Susquehanna

by Chris Pourteau

  There it was again, the sound of friendly fire quickly answered by the enemy. The age-old dance of opposing soldiers, mere feet apart, engaging in corridor warfare: a look around a corner, quick snap fire, and ducking back into cover. Each hoping for the other to poke their head up at precisely the wrong moment. Pusher was good and she was brave, but the law of averages wasn’t in her favor. Eventually she’d make a mistake.

  “I’m going up there,” Hatch said. “Get the batteries installed and tote the AAB upstairs. Whistle to let me know when you’re ready to move.”

  “We promised two crates, forty laser rifles,” said Stug.

  “They’ll have to settle for half,” breathed Hatch. “It’s too hot in here. Double-time it.”

  Stug nodded. If Hatch was feeling the itch to bug out, the time for joking was over. Now the mathematics of battle became a simple matter of subtraction on both sides of the equation—of killing the other guy before he killed you. Honor and medals and tales for grandchildren came later. If you lived.

  Hatch mounted the stairs from the basement and knelt at the doorway to the first floor. He quick-glanced, saw Pusher still prostrate, her laser rifle wedged between the bodies of the Transport soldiers. Even from behind the door, he could see that the blasted, charred bodies she used for sandbags were riddled with holes from heavy enemy fire. After five agonizingly slow minutes of combat, Pusher was much more exposed than she’d been when he’d first left her to defend their escape route.

  “Sergeant!” he demanded over the mayhem. “Report!”

  “Two porters down,” she said, half turning her mouth to aim her words his way. “Two more still wanting to play.”

  Hatch smiled at her poise. Ellis’s coolness was the product of a soldier’s training, an expectation of performance under fire. He had no doubt she was actually scared to death.

  “Pusher! Ears!”

  Hatch spat the warning at her as a sonic grenade thrown by a porter landed behind her, bumping to a stop against the corridor’s wall halfway between them. He threw himself toward the basement and clamped his hands hard over his ears. Hatch counted the grenade’s timer, then gave it five extra seconds.

  Up top he could hear the chaos of stomping boots, shouting, and blasting lasers. He pulled himself back up the stairs, threw himself prone, and laid his rifle horizontal over the lip of the landing. He almost fired without thinking. The corpses of the Transport soldiers had come back to life and were standing over Pusher, their weapons aimed at her head.

  No, wait. The corpses were still on the floor. These were fresh Authority troops poised to execute Pusher. Her position had been overrun.

  “Our orders are to stay here,” insisted Bracer. “We’re the gatekeepers.”

  “I know that,” Hawkeye said, eyes glued to his omni-lens. Unlike his partner, he could see the heat sigs inside the building: their positions, their movements, and when they fired their okcillium-powered weapons. “But I think they’re in big trouble on the first floor.”

  He shifted his gaze up by thirty degrees. The building was old and its walls hadn’t been reinforced with glass. Glass in the walls would’ve bent the infrared spectrum just enough to prevent him from seeing the heat-producing sources inside. With nothing but simple stone and concrete between Hawkeye and his targets, finding heat signatures was easy enough. But his device couldn’t differentiate between Transport and TRACE soldiers. Perhaps he should rename it.

  Higher up, he thought he saw the QB and Logan holed up on the second floor, occupying an increasing number of Authority troopers. But just as many were on the ground floor, and that threatened their main mission. He stared intently at Pusher’s position, then saw what must’ve been Transport soldiers charging it.

  “Damn it! I think they just overran Pusher!”

  Bracer considered moving down to flank the porters. Technically, he and Hawkeye both held the rank of corporal, but he’d been promoted before the spotter, and that meant the onus of making a command decision was his. It was at times like this that he wished for Stug’s quick-sure field experience . . . or the QB’s calm resolve.

  “Maybe we should—”

  “Wait!” Hawkeye motioned him to silence. A few moments passed.

  “Well?”

  The spotter turned to him and smiled. Then his face went white.

  Bracer grew eyes in the back of his head. He knew without seeing exactly what Hawkeye was staring at. His ears had picked up the low, metallic buzzing a moment before his brain recognized the sound. The hum of a hovering Transport drone.

  “Can I lend you a hand?”

  Lasers plastered the corridor wall, forcing them back into the alcove.

  “Funny,” said the QB, wrinkling her upper lip. “Stug’s been a bad influence, I see.” She took the corpse’s severed forearm from Logan. She wasn’t squeamish by nature, but handling the dead weight of another man’s limb made her queasier than humping it through the stink of the City’s sewers had. Her ally carefully wiped his knife on his trousers and stuck it back in his belt.

  “Cover me,” she said, gathering her legs beneath her.

  This was easier ten years ago, her inner self warned. Mercifully, not in Hatch’s voice.

  Shut up.

  The porters fired on their position again. Logan went flat on the ground, aiming around the door and whipping out a brace of bullets inches from the corridor floor. He snapped off three rounds, then waited without returning to cover for his dance partner on the other end of the hallway to pop up. Up he popped. Logan squeezed his trigger repeatedly, taking the porter in the chest.

  “Go now.”

  Knees popping, forehead furrowed, the QB launched herself across the corridor. Logan unloaded three more rounds down the hall to discourage enemy initiative. She slapped the dead soldier’s still-warm palm against the swipe pad and the door whooshed open. The captain reconnoitered the dim room, clearing it for enemy presence, then spun around and took up a standing position. Her body blocked the door, holding it open.

  “Hey, boys!” she shouted down the corridor. “Bury this, would you?” Winding up her underhanded pitch once, twice, she lobbed the forearm at them. It smacked the floor halfway between them, leaving a bloody trail in its wake as it rolled to a stop. The hand opened upward as if begging its living comrades for help.

  Logan pulled back under cover as the captain watched for a reaction. She thought she saw half a face gape in shock at the mutilated flesh. She unloaded three blasts in its direction, and the half face withdrew.

  “Now what?” hissed Logan.

  Her BICE offline, Mary accessed her inner clock, the one that woke her in the morning for reveille thirty seconds before her implant’s alarm sounded.

  “Three more minutes. Then up and out.”

  Shouts and screams down the hall. She couldn’t tell if the enemy was enraged by the sight of their butchered comrade’s arm or if someone was having a disciplinary problem with his troops. Then the QB heard the heavy thunk of a metal ball hitting the floor, followed by the eerie echo of a loud, hollow roll in a suddenly silent hallway.

  It was the first one, then, noted her inner voice, unflappable as always.

  “Grenade!” shouted Logan.

  Hatch ducked hard away from the doorway. It was all he could do to get out of the way in time to avoid being flattened himself. He felt the speed of the AAB as it blurred past, shooting like a rocket at Pusher’s position. One porter barely had time to turn before it took him airborne and dragged him past the dead sandbags.

  Pusher fell backward as the AAB passed overhead, then swung her leg out and around. Her second would-be executioner lost his balance as she swept his legs out from under him. She was up and straddling him before he even realized he’d dropped his weapon. He had time for one fleeting look of knowing awareness before her rifle butt stove in his nose.

  “I hate when I can’t do that myself!” shouted Stug, racing into the doorway next to Hatch, who lay stunned on his side. “We rely on
technology too much,” he groused. Then he winked at Hatch and whistled. “I’m ready to move.”

  As the reality of what had just happened dawned on him, Hatch gawked up at the sergeant. “You’re not as dumb as you look,” he said.

  “I keep telling you that,” said Stug, his voice burdened with the weight of the unappreciated.

  The buzz of the AAB’s engine competed with the soldier’s gasping as it pinned him to the wall. Pusher lay across the corpses, took aim, and fired. Only the sound of the purring engine remained.

  “We better get that box and get out of here,” said Hatch, “before more bad guys show up.”

  Outside, they heard shouts and the rapid fire of a Transport drone’s Gatling laser.

  Stug’s shoulders sagged. Just once, he thought. “Too late.”

  Bracer fell flat on his face. He felt more than saw Hawkeye go for his weapon, but the spotter first had to let go of his omni-lens, then kneel and draw. The drone shot him in the chest before his knee even hit the roof.

  Bringing his rifle to bear, Bracer rolled left. The drone redirected its targeting sensors, tracing its fire across the gritty roof, ranging in on him. Bracer stopped, breathed, and sighted. One long, straight beam of laser fire hit the drone’s camera eye.

  The blast overloaded its circuitry and the resulting explosion showered the roof with white-hot metal. Bracer hissed in pain as a chunk of shrapnel took him in the upper thigh. Metal, wiring, and one heavy Gatling laser rained down on the alleyway below.

  “Hawkeye!”

  Bracer crawled across the rooftop to reach his friend, pain arcing like lightning in his left leg. The spotter’s eagle eyes had saved the members of Alpha Squad and others in B Company more times than they could count. His squadmates often joked over drinks after an engagement about how Ole One Eye had kept them from being overrun or flanked. Hawkeye hated the moniker and its double entendre, but that just made his fellow soldiers, especially the women, laugh all the harder. His usual response was, “Well, maybe when I’m dead, you’ll stop calling me that goddamned awful name.”

  As he pulled himself up next to his friend, Bracer feared Hawkeye would get his wish. The spotter lay motionless, his omni-lens shattered and hanging uselessly around his neck.

  The explosion knocked both of them back into their respective doorways. Transport had thrown a frag grenade, an almost passé weapon in an era of sonic grenades and laser rifles. Neither Logan nor the QB had expected it. The blast had taken out half the wall on either side of the corridor, its radius rocking everything for fifty feet in all directions.

  The captain’s inner ear hummed with the heavy concussive shock. She moved slowly, randomly, like each of her limbs had a mind of its own. Slow and clumsy, she tried to focus her brain on reality and get her arms and legs to respond. Her ears felt thick, like her head did on the morning after a bout of heavy drinking. Her brain felt like it was floating inside her skull. She knew she needed to move, to grab her rifle and prepare. Transport had thrown the frag grenade to put them on their asses. They were coming.

  Weakly, her eyesight teary and unfocused, she saw that Logan had gotten it worse. He moved, but even more slowly than she did. Mary knew she had to get to him, to defend him. He was the only real leader the Wild Ones had. And if they were to be allies to TRACE, that made him more valuable in the struggle against Transport than she was. She had to protect him.

  She could hear the grinding stomp of boots on the ground, stepping through debris. They echoed from what seemed like a hundred miles away. The QB’s training took over. Muscle memory alone pulled the third and final sonic grenade from her belt.

  Her numb fingers could barely hold on to its slick metal surface. She pulled the pin with her teeth. With a lethargic lob, she threw it at the star-like blast of black that scorched the walls. The enemy was almost on top of her.

  The grenade landed behind their line of advance. Yelling. Scrambling. Boots moving quickly, crushing fallout from the earlier blast in their haste.

  The QB covered her ears and turned her face away. It felt like an eternity to her: the covering, the turning, the waiting.

  The grenade failed to go off. It was a dud.

  She glanced back to find the enemy realizing the same thing at the same moment. Anger fired her limbs—anger at the tech’s failure, at their desperate situation. Her ever-present, simmering hatred for Transport erupted, shooting adrenaline into her veins. She took a deep breath, her legendary calmness and hyper-awareness brought to bear on the task before her.

  Mary screamed. But it was not the high-pitched cry of a woman forced into powerless paralysis by a fate beyond her control. Her Amazonian voice, strained and feral, carried a hate-filled promise of justice without mercy for her enemies.

  That mortal wail filled the corridor as the QB leveled her laser rifle and fired, precise and deadly, at everything in front of her. Answering shots hit the walls and floor around her, but they were hurried and far less accurate. She ignored their the death they carried. Her voice cut through the smoke and thorny burn of heavy laser fire in the air. Though her assault upon the enemy seemed to go on for hours, her shrill scream lasted less than thirty seconds. When there were no targets left, the captain’s finger released the trigger by reflex. Her voice trailed away, its fury dying on the scorched walls.

  The fog of smoking wounds choked the corridor. It was like the spirits of the dead hovered in the haze, releasing their mortal coils.

  Mary crawled across the hall to Logan, heedless of the threat should more of the enemy come around the corner. But nothing living moved, save her.

  “We’re out of time!” said Hatch. “Get that goddamned box moving!”

  Stug was at its controls, reprogramming it to auto-follow his biosign. Pusher guarded the hallway, allowing him to work.

  Hatch moved back to the red door, sheltering behind it as pieces of a Transport drone hit the ground in front of him. He searched the roof across the alley but could see nothing of his squadmates. For all he knew, Transport had an entire squadron of drones inbound, and Alpha Squad had no cover on the roof.

  Damn it, boys, where the hell are you?

  He heard the thready vibration of the AAB as it followed Stug to his position. Pusher jogged backward behind it, guarding their rear. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on out there. We need to make a run for it. Get that damned box down into the sewer,” he ordered.

  “Yes, sir,” Stug acknowledged, all business. “Pusher, with me.”

  Hatch became the rear guard, scanning the armory behind them. For now, Transport had run out of soldiers to feed TRACE’s gristmill.

  Stug scouted the alleyway. “Looks clear,” he grumbled.

  “Go!”

  The big man sprinted, the AAB following close on his heels. Pusher resumed her rearguard duty, backstepping and scanning for enemy intervention from behind. Stug dropped feet-first through the manhole despite the distance to the sewer below. His thick legs absorbed the jump, and he looked up expectantly. The airbox hovered, appearing confused, until its tracking sensors and algorithms determined how to reach Stug. It turned ninety degrees, faced perpendicular to the ground, and glided straight through the hole. Pusher followed.

  Hatch observed the roof of the flophouse again. He still couldn’t find his team stationed there.

  Now I’m officially worried.

  Her head was finally starting to clear, and Logan was coming around. He struggled, tried to blink away the effects of the blast.

  The QB reconnoitered around the corner. Hazy and filled with dead Transport soldiers, the corridor was still clear. But they were out of time. More porters would be arriving any minute, recalled from the explosions throughout the City to re-secure the armory.

  She slapped Logan across the face. And again. When her arm swung at him a third time, he caught it by the wrist.

  “The joke wasn’t that bad,” he mumbled.

  “How many fingers am I holding up?”

  He pee
red at her hand, then squinted to make sure. “One. And the same to you.”

  “On your feet, soldier.”

  “I’m a spy, remember?”

  “Today, it’s the same thing.”

  Logan stood up warily, as if trying out a new set of legs. She heard the crunching then. Boots again, pressing fragments of wall and bloody viscera into the floor.

  “Crap.”

  “What?”

  “Go.”

  The QB unslung the laser rifle she’d taken off the dead porter and handed it to him. He took it without thinking and shoved it in the netting bag, then realized what she was doing.

  “Now wait a minute—”

  “No time! This is our mission!” she hissed. “Remember those children in Bedrock? Now go!” After a moment’s hesitation, she handed him her own half-drained rifle as well. “Hurry!”

  Reluctant but accepting, Logan backed away from her, moving as fast up the stairs as his unsteady legs, burdened by four laser rifles, would carry him. Mary watched him go, then grabbed at her uniform before she remembered she was out of grenades. Cursing silently, she pulled her .50-caliber sidearm.

  This is it then, her inner voice said. Composed. Resolved. She settled into herself, felt the pit of her stomach harden. In that moment, she became the QB—mind, body, and soul.

  She thumbed the pistol’s safety off, kneeled, pointed her arm and one eye down the hallway. She didn’t lack for targets. One enemy saw her weapon and shouted, raising his rifle.

  Mary fired.

  “Lieutenant!”

  Bracer was limping from the doorway of the flophouse and into the alley. He had Hawkeye slung across his shoulder.

  He must’ve carried him from the roof, Hatch thought. Jesus, is he—

  “Wounded. Took a drone blast straight to the chest,” reported Bracer. “Saved by his damned omni-lens, of all things.”

  Hatch allowed himself half a breath of thankful relief. Then he heard the Gatling lasers not far away. Transport was bringing its drones home to secure the armory, and they were cleaning up any problems along the way, it sounded like.