by J N Chaney
The man was huge, and I didn’t think it too likely that I could really drag him. Even a much smaller man, unconscious weight like Bray now was, would be a heavy thing to drag. Someone of Jonathan’s sheer size and bulk, lying there as dead weight—
“Fuck it,” I said to myself, and slung the shotgun across my back. I leaned down over Bray, got my hands below his armpits, and started to pull. As soon as I did, I had to laugh. In the Martian gravity, Bray was less than forty percent of his weight on Earth. As huge as he was, I could feasibly drag him to safety.
I heaved and strained, then I twisted until my spinal cord felt like it was going to telescope into itself, and Bray moved. He slid a few feet in the right direction.
I braced myself again and slid him a few more feet. He was still breathing, but his breath sounded uneven and ragged. Knowing that he was alive, I redoubled my efforts and yanked him forward. I was able to drag him along for several steps this time, and I actually started to think I might be able to do it.
That’s when two alien shapes came around the corner, padding toward me with quiet, predatory grace—a chimeral dog and a chimeral primate, their nanosuited bodies slick with blood and filth. I slowly lowered Bray to the ground and raised the shotgun in front of me, aiming directly at the primate’s body. It stopped where it was, and the dog looked to it before apprehensively stopping as well.
Aiming the shotgun in a single hand despite its considerable size, I reached down with my other hand and grabbed hold on Jonathan’s collar. I can only describe this as an act of childlike optimism, because the idea that I was going to pull Bray along with just one hand was really out of the question, as was the equally bizarre notion that I was going to successfully fire that bullpup shotgun one-handed. The kick alone would probably have snapped my arm in two.
The shotgun wobbled in my outstretched hand, and the dog took a slow step forward. I let go of Bray’s jacket and steadied the weapon with my other hand. The Erinyes stopped again. From around the corner, their clawed companion stepped into sight.
I was in deep shit. If I turned and ran, they’d rip me open before I could make it three steps. If I backed away and left him, that was tantamount to killing Bray myself. If I stayed where I was, they would eventually realize I couldn’t get them all or that my weapon was at most a limited threat.
The primate edged forward, and I swiveled to aim the gun at its head. It froze in place, but then the dog stepped forward. I aimed at the dog, and it stopped while the clawed Erinys came up from behind. I aimed at the clawed Erinys, and it actually shrank back a little, but the dog and the primate both inched forward.
They were intelligently closing the distance between us. They were forcing me back, inch by irrevocable inch. When they got to Bray, would they simply ignore him and keep moving forward, or would they notice he was still breathing and finish the job?
“Don’t come any closer.” My voice was cold. I was trying to intimidate them, and they did seem intimidated, but I was certain the source of their caution was my powerful weapon and not my voice. The dog stepped forward, more confident now. The clawed Erinys stepped in a half-second later, and the primate a half-second after that. They were staggering their movements, ensuring that I would have to keep turning constantly just to keep up with them.
I wondered grimly when the moment would come, when they would rush me as I swiveled my aim. I had fired twice, and the gun had an eight shot capacity. Had Bray topped off before he’d fallen? That would give me at most six shots. Was that enough? The Erinyes were almost close enough to reach us.
I had to make a call.
Then a dark shape came into view behind them. Vincenzo Veraldi creeped up like a shadow, his shard of glass gleaming in his hand, a streak of blood still rolling down its edge.
When the tension broke, everything seemed to happen at the same time. The dog leapt for my throat, and Veraldi tackled it, slamming it sideways into the glass wall. The other Erinyes charged, and I fired but missed them both. Behind them a glass wall exploded, not because of my shotgun, but from a barrage of steady gunfire. Andrew Jones and Thomas Young approached from behind me, firing continuously at the advancing Erinyes.
I took aim and fired again, knocking the primate backward. Vincenzo was stabbing the dog Erinys with his improvised blade, wedging it between the plating in the thing’s body. This couldn't do much more than shred the silica fiber, but he must have been trying to find some way to make it bleed, to cut anything alive inside there.
I fired once more and hit the clawed Erinys directly in the chest. It showed no signs of being seriously harmed, but it did clutch at its chest. It stared eyelessly at me then retreated around the corner, followed closely by the primate.
“I’ve got the dog!” growled Veraldi. “Get Jonathan!”
Like a lot of the things Veraldi did, this didn’t make much sense. Taking on a cyborg chimera with nothing but a piece of broken glass? It could only result in his death, but there was no time to argue, not if we wanted to have the slightest chance of saving Bray.
“Come on!” yelled Andrew. “While we have the chance!”
He slung his weapon across his shoulder then grabbed Bray by the arm and started pulling. I did the same, and Thomas covered us both. With both Andrew and I pulling, we were able to drag Bray quickly back down the corridor and caught up with Andrea just a few minutes later.
“Where’s Veraldi?” she asked.
Jones pointed with his thumb. “He’s playing with a dog.”
Ivanovich was staring at us like he couldn’t understand what we were doing. “Don’t we need to be going somewhere?!”
No one paid him any attention. Andrea came over and put an arm around Jonathan, then she dragged him easily the rest of the way. It was all Sasha could do to stay ahead of her, and we were out of the labyrinth in just a few short minutes. When we stepped out onto the bridge, I glanced over the edge and saw what looked like rooftops down below us.
We were on the border at last, the legal dividing line between the two hostile halves of the city. West Hellas was so close, but I no longer felt the confidence I’d felt before. It had been replaced by dread, a gnawing feeling that there was no escape.
Andrew was standing near the turnstiles, craning his head to look for any sign of Veraldi. It seemed like a senseless waste, going so far to save Jonathan’s life just to sacrifice Veraldi’s. I was talking myself into going back in when the primate Erinys came charging out. It caught Andrew with a backhand and knocked him tumbling backward. He fell over hard onto the bridge, and the creature jumped forward and stomped him in the stomach.
Andrea opened fire and called out to me. “Tycho! He’s crashing! I’ll keep you covered, stabilize Jonathan.”
I shook my head to clear it then leaned over and checked for a pulse. It was faint, but there. He was still bleeding badly from a gash in his right leg, so I ripped a long strip of cloth from my ridiculous uniform to make a tourniquet. For the next few moments, I tried not to pay attention to the sounds of shooting, the bullets flattening against nanosuit plating, the screams from Andrew as the creature mauled him. I focused only on the task at hand: stop the bleeding as much as possible and check his pulse again.
His pulse had stopped. Jonathan Bray’s heart was no longer beating. With my jaw clenched tight, I started immediately on chest compressions. I would get him out of this. I wasn’t losing another—
“Tycho, the shotgun! I need backup!”
I looked up when Andrea called my name and saw that the primate had abandoned Jones and was now bounding in our direction. I unslung the shotgun and fired, and the thing was staggered by the impact of the shot. It fell over mid-stride and tried to catch itself with its hands.
As it hopped back up onto its feet, I pulled the trigger again, and the primate bent in half. It curled into itself, and I saw blood seep through shattered plating on its chest. I had at most thirty seconds to press the momentum before the nanosuit could repair itself, so I leveled the
shotgun, aiming square for the fracture, and pulled the trigger.
Click.
It was the loudest sound you could ever hear in a firefight.
Andrea didn’t miss a beat. She closed in on the primate and punched it in the face for all she was worth. The hit lifted the creature off the ground and sent it skipping across the bridge. It had barely come to a rest when she laid into it again, raining blows. As Andrea bought us time, I checked Bray’s pockets for ammo. He had eight shells, hopefully more than enough. As I reloaded, I saw something I realized I had never expected to see: Vincenzo Veraldi walking through the turnstiles with new blades in his hand.
I found out much later that he hadn’t found knives somewhere. Veraldi was holding the severed talons of the dog, which he had ripped out of its body after killing the creature with his shard of glass.
I cocked the shotgun and called out to Andrea, “Chief, get clear!”
Andrea dove aside as I fired. Andrew Jones, despite having just suffered the beating of a lifetime, sat up and started shooting at it. Thomas Young, waking up from the data stream if only for a moment, aimed at the primate as well and held his trigger down.
The thing began to fall back, looking first at us and then at the turnstiles as if unsure of what it should do next. Judging only by its body language, I’d say it was the same strange nervousness I’d seen in these Erinyes before. They’d kill scores of people without a moment’s thought, then shy away if you hurt them at all despite being practically indestructible. A short time later, and they’d come back at you again from another direction.
Vincenzo might have been a deranged obsessive when it came to bladed weapons, but he was no fool. If the primate wanted to back away, he wasn’t dumb enough to stop it. He edged away from the turnstile, leaving the cyborg a path to retreat. It backed away from us warily then turned and looked again as if it heard a sound. A shape came up from behind it, and I realized, with a sinking feeling of abject weariness, that we were still just as far as ever from getting away.
The clawed Erinys had returned. You could say we were winning, you could say we had driven the primate back and killed the dog, but it didn’t matter. Now that the clawed Erinys had rejoined the fight, the primate cyborg had regained its confidence. It turned back toward us aggressively, slammed a clenched fist into its mended chest as if to make a point, then dove into battle like that was its favorite thing in the all the world.
21
That was one of the strangest fights I’ve ever been in. The primate cyborg ran at us on all fours, jumping from side to side, blindly trying to grab whatever it could. If it got any of us, I have no doubt it would have ripped off limbs and broken every bone it could feel beneath its powerful hands. We didn’t give it the chance. Between the concentrated fire from Andrea, Thomas, Andrew, and myself, the primate couldn’t make a clean grab.
It couldn’t get any closer, but we couldn’t kill it. With three of us shooting at it all at once, Veraldi was left to deal with the clawed Erinys by himself. To the limited extent that I was aware of him at all, he did seem to be equal to the task. I could vaguely see that he was using the dog Erinys’s talons to block everything the clawed cyborg could throw at him.
Of course, blocking attacks is not the same thing as making effective counterattacks. As breathtaking as Veraldi’s display of combative mastery might be, he was only succeeding in defending himself, just like we were. If we couldn’t kill these Erinyes, we would die through attrition. Either we’d run out of ammo, or one of the Erinyes would manage to get that one hit to open us up. A talon to an artery or a heavy hand crushing bone, and that would be it for Section 9.
The primate suddenly stopped cringing beneath our fire, threw its shoulders back to look as big as possible, and charged right at me. Out of everything we were throwing at it, my shotgun blasts must have been hurting it the most. I fired at it again, and it staggered back but then kept coming. I pulled the trigger, and it made that all-too-loud sound again.
Click.
I needed to reload, but I wasn’t going to get the chance. The primate hit me, a savage openhand that knocked me sprawling. At about that same time, the clawed Erinys succeeded in driving Veraldi to the edge of the bridge, where there was no more room to retreat without plummeting down onto the rooftops in the dark far below. Andrew Jones saw what was happening and called out to Ivanovich.
“Sasha, RUN!”
I don’t think he wasn’t actually trying to save Sasha’s life, even if that was officially our mission. He was trying to save Veraldi by using Ivanovich as bait. Sasha was startled when Jones yelled, presumably thinking that he must be in immediate danger. He bolted and ran toward Jones, but the clawed Erinys didn’t react.
Andrew’s plan did end up helping, though. When Sasha ran, the primate turned away from me. It saw the scientist and moved right toward him, raising a hand to swat him down. I rolled over and rose onto one knee, trying to get my bearings. My head was spinning wildly, and I felt like I was going to puke. As the others did what they could to drive the primate away from Sasha, I slipped off my shotgun and racked my SMG. It didn’t have the stopping power of the shotgun, but we were up against the wall and had to make do with what we had.
As Thomas and Andrew reloaded, Andrea went back into close range. The primate had Sasha in its hands and was lifting him up, while he screamed something unintelligible. Andrea led with a wicked hook to the ape’s ribs before wheeling around and driving a kick into the cyborg’s jaw. The creature was stunned with the first hit, and it dropped Ivanovich with the second.
I don’t know if he ever realized that Jones had used him to save Veraldi, but Sasha Ivanovich had had enough. He scrambled to his feet and bolted away, running for the West Hellas border as fast as his legs could carry him. As far as our mission was concerned, this wasn’t really such a bad thing for him to do. If he made it across the border safely, then this would have been a success by definition.
Andrew called “Clear!” and Andrea dove out of the field of fire. Andrew opened, and as she shouldered her weapon and joined him, I saw the torn pleximesh skin on her hands and the exposed, scarred metal beneath. Her prosthetics gave her enough strength to stand face-to-face against the Erinyes, but they couldn’t last. Graphene and silica were no match for nanosuit plating and, unlike the nanosuit, her prosthetics couldn’t self-repair.
I spun in Veraldi’s direction and fired a burst at the clawed Erinys, causing it to pause for just a moment and turn in my direction. Vincenzo took that opportunity to go on the offensive, slashing with his trophy talons. His attacks were precise. Far more precise than I would have considered possible under combat conditions.
I spun again and shot the primate in the back as it went after Sasha Ivanovich. Our overlapping fire forced it into a clumsy hobble, and it eventually stumbled, falling to one knee. I ran a few steps to get closer, planning to level my weapon at its head and shoot it from point-blank range.
Unfortunately, the primate wasn’t anywhere near as badly hurt as I had hoped. It spun around as I got in close, knocking my SMG to the side. Now it was my turn to trip, and Iost my balance with the force of impact. The Erinys grabbed my leg and tossed me through the air as if I weighed nothing. I flew across the bridge, losing all sense of where I was in space. I hit something hard and realized it was Vincenzo and the clawed Erinys as we all three went over the edge.
The fall felt like it took days, a drop I would have expected to be fatal if I’d been in any condition to think at all. We hit the edge of a roof, and the centuries-old brickwork gave way beneath us. We smashed through some tile, then a terrace of some kind, then construction scaffolding.
Not surprisingly, it’s all fairly vague to me now. I can’t really say for sure exactly what we hit, but I’m fairly sure that’s what kept us alive. As every tier broke and crumbled beneath us, the speed of our drop decreased. When we hit the street, all three of us lay there stunned for a moment.
Things were dark down there in “Ol
d Hellas.” We were lying in one of the derelict streets in the ruins of an earlier stage of the city. They’d built the modern city right over the top, and the bridge that connected East and West was one of the only ways to get into the old ruins.
The clawed Erinys shook itself off and jumped to its feet with sickening speed. I grabbed up the submachine gun, ignored the fact that the shoulder strap was now twisted alarmingly around my neck, and shot at the thing in its center mass. In the dim light, accuracy would have to concede to precision.
It ducked sideways, dodging my shot just like on the train. As the Erinys skulked back and slowly circled, I had the unpleasant thought that it was waiting until I was out of ammunition. Veraldi pulled himself to his feet somehow. He looked around for his blades, but both talons had been knocked clear as we fell through the ruins of the old city.
“Any ideas?” I asked him. “She’s not a dumb animal.”
“That was already clear on the train.”
“If we aren’t smart about this, we’re dead. Do you have a weapon?”
He stood and picked up a reinforcing bar from the collapsed construction site. He held it in front of himself like a spear. “I do now.”
Keeping my weapon trained on the Erinys, I stepped to the right as Veraldi went left. Giving each other space meant it would have to choose a target and couldn’t attack the both of us at once. It must have realized that, because it held back.
“How many rounds do you have?” Veraldi asked, his voice barely above a whisper.
“Last mag, twelve or sixteen shots left.”
“Twelve or sixteen?”
“I’m not sure. I swapped weapons.”
He tightened his grip around the makeshift spear. “Single-round bursts. Time your fire to my attacks.”
