Steel Sworn

by Richard Fox

  Holograms of Roland and Makarov faded in and out as they spoke to each other, their words clipped and laden with static. The stark metal room around them had sharp, angled walls and was lit by a ring in the low ceiling.

  A Geist watched the scrambled conversation take place. His body was made up of tiny metal cubes stacked into a wide-shouldered frame and bound into simple rods for arms and legs. A red sash covered the Geist’s chest and flowed into a short cape over his back. Cubes the size of grains of sand made up his face; his jaw jutted out and his teeth were exposed. The brightness of his two sets of eyes fluctuated with the Geist’s emotions.

  “You’re wasting my time.” The Geist turned from the holo and Commissar Nakir appeared as a ring of light swept up from the floor to the ceiling. He wore pristine flak armor, the chrome of his face mask catching the reflection of the Geist and the distorted human commanders.

  “Exalted Noyan demands the recovery of the refugee,” Nakir said. “I am commanded and I obey.”

  “This is my domain, thrall. Not hers. I indulged her request when you arrived and lost one of my more favorite pets in the process.” His face changed colors as a wave washed through the grains.

  “A setback, but my target will be easier to find. He’s stuck to the suits, and his suit is unique. I won’t be looking for a single boy hiding in the city,” Nakir said.

  “And how is this relevant?” The Geist raised a four-fingered hand at Makarov and Roland. “I know my foes. I’ve fought them across the system. A poorly intercepted communication changes nothing.”

  “We’ve made some progress on breaking the encryption, but this is significant, Exalted Mahnark.” Nakir approached the recording as it looped back to the beginning. His boots made no sound as he moved, and he cast no shadow. “These two are a mated pair. The Commissariat is well-versed in studying human interactions. You see how Makarov’s features contract as she speaks? Then Marshal Shaw’s breathing rate when—”

  “Get to the point,” Mahnark grumbled.

  “They’re moving toward a major decision,” Nakir said. “They will either abandon the system or attempt to break the interdiction over the planet.”

  “Let them.” Mahnark lifted a finger and a holo of the system appeared, run through with runes as data moved between the Geist ships split between the moon and around the city. “I’ve kept this system under siege to fix Makarov’s forces here. It kept her from reinforcing Larnaca, just long enough for that system to fall to us. I didn’t need the expertise of one such as you to accomplish this. We will grind the planet down and harvest the survivors. Same as the Geist have ever done.”

  “Humans can be most ingenious when they face certain defeat, Exalted One. Hale’s escape from Earth was years in the making. They would not have sacrificed so much unless he was worth it. I must capture him before they act,” Nakir said.

  “Besides the souls we can gift to Malal’s glory, the only thing worth my effort is the Keystone gate.” Mahnark’s eyes flickered and the mobile Crucible appeared in the projection, Ibarran ships floating in space around it. “I seize one of these for the Geist and I will be elevated in Malal’s gaze.”

  “Then use human irrationality against them. Force them into an error before they’re ready,” Nakir said. “These two, Shaw and Makarov, are famous within the Ibarra Nation for an action on Mars where Makarov evacuated their heretic elites from a prison. They’ll do it again.”

  “What do you suggest?” the Geist asked.

  “Full assault. The fog of war will allow me to infiltrate the city and capture Hale as they scramble to react,” Nakir said.

  “You are one of them beneath that mask…not one of our more perfect servants from the procedural tubes.” Mahnark canted his head slightly.

  A Sanheel appeared within a circle of light. The centaur-like alien’s legs were caked in mud, his battle armor stained by smoke and pitted by bullet strikes.

  “Exalted One,” said the Sanheel as his forward knees went to the ground and he removed his helmet. Thin dreadlocks of hair spilled down his neck, and he wiped a heavy hand across the pale-green skin of his forehead. Blunt tusks were capped in gold.

  “General Gon’baya…the Commissar asks more of us,” the Geist said.

  “I lost my best strike team guarding him already,” the Sanheel rumbled. “I have no more breaching assets to lose.”

  “I propose a subtler approach for my talents. It requires a large-scale assault to conceal my efforts,” Nakir said.

  Gon’baya got back on his hooves. “You call that ‘subtle’? Is this some human joke I can’t grasp? Bleeding my soldiers for the sake of some thrall…” The Sanheel reached to one side and a wide-bladed spear appeared in his hand.

  “Because I wish it,” Mahnark said, “and infiltrating a spy that will relay information from within the city would be valuable.”

  The thick lips around the Sanheel’s tusks twitched. “As you command, Exalted One,” Gon’baya said.

  Nakir touched fingertips to one temple in salute. “I need Hale as whole as possible. His head at the very least. Alive preferred. And if we can capture his Armor, the Highest would appreciate it as a gift. It is an Ibarran relic. Melting it down would be a blow to their morale, and it would please Malal.”

  “I serve,” Gon’baya said. “What do you need of my forces, thrall?”

  Chapter 4

  Ely walked slowly through battery stacks humming with electricity. He was close to the shield tower, and the pale-blue beam wavered like a tall flame as it reached to the dome above. He was alone in the many rows.

  “What even is this tech?” Ely asked. “Force shields? The theoretical energy requirements are astronomical. Could it be related to the energy field manipulation that Marshal Roland used during that fight with the Geist?”

  +I have no idea,+ Aignar said. +I’ve been on ice since not long after the Line. Big Green never mentioned anything about this.+

  “Big who? Is there a local network you can tap in to and download the specs on this?” Ely switched his active optics, examining the beam on different spectrums.

  +You forget that you’re supposed to report somewhere? This is an active war zone. I doubt the Ibarra Crusade’s standards are that different from the Terran Armor Corps if you miss movement.+

  Ely raised a hand to the beam. “But science!”

  +You think ‘but science’ will stop your new chain of command from stomping you into the dirt because you got starry-eyed at some big blue sky beam?+

  “Right…guess I did join the military.”

  The center point where the energy beam met the hexagon dome pulsated as larger and larger ripples expanded against the shield. It was like Ely was looking up at the surface of a lake during a storm.

  A hiss grew in the air and the beam cut out with a snap that knocked dust off the nearby power packs. Shadows swarmed over the dome and lines of sparks traced down the sides of a hexagon tile.

  “Uh oh.” Ely looked around. “What do we do?”

  +You’re Armor. You kill and break things.+

  Ely’s targeting systems came online and bullets rolled down the ammo line connecting the magazines beneath the back plates of his suit and into the double-barreled gauss cannon mounted on his left arm. A blinking reticle flashed over the sparking hexagon and Ely raised his arm, sweeping the aim of his cannons to synch up.

  The tile came loose and fell straight toward Ely.

  He jumped back and the edge of the tile that was easily twice as big as he was smashed into the concrete pad. A thick spider web of cracks broke along the face and it slammed down in front of Ely.

  +Contact. Contact!+

  A buzz of insect wings assaulted Ely’s audio receptors and a swarm came pouring into the hole. Ely punched his arm up and opened fire, barely needing to aim. Flying ants in matte-black body armor the size of a man burst apart as each gauss shell tore through several before impacting the underside of the dome.

  Silver bolts of energy answered
back, the hits against Ely’s arms and shoulders sending a sting of pain through the neural collar connecting him to the suit.

  One of the flying aliens landed on his cannon arm. Its head was rounded like a bee’s, but with longer, metal-lined mandibles at its mouth. The alien bit at the ammo line at the back of his cannons, trying to rip it away.

  “Oh, no you don’t!” Ely swung his cannon arm toward his chest and punched the alien with his other fist. The bug’s head exploded and pale-green ooze smeared Ely’s arm up to the elbow.

  Another alien crashed into Ely’s helmet, covering the optics with his body.

  Ely fired wildly as he slapped at his helm with his other arm, failing to connect with the alien as it flitted around Ely’s head and shoulders. Ely finally caught a leg and slammed the alien against the ground, squashing it.

  “These look like Vishrakath.” Ely’s optics went dark and he touched his helm. Some sort of thick tar had stuck against his faceplate.

  +They are Vish. Hold on, the secondary optics are in all the wrong places on this model.+

  “Wait, they fly now?”

  +They fly now!+

  Ely’s vision returned, cobbled together from several different camera lenses, giving his new view of the world a jagged appearance. A trio of Vishrakath held a spindly device with silver cables running into backpacks on each of the aliens. It was pointed directly at Ely.

  He kicked a hunk of broken hexagon tile at the weapons team and the impact knocked the muzzle to one side. A bolt of lightning confined to a cylinder the width of a coffee can shot out and hit one of the storage batteries. It grew white-hot and Ely dove for cover.

  The battery exploded into a fireball, singeing Ely’s Armor and washing out all his sensors. The heat turned the tar on his helm to ash, and his normal vision returned, but with a gray sheen to everything.

  Nothing but charred remains were left of the weapons team. Vishrakath fell out of the sky, their thin wings on fire or burnt away. Ely stomped on any that survived the impact. More and more fell around him, their bodies broken from bullet strikes instead of intense heat.

  A siren rose in the distance and the pale-blue energy shield grew across the dome and covered the aliens’ breach.

  “Duck!” someone shouted.

  Ely hunched down and a stream of bullets split the air over him, annihilating a pair of Vishrakath where they were chewing on the power cables between battery packs.

  A suit of Armor appeared, as tall and dark as Marshal Roland’s but with a heraldry shield in the left shoulder with a sword crossed by a thick orange line. The rotary cannon mounted on its shoulder wound down, then snapped back, the barrels red with heat.

  “Ely Hale, I presume?” the Armor asked.

  “That’s me.” Ely got up and brushed fingertips against his helm, knocking bits of char and soot away.

  “How’d you know the Vish would hit here? You should’ve been at your barracks by now.” The new arrival had an air of authority to him—and a slight Spanish accent.

  “You know, some of that old Hale family luck to—”

  +Don’t bullshit.+

  “I wanted to look at the neat sky beam. That’s my mistake. I should’ve kept wandering around until I found that Basque place. I asked for directions but kept getting pointed in different directions. Maybe I wasn’t pronouncing it right and they thought I wanted to go to the restroom. Or the library.”

  “The Vish don’t mind suicide raids,” the Armor said, nudging one of the dead aliens with his foot, “but they don’t have many of these gene variants to spare. Odd.” His helm turned to the smoldering remains of a battery pack.

  “That wasn’t me,” Ely said. “They had this lightning gun…thing, and it was pointed at me, so I—”

  The Armor pointed at another battery with several punctures the size of gauss bullets.

  “Me…for sure. Sorry.”

  “The shield wall has redundancies on top of redundancies,” the Armor said. “The Vish were probably here to slag as many batteries as they could before we could take them out. Losing a couple isn’t that bad, all things considered.”

  He looked to the sky, where burning debris streaked through the clouds.

  “Geist committed a Kesaht destroyer to pounding open the breach. They lost more than we did…small victories. I’m Captain Santos, your lance commander. Nice to meet—”

  +No!+

  Ely felt like he was in free fall as darkness closed around him.

  “Fall back! Fall back to phase line delta!” Santos cried out, though he sounded far away.

  He lay on a road, feeling nothing against his body. He was his normal self, surrounded by a city on fire, the buildings smaller than they should be. The snap of gauss cannons echoed all around him and an Armor in pale-gray paint and Terran Union unit patches ran toward him—and through him—before he could roll out of the way.

  “There is no place to fall back to!” A new voice, female and oddly accented, came to him, though Ely couldn’t place where it was coming from or how he heard it.

  A Geist pyramid ship, its flat base skyward and the tip pointed at the ground, hung over a distant mountain range. Explosions of dying fighters and short laser stabs from the ship and the surrounding dogfight came in fits and spurts. The bottom point glowed, and a lance of energy struck the city blocks away. The beam slashed through buildings, bursting them apart and casting smoke and debris everywhere.

  A wave of dirt crashed over Ely, though he couldn’t feel or smell it.

  “We need a firing line!” Armor appeared in the chaos with the same heraldic shield as Santos. Ely realized the voice was Aignar’s. “Drop anchor and launch as soon as the smoke clears!”

  “We have to fall back!” Santos strode out of the dust and grabbed Aignar by the shoulder. “We cannot hold! You understand that? There are too many of them!”

  “All Union forces,” a transmission crackled in Ely’s ears, “make for Ibarra Navy transports. There will be only one chance to evacuate off world. All Union—”

  “To hell with them!” Aignar backhanded Santos’ arm away. “This is our home. We can’t just leave it! How can Cha’ril be willing to fight to the end and you aren’t!”

  “It will only be the end if we die now—and for nothing!” Santos thrust a finger to one side. He froze, then turned suddenly to the devastation just wrought by the Geist ship. “Cha’ril…Cha’ril, come in. Cha’ril, answer me!”

  Enemy fighters roared overhead, a dozen shadows against the gloom and smoke.

  “What did Gideon always tell us?” Aignar raised a foot and a diamond-tipped drill bit popped out of his heel. He rammed it into the ground and his leg shook as the anchor bit deep into the ground. “I am Armor! I am fury! I will not—”

  A missile tore down the street. Ely screamed in fright as the warhead went off mere yards from Aignar and everything went dark again.

  Ely breathed hard, reaching out for anything to touch, then the still eerie sensation of amniosis fluid built around his body and his lungs felt full.

  “I can’t stay long,” said a maternal voice, and the darkness above changed to a single light, the shadow of a woman with green highlights in a halo of hair barely visible against the brightness. “You’re hurt, my dear. You’re hurt and you can’t come back the way you remember…but you can keep fighting. Will you do that? Will you keep fighting?”

  The stump of an arm reached up and a painful, choking gurgle filled the air.

  “I know…I know it hurts,” the woman said, “and it will always hurt. But it’s the pain or the long dark, Aignar. That’s all I can do.”

  A crude prosthetic appeared at the end of the arm and the gurgle turned to a cough.

  Aignar managed two words through a throat speaker. “The…pain.”

  ****

  “—you,” Santos said.

  Ely raised his arms and shoulders slightly, glancing around at the battery pack.

  “You all right?” Santos asked.

&n
bsp; “Yes?” Ely stood up straight. He stretched an arm out, and it felt like he was pushing through water. “I’m right here. Aren’t I?”

  Santos brought a hand up to Ely’s helm, and cables snaked out, plugging into ports behind the audio receptors.

  “Your synch rating bottomed out. Let’s get you to our cemetery and flush your system. Follow me.” Santos detached the cables and scooped an arm away—the classic patrolling hand signal—from the deactivated shield tower.

  Ely followed him, moving sluggishly, feeling the bend of every servo.

  “Aignar? Aignar, you there?” Ely asked within his pod.

  No answer.

  Chapter 5

  Lieutenant Haddar slid down a shell hole and hustled to the other side, the edge made up of pulverized rock-crete and broken fiber optics. The simple flak armor he wore made too much noise as he thumped against the wall to stop his forward momentum. He stepped against the loose wall and got footing, enough to raise his head up to peer over the edge.

  The Memel city wall was a curved slab in the distance, the outermost neighborhoods and buildings demolished and leveled soon after the Geist made landfall and brought the city under siege. Plenty of dead space between the wall and defensive positions in the city gave the Crusade a nice killing ground to make the Geist pay in blood every time they tried to exploit a breach in the walls.

  The dome flickered and Haddar swallowed hard. Losing the energy shield would give the Geist the option to simply pound the city into ruin instead of trying to seize it and all the souls within.

  “Skies clean, no ants,” Haddar’s radioman said from where he crouched next to the lieutenant.

  “Something wiped out Delta company.” Haddar touched the edge of his helmet and optics snapped down.

  A gauss rifle fired in the ruins ahead of him and the long-armed, hunched shoulders of a Rakka fell out of a window and hit the pavement with a crunch that brought a smile to Haddar’s face.

  More gauss shots—mixed with the heavy report of the Rakka firearms—broke out in the building, then died down as a human rifle fired single shots.