by Ben Weaver
“You’ll get used to it.”
Halitov aimed his particle rifle at a conventional lock on one of three roof access hatches. The hatch blew inward. With his rifle at the ready, he shifted warily inside, down a narrow staircase. I motioned for Rainey to follow him, then hazarded a final glance at the facility my battalion had been charged with protecting. Fires raged from nearly every building within view, and at least a half dozen hangars now lay in twisted, burning piles of steel and quickcrete. To the south, a trio of ATCs jetted away, escorting a pair of civilian shuttles. The ATCs banked steeply to port, evading missile fire. I tensed as they rose higher, higher, then vanished into the clouds. “Go,” I whispered. “Go. Go.” But an echoing drumroll of multiple explosions made my heart sink, and a second later, fiery ribbons cut across the sky. I started for the hatch, hesitated, kept asking myself why. The Alliances had probably made a deliberate strike on that tawt drive in the hope of a core leak. Why were they wasting a valuable resource that they could have exploited? Later I would learn that all of Columbia Colony was ordered destroyed, including personal residences. The Alliances wanted to ruin our morale, and a massacre on the capitol world was just the ticket.
I hurried down the stairs and came into a wide corridor with a half dozen intersecting passages.
“Somebody said you have two little boys,” Halitov called to Rainey.
“That’s none of your business,” she said, tentatively touching the wall with a finger covered by her combat skin.
“You risked your life for a story?” he asked. “What about your kids? They don’t count?”
“Look, you saved my life back there—”
“And I’ll save it again,” he said.
“Right. So I owe you a thanks. No personal explanations. No insights. That’s it.”
“We can stay, chat, probably die,” I said, shuffling past them.
“I’m walking point,” cried Halitov, jogging ahead of me.
He was skinned up. I didn’t argue. We charged on, and I played navigator, directing him down the first two corridors toward another stairwell.
It had been a while since he and I had utilized our infantry hand signals, but they had been cerebroed into our memories, and when we reached the stairwell door, he raised a finger for halt. We hugged the wall on either side of the door, and with a start, he swung it open, rolled and pointed his particle rifle into the well.
A flash of light blinded me, and an explosion rattled me to the marrow. Halitov flew past me and collided with the opposite wall, his combat skin alive with tendrils of energy threatening to reach his flesh. Rainey screamed.
I rolled into the doorway, came face to face with an Alliance Marine gripping an unfamiliar weapon not unlike our QQ90 particle rifles but with a much larger muzzle. He was about to fire. I willed myself behind him, my Ka-bar already coming up to penetrate his combat skin, my other hand directing my rifle up to knock his away. Simultaneously, another round exploded from his weapon and hit the ceiling as I thrust my knife into his back and pierced his heart. He dropped as shattered rafters swung down on us. I bolted left, away from the debris, then slipped back into the corridor.
Halitov looked winded but all right, the ghost of his combat skin fading behind him. He had escaped from the weapon the same way I had from the airjeep’s cannon. Unconditioned soldiers would not fare as well against that device.
“How did you do that?” Rainey asked him. “I’ve never seen anything like—”
“That’s classified. And if we make it out of here and you do put it in a story, I guess the Wardens might be a little upset over that.”
She frowned. “Whoa. I’m threatened.”
“You up there?” came an electronically modulated voice from the stairwell. “Abandon your weapons and come down with your hands on your heads.”
“That’ll be the platoon sergeant,” said Halitov.
“Stay here,” I told Rainey, then motioned for Halitov to join me in the well.
“You’re going to kill them, all of them, aren’t you,” Rainey called after us.
“Nah, we’ll leave one for you,” Halitov snapped.
As we shifted stealthily down the stairs, I played a mental game to purge the guilt I was already feeling. I thought of my brother and Jing. I thought of my father, somewhere out there on Kennedy-Centauri. I wanted to see all of them again. And those Marines waiting for us on the next landing stood in my way. I turned myself into a stoic machine, working to the rhythm of my pulse.
“Time?” I asked Halitov.
“Thirty-three minutes, nineteen seconds.”
“I want this path clear,” I told him. “I want it clear right now.”
“Hell yeah,” he said, getting pumped up.
“You mean yes, sir!”
“That, too.”
Twin pops resounded as we hit the well. Vizi canisters rolled inside, spraying a thick, emerald cloud of the poisonous gas. Halitov’s skin would protect him, but Rainey had mine. I remembered the time Halitov and I had been struck unconscious by Losha gas. We had resigned to the defeat. I took a last breath and told myself no, I’m not going to accept this. With that, I tried something new. I manipulated the bond between the particles of that gas, and in doing so, I imagined a combat skin covering my body and protecting my lungs.
“Scott,” Halitov shouted, trying to grab my arm—but his hand rebounded.
“I’m all right,” I said, grinning in amazement.
“The quantum bond, huh? Whatever works,” he said, then vanished into a wall of smoke.
Someone grunted. Sounds of boots shuffling. The gas still hissing. A collapse. Another grunt. Halitov swore.
A Marine came at me from the smoke, a particle pistol blazing. Given the absences of my combat skin, the soldier assumed he had me, then he did a double take as the rounds struck my thought-inspired shield and melted.
I raised my rifle, locked a bead on his head, and held down the trigger until his skin dissolved. I jerked my head away as his scream broke into a gargle, then nothing.
When I turned back, the world darkened around the edges. I couldn’t hold out for much longer. I rushed into the smoke, searching wildly for a corridor, someplace, anywhere away from the deadly fumes. I was so intent on finding a sanctuary that the eleven Marines who attacked me fell one after another in a blur of death. I shot them, stabbed them, broke their necks, their backs, drove their noses into their brains. And the blood drenched my utilities as the quantum combat skin faded.
Dizzy, nauseous, my legs wobbling, I staggered into a tunnel marked SUBPASSAGE A7, took a glance at a line of little hovers waiting like golf carts at a club. “Rooslin!” I called. “Over here.”
I leaned on one of the small vehicles, then tentatively pulled my thoughts away from the bond and chanced the air. There was something there, something faint. We had to move quickly, but I was exhausted.
After a moment, he came rushing forward, literally dragging Rainey with him.
“Oh, god,” she said, wincing at me.
I touched my cheek, and my fingers came up bloody.
“You getting all this,” Halitov said to her, his eyes wide, his tone maniacal. “You getting all this okay? You like this, huh? Good story for you?”
“Shut up!” she cried, her eyes swollen with tears. “Just shut up!”
I raised my brows at Halitov. “Time?”
“Twenty-one minutes.”
“Can we make it?” Rainey asked.
I just looked at her. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know. Well can you answer this: How do we know there’ll be a ride waiting for us? I mean, you can’t contact them, right?”
“Every escape pad has a pair of underground hangars. They’re pretty well hidden. We’ve stowed a half dozen SRTCs in each,” I explained. “They’re high-speed fighters carrying minimal weapons. They’re the best evac craft we have.”
“But if the Marines get to them first?”
I hardened my gaze.
“Then I hope for your family’s sake that you have good life insurance.”
“Aw, shit, what now,” Halitov groaned as a pair of Alliance Anti-Personnel Drones whirred toward us, their whiskers fluctuating, their spherical shells beaming in the bright tunnel lights.
“They’ve wised up,” I said. “They won’t waste troops. They’ll wear us down with the drones.”
“Wear us down?” Halitov said. “I doubt that.”
Before he could launch into his attack, one drone got off a quick shot. My gaze darted around the room, searching for the impact of that round. There was no ricochet. Nothing. Had I not been covered in so much blood, I wouldn’t have recognized the obvious. The sting finally came. My mouth fell open. I looked to Rainey, who realized what had happened. “He’s been hit,” she yelled.
But Halitov was already airborne, sliding toward the drones in a shoru that would abruptly take him below then behind them. In the second it would take them to swivel, he would reverse engineer them the hard way. But as he shot below, he craned his head toward Rainey, distracted by her call. The drones exploited the opening and fired pointblank, sending him into a wild tumble toward the rear wall.
With an ominous click, they swiveled their guns around, toward Rainey and I.
“What do I do?” she asked. “What do I do?”
I wanted to answer, but I could barely move through all the pain. My particle rifle lay at my feet. I reached for the bond, but mental fingers grasped nothing. Shit. I would be killed by a soulless automaton. At the very least, I wanted my killer to feel something, anything, over my death.
Rainey lifted her palms and edged back toward me.
The drones glided slowly forward. Halitov came out of his spin and crashed onto the floor. One drone swung toward him, the other kept on us.
“Just stay here,” she muttered, then turned and shocked me.
3
Clearly, Ms. Elise Rainey had trouble with the damsel in distress role that Halitov and I had foisted upon her. She was, after all, a war correspondent, had probably seen her share of bloodshed and had escaped from more than one precarious situation. But those facts were easy to forget when you looked at her lithe form and civilian clothes and when you listened to the dread in her voice.
Which was why my mouth fell open as she threw herself in front of me, the drone’s cannon expelling so much automatic particle fire that I swore her skin would never hold.
But she understood exactly what was happening, drove herself toward the drone, reached up, and grabbed the thing by its whiskers. The drone took off, carrying Rainey with it. She flew through the air as though gripping a possessed beach ball. The drone carried her toward the wall, then veered sharply, hoping to shake her off. But Rainey threw her legs out, tugging the drone back toward the wall where it smashed violently against the hard steel and heaved a shower of sparks.
Meanwhile, Halitov had made a flying leap toward his drone, and in a display as deadly as it was comical, he gripped the thing between his legs. The drone struggled to remain airborne, even as its cannons directed twin streams of particle fire right into his crotch. Halitov rode that drone as though it were a wild bull, one hand gripping the base of a whisker, the other struggling to jam a particle rifle into a small panel on the drone’s face. Even as Halitov fired, Rainey’s drone dropped hard and rolled across the floor, shedding more sparks in its wake. Then Halitov blew apart his drone’s panel. His mouth opened as he realized that he now plummeted some three meters toward the floor. He could have leapt off the drone, but for some reason he hung on. The drone hit first and blew free of his legs, as he fell off and tumbled onto his side.
Rainey charged over to him, offered her hand, which he ignored, saying, “Take off that tac and give it to him.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Let me borrow it for a moment.”
She hurried to me, and I helped her remove the bracelet. Once I had it around my wrist, I activated the skin, and the tac’s computer switched to medical mode to stabilize my wound. I would still need surgery to remove the round, but the skin’s lasers would prevent me from bleeding out and protect the wound from infection.
“How long is that going to take?” Halitov asked, glancing warily ahead, expecting more drones to pursue us.
I checked a databar in my HUV. “About forty-five seconds.”
He nodded, then shoved Rainey by the shoulder. “Stay behind me.”
She leered at him but complied.
“Hey,” I called to her. “Thanks.”
“Look, to be honest, I really don’t give a shit about you. You’re just my map out of here. Okay?”
I wasn’t offended. In fact, I even smiled. “Okay.”
“Come on, come on,” Halitov urged, beginning to pace.
“All right,” I said, switching off the skin, then returning the tac to Rainey. I stood, grimaced over the smoldering fire in my shoulder, then turned back to the hover I had been leaning on. I climbed into the little transport, bypassed the controls with access codes cerebroed into my brain, then started the engine as Halitov and Rainey climbed into the backseat. The hover had no windows, no roof, no weapons, but it would save us from having to run all the way down to Delta pad.
The whir of more Alliance drones drew closer, and I jammed the accelerator arm forward. Halitov jerked back and leveled his particle rifle on the new pursuers, even as Rainey, who had been gripping my weapon, pointed it over Halitov’s shoulder.
“Do I just pull this trigger?” she shouted.
“USM’s off,” I told Halitov, explaining that anyone could now fire the weapon.
“You want to know how to use that, sweetheart?” Halitov began, hollering over the report of his own weapon. “Hit that button. That’s the safety.”
“Got it.”
“What are you waiting for? Fire!”
She did, but behind us, five drones fanned out, evading our attack as their cannons extended.
An intersection lay ahead, and while the swiftest path to Delta lay beyond it, I opted for a detour in order to lose our mechanical fan club. As we neared the corner, I jerked the control stick left, banking hard. We buzzed around the corner, and Rainey shouted something, though salvos of particle fire stole her words.
“What?” I cried.
“He fell out!” she yelled.
I craned my neck, and there was Halitov, lying on the floor behind us, the five drones swarming him as though he had rattled their nest. He scrambled to his feet and took off running.
“He can’t catch up!” Rainey cried.
“Oh, yes he can,” I said. But I knew that if Halitov found the bond, he would rocket right toward us. I eased back on the throttle a bit. He reached us, then threw himself onto the small trunk compartment. As he crawled toward his seat, the drones narrowed the gap, their cannons locked on to the hover.
When I hit the accelerator arm, I thought I had triggered an explosion, but I hadn’t. A round of particle fire had blown apart one of our turbines. The control stick felt mushy, and the hover slowed as we reached another intersection, the tunnel cutting thirty-degrees across our path. I fought to bring us around that corner, and once there, I hit the brakes. “This thing is tommyed.”
Halitov and Rainey bailed out and took up positions behind the hover, just as the five drones glided around the corner.
Though significantly weakened, I had to do something more than huddle there and turn over my fate to Halitov and Rainey. I imagined myself inside the lead drone, my fingers plucking out the thing’s protein CPU. My vision fogged for a moment, but when it cleared that drone fell and skittered across the floor like an errant bowling ball.
With a mild grin, I took on the second drone, but this time when my vision fogged, it grew darker, and, damn it, I passed out.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m terrific. I can’t think of another place I’d rather be. How ’bout you?”
“All right, wiseass. You must be tired by now. Come on. We’ll stop.”
>
“Sounds great. We can hang around for the last eleven minutes of our lives.”
The voices echoed and faded in and out of each other as I grew aware of a strong pressure across my chest. My eyes snapped open, and I found myself slung across Halitov’s back. I wasn’t sure where we were. The quickcrete was damp, the lighting poor. Had we already reached Delta pad?
“Rooslin,” I called softly, barely recognizing my own voice.
He slowed and gingerly slid me off his back. Thankfully, he gripped my shoulders because the ground felt spongy, though it appeared firm, and I nearly fell back, into Rainey. “Time?”
“About ten minutes, but we’re almost there,” he answered, lifting his chin toward the distance. “The hangars are just past that hatch.”
Halitov had taken us in the back way, through maintenance shafts spanned by bundled draperies of pipes and wires. Light filtered in from a huge, open hatch about two hundred meters ahead.
“Can you walk?” Rainey asked.
“Yeah,” I said, staggering forward.
She gripped my wrist and tugged me on as Halitov jogged ahead on point. After a moment, she sighed heavily. “I guess there’s no way to contact my boys.”
“They’ve cut us off. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right. It was my decision to stay behind and cover the attack.”
“What were you thinking?”
“I was thinking Pulitzer. Now I’m thinking idiot.”
“No, now you’re thinking stay alive.” I reached out to grab the wall as the floor suddenly shifted, or at least it felt so.
“Major, I, uh, I don’t know how to tell you this, but you’re looking…I don’t know. I mean, I figured you for forty, but—”
“Must be the stress,” I said, averting my gaze.
“They did something to you, didn’t they.”
“Who’s they?”
“They did something with your conditioning, right? I’ve heard rumors about Guardsmen and Wardens who’ve been messed up. Those rumors are true, aren’t they.”
“Do me a favor and switch out of reporter mode for a moment, okay?”
