by Isaac Hooke
One moment the platoon was leaping over the black-caked buildings of a quiet, empty street, and the next the ground veritably seethed with activity. Alien crabs and slugs crawled everywhere below, competing for space among the smashed vehicles and other former accoutrements of urban living.
I suddenly wished the buildings were higher, because the aliens became utterly berserk below—they were acting in what I had heard described as “hive defense” mode. Their mandibles chopped frenetically at the air, and their whole bodies gyrated as if in time to some hidden song. Fresh slugs poured from the holes in the black substance coating the lower halves of the buildings. Crabs leaped upward en masse as we passed, trying to pluck members of the platoon from the sky. Launching from the backside of a very big slug, a couple of crabs nearly succeeded.
Our stealth was now gone, but that didn’t necessarily mean that we couldn’t complete the mission. The HS3s were still flying ahead, ready to provide us with the latest updates on the High-Value Target’s position once we were in range.
More than one slug launched its ponderous body skyward in an attempt to bash us from the air. We had to alter our flight path, expending precious fuel to avoid them.
“Uh,” Manic sent over the comm. “I thought this was supposed to be the path of least resistance?”
“Blimey!” Facehopper sent. “The battle space changes in real-time, you know that, mate. Dragon stirred them up bloody good when it passed.”
“Speaking of our SK friends,” Manic transmitted. “It would appear they’ve found themselves in a bit of a pinch.”
On the HUD map I saw the green dots of the HS3s strung out ahead of us. The drones indicated Dragon platoon was roughly thirty meters from the warehouse, where the High-Value resided. And judging from the red amassing around them, the SKs were pinned pretty good.
“We’ll come to their aid,” Facehopper answered. “After we reach Waypoint Chicago as planned. We should be within sight of Dragon once there.”
The blue trajectory I was following abruptly updated as Facehopper made adjustments.
“Note course changes,” Facehopper sent over the comm.
Continuing to vault from building to building, my platoon brothers and I made the necessary course corrections, and we ended up in a side street that had much less horde activity.
Waypoint Chicago was just ahead, on the rooftop of a twenty-story building, one of the tallest we’d come across so far. I thought it was an office building of some kind, judging from all the glass windows. The warehouse holding the High-Value Target was just beyond it, though hidden from view.
One by one my platoon members pushed off from a smaller apartment complex. Each man landed on the upper portion of the office tower, using the concrete ledges spaced every three stories to make their way toward the rooftop in jumpjet spurts.
Tahoe and I brought up the rear, jumping the ten-meter gap between ledges like pros. We landed on each ledge at the same time, then jumped and thrusted simultaneously. Our stabilizing jets countered the buffeting winds, which were quite strong at this height.
The rest of the platoon vanished from view on the rooftop above.
Tahoe and I were almost there. Only three more ledges between us and the rooftop . . .
Just as we landed on the third ledge from the top, the weight of the container abruptly shifted.
Tahoe had dropped his end.
In that moment, time seemed to slow, and through the glass I saw the stunned expression he gave me.
Blood dripped from his hand, and I realized he’d been shot.
The container moved downward, pivoting around my lone grip.
The three-meter cord that secured Tahoe to the container had somehow become tangled around his jetpack, and as his side descended, the carbon-fiber cord sheered right through his fuel canisters.
The cord reached its three-meter limit, and hauled Tahoe over the ledge.
The bottom of the container smashed into the side of the building.
I was dragged over the ledge, too.
I lost my grip on the handle, and the three-meter-long cord connecting my belt to the container stretched out.
I activated my jumpjet in an attempt to slow my descent. The cord grew taut, making a sound like a whip. My belt strained against the jumpsuit, wrenching me downward.
I managed to land on a lower ledge. Balancing there precariously, I went down on one knee, and flattened myself against the window.
The winds slammed me, combining with the drag from the container to nearly tear me from the ledge.
The cord turned, and the glass container scraped against the window three meters below me. Tahoe in turn dangled three meters underneath that, at the end of his own cord. The wind tossed him about, and he kept spinning around. Blood dripped from his wounded hand. The next ledge looked to be about five meters below him.
Much too far.
I tried reeling in the cord. However, even with the enhanced strength of my jumpsuit, I couldn’t pull both Tahoe and the container up against the force of gravity.
I glanced down at the dizzying heights, steeling myself against the vertigo, wanting to fully gauge the situation. The crabs were swarming below, sensing an easy kill. Some of them had already started climbing the bulbous black substance affixed to the lower half of the office building. The substance ended about twenty meters below Tahoe.
I didn’t think the crabs could scale smooth glass. Still, with only a small ledge holding me up, and limited fuel in my jetpack, and a cord pulling down on me with the combined weight of Tahoe and a half-tonne container, I didn’t find that fact all too reassuring.
“Chief,” I transmitted. “We’ve hit a bit of snag. Could use some help here.”
“I’m sending Bender and Hijak to get you,” the Chief returned.
Tahoe and I started taking incoming fire from the fourth or fifth floor of the adjacent building. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly where—my aReal didn’t have enough data to trace the route back to potential sources, which would’ve helped the rest of the platoon snipe them.
“Chief, taking fire!” I sent.
“Doing what we can,” the Chief answered.
Below me, Tahoe had finally managed to stabilize himself against the glass, despite the buffeting winds.
But Tahoe’s next words hit me like a gunshot.
“I’m going to cut away,” Tahoe announced, reaching for the knife in his utility belt. “There’s no time for anything else. It’s the only way to save you and the package.”
If he did that, he’d never survive. A fall from this height without a working jetpack? The exoskeleton wouldn’t save him. He’d break every bone and pulp every organ in his body.
“Tahoe, hold!”
But he didn’t listen to me.
The fingers of his good hand wrapped around the knife hilt.
I’d already watched one friend die saving me.
And now I was about to watch another.
CHAPTER TEN
Shaw
After several more spectacular falls I finally got to the point where I could sprint relatively smoothly in the ATLAS 5. I ran in a practice circle, and when I hadn’t stumbled for a whole twenty minutes, Fan allowed me to carry him via the designated seat again. Maybe it wasn’t entirely trust that compelled him to sit there, because I also told him if he didn’t ride with me, I’d leave him behind. He’d already sent the location of his oxygen extractor to my aReal, so in theory I could run ahead and take it for myself, using the strength of my mech to haul it away. He’d have to trek to the next Forma pipe on his own and build himself another. Assuming his oxygen didn’t run out before then.
Of course, I wouldn’t have really ditched him like that. Just wasn’t my nature. Besides, I didn’t know if the extractor coordinates he’d given me were real or fake, so I couldn’t abandon him even if I wa
nted to.
Queequeg shadowed Battlehawk ten meters to my left, clipping along beside me. He loved it when I let him run like that. I didn’t blame him. There was something special about propelling yourself forward under the power of your own muscles, feeling the air burning in your lungs and the wind running through your hair. Okay, I supposed I myself wasn’t really operating under the power of my own muscles, not completely, and I didn’t actually feel the wind in my hair, but I certainly felt the burning in my lungs. I was working hard inside the inner cocoon of the mech, sprinting in place, suspended in the cockpit. The ATLAS 5 probably had an auto-run capability, but I preferred being in control.
Now that I had a mech, some new options for leaving the planet had opened up. The first involved tracking down the booster-rocket payloads that would have come down with the mechs. The payloads would be near the original landing site far to the north, and might take a week to reach at this speed. Since I had enough O2 now, instead of making my way toward Fan’s oxygen extractor, I could go north, retrieve the boosters, and launch myself into space.
Though there wasn’t much point in doing that, as Battlehawk didn’t have enough jumpjet fuel to actually go anywhere once I attained orbit. And where would I go anyway? There was no Gate, not anymore.
Unless . . . what if I waited until the Skull Ship made a reappearance? It had returned once before, since I’d crash-landed. The sky had filled with clouds that towered all the way to the heavens. A terrible storm had ensued and since I had been caught away from the shuttle, which still had power at the time, I was forced to take shelter in a sinkhole. An unpleasant encounter with the beasts had followed.
In any case, I had a theory that a Skull Ship appeared every four Stanmonths or so to refuel.
And it had been about four months since the last appearance.
But how would I get on board without being blasted from the sky?
That was a problem for another day.
But right now, there was something I needed to check. Something only Battlehawk could reveal to me.
“Voice projection off.” I didn’t want Fan to hear my next commands.
Battlehawk’s AI answered from somewhere deep within the cockpit. “Voice projection disabled.”
“Battlehawk, replay your archived audio and vid feeds for me, starting from the moment you landed on this planet.”
“Initiating video replay.”
The playback speed was 4x. I shrunk the video to one-fifth its original size, and moved it to the upper right of my Heads-Up Display as I ran.
On the video, I saw the members of Bravo platoon enter the excavation site and approach an ominous-looking shaft drilled into the darkness. The ATLAS 5s were too big for the shaft, so the pilots ejected and deployed the four mechs in a guard capacity.
The sixteen members of the platoon rappelled down the shaft.
Battlehawk scanned the now-empty excavation site. I saw giant dump trucks, monster mining shovels on treads, and the ever-present walls of Geronium, enclosing everything like a prison. The view kept returning to the shaft. Everything seemed calm. Lifeless.
Sometime later, two MOTHs emerged from the shaft—only two, out of the original sixteen. Kasper and Pyro. The spec-ops men hurried into the other mechs, and ordered Battlehawk and the remaining ATLAS to follow tight.
Crabs flowed out of the shaft as if from a disturbed hornet’s nest. The survivors fought them for a few minutes, but when it became clear the odds were overwhelming, the MOTHs fled toward the MDV.
A sinkhole opened up behind one of the dump trucks, and a white-hot slug barreled out, launching fresh crabs. More and more slugs emerged, carrying with them two hundred crabs each.
Man and machine fought side by side, MOTH and ATLAS versus crab and slug. But the enemy proved inexorable. For every two crabs that fell, five more appeared. Worse, blue Phants drifted en masse from the sinkhole, forming a deadly, impassable wall of vapor. While the crabs and slugs slowly closed on both flanks like a noose, the Phants approached head-on, immune to all the weaponry the ATLAS 5s threw at them.
Seeing them made me wonder why the Phants didn’t fight entirely on their own. They couldn’t be hurt, they killed all life and controlled all robots . . . maybe there weren’t enough of them. Or maybe the appearance of the slugs and crabs was some kind of swarm response built into the biological aliens.
Whatever the case, the way to the MDV was blocked.
The MOTHs fled.
The beasts harried and pursued them for the next few hours. At some point, a wave of dormant Phants arose in ambush from the landscape ahead, directly in front of the group. The two leading mechs made it through, but Battlehawk and the other ATLAS 5 became possessed.
The video feed became tinted blue. I paused the playback, and rewound, because I thought I noticed something odd about the possession incident. I resumed playback at normal speed.
What I saw was decidedly odd, but maybe not entirely unexpected. Shortly after possession, the two mechs looked down at their hands and body, as if they were experiencing what it was like to have arms and legs for the first time. Battlehawk took a tentative step, and nearly fell, just as I had foundered my first time. The mech took another wobbly step, and another. The possessed ATLAS 5 seemed like a baby struggling to walk for the first time.
Crabs and slugs tore past Battlehawk and the other mech, giving the pair a wide berth, apparently sensing the Phants within. When the alien horde was gone, Battlehawk and the other mech resumed exploring their new bodies.
I set the playback speed to 4x once again, and watched as the mechs advanced from wobbly steps all the way up to full-blown sprints. Battlehawk’s owner soon became proficient in using its jumpjets and full complement of weapons. The Phant nearly blew its own mech up when it stupidly pointed a rocket launcher at its vision sensors—I was reminded of a child who had discovered a pistol in his father’s dresser. Peering down the gun barrel was always the best thing for the child to do, right? Luckily, the Phant steered the weapon aside right before pulling the trigger, and the rocket streaked harmlessly past. However, the discharge obviously frightened the possessing Phant, because it threw the mech’s arm outward as if trying to rid itself of serpent launcher and arm alike.
Eventually, Battlehawk returned to the excavation site with the other mech. Crouching near the rim, the two mechs secretly observed a new party of men loitering within the site.
It was the MOTHs of Alfa platoon, returned from their failed mission to find Bravo.
Near them, where the shaft used to be, remained only a collapsed crater. All the MOTH weaponry was pointed at that crater, waiting for something to emerge. Expecting something to.
The video feed began to wobble slightly, and I thought the ground was shaking.
The platoon ran toward the opposite rim of the excavation site, weaving between the giant trucks.
The sole mech with Alfa platoon remained behind, buying the others time.
It was Hornet.
Rade’s ATLAS 5.
I stumbled and fell.
“Chòu sān bā!” Fan said. The crash hurled him some meters ahead of me. He hadn’t buckled up again, despite my insistence. “Again you fall!”
I ignored him. My attention was focused entirely on the vid. I enlarged it to take up the full screen, and slowed the playback to 1x.
Battlehawk and the other possessed mech assumed a position behind one of the dump trucks, and eventually engaged Hornet. I cheered for Rade the whole time, entranced. I was cheering against myself, because I felt like I was actually there, fighting him. It wasn’t a good feeling.
Go, Rade!
I knew he would win in the end, but still, not knowing how he would win, and watching how close to demise he came each time, was extremely nerve-wracking.
When a dump truck backed over Battlehawk, I exhaled in relief.
I n
ever thought I’d feel so glad to be run over in my life.
The vision feed blinked out, and when it cut in again, Battlehawk was no longer at the excavation site. The mech had been dragged inside a hangar bay of some kind. I could see the dome-shaped buildings of an SK outpost beyond the bay doors.
Battlehawk’s vision was no longer blue-tinged and had returned to normal.
Rade’s mech was gone. Well, I already knew what happened next. Alejandro would be dead by now. And with him, a part of Rade.
I closed my eyes, remembering the shared grief, and the days spent comforting Rade when he returned. Well, those days were long gone now. I had to focus on the here and now, on outcomes I could affect, rather than those I could not.
I concentrated on the vid feed. Around Battlehawk, Weaver-like robots worked, fixing the damaged mech. The robots weren’t possessed as far as I could tell. I didn’t see any of the characteristic vapors that would’ve betrayed the presence of Phants in the smaller robots.
I increased the playback speed to 8x. The repair robots eventually moved away, clearing the way for the approach of a Phant. Battlehawk’s self-defense algorithms activated. It loaded its Gatling guns and attempted to fire at the glowing blue mist, to no avail.
The ATLAS 5 became possessed once again.
The mech moved south along the rocky plains, sprinting at near its maximum speed. I switched the playback to 32x, and watched the time indicator scroll past. A few days of constant running later, Battlehawk reached the Main Rift. At least I thought it was the Rift, given the sprawling canyons and towering rock formations.
I slowed the playback speed to 8x as Battlehawk approached a very large sinkhole, the largest I’d ever seen, about as wide and long as a football stadium. Despite the vast size of the hole, none of the alien beasts were present.
The possessed mech went inside, lighting the way with its headlamps.
Navigating the circular tunnels and jagged caves, the mech reached a small natural cavern of sorts. An odd-looking metallic disc was embedded in the cave floor. Fibonacci spirals etched the surface.
