings cut as the bursts chewed into them in an almost pedestrian fashion.
I kept moving, not giving the ones who’d armed themselves time to target me, swapping out magazines as I moved. I heard the clatter of the empty magazine bouncing off the hard floor and skittering to a stop against one of the bunks, felt the solid click of the new on
e sliding home; it was just another data-point, like the blood droplets and the soft resistance of flesh.
There was another sound over the shouts and screams and the tiny thunderclaps of the laser pulses; it was the hum-snap of KE-guns firing, the tantalum needles flung outward at hundreds of meters per second by the electromagnetic coils in the rifles' fat, nitrogen-cooled bore. Chunks were blown out of the wall lining as the needles impacted there, missing Deke and I by centimeters as Tahni soldiers tried futilely to track us with flesh-and-blood eyes.
I sidestepped a clumsy charge by two of the newly awoken soldiers, hardly even noticing it except to swipe backwards with my left hand as I passed. One of the two staggered and dropped to his knees, his throat torn out, while the other recoiled in horror. I didn't bother with him, focusing my attention and my carbine's sights on a tall male dressed in some sort of night-clothes and firing a KE-gun wildly. Laser pulses chopped into him, ripping apart his upper chest in a spray of superheated blood, and the KE-gun went flying as he dropped.
I swept my carbine left and right, emptying the magazine in barely two seconds. Everything in the room went still. Steam hissed off the cooling vanes of my carbine, heat radiating off of it in waves of distortion and faint clicks and pings sounding as metal and plastic expanded. I touched a release with my right thumb and the empty magazine dropped out, my hands automatically slipping a new one from my chest harness and slapping it home.
Tahni soldiers were draped over their cots and floor lockers, or sprawled across the tiles, or slumped against the wall near the exit; their blood pooled where they fell, creeping across the tile as if it were alive and trying to join together.
I suddenly remembered what Holly had said, that if the Glory Boys didn’t work, the only way we’d defeat the Tahni was to kill every last one of them. It was starting to feel like we’d have to do that anyway.
Another explosion sent vibrations up through the floor and shook me from my half-second of reverie. The sleeping quarters had two exits, one that led to the next barracks over and another to the central compound outside.
Think we can catch any more of them with their pants down? Deke asked me, nodding towards the door to the next set of sleeping quarters.
It’s been too long, I said, shaking my head. They’ll be heading outside to join the fight. I headed for the door to the compound. And so should we.
Chapter Seventeen
I’d never seen a battle before. The thought seemed ludicrous to me: I’d personally killed dozens of Tahni soldiers, most with my hands, but I’d never seen a battle. This was a hell of a one to start with.
The night was chaos wadded into a ball and tossed into a fire. The other barracks buildings were collapsed and smoldering, flames licking at the parts that would burn, and newly-awakened Tahni soldiers were scrambling out of the drifting smoke in a disorganized rush to fill the gaps blown in the perimeter wall. The duty troops were already on the line, pouring KE-gun fire out into the positions the militia had taken out at the edge of the clearing. The hum-snap of the discharges contrasted with the heavier crack of the militia’s Gauss rifles and I could hear the smack of their heavy, tungsten slugs slicing into the intact portions of the wall. I knew Holly and Brian had taken care of planting the charges to blow fighting positions out of the bare ground and I guessed that had been the source of the first explosions we’d felt.
As we ran through the compound towards the wall, I debated for all of a half-second how best to approach to avoid getting hit by friendly fire; my headcomp came up with a route that kept intact perimeter wall between us and the militia’s line of fire. None of the Tahni had noticed us yet, but that was about to change. I opened fire when we were thirty meters from the wall, cutting down three of the Tahni soldiers in about as many seconds, and I could hear the report of Deke’s pulse carbine behind me and off to the left a few meters. Through the sensors in my hood, I knew he’d killed another three, and then we were at the wall.
This was where it would get tricky. They’d seen the firing signature of the pulse carbines even if they hadn’t seen us, and we likely only had seconds before the line troops realized we were here…but then again, that was why we were out here, to draw their fire away from the civilians. I emptied a magazine into a cluster of Tahni troops who’d gathered at a smoking, jagged hole blown through the wall only ten meters down from us, the laser pulses clearly visible as white streaks of plasma as they ionized the air around them and burned through the haze of smoke. Four of them died from my long burst and another two ran panicking through the hole to the other side of the wall and made it only meters before they were cut down by Holly or Brian’s laser coming from the other side.
At the same time, I could tell that Deke was heading up the stairway emplaced in the thickly reinforced wall, chopping through two armored soldiers in his way before he attacked a weapons emplacement. Two Tahni were crewing the heavy KE-gun turret, pouring thousands of tantalum needles a minute out into the attacking militia from behind a heavy, alloy shield. One of the gun crew saw Deke approaching and tried desperately to unsling his KE rifle, but it was far too late. Deke shot him through the neck and the big Tahni toppled off his position, landing with a heavy thud on the aggregate pavement below. I saw other Tahni soldiers turning in their positions on the wall towards Deke, and I swapped out a full magazine and opened up on them.
Shit, I thought, or maybe I said it to Deke, we might actually pull this thing off.
Holly, Brian, Deke, Cal, Mat’s transmission came over my neurolink and hit me like a physical shock. Abort. I repeat, abort. Tell the civilians to withdraw and then make your way immediately to your extraction point.
What’s wrong, Mat? Holly asked on our unit frequency. Why are we pulling out?
The Marines ran into a Tahni High Guard armored patrol, Mat said tersely, bitterly. Most of them are dead and the mission is a no-go.
We can take the reactor down ourselves, Brian Hammer protested. The four of us can go…
Get out now, that’s a fucking order.
Mat cursing surprised me almost as much as the order. He never cursed, never said an uncontrolled word. He was pissed and shaken and that shook me. There was a gone feeling in my gut and I had to work to get my head back in the game.
Get the civilians out, I told Holly, still firing off bursts at the Tahni soldiers on the wall. Deke and I will cover their withdrawal.
Doing it already, Holly answered. Keep them off our backs.
On it.
I followed Deke up the stairs to the defensive catwalk set in the wall and we both sprinted down its length, tantalum needles sending chunks of aggregate flying around us as soldiers fired at us from the ground.
Running low on ammo, Deke told me, firing a short burst at the next weapons platform; I could see one of the crew there fall as the lasers hit unerringly.
Me too, I agreed, taking down one of the troops on the ground with two quick rounds to the faceplate. But we just have to keep them occupied for a couple minutes.
That was the exact moment the world exploded.
In retrospect, I knew exactly what had happened; my hood sensors told me the story, as did Deke’s and Holly’s and Brian’s over line-of-sight communications. In the moment, all I knew was that something loud and hot and painful had happened and I was flying through the air with a fair amount of certainty that I was dead. Reality caught up with me before I hit the ground below the wall, all the data flooding into my head like a memory. High Guard battlesuits were screaming down on jets of superheated steam, four of them spread out over half a kilometer, each over three meters tall and weighing over a ton with centimeters-thick tungsten alloy armor powered by isotope reactors.
They’d announced their presence with a missile strike, and just the concussion from the explosions had thrown Deke and I off the wall; I landed in a crouch only due to the intervention of my headcomp, because my conscious mind was still fogged from the pressure wave that had hit us. I could only process one tho
ught in the moment I knelt there on the ground: nothing I was carrying could scratch the armor on one of those things.
Deke, Cal, Holly was calling us. I looked over at Deke and saw him clambering to his feet, shaking his head to clear it. Get the hell out of there! Get to the extraction site!
What about the civilians? I tried to argue, but Deke was already tugging at my arm, leading me into a serpentine run back through the Tahni base, trying to keep the installation’s buildings between us and the High Guard troops.
It all seemed unreal to me, as if I was watching someone else instead of looking through my own eyes. We were moving quickly through a night torn by fire and explosion and clouded with a haze of black smoke, unnoticed by the Tahni soldiers running in a panic from one emergency to another. I wondered dully if Holly was going to answer me.
The ones still alive are already running. There was pain and bitterness in Holly’s tone that carried through the neurolink “voice.” And so are we.
How bad is it? Deke asked her. He was a faceless, black shadow beside me, but I could feel the stress and anger radiating off of him as we ran. Or maybe I was just projecting what I was feeling.
Jaden and Abel are dead, her tone was flat and emotionless and I wondered if maybe that was because of how distracted she was with trying to evade the battlesuits. I saw them go in the first missile strike. I don’t know how many of the civilians lived. I saw some running, but I saw a lot of bodies too. And body parts. Brian’s hurt, I don’t know how bad.
I am fine. It was Brian, and his tone was translated by the neurolink as flat and strained. And if I were not, there is still no alternative but to get to the ship and get out of here, is there?
No one answered that rhetorical question because Deke and I were suddenly too busy to talk. We’d made it back through the abandoned and burning wreckage of the troop barracks and we were bypassing the security building, trying to avoid any troops who might be trying to reboot the system. We were within sight of the perimeter wall when one of the High Guard troopers jetted in over the installation and landed with a brittle crunch of dry soil beneath the circular pads of its massive legs.
