The Way of Death

by James Von Ohlen

  As he moved to the door, only a few steps behind the twins who always stayed between Gavin and everyone else, no surprise showed itself. No arrows, flames, tanks, guns, or death from orbit claimed them. They simply closed silently on the single door that was visible.

  Varg and Virgil made no noise, the boots of the others crunched softly in the sand and stone beneath them. A soft breeze carried cold air over them. Reiji realized that he didn’t see Gavin’s mechanical horse. Perhaps it had been left somewhere safer.

  “Now,” Gavin whispered, but spoke loudly enough for all to hear. “We reach a crossroads. We may have to cut the door down with a torch or knock it down with explosives. That will undoubtedly signal our presence to the men inside. I want every man ready to fight immediately.”

  The few blades that weren’t already at hand were drawn and gripped tight. Men shifted their weight nervously from one foot to another. One of the twins placed a large pack on the ground and Gavin knelt and sifted through its contents.

  “Hold for a moment,” Reiji said and Gavin looked up at him. Reiji strode to the door, feeling around the edges and finding the small scanner he sought. Reaching into a pocket, he retrieved the ID badge from the slain sentry. He passed it over the scanner and it beeped once accompanied by a click within the door as it unlocked.

  Reiji gripped the handle and pulled lightly. The door opened smoothly without sound, swinging outwards. Gavin ignored the pack and rose to his feet, lifting his blade to the ready and signaling for the twins to move through the door.

  Reiji stepped aside as the two towering monsters passed through, still unarmed as far as he could see. He looked back to Gavin who signaled to him. “With me,” was clearly what the hand signals meant. Reiji watched the other men file through the now open door, following the lead of the twins. Finally Gavin approached and motioned for Reiji to move ahead of him.

  Through the doorway the building maintained the appearance of being not much more than an industrial warehouse. Walls of sheet metal, not quite reaching halfway to a high ceiling beyond, formed a long corridor with chicken-wire windows peering into dimly lit rooms beyond. There was nothing to show how many men might be within or what business they might be about.

  Muffled voices rose somewhere within the warehouse, out of sight. There was no telling what was being said, but it sounded far from urgent. Men froze ahead of Reiji as someone laughed and then began speaking loudly.

  “Another hand? We need some new cards. Maybe a different pattern on the back that you haven’t memorized. I’m getting tired of losing half my shift pay to you every time we play.” Footsteps on metal flooring sounded loudly, approaching from around a distant corner. “I’m going to the mess to grab a beer.”

  Drinking on duty? Reiji found himself wondering if everything he’d heard about the Cent-Sec scouts was utter bullshit. What kind of rank amateurs did shit like that? In the dim light ahead of Reiji, he could see one of the twins moving forward. For such a large, well… whatever the fuck he was, he moved with utmost silence. Not a sound from his advance reached back to Reiji’s ears.

  Varg, or possibly Virgil, Reiji thought, leaned against the wall, almost perfectly matching its surface with his bulk. Some type of optical camouflage must be at work. He found himself pondering how much something like that would cost.

  The footsteps drew closer and closer, eliciting the nervous exchange of glances among the crew. Hands gripped weapons tighter and bodies became tense. Gavin signaled to the remaining member of the twins who signaled back to the men behind him. Something along the lines of step back and be quiet, but Reiji couldn’t tell exactly what it was supposed to mean.

  A shaggy head showed around the corner and eyes grew wide with surprise as the Cent-Sec scout saw the group of cutthroats lying in wait for him. His mouth moved to open and shout a warning, but the twin’s massive hands reached out like lightning from the shadows and closed around the scout’s mouth and throat. The unfortunate man was lifted from the ground where his feet thrashed for all of two seconds before his neck was broken with a flick of the wrist.

  The twin held the man aloft for a few more seconds as his body twitched and then gently laid him to the floor against the wall in a sitting position. To a casual observer he would be passed out drunk, but the ruse wouldn’t last long if someone noticed the unnatural angle that his head hung at.

  Deathlike silence reigned in the hallway as no one dared to move or speak. Gavin finally broke the spell when he produced a small data slate and panned it all directions ahead of him. He signaled something to the twins and they each motioned for half of the crew to follow them. In seconds the hallway was empty and the faint sounds of movement were fading from Reiji’s ears. He looked back to Gavin, waiting for his instructions.

  Was this why he had been brought here? To wait by the door in case someone tried to run and summon help? This was work for a common thug, not a warrior of his caliber. His eyes bored a hole into Gavin who smirked back at him as if the man could read Reiji’s thoughts. Finally Gavin leaned forward, close enough that Reiji could smell the man’s unique scent, and whispered to him.

  “With me.”

  The man began moving down the hallway at a good pace, but managing to remain silent. Reiji kept up with him, but just barely. He didn’t dare move any faster for fear of giving away his presence and position to an unknown number of enemies with unknown armament.

  Three paths presented themselves to the men of Gavin’s crew. Each of the twins had taken about a half dozen men with them down separate paths. That left the one path for Gavin and Reiji to take. Gavin replaced the data slate within a concealed pocket on his jacket and drew his own sword, wielding it for the first time Reiji had seen outside of cutting the farmer’s hands from his wrists.

  Despite the appearance of his age, the man moved light on his feet with a strength that was hard to miss. Quick and sure in his movements. The broadsword was held at low-guard as he advanced. There was no uncertainty in his path. The man seemed to know exactly where he was going.

  Reiji moved behind him, both blades drawn and his grip on Little Brother reversed so that the spine of the blade pressed firmly against the exposed flesh of his forearm. The tip extended a short distance beyond his elbow, like a natural weapon that had grown out of his arm. Useful at short range, in Reiji’s experience.

  The sheet metal corridor wound its way deeper into the warehouse, passing by doors made of bars and locked like old time prisons. Each room had various crates stacked in it. Supplies and who knew what else for the scouts. Perhaps leftovers from the days when the facility had been built and seen use for its intended purpose, whatever that may have been.

  After what seemed to be several hours, though probably no more than a minute or two in Reiji’s estimation, Gavin stopped near a solid door and motioned for Reiji to stand at the ready before it. He shifted his grip on his sword to one-handed and produced the data slate from his jacket once more.

  Gavin’s fingertips danced across the tiny screen for a few seconds before he placed it back in his pocket and adjusted his grip on his weapon. He stepped away from the wall and took a few paces back from the door, looking it over intently.

  “There are two men in this room,” he began in a whisper. “When I open the door, I want you to kill both of them.”

  Reiji nodded once and waited for Gavin to move. The pair sat still and silent in the dimly lit corridor. Somewhere inside the warehouse a man screamed and was cut short. Movement sounded from the other side of the door and Gavin stepped forward, delivering the mother of all stomps to the door near the small locking mechanism.

  The door and the lock held firm, but the frame failed and the whole construct went crashing inward to the floor. Reiji was stepping over the edge of it before it touched the ground, looking for targets and finding both.

  To their credit, they were quick. Each moved without hesitation towards their weapons, and one even reached his blade before Reiji reached him. The first was impa
led through the lower back and out the stomach with Kai while Little Brother cut through the base of his neck from behind. The man’s spine was severed, but a thick flap of skin and muscle held his head on and prevented it from rolling away from his body as he collapsed.

  Reiji turned to face the remaining man just in time to turn aside a series of swipes from a wide blade with a rounded tip. The way the man swung it made the blade seem like it was weighted. For chopping and slashing. Likely for executions, but this man moved with it like a weapon for the battlefield. Reiji moved out of the way of an incoming blow and attempted a riposte that got him kicked in the groin.

  Pain shot up through his abdomen, but mostly he felt rage. Such a thing was far from uncommon in his line of work, but he’d forgotten the Kevlar codpiece he usually wore in his haste to make it out of the city alive. If he didn’t get his act together, bruised and swollen testicles were going to be the least of his worries.

  The Cent-Sec scout swung the blade around again in a wide arc that sent furniture crashing and electricity sparking from equipment that Reiji didn’t recognize. Men yelled somewhere else in the warehouse and blades clashed in the distance. The scout recovered quickly from the overextension of his attack and changed direction, tearing a hole through sheet metal when Reiji failed to stay in place and die, no doubt as the other man had been expecting him to do. Sorry to disappoint, Reiji thought as he took a single lightning fast lunge forward, his head passing mere centimeters under the swung blade, and gutted his opponent with Kai.

  The large blade clanged to the ground and the man fell to his knees. In the past Reiji had seen men wounded in such a way begin screaming and trying to keep their intestines from spilling until they passed out from loss of blood or pain. This one ignored the blood and guts pouring out of his split abdomen and began trying to rise back to his feet, even managing to take a step in the direction of his sword.

  “Not bad,” Reiji muttered in admiration. This one had some balls. And that was the highest praise he’d given another man in quite some time. “I’ll give you a clean death. You deserve it.” The scout slipped and fell to a knee. Kai flashed and his head rolled from his shoulders as his body slumped to the ground.

  Reiji performed the chiburi with both Kai and Little Brother and then placed them back into their sheaths, more out of habit than anything else. Gavin stood impassively in the broken doorway, simply watching. There was one final shout of defiance in the distance and then the sound of someone or something crashing to the ground and then the warehouse was silent.

  Reiji ignored Gavin as he finally stepped into the room, instead choosing to fully take in his surroundings. The room seemed like some type of maintenance area. Electrical equipment and a wide variety of tools lay strewn about the many countertops and tables. Looking down to the two dead men, their uniforms were slightly different than the Cent-Sec scouts Reiji had seen in the past.

  Something he had seen, only very briefly and in passing during the fight, now leapt out in his mind. An unusual color on the dead men’s uniforms. A strange array that struck him as not right.

  He knelt and picked at the shoulder patch of the second scout fallen in the fight, taking care to not slip on the blood pooled and still spreading along the metal floor. Reiji moved it so that he could read what was written within the coat of arms there. A metal clad fist stood upright and clenched in the center, holding a bolt of lightning. Above the fist was the word ‘MOBILE’ and below stood the word ‘INFANTRY’.

  It took a second to register what that might mean. Reiji had never seen a member of the unit before. At least not in person. Only in news broadcasts showing the elite troops that protected the ruling council and dealt with serious threats to Cent-Com hegemony. Powerful enemies that Overlord didn’t deal with. But here this man was, flesh and blood, when they were known for their armor as much as their skill with weapons.

  Not simple plate of old alloys like most Cent-Sec soldiers wore. That would serve a man well in a fight against street thugs, but against a nanoforged weapon those alloys were of little more use than paper.

  These guys were supposed to be the best of the best. The cream of the crop. And they were equipped accordingly. They spent years training to use powered exoskeletons that made them invulnerable to virtually everything that Lexington could throw at a man in a fight. Like superpowered versions of the plate-clad knights of old. Like living versions of the up-armored samurai form that the ancestors took to make training bouts more difficult.

  Reiji turned his head slightly to see Gavin standing over him, looking down at the patch as well. He’d moved within arms’ reach without making a sound. Like the twins. Did that say something about whether he was human or not?

  Gavin’s gaze shifted up and locked on something on the far side of the room. He raised a single hand and removed his sunglasses, still worn despite the low light levels in the warehouse. Definitely night vision equipment, Reiji concluded before turning his eyes to follow Gavin’s.

  There on the far side of the room, beyond a door of heavy steel bars like something out of a zoo filled with dangerous alien species, stood a darkened form. Far too large to be a man, towering over even the twins in its size. Two and a half meters tall, easily, and a width to match.

  A powered exoskeleton. The single most powerful weapon system left on the face of Lexington. Worth a fortune that could drown a dozen kings. If this was what Gavin had come for, his expenditure on the expedition now made perfect sense. He was about to be very, very rich. Or very, very powerful.

  Shadows shifted and Reiji saw more. Not one suit, but two. Standing in tandem.

  In the dim light Reiji could see the panels of the chest of the first opened like a clam shell, so that a person could enter and take command of the suit. As his eyes adjusted to the light, Reiji could make out more details of the suits. Thick cables carrying power and data emerged from the suits at various points and ran along the walls and ceiling of their cage to diagnostic equipment arrayed nearby.

  Blue and green lights danced in the air above the equipment like tiny ghosts or lost spirits. Their color likely indicating the active status of the suits. It was both a miracle of planning and timing or sheer luck that the two Mobile Infantry soldiers had not been suited up when Reiji and the rest of Gavin’s crew arrived. Had the suits been active, Reiji and all of the others, the inhuman twins included, would now be very, very dead.

  But the soldiers had not been prepared, and Reiji was not dead. Quite the opposite.

  “Is this it?” Reiji asked. “What we came here for?”

  Gavin stared at the exoskeletons for a moment before he looked back to Reiji. “I don’t think so. They’re worth a great deal, but they’re not so uncommon that finding two of them would provoke such secretive actions by Cent-Com. There must be something else.”

  Reiji followed the reasoning and agreed with it. There were likely a dozen or so suits in each city worth defending in the eyes of Cent-Com. Adding just two to a global total of several hundred would be unlikely to send a group of scouts into the desert on a secret operation to salvage them. That likely would have been carried out by a group of mechanics accompanied by riot tanks. And Cent-Com would have plastered the operation on the news so that everyone knew that they were growing stronger.

  Gavin stepped forward and looked at the cage the suits were being stored in. It looked to be forged from one solid piece of metal and was bolted to the floor of the warehouse in a few places. He turned back to Reiji and nodded his head once before leaving the room.

  Reiji followed until he entered a large dining hall. A few dead men lay scattered about the room, throats cut and otherwise silently eliminated. One of the twins entered the room as Gavin took a seat at one of the tables, followed by the men he’d led into the warehouse. Two limped heavily as they walked and another was bandaged about the abdomen. Wounded in the fight.

  The second of the twins showed himself within the minute, followed by the men he directed. All were unharm
ed and looked much happier in general than the other bunch. When the last man entered the room, Gavin stood. He conferred in low tones with Varg and Virgil, talking for a few minutes before he turned back to address the rest of his crew.

  “Wounded men, relax. Have a seat and a drink and we’ll see what we can do to help you recover.” The man almost smiled as he spoke. “Everyone else, you will be given a section of the perimeter to secure. You will hold the perimeter until you hear from me directly. In the meantime, Varg, Virgil, and I have business to tend to.”

  Reiji looked expectantly at Gavin, but the man ignored him and dismissed everyone after issuing his orders. Reiji found himself filing out of the door into the cold night as he snapped his night vision goggles into place. He was to return to the guard shack and monitor any incoming communications while Gavin and the twins ransacked the place, looking for who knew what. Simple enough, he thought.

  The wind drove bits and pieces of stinging sand into Reiji’s face as he trudged through the darkness with the others. Each man progressively growing further away from the others as he changed direction to find his assigned spot in the picket.

  The green-tinted waste gave way to the shape of the guard shack, growing larger in Reiji’s vision as he approached. He gripped Kai with both hands as he slowly pushed the door open, Little Brother returned to his sheath but always at the ready. There was no telling what surprises the room might hold.

  The sentry had been decapitated, so even if he was a regenerator, pumped full of nanobots that would repair damage to his body almost as fast as it occurred, he would still be dead. To the extent of Reiji’s knowledge there were no nanobots out there that could repair a wound like that. Still, being cautious tended to pay one back in dividends.

  He pushed the door open all the way and took in the room. The dead man still lay exactly where he had fallen. The artwork of his demise was still preserved in the unique spray and spatter of the lost blood across the walls, floor, and ceiling. Still soaked into Reiji’s clothes.