Renegade Rising

by J. N. Chaney

  “Is that what the room of tanks is? Experiments?” asked Abigail.

  “Yes, Miss Pryar,” he confirmed. “It has become a simple process where desired traits can be selected for and expressed, based on the templates set forth over five centuries ago, but more classes are still being produced and refined. The Engineers are frail, however, and lack the physical strength of their creations.”

  “Why wouldn’t they enhance their own bodies more?” asked Davon.

  “Faith in their creations,” said Carl. “There is a belief among the Engineers that they are the pinnacle of guided evolution. Having achieved perfection in all substantive measures, extremes in specialized functions were best left to others.”

  “Sounds almost religious,” I said.

  “One could view it that way,” said Carl. “Athena and I discussed the history of mankind and learned much about the pride of humanity. Even now, so far removed as we are from those long forgotten humans, their arrogance still lingers in the blood of their descendants.”

  “Let’s get on with this,” I said, trying to pull everyone back to the topic at hand.

  Every second we weren’t out there was one wasted, although the more information we had, the better prepared we could be. As it happened, I was interested. Everything that Carl had said reminded me of another group of individuals who meddled in things they ought not have—the scientists responsible for the creation of the Boneclaws, the monsters we’d found on that ice planet. If the Celestials had a flaw, it was arrogance, and I’d use whatever opportunity I could find to exploit it.

  “Above the Engineers are the Primus,” Carl explained. “They are the oldest among the Celestials, having been the first of their kind.”

  “So, these Primus control the rest?” asked Abigail.

  “They are the guiding hand,” said Carl. “All others obey their decree, such has been the path since time immemorial.”

  “Back to Athena,” I said, looking around the table. No one spoke up or interrupted, so I laid out the basics of the plan I’d come up with. “We already know the Celestials are holed up in the Archives. If we surround the area and draw them out, we can pick them off. I know it won’t be that simple, but we’ll have numbers on our side, not to mention the pulse cannons.”

  When Vick began to speak, I tensed up, expecting a long list of reasons why my plan would fail. “That’s a good start,” he allowed, taking me by surprise yet again. “We should strike fast and hard, focus on coordination, and bring some added incendiaries. Multiple teams, multiple rings of engagement, attacking in waves.”

  “That works for me,” I said, deciding not to press my luck with him and counter the ideas he’d presented. “Major Sanchez, does the Empire want to lend us its forces?”

  Sanchez smiled, showing his teeth. “We are with you both. I will have supplies and soldiers sent down immediately.”

  * * *

  “Athena’s signature has grown weaker.” Carl’s words surprised me, having come at the end of the meeting with the other leaders. I stood at the threshold of the room, prepared to leave and meet my team.

  “What does that mean?” I asked, taking a moment to try and understand what he was saying.

  “I’m not entirely certain,” he admitted. “But I posit that the Celestials are attempting to remove her program for transportation purposes.”

  I turned to everyone still in the room with us. “We’re out of time,” I announced. “The Celestials could be getting ready to make a coordinated retreat. Get your people together and meet at the strike point. It takes ten minutes to get down there from our deployment area. I expect everyone to be ready and geared up in fifteen.”

  No one argued. The room erupted into a flurry of activity as everyone rushed to prepare and inform their subordinates.

  “Abigail, I want you to pull every available soldier we have for this. Dressler, get that pulse cannon working so we can keep them from phasing out of our line of fire once we have them cornered. Hand it off to someone you trust to operate it and--”

  “I’m fully capable of handling it myself,” said the doctor.

  “I understand that,” I assured her. “I’m more concerned with you getting killed out there. We’re about to walk into the enemy’s den. That ain’t exactly the sort of place a scientist needs to be.”

  “That might very well be true, but I don’t trust anyone else to extract Athena’s program from that system,” asserted Dressler. “More to the point, if a situation arises during the assault that requires my expertise—"

  “Fine,” I said. “But if you find yourself in any danger, I want you to run. You’re not a soldier, despite how many scrapes you’ve been in. You’re too important to die, unlike the rest of us. Prioritize your life and get the hell out of there. You follow?”

  She nodded.

  I was going to head to the Renegade Star to gear up when Sigmond surprised me with a message. “I hope you don’t mind me taking the liberty,” he said, dropping my weapons and armor off with one of his smaller drones. “But I thought this might save you some time, sir. I must admit, Captain, I don’t feel very useful in this fight. I apologize.”

  “Useful? Siggy, what the hell are you talking about?” I dragged my gear out of the pack as I spoke and slapped a shield on my shoulder.

  “Carl is quite advanced and has access to so much information that I do not,” said the Cognitive. I stopped what I was doing to give him my full attention. “I regret my inability to assist in a larger capacity, specifically in regards to Athena.”

  “Is that what this is about?” I asked him, strapping on my boot and fixing my glove. “You’re sad because you couldn’t save Athena? Or you somehow feel like you’re not doing enough to save her this time around?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” admitted Sigmond. “It is a strange sensation, but perhaps what you say is accurate to some degree. Perhaps I simply feel regret and being unable to do more.”

  “It’s normal to feel that way, Siggy,” I told him.

  “Sir?” he asked, the way a person did when they needed a deeper explanation.

  “You’re a Cognitive, and if I understand that right, it means you’re basically human,” I explained. “Well, not human. Maybe a little better. But all the same, it means you’ve got yourself a spectrum of emotions inside of you now, and each and every one of them is going to make you feel things that sometimes don’t make sense. You couldn’t have done anything else to save Athena the first time. You don’t have the ability to see the future, smart as you might be, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t going to feel as though there was something you could’ve done. That’s just the burden of hindsight and regret. We all feel it. Some more than others. And it comes in waves at varying points in our lives. You feel it now, it sounds like, but so do the rest of us, probably for the same reason.”

  “What do you do when you feel this way?” he asked.

  “Better,” I told him. “You aim to be better the second time, and if you can help it, you try to win. Regret isn’t good or bad, but if you use it right, you can learn from it, and maybe next time you don’t make the same mistakes.”

  “Truly?” asked Sigmond.

  I chuckled. “You make new ones instead. That’s what it means to be human, Siggy. Living with the weight of your past and learning to walk forward with it.”

  18

  Freddie met up with us at Dressler’s lab, since we had to stop by to grab the pulse cannon and he happened to be nearby. I didn’t figure Dressler would be eager to wade back into the fray so soon after the day she’d had, but we found her strapping on her own set of armor, eager to get going again.

  “What are you doing, Dr. Dressler?” asked Freddie, seeing the woman clad herself with practically enough armor to cover every centimeter of skin.

  “I would think that would be obvious, Mr. Tabernacle,” said Dressler.

  Freddie looked at me and I just shrugged.

  “I see,” he said, finally opting to jus
t go along with it.

  I gave the doctor major points for coming along. The woman had grown considerably since our first meeting, back when I kidnapped her and stole that tritium core for Titan. She was still brilliant, still the same sort of person you’d expect a genius to be, but there was a hardness to her now. Gone was the woman who ducked at the sound of gunfire and feared for her life. She was tougher, perhaps too accustomed to combat situations and the fighting that inevitably arose from being in this group and by my side.

  Sure, Abigail, Octavia, and even Petra were doing the same, all of them wearing armor and readying their weapons, but they were warrior women trained to fight. Abigail was raised by assassins. Octavia served in the Union military as a field medic. Petra was raised on a world of ice and trained to survive actual monsters. Dressler had been a Union scientist before, holed up in a secret lab far from any battlefields, and still she had more courage than half the soldiers I’d ever met.

  That wasn’t to say that none of them were brave. All warriors must have that quality in them in order to be who they are, but it is something else for a person without the experience of war to suddenly pick up the cause and plunge themselves into conflict.

  Petra pointed at the pulse cannon sitting on a stand next to Dressler. “Doctor, is the dolly finished?”

  She nodded in response. Turning to the cannon, she pushed it to Petra with one hand. I realized she must have modified a cart for this specific purpose. The cannon fit snugly in curved braces that continued around the top and connected on one side. I remembered the first time it had been fired — the blast was so powerful, it threw the two soldiers operating it off their feet.

  “Dressler, is there a brake or something to stop it from kicking back when it fires?” I asked.

  With a nod, she spun the front of the cannon toward me and pointed at a button.

  “Hey, watch where you’re aiming that thing!” I snapped, not wanting to die before the fight even started.

  Another leg extended from the front of the cart and landed on the floor. As soon as it made contact, a click sounded. Dressler pushed the cart again, but it didn’t budge. “Magnetic clamp. Tartarus is made of ferromagnetic metal, so it was the logical choice.”

  “That’s good work,” commented Abigail. “One person can operate it?”

  “Yes. Davon has been working on getting the cannons he brought modified. I believe he finished at least one.”

  I had to admit it was a clever workaround. It sure as hell beat requiring two people to carry the thing. “What about that phasing cuff?” I asked her. “Do you still have it?”

  She nodded and picked it up from a nearby desk, offering it to me. I shook my head at her.

  “You put it on,” I instructed.

  Dressler didn’t move. “Are you certain, Captain? Sanchez seemed a little too interested in this device. We may not want to use it in the field yet.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure he wants it just as bad as Vick, but that thing already saved your life once today. At least, that’s how I assume you escaped that Berserker?”

  Dressler glanced at the cuff, looking guilty enough that I knew I’d been right. “I activated it at the last moment and fell through the door,” she admitted.

  I nodded. “Thought as much. So, keep it on. Could come in handy. If someone decides they want to take it from us, I’ll deal with it,” I told her.

  “Alright,” she agreed. “Before we go, I need to update you on the mobile armor.”

  “What about them?” I asked. “Davon mentioned in the meeting that the suits were assembled in the room with ceiling tracks. Is that what you’re getting at?”

  She shook her head. “While I was in the healing pod, he ran a few scans on the Celestial and revealed quite a bit,’ she replied. “The suit contains very little organic material. It appears to be made almost entirely of metal and synthetic materials.”

  “So, it’s a robot?” asked Freddie. His eyes lit up at the notion, more of fascination than joy.

  “Not quite. I said mostly inorganic,” she reminded him. “It is closer to a cyborg. The scan revealed organic matter inside the helmet, but we haven’t had time to perform a dissection yet. To me, that suggests a brain. We’ll know more in a few days, but I thought it prudent to explain their composition before another encounter. You aren’t fighting normal Celestials, and those suits are not what one might call traditional armor. They are merely bodies, naked and exposed.”

  I’d already started to reach the same conclusion when we first opened the room containing the suits. The dimensions just hadn’t fit. Now I knew why.

  Abigail’s mouth dropped open in horror. “There’s just a brain inside? Who would volunteer to do something like that?”

  “Maybe they didn’t volunteer,” Petra pointed out. That was kind of gruesome if you thought about it too much.

  “We don’t have time to debate right now,” I told them. “If another mobile armor shows up, aim for the head and joints.”

  “Yes, the hydraulics were exposed,” Abigail agreed. “A well-aimed shot will hobble movement and provide time to disable the rest.”

  “Exactly,” I said shortly. We’d already spent too long talking and I was itching to get to Athena. “Freddie, grab that pulse cannon and take lead with me. I don’t need Dressler shooting a random Union boy and starting another war.”

  Dressler rolled her eyes. “That’s not what would happen.”

  I ignored her, knowing if I gave her half a chance she’d try to convince me how wrong I was. Instead, I simply strode out the door.

  When our small troop arrived at the rendezvous, another team was already there. The team leader addressing them had his back to me, but I recognized the profile instantly.

  Vick. The vice admiral must have gotten tired of sitting on the sidelines. I supposed it was harder to call the shots from a comm. Next to him, Rackham was standing rigidly like the military man he was, holding a data pad and presumably keeping an eye on the Archives.

  Pointless on his end, given that we had Sigmond and Carl to warn us of any movement as soon it happened, but I supposed redundancy couldn’t hurt. My guess was that Vick had ordered him to do it out of the distrust he had for Carl. It was also a task best left to someone else--a grunt, maybe--but given how often Rackham had sided with me in recent weeks, this might very well be his punishment.

  Putting that aside for now, I pulled my own pad out to send Octavia a message that we were there. She responded quickly with a short note that they were almost to our position. So far, so good, I thought.

  According to Carl, the other Celestials hadn’t moved, and Athena’s signal was weakening. A part of me wondered if this was a ploy to get us to act now before we had a chance to further assess the situation. We could be walking into a trap. In fact, given how intelligent these Celestials were, it certainly seemed to be the most likely possibility.

  I made both the Celestial Cognitive and Sigmond verify the signal to make sure it was in fact Athena. It matched, but the two Cognitives warned me that such a thing could be replicated with enough time and precision. That didn’t help the unease I felt, but oh well. Doing nothing wasn’t an option.

  Octavia and Leif arrived in short order, followed by Sanchez, Davon, and a platoon’s worth of Sarkon’s finest. The space quickly grew crowded and I figured it was time to disperse the teams. Just as I had asked them, the other leaders had delivered an army to me in under twenty minutes.

  Consider me impressed.

  Finally, I tapped my comm. “Vick, Sanchez. Now that everyone’s here, let’s deploy teams.”

  I wasn’t particularly worried about the noise, as the rendezvous had purposely been set in the outermost corridor two levels down but decided to take the cautionary approach. Much as I wanted to get to Athena, rushing would only lead to mistakes. There was too much at stake to be sloppy now.

  As we’d planned, three layers of teams would encircle the archives, using the honeycombed structuring to our advanta
ge. A group at the alternate entrance would be ready with the other pulse cannon while I, Vick, and Sanchez—along with our respective chosen personnel—would take the main entrance. It seemed foolproof, but I knew better. Nothing ever was. Still, we were hunting the Celestials, not the other way around, and that was better than the alternative.

  I adjusted my grip on my rifle as we reached the Archives. If the Celestials inside hadn’t yet been aware of our presence, I’d assume they were now. I half expected them to come charging out the door, hard light swords in hand, but all seemed quiet. I was prepared for whatever might come.

  Vick walked up to me and tapped his helmet, opening a private channel. “The team guarding the transport door just checked in. No activity.”

  “Good,” I replied. “Let’s hope it stays that way.”

  “This plan had better work,” he added. “For all our sakes.”

  His tone was genuine concern, no hint of animosity. Maybe it was because the plan had belonged to both of us in equal measure, so if it failed, the blame would be ours to share.

  I didn’t respond. The Vice Admiral seemed ready for a fight, and for once, I was glad for that. I could use the man who tried to invade Earth. That same vigor and unwavering determination would take us far in this war, but especially here in this moment. “Get the cannon into position,” I ordered the two soldiers behind us. “It’s time to move.”

  Two Union soldiers—artillery specialists, according to Vick—nodded and moved away to take up a position with the best line of sight. Though the cannon only required one user now, a two-man team still seemed the most practical. If one fell in combat, then the other could take over the job and keep firing.

  It was a morbid thought, but it was also necessary.

  “Captain Hughes, I have detected movement inside,” informed Carl, his voice coming through the comm in my ear. It was strange to have the enemy’s former Cognitive on my side. I still didn’t entirely trust him, but I did trust Sigmond, and if my friend told me this intelligence was on our side, then I would give him the benefit of the doubt. At least until he gave me a reason to think otherwise. “They seem to be reacting to your arrival. I suggest caution.”