by P. R. Adams
Kohn stood, nearly banging his head on the low ceiling. “I’m on it!”
He shuffled between the legs of the Marines, leaned into the lever that opened the rear hatch, looked around, then descended the short ramp.
Without thinking, Stiles got up. “Excuse me.”
She squeezed past the same legs, noting the way they didn’t part as they had for the petty officer.
Not insubordination. Not intimidation.
Lust. Even Grier’s knees brushed against the lieutenant.
There would come a time when Stiles wouldn’t need or even be able to use her looks, but she looked toward the day when she could at least control how others saw her.
Tactical lamps mounted flush to the back of the vehicle provided some hint of red light, but it wasn’t much with the frozen rain picking up. Kohn was squatting beside the front driver’s side tire, head stuck beneath the vehicle frame. He had one gloved hand stuck in the tracks of the tire, the other braced against the black ground. The lights reflected off ice-coated rocks, which had been polished by the wind or blasted by some terrific heat.
Kohn slid deeper under the vehicle, until his torso was completely hidden.
She squatted beside him, touching his leg without thinking about it. “Chuck?”
It sounded like his head banged against something. “Brianna? I mean, Lieutenant?”
“You see anything?”
“Looks like the rock cracked back there. Like a whole sheet of it snapped.”
She dropped to all fours and tried to see it. He had a flashlight, which he was running across a sharp mound that sparkled like black diamond. “Did it do any damage?”
“I think it knocked the exhaust manifold loose.”
“Can you fix it?”
“I think so. This rock is as sharp as a blade, though. If we could move the vehicle a little, that’d be better.”
Move a multi-ton vehicle. On a fairly slick stone surface. That was rapidly collecting freezing rain.
“See what you can do without that, okay?”
“Y-yes ma’am.”
He pushed back out slowly, then carefully maneuvered past her. There were tools stashed in a small compartment inside the hatch. She helped him haul those out and around to the vehicle front. As they set them down, she felt rather than saw someone approaching. She wiped the ice from her face mask.
Halliwell stood a meter back. “Lieutenant, Corporal Grier and I want to scout ahead a little bit.”
The corporal was hunched over behind the staff sergeant, fiddling with something.
Stiles searched the dark ahead, noting that the Badger’s headlamps were noticeably dimming. “You think you can make anything out in this mess?”
The tall Marine seemed to study the rift walls. “I think so, ma’am.”
“Stay in contact, and don’t go far.”
Halliwell saluted, then he and Grier slowly trundled past to be quickly swallowed by the darkness.
Kohn was already on his back, half hidden by the vehicle.
Stiles dropped to her knees. “What’s it look like?”
“Well, a mess, sort of. I can’t get my lamp to mount to the undercarriage.”
“Scoot over.”
She dropped onto her back and squeezed in beside him. There wasn’t much room, and the underside of the vehicle was like a huge plate of rust with wrinkles and folds, all threatening to break loose and crush her.
“Um.” He pushed the lamp across his chest to her. When she had it, he tapped the spot he needed the light on. “See where it’s scraped?”
“Took all the rust right off.”
“That was probably all that was holding this together.” He chuckled.
It was an insecure sound. For someone so smart, he was amazingly full of insecurities. There was a small amount of charm in it, but the annoyance it caused was even worse. From the first memory of awareness, she had been trained to have confidence and to appreciate confidence. People who weren’t sure of themselves were weak. They were a liability. They were tools to be used.
But Kohn had made her see the folly in that training. He was every bit as smart as Parkinson but held back by a lack of self-confidence. Commander Dietrich had seen Kohn’s potential where no one else had.
Stiles remembered the way the insecurity had come through in Kohn’s kisses, in his fumbling when he touched her. It had been so different from Parkinson, who seemed to think she was a conquest, a trophy he could stick in a cabinet and brag about. Kohn’s loving had been more like worship, Parkinson’s like dominance.
As he brought one of the tools up, she squeezed closer to him. “Do you need to take this part here off?” She tapped what looked like might have been bent by the impact.
“Yeah. Ma’am. I think the manifold’s under there. I mean, it is.”
His voice sounded as pained as the night he’d opened up about the way he’d never believed he could qualify for medical school. The raw pain that had been there when his scores had qualified him, but Commander Martinez had declined to put forward the package—she’d held Kohn that night until the crying had stopped. They hadn’t made love, something she’d never considered possible with the passion he’d shown for her.
The tool clanged against the undercarriage as he shakily explained the purpose of the exhaust manifold and how a simple physical breaker would shut the engine off rather than a sensor system monitoring for a dangerous exhaust buildup.
The bent plate came free and dropped onto his chest, drawing a surprised grunt.
She took the mangled square. “Do we need this?”
“No. It’s useless now.” He pointed to a spot where two metal pipes joined. “See how it’s been bent here?”
“That small gap?”
“Big enough to let gasses out.”
“You know as much about mechanics as you do electronics.”
“I loved electronics as a kid, but my father needed someone to help fix things around the…place.”
He was always ashamed of his simple upbringing. “Is that how you see medicine?”
“Fixing?”
“Something you love or something you need?”
He had a tube of some sort of paste in his hand but paused. “I guess I’ll never know. I mean, maybe? I love knowing how the body works and how to fix it. Is that what it’s like for you? This GSA work?”
“It’s doing the right thing. There are…people who want war. They want it now.”
Kohn squeezed the tube, and a shiny string of metallic goop came out, attaching to the bent pipes. “Who would want war? That makes no sense. People die. Lives are destroyed.”
“I know. But there are people who feel like they’ll be failures if they retire without a war on their resumes.”
“That sounds so petty.”
“It is, but it’s only one motivation. There are others who feel that war is inevitable. They reason that it’s better to choose your time than have it choose you.”
The petty officer rubbed a grimy towel over the area until everything was smooth. “And that sounds needlessly dangerous.”
“I know.”
“I guess I’ll never understand politics.”
“It can be terrible. It doesn’t have to be but can.”
“I guess that’s it. A minute, and that should seal as well as metal.”
She caught his eyes drifting over to her but wouldn’t meet them. “Let’s go.”
“Yeah. Lives to save.”
Stiles couldn’t admit to him that the listening post team weren’t likely to be alive, and if they were, they weren’t actually on the priority list. Recovering the data or at least destroying all evidence—that was the priority.
Everyone was expendable. Including her.
They gathered the tools in silence, then headed to the rear.
Carruth was there, scanning the walls on either side, weapon ready. “We good to go, Lieutenant?”
She nodded toward Kohn. “Should be now.”
&nb
sp; “Good. I don’t like sitting in one place like this.”
“I haven’t heard anything yet from Staff Sergeant Halliwell or Corporal Grier.”
“They’ll be just fine.”
They piled in, and the engine growled to life. The driver didn’t wait for them before putting the vehicle into gear; they lurched forward.
Stiles pulled out her communicator. It had been several minutes, and Halliwell hadn’t connected. Neither his nor Grier’s signal showed up on the communicator display. It wasn’t likely they could have made it out of communicator range, not with the ground so slick.
The GSA officer frowned and leaned forward. “Sergeant Simms, stay alert.”
The old Marine squatted enough to get a look at her. “You don’t do forty years in the Marines without being alert, Lieutenant.”
“All right.”
There was concern in Carruth’s eyes. Marines were still human—susceptible to fear. There hadn’t been gunfire or an explosion, but you could kill someone without making a sound if you were good enough, even combat veterans like Halliwell and Grier.
The driver twisted her head around again. “Another bend!”
Stiles checked her sidearm and sucked in a calming breath. They were close to the ruins, but her instincts told her they weren’t close enough.
And she always trusted her instincts.
20
A piercing shriek broke the silence in the crater. Benson froze for an instant, caught with a water bottle attached to her helmet, a sweet puddle of fluid on her tongue.
Then she remembered what the noise meant and swallowed: invaders!
She connected to Fero and Gadreau. “Move your people into position! Heads down!”
Waiting for responses wasn’t an option. People had to do their jobs.
Benson drew her pistol and slid from the airlock to the stone, which was even slicker now with the shallow ice sheath that had settled over everything. By the time she had her balance, the thunderous roar of the turret weapon had drowned out the alarm. Bright gold flashed from the end of the barrel, and tiny sparks erupted on the southern crater wall where the rounds cracked.
Those sparks were a lot lower on the wall than they should have been.
The enemy was inside the perimeter.
Her knee felt ready to buckle, worsened by the crampons not finding a solid grip. She slipped as she rounded the corner of the shuttle between her and the turret and spilled headfirst onto the hard stone. The impact momentarily numbed her wrist, and her pistol skidded away.
She stretched out, then froze again: Someone staggered out of the opening of the gun emplacement defense, then fell.
Short with fairly broad shoulders. Parkinson.
And something that looked like a slice of the night pursued. It held a knife nearly as dark and hard to pick out, but both were visible in the muzzle flash of the big gun.
Could a blade look more wicked? It seemed to suck in the light from the big gun and distort it.
The form’s flickering head came up, no longer concerned with Parkinson.
It sees me!
She scampered forward, hand outstretched, but her knee roared in protest, and all she managed to do was to knock the gun farther away. And to press against her swollen bladder.
And the thing that had been spawned by the darkness disappeared.
Just like Gadreau had talked about, she realized.
She tried to push up again, and this time she managed to get onto her good knee, then to get her good foot on the ground. Standing meant putting weight on the bad leg, and that burned like fire in the joint, but she was up.
Parkinson crawled toward her. “Azoren.” He barely gasped that out.
He was wounded, but she couldn’t see where, and she wasn’t about to run to him, not with the invisible thing out there somewhere.
She stretched out for the pistol, but the glow from the big gun’s muzzle flash revealed something off to her left, pressed against the side the shuttle.
The knife. The black blade.
The sliver of darkness jumped at her, and she threw herself flat. Once again, there was pain, and this time she lost control of her bladder upon impact.
But she had her pistol.
Just as the Azoren assassin landed on her.
And she had an answer about the wickedness of the knife. It sank deep into a joint in her armor, and when the blade came back out, it left a cold that must have rivaled the chill of Jotun.
Benson groaned. Her body shook, and she thought she was just going to shut down.
Just below the ribs, above the hip. How long had that blade been?
She rolled away, eyes frozen open, and she imagined she saw the faint outline of her attacker.
The pistol came up, and before she could think too much about it, she pulled the trigger.
The dark form jerked backward.
Or did it disappear? Was it moving for another attack? If it caught people running around individually or in small teams, it could wipe the entire force out.
Small arms fire filled the crater now. Flares lit the walls. It sounded like the gunfire intensified, slightly different.
She wiped a glove over the wound and held the palm up to see in the uncertain light.
Wet.
But the assailant hadn’t come at her again.
She felt around her and ended up with a handful of something. Uniform? Whatever the suit was. Solid, which is what mattered.
Probing revealed a form: chest, then crotch. Not chest but abdomen. She reversed her search, found the bloody chest, the throat, then the head. There was a mask there, something human in its placement and vague shape.
Shivering took her again, and the cold from the wound became more like acid.
There were no obvious things on the mask to unlatch or twist or whatever, so the second she found something she could grab onto, she yanked with what strength she could muster. It was stupid, but she had to know who had stabbed her. Were the Azoren, with their sick worship of a very particular human ideal, even human anymore?
The face covering tugged away slightly, revealing pale flesh.
A chin. Strong.
And apparently lifting the helmet front up was enough to break the circuit. The rest of the outfit flickered, then became visible.
It was black, but there was a slickness to it, and in spots, it was as if she was looking right through the body to the ground below. It was imperfect, distorted, with the slick rock probably too close to appear just right.
There was blood on the chin. Bubbling up from the throat.
A lucky shot. It was that simple.
The gun emplacement wound down, then went silent.
Had it lost track of targets?
No. It sounded like an ammunition problem. Empty, maybe?
She got to her feet, this time with even more effort. If the weapon had been firing the whole time, that meant the sensors still had an idea where the enemy was. They needed the weapon firing.
Parkinson’s hand brushed her boot as she staggered past. “Help—”
“Hang in there, Chief. Lots of fighting going on.”
But she understood completely. Blood was down inside her thighs already. She must be bleeding out fast. How long was she even going to be able to stand up? Not long.
Inside the little defensive structure, she spotted two of Fero’s Marines. Older, out of shape—they’d suffered non-life-threatening wounds during the landing. That made them perfect for the gun emplacement.
Apparently they hadn’t been up for someone invisible sneaking up out of the night.
Benson confirmed the weapon system was asking for a reload, then pulled the ammo drum from the bottom of the device. She tossed the drum away, then pulled another from the small stack that had been piled nearby. It was easy to slap the thing into place.
A green light, and the weapon system spun up.
And the gun began to fire again.
She took a Grizzly from one of the corpse
s, searched around for a couple magazines, then hobbled back to Parkinson. “Chief?”
“I…hurt.”
He had a maintenance lamp hanging off his belt. She turned that on. “Oh, that looks bad.”
“Right…under the armor.” Blood darkened his crotch and thighs. He shivered.
She wasn’t actually bleeding anywhere near as much as him. Was it all going down inside her armor and suit? It hit her, and she blushed. In the struggle, she’d peed herself. Her thermals were wet with urine, not blood.
“Chief, hold tight. I’ll get Commander Dietrich.” Benson searched through her connection log and found the petty officer who’d helped the folks inside the crashed shuttle but couldn’t make a connection. After a second, Benson just searched for Dietrich directly. “Commander Dietrich, do you read me?”
“Commander Benson?” Gunfire was a deep bass thump through his helmet. “Do you need something? I’m tending to a severe—”
“I’ve been stabbed, but Chief Parkinson is worse.”
“I see. You’re not far from my position. A few minutes, then I’ll be there.”
“What about the medic? Magdy?”
“Unfortunately, she’s dead.”
“Oh.”
Benson’s heart sank. She almost asked if there was anyone worse off, but the doctor wouldn’t have hesitated to say something if that were the case. Did that mean the enemy was being held at bay by the gun emplacement and the small Marine force, or did it mean the Marines were dying too quickly to be saved?
Something told Benson to turn to her right, and she saw another of the flickering forms racing through the darkness.
Headed for the gun turret.
It took a second to realize what had caught her eye: The form was raising a weapon, a big gun like the one she had.
She dropped to the ground just as the other person’s muzzle flashed. It wasn’t so bright that it could’ve been seen from a good distance, but it was maybe fifteen meters away—some sort of suppressor.
Bullets cracked off the rocky ground all around her, and one grazed her shoulder.
Armor. For once it did what it was supposed to.
The carbine she’d taken from the Marine was old, without the advanced biometrics she could have used to take control of it. Instead, she had to physically disable the security system. She rolled away from the impact area of the first burst just as the second cracked against the stone.