The Tin Soldiers (Final Dawn, Book 5)

by T W M Ashford

  Nobody in the stadium dared move, not even the automata battalion.

  And then the LX-14s opened fire.

  Laser bolts tore through the stands, killing some crowd members and maiming others. People cried out over the sound of screaming energy rounds. Blood ran through the stands and rained down on the muddy pitch. Everybody panicked. Jack watched as a small rodent close to the bottom of the stand got trampled underfoot, crushed in the rush before anyone could notice his outstretched hand.

  Now Jack had an idea for what they should do.

  They should run.

  Dev was already down at the security door, swatting his keycard against the scanner. They were lucky nobody else in the audience had noticed their private exit yet. Jack called down to him.

  “Hold that door, Dev,” he begged. “Don’t go leaving us behind.”

  Dev dragged the door open, slipped out, and then leaned back through the crack to keep it from swinging shut. He winced. It must have been as heavy as it looked.

  “Hurry!”

  “Give him a hand,” Jack said to Tuner. “I’ll get the others.”

  He jogged back to the end of the partition and felt his head grow faint. The whole stadium was so… busy. The panicked crowds ran in every direction, both inwards and out, clambering over bodies and throwing each other out of the way in their bid to reach the safety of the exit tunnels. All the while, the LX-14s steadily and emotionlessly marched outwards from the centre.

  He couldn’t see Rogan or Klik anywhere.

  A laser bolt tore into the wall of the spectator stand to Jack’s right, leaving a black and warped patch of silicone in its wake. He ducked down and squinted through the mad throng. Showers of mud and smoke only added to the hysterical cyclone.

  “Rogan?” he cried out. “Klik?”

  Nothing.

  Surely they knew how to get back to the partition. Rogan had a supercomputer for a brain – it wasn’t like her to lose her bearings, not in the way a human might. And even though her suit left her unable to deploy her blades, Klik was more than capable of holding her own against any of the more “desperate” survivors out there.

  Something must have happened to them.

  He tried calling out again – louder this time, enough to crack his voice – but still got no response.

  “Oh, goddammit,” he croaked, before gritting his teeth and pushing his way into the stampede.

  Protecting his exposed head with his hands, Jack tried to remember exactly where he’d seen both of his crew members last. The barriers dividing the stands from the pitch had long been toppled, and, besides the crowd, he could barely make out anything beyond the mud beneath his feet and the stars drifting overhead.

  He couldn’t go after both Rogan and Klik. Not at the same time, at least. His mind raced, but he couldn’t collect his thoughts long enough to formulate a plan – not even a bad one. There was only time to search for one of them.

  He chose Klik. It’s what Rogan would have done.

  Somebody large and leathery barged into him from behind, causing him to stagger forwards with his arms outstretched. Jack knew that to fall in a crowd like this was a death sentence. He swore loudly and caught hold of a passing Krolak for balance. She shrugged him off, disgusted.

  “Klik!” He struggled to shout above everyone else’s screams. “Where are you, Klik?”

  A laser bolt tore through the Krolak standing on Jack’s left, showering his suit with reptile blood. For a second Jack froze as if he too had been hit, staring blankly through the gap in the crowd, and for that short second he saw them – a wall of LX-14s marching straight towards him, no remorse on their expressionless faces, their rifles firing to a steady, murderous beat.

  And then the tide of fleeing spectators rushed to fill the gap, and he was carried forward by the collective panic once more.

  “Klik?” His breaths came short and sharp, and the words even more so. “Come on, Klik, please…”

  His head started to spin. The whole space station took on a blurry, dreamlike quality. His knees trembled as if he were walking across an inflatable pool lilo and his skin became three sizes too small for his body.

  It was just so goddamn busy.

  Jack dropped to one knee. His chest grew tight. Suddenly he couldn’t breathe. The person behind him tripped up and smacked Jack in the back of the head, making him dizzier still. He clutched at the front of his space suit, trying to pry it loose, trying to cool down and let the air in.

  The heavy rumble of elephantine footsteps came rushing up behind him. Jack leaned forwards with one last wheezing breath and prepared to be trampled.

  A strong hand grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back onto his feet instead. Rogan’s chrome face swam into view.

  “Klik,” Jack gasped. “I tried… Where’s…?”

  “She’s over at the door with Tuner,” Rogan shouted as she dragged him back through the crowd. “You must have crossed paths with her without realising.”

  A wide-eyed Alpha Rhoden, who Jack suspected may have even been playing in the match before it got interrupted, came charging towards Rogan with his head down and horn pointing forward. Rogan raised a mechanical fist and the frightened ungulate changed course. His vision swimming, Jack shut his eyes. When he opened them again, he was back by the partition. After all that agitation, it turned out he hadn’t travelled very far at all.

  “Where’ve you been?” Klik asked as Jack slumped against the wall of one of the stands. He shook his head, too weak to try and explain.

  “Why are we still here?” he groaned, craning his neck to look at the security door. “Where’s Dev?”

  “He’s gone,” said Tuner, trying to hack the scanner. “The door won’t open.”

  “What?” Jack stumbled back onto his feet. “What do you mean, he’s gone?”

  “He left us behind,” Tuner said with a shrug. “Either the door’s gone into lockdown or he’s blocking us from the other side.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Jack ran his hands through his gunky hair. “And that’s why you never trust a human.”

  “There must be other exits,” said Rogan, scanning the stadium. “Other people are getting out. Not many, but some…”

  Jack stared back down the narrow partition. There were spectator tunnels, not to mention the backstage tunnel through which the LX-14s had entered. But most people still inside the stadium were dead, and the automata strike force was almost off the pitch. There was no way any of them could cross such a distance without being shot to pieces. He chewed his lip. Maybe Jack and Klik’s suits were robust enough to withstand a hit or two, but…

  Rogan pounded on the door hard enough to leave a dent.

  “Open up, you coward!”

  “Erm, guys?” Klik pointed up at the transparent dome above their heads. “How strong is that glass, do you reckon?”

  “Pretty strong,” Rogan replied distractedly, trying to punch her way through the metal. “They can’t have just any piece of wayward rock cracking it.”

  “How about a few dozen rockets?”

  Jack turned his attention upwards. Three identical attack ships had come to a stop about a hundred metres away from the stadium’s glass roof. All of their underwing missiles had descended from their hardpoint mountings and were primed to fire.

  “They Krolaks don’t want the LX-14s infiltrating the rest of the station.” He desperately pulled at the door alongside Rogan. “They’re cutting their losses and blowing the stadium!”

  “They’re hoping the LX-14s get sucked out when the dome depressurises,” said Tuner, spinning around in a panic. “But everyone else still in here will be pulled into the vacuum too…”

  “A small price to pay to protect the thousands of citizens who live and work downstairs,” said Rogan. She yanked the metal handle down so hard it snapped off in her hand. “How long do we—?”

  “About two seconds,” Klik shouted, diving towards the door.

  One of the attack ships launched a mi
ssile, which, given the lack of air resistance, reached the dome even sooner than Klik anticipated. There wasn’t so much a boom upon impact as there was an exaggerated wobble followed by the harrowing sound of cracking ice.

  And then the glass broke.

  Although the dome appeared to consist of a single, seamless pane spanning the whole of the stadium’s ceiling, it was actually assembled from a plethora of tiny, interlocking panels. This meant that the missile didn’t destroy the whole rooftop, but only a select part of it; the hexagonal segments outside of the immediate blast zone remained intact. There was no need to total the space station’s most profitable enterprise, after all.

  This wasn’t of great consolation to those still stuck inside the stadium, however.

  A section of dome about as big as the Adeona blew outwards with a sharp and short-lived snap. After that, the only sound Jack could hear was a deafening whistle as all the air in the stadium whooshed past him. His ears popped from the change in pressure. The world turned upside down around him, and then he lost all sense of weight altogether.

  He shot out his arm and grabbed one of the hydraulic pistons running down the door before the current could suck him out of the space station. Rogan and Tuner had already pinned themselves against its frame. Jack turned his head and, holding on for dear life, searched the partition for Klik. With a plummeting sense of icy doom, he believed she was gone… until he spotted her crawling across the floor beneath him, using the overflow grates as a ladder.

  Though it meant risking his own tenuous grip on the hydraulics, Jack reached out and grabbed her hand. It took a lot of straining, but together they managed to get Klik perched on the door beside him.

  “Take a deep breath,” he tried to tell her. “Any second now, we’re gonna run out of air.”

  But it was no use. All of the air was rushing past too quickly for sound to carry between them, no matter how hard he shouted. Besides, it wasn’t as if they could hold their breath forever. Nor would it help against the absolute-zero temperature that would soon infiltrate the exposed stadium.

  Without their helmets, Jack and Klik were going to die.

  Rogan turned her head to face Jack. Even having to squint through the punishing torrent of air, he could tell from her expression that she knew it too.

  He activated his mag-boots, even though the intense depressurisation made standing up straight frightfully painful, and glanced behind him. Doing so hurt his eyes almost as much as it did his back, so he quickly shut them and turned his head back to face the door. If he was going to die, he’d rather do it with his eyeballs still inside his skull, thank-you-very-much.

  At least what he saw in that short moment was somewhat reassuring; the Krolak counter-attack on the dome had had some modicum of success. Half of the LX-14s marching across the pitch had been yanked violently out of the hole in the dome as if by an invisible hand (though dozens of dying spectators had been sucked out along with them, and one LX-14 appeared to have survived and was crawling back across the glass, away from the shattered opening), whilst the rest were struggling to push any further forward. Many of the latter had lost their firearms, which at least rendered them mostly harmless at a distance.

  Jack felt the current around him grow weaker. He tapped Klik on the shoulder so she would see what he did, then took a deep gulp of air. She copied him. If she got anywhere near as little oxygen as he did, neither of them would last long.

  Still, suffocation might be preferable to what the LX-14s would do to them…

  Suddenly there came a heavy clunk behind the security door. With Jack and Klik’s mag-boots activated (and in Rogan and Tuner’s case, gripping the sides of the partition as tight as they could), they carefully stepped backwards. Jack waited with burning lungs as a series of industrial boinking sounds followed the first. Then, with a fresh burst of air, the door swung open.

  “Get inside,” Dev shouted through the rush of escaping atmosphere, “before the whole station gets sucked out with you!”

  The four of them stomped into the stairwell as quickly as they could. Fighting against the stream was exhausting work. Dev punched an emergency button beside the door once everyone was inside, and it slammed shut behind them. Various pistons, locks and deadbolts shot into place, and then all was terrifyingly silent.

  “I thought you’d run off on us,” Jack gasped, fighting the urge to throw up.

  “Sorry,” Dev replied, wiping his streaming eyes. “The door was too heavy. I couldn’t hold it any longer. Before I could get it open again, the whole stadium went into lockdown, you know? I had to perform a manual override to get you out. Didn’t think I even had the clearance. The station’s security systems must be going haywire or something.”

  “Well, at least that’s over.” Rogan patted Klik on the back. She was facing the corner of the stairwell and coughing up something vile and acidic. “The LX-14s are cut off. It could have been a lot worse.”

  “Over?” Dev’s cheek twitched. “I wish it were over.”

  He held up his data pad. It was flashing a red evacuation warning.

  “The whole station’s been overrun.”

  17

  Murder Made Mechanical

  The stairwell was quiet and offered them no clue as to the state of the rest of the space station. Behind them, the mudball stadium – once the jewel in Kagna One’s crown – was nothing more than a wasteland of shattered glass, semi-weightless sludge and confused LX-14s. Not even Dev knew what lay before them.

  His data pad kept flashing red, though.

  They reached the bottom of the stairwell in next to no time. Jack cracked open the door to Administration and peered down the bland, anonymous corridor full of bland, anonymous doors. Thanks to the emergency warning lights, the walls had gone from white to red. A klaxon wailed somewhere in the distance.

  He recognised Dev’s office on the right – they’d left the door wide open in their hurry to get upstairs. All the rest looked deserted. Or maybe barricaded. Jack didn’t care all that much so long as nobody else got in their way.

  “Looks clear,” he whispered. “Let’s move.”

  The five of them crept along the corridor, with Jack and Dev at the front and Tuner bringing up the rear. Though much calmer now that he wasn’t at risk of being sucked out into the frozen vacuum of space amongst a battalion of killer automata, Jack couldn’t shake the fear that a robotic hand was about to burst out from one of the doorways to either side of them and snap his neck with a simple twist. But glancing through the foggy glass windows of each office as they passed, none of them appeared occupied at all. It seemed like the whole space station had evacuated ahead of them.

  Apparently, Dev had other ideas.

  “There’s a security level down on the lower floors,” he said, stumbling over his words as they crouched down by the door leading back into the lobby. “Sort of like a bunker in case of emergencies, you know? A lot of the residents will have headed down there when they heard the alarms go off. If we’re lucky, they might not have gone into lockdown yet.”

  “As if the Krolaks wouldn’t have shut the doors the second the last one of them got through,” said Rogan. “They certainly won’t open up for the likes of us.”

  “Even if they did, I wouldn’t want to still be here when the Krolak fleet shows up.” Jack shook his head. “No, we’ve got a ship parked in one of the ports. If we get down there, we can fly straight out of this place.”

  “You presume they haven’t shuttered all the docks already,” said Dev, his cheek sprouting another nervous twitch.

  “Let’s check,” said Tuner, shrugging.

  “Adi, are you there?” Rogan spoke aloud as a curtesy to the fleshies in their group – she and the Adeona could easily and more quickly communicate without words. “Do you have any idea what’s going on elsewhere in the station?”

  “Oh, thank goodness you’re all right,” Adi replied through the speakers of Jack’s data pad in her usual cheery voice. “It’s madness dow
n here. Something explosive went off in the next hangar over about fifteen minutes ago. Then there was a lot of shouting and everyone started rushing back into their ships. There’s only me and an old tugger left in here now. If you ask me, I don’t think his owner’s coming back…”

  “I guess we know how the acolytes got their LX-14s inside the station, then,” said Klik.

  “Are the hangar doors still open?” Rogan asked.

  “Yes,” Adi immediately replied. Jack refrained from pumping the air with his fist. “For now, at least. That’s not to say the attack ships orbiting the station won’t stop anyone else from leaving, of course. Do you want me to come and pick you up?”

  “No,” said Jack, interjecting. “The only way off-station is via a hangar, anyway. We’d only get lost trying to find a different one. Stay put and we’ll come to you.”

  “Suit yourself. I’ll have my engines primed for when you get here. And be careful,” she added. “I can still detect people stomping about outside.”

  “Thanks, Adi.” Tuner quickly joined in before the comms were cut. “We’ll see you in a few minutes.”

  “I assume you remember the way back,” Jack whispered to Rogan as soon as the call ended.

  “It’s almost as if I purposefully saved the exact route we took up here in case of such an event,” Rogan replied with a cold smile.

  “Erm, can I have a moment?” Dev raised a trembling finger. “Would your pilot mind if… ah, that is to say… do you think it would be all right if I came with you?”

  Jack hesitated. He was tempted to say the ship was getting a bit crowded, but with a cargo bay as big as the Adeona’s, it really wasn’t. And humanity was an endangered species, after all.

  “Well, I don’t fancy your chances of lasting very long out here on your own,” Jack sighed. “I guess you’d better. But stick close and do whatever we tell you, okay?”