Siege Line

by Myke Cole

  Schweitzer could see Reeves arching an eyebrow through the clear plastic of his suit’s faceplate. “You . . . uh . . . notice anything?”

  Schweitzer dialed his augmented hearing out, scanned through the infrared spectrum. Nothing. “Clear,” he said.

  Cort nodded and slapped a dot to the side of the camera. It was the size of an eraser’s head, adhesive on one side. It stuck fast. Cort stepped back, keeping his eyes on the door the entire time, unzipped his suit and reached inside to his tac vest. Schweitzer heard the click of a button, and blue electricity sparked across the surface of the camera. There was a quiet fizzle and pop, and smoke wafted up into the night sky.

  “Guns up,” Reeves said, and the team knelt as a single man, unlocking the plastic cases and lifting the weapons out, stacking on the doors. Schweitzer pulled the cover off his buzz saw and stood opposite them. There were a few sharp intakes of breath, but that was the sum of their reaction to this latest strangeness.

  Reeves nudged the door; it was locked. “Sharon, come up,” he said, but Schweitzer stopped her with a wave of his hand.

  She froze, looked askance at Reeves. Schweitzer didn’t wait for his answer but instead moved up, putting his hand at the precise location of the locking bar. What he was about to do would dazzle the team members who didn’t know what he was, but that couldn’t be avoided. They would be finding out soon enough anyway.

  He pushed on the seam between the doors, adding pressure slowly, until the doors gently groaned and the locking bar strained. He could hear the fibers of the metal trembling, a reverberating song like a high-tension cable in the wind, and at long last, they parted with a soft snap. Schweitzer heard more sharp breaths, but the team again stayed focused as he flowed into the room beyond.

  The words they’d seen on the door were written larger here, in blocks of stainless steel moving diagonally up the wall behind an L-shaped desk made of the same reflective black material as the rest of the building. A monitor glowed gently atop the otherwise bare surface. No guards, no administrative personnel.

  “Two cameras,” Schweitzer whispered, gesturing to the vaulted corners of the ceiling.

  Cort knelt, reaching inside his unzipped suit and producing what appeared to be a small pistol. He aimed it at the cameras in turn, and Schweitzer could see a pencil-thin beam of ultraviolet light visible only to him. The cameras sparked and went out in turn.

  “Suits,” Reeves said, unzipping his own. The team followed suit, leaving the bulky hazmat suits on the floor and stepping out of them in their ops gear, weapons trained on the only exit to the room, two featureless double-doors behind the desk.

  “White, white. Blue,” Reeves said into the commlink. “We’re on deck and ready.”

  “Blue, this is white,” Ghaznavi’s voice came back. “Go on your mark. Everything looks good from up here.”

  Schweitzer scanned the room once more, straining his abilities to push beyond the walls and doors. No heat signatures whatsoever. “It’s clear,” he said, “but we’re going to get jumped.”

  “Why do you say that?” Reeves didn’t sound surprised.

  “I broke out of here at roughly the same time of night,” Schweitzer said. “There was a lady behind the front desk. The lights were on. There were people around. It shouldn’t be this deserted.”

  “Yeah,” Cort said, scanning the corners. “This whole thing stinks.”

  “Stack up.” Reeves jerked his chin at the doors. The team, whatever their misgivings, moved to comply.

  “Straight through there.” Schweitzer gestured at the door. “T-shaped corridor I drew for you. Cell blocks are down one floor. Admin offices to your right. Helo hangar is to your left.”

  Reeves leaned forward, nudged the door with the side of his hand, it gave gently. He whispered into the commlink. “Unlocked.”

  He pulled a long, narrow wand from his tac vest, flicked his wrist. The wand telescoped out, a mirror unfurling from its end. Reeves crouched, slid the mirror under the door.

  “No heat signatures.” Schweitzer whispered.

  Reeves nodded. “It’s clear. Buttonhook by element. Gold left, silver right. On my mark.”

  Schweitzer heard the round break before it impacted. A short cough of primer igniting, the tiny roar as metal pierced the sound barrier, the acrid whiff of propellant, and then the wet thud as it pierced bone and brain. One of the operators dropped like a sack of stones, and the rest scattered.

  “Contact rear!” Reeves shouted, the need for stealth long past. Schweitzer whirled. The space behind them was empty, but he could hear a dull rattling in the ceiling above. He scanned the infrared and saw the dissipating patch of heat where the propellant gas had vented from the muzzle; it spread and thinned outside a louvered air intake in the ceiling.

  “They’re overhead!” Schweitzer shouted, setting the saw spinning.

  The team’s weapons went up, but they were far too disciplined to fire without a clear target. Cort and two others scrambled behind the desk. Concealment, not cover, but it was better than nothing. The remaining operators eyed the door, but the corridor behind it was an unbending six feet, every step of which would silhouette the team, making them easy targets. A fatal funnel.

  “Everybody out!” Schweitzer shouted, gesturing at the front doors. The enemy would get a shot at them as they passed, but it was far better than sending the team scrambling deeper into the facility through a tight space where burst fire would scythe them down in seconds.

  The team lacked Schweitzer’s superhuman reflexes, but they were still the best of their kind. They didn’t hesitate. They fired three-round bursts into the ceiling, intended to scatter an enemy, forcing them to keep their heads down while the team made their escape. The team fired and moved slowly, carefully. There was no risk they would stumble, and their weapons spit rounds precisely where they aimed. Schweitzer could tell from the sound of their hearts and the smell of the chemicals in their blood that they were rattled, but to anyone else, it would appear the team was unhurriedly moving to the exit, firing accurately the whole while. When he’d been a living SEAL with a beating heart, Schweitzer had been the same.

  The metallic rattling reached a crescendo and the drop ceiling shuddered, followed by frantic scratching. Schweitzer scanned the ceiling. A Gold wouldn’t be sniping, but there were still no heat signatures. There was someone up there, hosed down with Freon or lying in a refrigerated compartment. The scratching was farther back, just over the doors leading to the parking lot. A living, breathing enemy wouldn’t make those sounds.

  Schweitzer waved frantically back toward the passage behind the desk. Fatal funnel or no, they needed to go through it, and fast. “Go back in! Go back in!” he shouted.

  And now the team did hesitate. Because it wasn’t sound tactical advice. Heading back into the tight space would guarantee at least one death, probably more. They froze, some of them coming off their sights to glance at the ceiling by the main entrance, looking for what caused Schweitzer to change his mind.

  The shooter in the ceiling fired again, and another operator spun and dropped. Another one of the Mikes. Not even sixty seconds and the team was down by two.

  And then the ceiling exploded, showering them all in white dust.

  Three figures dropped twelve feet onto the hard concrete floor. The drop would have broken the leg of any normal person, but they only crouched, absorbing the shock and rising slowly. Their skin was gray, shot through with plunging metal cables and clumsy purple scars. Their faces were leering skulls that rivaled Schweitzer’s own. Their long gray tongues hung to their waists, one flung carelessly over a thick shoulder. Bone claws sprouted from their fingertips. They leaned forward, their golden eyes burning with anticipation.

  “Back! Go now! As fast as you can!” Schweitzer shouted, sprinting toward the Golds.

  “What ab—” Cort said into the commlink.


  “You can’t fight them! Just get the hell out of here!”

  Schweitzer reached the first of the three. In life, it had been a short man, thick in the neck and shoulders. Bone spines ran in a single line from its chin, over its head, and down its back. The Gold’s eyes flicked to Schweitzer, then over his shoulder to the team, drawn by the thumping of their hearts. It jerked left, then dove right with superhuman speed. Schweitzer swung his buzz-saw arm, felt the blade catch in the back of the thing’s thigh as it shot past. It would have felled someone who could feel pain, but of course, pain was nothing to a Gold.

  The team, to their credit, didn’t panic. They set up a walking retreat, moving and covering one another, leapfrogging back to the hall. It was by the numbers, the tactically sound decision in the face of a normal enemy.

  But against Gold Operators, it was much too slow.

  The first Gold reached the desk where Cort and one of the Johns were retreating, just as the shooter in the ceiling fired again. The bullet drilled the other John retreating back to the door. The Gold reached the John beside Cort and delivered an uppercut that sent his head sailing toward the ceiling with a wet pop. Four down.

  The team’s sangfroid began to crumble. They fired on burst, backing pell-mell into the fatal funnel, still facing the enemy. Schweitzer felt rounds whir past his head. They weren’t being careful in their aim anymore. A few of the bullets found the Golds, who ignored them beyond righting themselves as the impact staggered them backward. They fell on the decapitated operator’s sinking corpse, raising their hands as the hot blood rained down, tipping their chins upward like children dancing in a storm.

  “Runrunrunrunrun!” Schweitzer shouted to the team. It was too late for a tactical retreat. The delight in savaging the corpse wouldn’t stop the Golds for long.

  And now the team did break and run, turning their backs on the enemy and bolting through the corridor, turning sharply left and moving out of sight.

  The Golds didn’t bother with Schweitzer. His heart was still, his body as cool as their own. The dead only cared for the living. They knelt, bowed over the steadily diminishing remains of the operator, as if in prayer. Even after sharing his corpse with one of them, feeling its urges as his own, Schweitzer couldn’t understand them. They didn’t need to eat, weren’t driven by any hunger he knew, yet still they tore the flesh to bloody ribbons, chewed it with relish.

  He remembered how clever Ninip had been when it thought guile would gratify its lust for blood, or would corrupt Schweitzer so that Ninip could cast him out, claiming his body for itself. But like all Golds, Ninip’s cunning could be marshaled only in service to its appetite. Golds might look like people, but they were animals, more self-determining than rabid dogs, but only just.

  Schweitzer brought the buzz saw up over his head. The Golds didn’t so much as turn as he brought it down, cleaving the first of them almost in two, the spinning blade passing with little resistance through its skull, catching briefly on the ribcage, before he drove it all the way to its waist. The Gold tried to turn, but its split spine couldn’t hold it upright, and it flopped over on its side.

  The other two rose, howling in rage at the interruption. The first showed more presence of mind, leaping for Schweitzer’s mechanical arm instead of his throat. The second punched him hard enough to make his bones vibrate, tearing him free from the grasp of the first and sending him smashing through the entryway doors to land on his shoulders out in the parking lot.

  “Khodaye!” Ghaznavi’s voice buzzed in Schweitzer’s ear. “Status? Do you need extract?”

  “Negative,” Reeves said before Schweitzer could answer. “We’ve got four down, but we’re still in the fight.”

  “You are not still in the fucking fight.” Schweitzer leapt to his feet. “Did you miss them kicking our ass for the past—”

  “We’re positioned now,” Reeves cut him off. “We can still do this.”

  Schweitzer looked past the broken glass hanging in the metal doorframes. The remaining two Golds had turned from Schweitzer and raced for the corridor, following the heartbeats of Reeves’ remaining people. As they left, two ropes dropped from the ceiling. Two figures slid down them and into view.

  Schweitzer could hear their beating hearts, but their STF armor smoked with cold, the gel inside each cell supercooled. Their heat signatures were invisible, as gray as the skin of the dead Golds. The people under the armor must be freezing, but a good operator could do their job no matter what the conditions.

  He didn’t doubt the operators roping down to the lobby floor were freezing, cold enough to keep them out of even his magically augmented visual spectrum, and he also knew that it wouldn’t slow them down at all.

  Good thing he was behind them.

  They scanned the room, getting on their gun sights. It was more than long enough for Schweitzer to cover the distance between them. He swept the buzz saw up and the blade caught the operator under the armpit. Shear-thickening fluid was designed to harden when impacted by terrific velocity on a small point—the striking of a bullet. Compared to a bullet, the serrated edge of the buzz-saw blade moved at a leisurely pace. Against it, the armor was only so much liquid. The operator screamed as the saw bit into him, the scream turning to a gurgling choke as the blade moved through his ribs and into his lungs. He collapsed, drowning in his own blood.

  Schweitzer turned on his companion, flicking the mechanical arm to one side, hearing the wet splatter of the blood sheeting off. The enemy turned, sighted his carbine, and fired. Not panicked but hurried, and the shot broke high, the round catching Schweitzer’s helmet and tearing it off. A few inches lower and it would have punched a neat hole in the metal plate that made up his face. As it was, it snapped his head back, sent him staggering a few steps.

  The enemy operator took one look at the flickering silver of Schweitzer’s eyes and didn’t bother to fire again. He turned and ran, bursting through the broken entry doors and out into the parking lot. Schweitzer thought to go after him, realized he couldn’t spare the time if he was going to help Reeves and his team. He ran for the corridor behind the desk.

  “One squirter,” he said into his commlink. “Main entrance, coming out into the parking lot.”

  “We’ve got him,” Ghaznavi said. Shots rang out from outside.

  “Reeves!” Schweitzer called into the commlink. “Where are you? I . . .”

  He rounded the corner, came to a skidding halt. One of the Golds was down, a sizeable chunk of its thigh sloughing off from a machete cut. The other was riddled with bullets, just finding its feet after what looked like an entire extended magazine of 5.56mm ammunition had been emptied into its face. Its head was a loose pulp, the gold flames lopsided, flickering at odd angles.

  Schweitzer resisted the temptation to assess the situation. The Golds were so fast that any hesitation would give them enough time to kill another one of the team. Schweitzer threw himself into pulp-head, arms wrapping around its waist. It slammed face-first into the wall hard enough to crack the cinder block, spraying dust. The Gold roared through its pulped mouth, swung an arm back, trying to use the momentum to turn itself around. Schweitzer pressed forward, holding it in place. He brought his knee up into its spine, then again and again. The Gold managed to get an elbow into Schweitzer’s ribs, but the blow lacked leverage, and Schweitzer barely felt it. Another knee to the spine, another, and Schweitzer finally felt the cracking he’d been hoping for as the Gold’s spine shivered and broke. He delivered two more knee shots, one to the short ribs on either side of the shattered spine, felt them give way. The Gold’s torso sagged and Schweitzer let it go, praying that he had damaged it enough to put it out of the fight.

  He let the Gold slump against the wall, spun to face the other. It had only been a moment, but that was more than enough time for a Gold to kill a human, no matter how well trained, even with a cut in its thigh . . .

  The remain
ing Gold lay on the ground in four neat pieces. The head lay on its side. One arm had been severed at the shoulder and kicked away to the wall. The second had been cut off at the elbow, lay next to the body. Reeves stood astride it, a machete in each hand, the flat black surface of the blades dripping with glycerol. Deep notches scarred the edges, bent and blued where they had struck the metal cabling inside the Gold’s body.

  Reeves took a shuffling step on his prosthetic leg. “Everybody okay?”

  “No,” Cort said, “but nobody else is dead, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I’ll take it,” Reeves said. “Look, I’m sorry, but we have to bug out. I thought we could hang in, but this is too close for comfort. They were waiting for us. Who the fuck knows what other surprises they’ve got planned?”

  “You’re the boss,” Cort said. The rest of the team murmured assent.

  “But no fucking Quick Reaction Force. No extraction. We walk out of here with our heads up,” Reeves said.

  The faces around him lit with pride and determination. Schweitzer heard the operators grunt with satisfaction. “Fuckin’ A, chief,” Cort said.

  Reeves finally looked up at Schweitzer. “Didn’t I tell you it was rude to stare?”

  “Sorry,” Schweitzer said. “I just . . .”

  “Never seen a gimp in a fight?”

  “I’ve never seen a living person beat a Gold before. Not in a stand-up fight. I didn’t think it was possible.”

  “Keep watching.” Reeves smiled. “I’m full of surprises.”

  Reeves turned to the team. “Get up and guns up. We’re clear back out of here, but I’m not taking any chances. I’ll take point. Frank, anchor.”

  “On it, boss,” Cort said.

  “No,” Schweitzer said, pointing deeper into the facility. “We have to go that way.”