Earthfall

by Joshua Guess

  I saw the movement create a ripple, a reaction as the enemy prepared itself for the obvious, so I did something completely different.

  My lower half went liquid, my left hand catching me as my suit dropped to the hull and slid in an amorphous sort of baseball slide. I bowled into the ranks of Gaethe at full speed, right arm a piston as I slammed a fist into the face of an enemy. The helmet cracked, Sand slipping in and doing things I didn’t want to think about to the Gaethe inside.

  I fought with them, but it was mostly a show. My best might be enough to win—one of them shoved his weapon arm into my suit, and Jax constricted around it and opened a hole, shooting one of the other Gaethe with the blast—but I checked my ego back at Bravo 2. My efforts were the big, obvious threat, the Sand creeping on and into armor more insidious and far more dangerous.

  That said, I still fought like a beast.

  I kicked away one soldier like one of those old superhero movies; he flew in a flat arc before slamming awkwardly into a destroyed turret platform. I snatched the legs of another, reforming my armor into a roughly human shape, and swung him over my head to crush two others. In my own body I’d have been chewed up in seconds, but the extra-dense suit let me break joints in enemy armor and keep ahead of the game.

  “Mars, MOVE!” Williams shouted on the com.

  I didn’t hesitate. I ran.

  I ported the rear view into my HUD as I did, just in time to see a blinding flare as the ring of bombs ignited in unison. A cocoon of Sand enclosed the reactor to redirect as much of the plasma as possible before melting.

  Jax overloaded the fusion reactor just as the DPF bombs finished their work, and the day suddenly became too bright to handle. I was looking at it through two layers of computer filtering, an electronic feed that couldn’t do my retinas any harm. The Gaethe were less fortunate; the heat and light overwhelmed their suits and forced their visibility to zero.

  Our abandoned ship came down at a right angle to the hull of the warseed, every gun blazing. Jax was kind enough to shoot the Gaethe I left behind while also launching everything he had at the buzzing ships that moved in from the coast. The cargo ship accelerated until just before impact, when Jax threw every emergency switch in the boat.

  The power plant and exotic matter containment units ejected from the ship, each flying off under rocket power, just enough to get them to a safe distance in case of an overload in space. We didn’t want the damn things exploding anywhere close to us.

  The ship crashed in a purely ballistic strike, rocking the warseed enough to actually make me momentarily unstable. The explosion was close enough to the reactor blast to make them essentially one event. A shock wave hit me, but the Sand kept the compressed air from blowing me away.

  “Let’s go,” Rinna said, her voice thick, somehow wet. “No time to waste.”

  The good thing about the draas was that it was almost impossible to actually melt. You could weaken it with a huge amount of energy or even penetrate through, but the damage was always contained to a small area. We had poured a lot of heat and punched a hole, but it wasn’t a molten hole. A fact I was grateful for as I sprinted back the way I came and took a running leap into the jagged passageway leading inside the warseed.

  “In,” I said.

  “Me too,” Williams said when he thumped down beside me. Reid and Durham appeared just after, followed by Rinna. Her suit was in the process of reforming from severe damage, so I expanded her readout and glanced at it.

  “You okay?” I asked her on a private channel.

  “Got knocked around inside my armor,” she said. “Hit my damn neck and head against the sides of it. I’ll be fine. You still have the thing, right?”

  I slid my hand—my actual hand—across the waist of my inner armor. The Kyotogen weapon was still inside its protective shell and firmly secured. “It’s fine. We’re good to go.”

  “Where are we?” Rinna asked.

  Jax brought up a representation of the warseed on my HUD and zoomed in to a large corridor running the length of the ship. A bright red arrow appeared, pointing at five red dots. The words YOU ARE HERE floated next to the arrow.

  “Seriously?” Williams said. “Is your computer making a joke?”

  “He’s being a smart-ass, sure, but I don’t think he was trying to make us laugh,” I said. “Jax, can we get a little more detail, please?”

  “Unfortunately not,” Jax said. “Shuul was only able to give us the general layout of the structure. He did not possess actual plans. We are currently standing in the dorsal supply conduit, which is also used to reach the exterior of the ship.”

  “No wonder we were able to break through,” Reid said. “This thing is what, thirty meters wide? Probably the only thin spot on the hull.”

  “Yes,” Jax said. “That is why I chose this location. The designers recognized this flaw, however. Getting inside the ship proper will be…challenging.”

  “Lead the way,” Rinna said. “Maybe if we get that little gizmo Paulson made close enough, we can just set it off in here.”

  “That would kill all of us,” Jax reminded her.

  Rinna raised her suited hand, fingers flapping against thumb. “Yeah, yeah. It’s just that kinda day.”

  ***

  “Maybe they just don’t see us as a threat,” I said twenty minutes later, when exactly zero Gaethe soldiers had appeared. “I mean, five of us against a ship this big isn’t even David and Goliath territory.”

  “They just don’t want to open any doors we might get through,” Durham said. “Why bother? They’ve probably scanned us a dozen times by now. They know we don’t have any more bombs.”

  “We have been scanned seven thousand, four hundred and sixty-eight times,” Jax said. “Their sensors poll quite rapidly.”

  Durham turned toward me as we walked. “You’ve been putting up with that your whole life?”

  I smiled inside my helmet. “It’s much more annoying when he does it inside your head, trust me.”

  “Wow,” Durham said. “I’d have eaten a bullet years ago. Good on you, I guess.”

  Durham’s suit mysteriously tripped as a momentary glitch seemed to overtake its Sand.

  “Dick,” he grumbled as he righted himself.

  Reid, who was moving a few hundred yards ahead, came on the com. “Guys, I think I’ve got something. Hustle up here.”

  We broke into a jog and ate up the distance in short order. We found Reid standing in front of a bulky slab of draas jutting out from the side of the corridor. The normally smooth lines were jarringly interrupted by it, as if someone had taken a raw block and slapped it over a hole. From what I’d observed of Gaethe design, they prized order and elegance in every aspect of their construction.

  This was ugly, and from the irregular globs of sealant where the slab met wall, hasty to boot.

  “Looks like it’s about a foot and a half thick,” Rinna said. “Think the rail gun will crack it?”

  I leaned forward to give my sensors a closer look. When I did, a tendril of Sand grew from the head of my suit and separated once it touched the sealant. I started getting data at once.

  “Jax is trying to degrade the seal,” I said.

  “We know, we have eyes,” Reid mumbled. “What do we do even if we can get in there? We have to be in space by now. No way out for us.”

  In response, a host of readings appeared on our displays. The entire corridor was open via the big fucking hole we knocked in it, which was useful for gathering external data. Surprisingly, we were not in space. The warseed was hovering at an altitude of roughly ten kilometers. Where the ship was doing so was unknown, but being in atmosphere was slightly encouraging.

  I laughed. “I guess we’ll find out whether it really is better to destroy a ship underwater instead of in the air. The good news is, statistically speaking, we’re probably over an ocean right now.”

  Reid laughed, which I took as a good sign.

  “What is that?” Durham asked as a spike o
f data showed up on the telemetry from the Sand attacking the door. “Do you hear—”

  The chunk of draas exploded from the wall, slamming into me and Williams and scattering everyone else. Weapons fire spewed through the opening, and I watched in horror as a handful of particle beams transfixed Durham. His suit went from black to cherry red in a second.

  “NO!” Reid screamed. He jumped in front of Durham just as the rest of the enemies began to track the easy target. Durham’s suit began to shed its severely damaged front at once, but Reid…

  The assault intensified before anyone could possibly help. Overwhelmed in a heartbeat, his suit flashed to thick liquid around him. His screams carried over the com, and the horrible realization struck me. He would live longer, suffer longer, because he wore a copy of my survival suit. It would mitigate much of the initial heat only to roast him alive over the course of the next minute or so. Reid was dead. He was still moving, still breathing, still shrieking as his skin sizzled against the inside of his armor, but he was dead all the same. The inescapable fact hammered against the inside of my skull.

  There were noises all around me. Flashes of light. Something in my vision grew larger and pulsed red in time with my heartbeat. It seemed like a strange coincidence that such a thing would happen.

  Something pushed against my side. My suit’s side. I only noticed because the pressure reminded me that I was still trapped beneath the slab of draas with Williams.

  Williams. Right.

  I tried to focus, pushing away the fog in my head. The noise in my ear resolved into a voice.

  “I said help me lift this goddamn thing, Mars! Now!”

  I spun around inside my suit and sent commands to Jax. My real body curled into a crouch between the slab and the deck, then the Sand around me contracted until it sat against my survival suit in an inch-thick layer as dense as Jax could make it.

  I stood, pushing with everything I had. The slab shifted enough to give Williams room to maneuver, and he used the increased leverage to help. Together we heaved, protected from direct fire by the thing, and with the sort of coordinated effort only a machine could provide we moved it.

  Our shove sent the slab upright and then some, slamming back into the small crowd of Gaethe soldiers making their way through the hole. Their armor was tough, but it was rigid. I took a savage pleasure in hearing it shatter under the mass of the slab, the sound like a giant stepping on a bug.

  Other shooters—many of them—stood revealed beyond the open doorway. The sudden crushing of their front line caught them off guard, which was just enough time for Rinna to unload with four rail guns simultaneously. Rounds capable of piercing ships tore through Gaethe armor like paper.

  Williams and Durham regrouped like the soldiers they were and raised their weapons—Durham doing it wearing half a slowly-reforming suit—and fired carefully aimed bursts. The hallway beyond the doorway sloped gently down and away, meaning we would have to either move toward the enemy or wait for more of them to pop their heads up once the front ranks were eliminated. I had no doubt that sooner than we liked, one of them would lob an explosive or something through the open portal.

  I decided to get there first.

  While the others laid down an impressive layer of suppressing fire, I wedged myself under one side of the slab. The Gaethe smashed beneath it put one side up at an angle half a meter off the deck. I extended Sand across the long side of the huge rectangle and braced myself for a hard push. It took a few seconds for the thing to start moving, but I got it on edge.

  “A little help here,” I said as I changed my stance.

  “I’ll cover us,” Rinna said. “Give it a push, boys!”

  Williams and Durham darted forward and grabbed hold of the slab. Jax pinged all three of us and took control of our movements completely, inner and outer suits both. A countdown flashed on my HUD, and when it hit zero, my body heaved with a sharpness I couldn’t have hoped to replicate.

  The slab slid across the floor, lubricated by blood, and through the opening in the wall where it vanished. I saw it tip and tumble, heard the frenzied screams and a few explosions from ruptured power cells or whatever. I didn’t care about the how just then, only the result.

  “I will scout ahead,” Jax said. “See to your friend. I will give warning if needed.”

  A sphere of Sand formed from my leg and rolled through the doorway and out of sight. I turned back to the still-cooling mound where Reid lay.

  He was quiet, now.

  Thirty

  “He’s gone,” Rinna said. The rest of us stood anxiously together. I was torn between a strong desire to take a moment for Reid and an equally powerful urge to move. Who knew what horrible shit would surprise us next.

  “We’ll raise a beer for him later, cap,” Williams said. Durham nodded.

  Rinna sighed, the sound oddly intimate over the com. “Right. Let’s get moving. Unless he tells us otherwise, we take the only way down we’ve seen.”

  “Y’all know that’s a trap, right?” Durham asked, his voice flat. “They were waiting for us. They’ll have planned for this.”

  “We don’t have a choice,” I said.

  “He’s right,” Rinna said. “We’re down a man, our Sand is operating on whatever power it has left with no ability to recharge. We have guns with limited ammo and no more bombs. We have to move fast, hit hard, and pray we get really fucking lucky.”

  “Okay,” Durham said. “Just making sure we’re all on the same page.”

  We moved down the side tunnel with weapons raised, ready for any sign of trouble. On a ship as large as the warseed, the resources had to exist to kill us a thousand times over. We needed to be ready for anything.

  The bodies of the Gaethe soldiers lay spread out over a long area. The first dozen or so were intact but for rail gun damage. Rinna put up a hand to stop us.

  “See if you can remove the power packs. We might be able to use them.”

  A minute of prying and tinkering proved that no, we couldn’t remove them by themselves. The power storage or small reactor or whatever was integrated into the back torso of the armor. We settled on taking the armor apart at the joints and carrying around the back panels. The downside to this was the fact that they did tend to blow up in spectacular fashion when breached, which meant we were toting targets around.

  On the plus side, the open connectors at the edges of each panel leaked energy our suits could absorb. Win!

  Further down the tunnel, things got horrific. The slab of draas sat atop several corpses at the bottom of a steep drop-off, a corner missing. More than one Gaethe soldier suffered a containment failure, and the explosions painted the walls with everything from the fine carbon of the vaporized to viscera and meat. Further away from the blasts we found more than a dozen bodies whose armor had been reduced to thousands of cracked pieces held in place by the pulverized bodies within.

  “Jesus,” Williams said. “Poor bastards.”

  “Fuck them,” I said. “It’s not like I hate the Gaethe, but these guys killed Reid. They don’t get my pity.”

  There was silence after that, and we left the bodies behind.

  Half a kilometer later Jax stopped us. “There is a blockade ahead,” he reported. “Thirty meters after this bend, a barricade has been set up. It is made of blocks identical to the one we encountered behind us. Soldiers are waiting behind it.”

  “That’s good cover,” Rinna mused. “We have nothing that will go through it. How many?”

  “Forty,” Jax said. “Though none of them noticed the sphere I am using to spy on them. Twenty meters behind the barricade there is a door leading to the interior of the ship. I believe one of your power packs could breach it.”

  “That’s great,” I said, “but how do we get past them in the first—oh. Oh, that might work.”

  “Did you just get a hard-on?” Williams asked. “I’m not judging.”

  “Shut it,” Rinna said. “Mars?”

  Inside my suit, I was
grinning like a madman. “Let me work it out with Jax. I don’t want to risk this being overheard.”

  ***

  Jax had taken the liberty of blinding the local sensors, so whoever was in charge of watching this section of tunnel couldn’t see what happened next.

  A lone Gaethe limped around the bend, one arm hanging at his side. Several shouts arose as the soldiers behind the barrier challenged him. The shuffling figure stopped abruptly, raising his good arm, and pointed to his helmet.

  The weapons pointed at him didn’t lower, but they did waver. A rapid conversation followed, then abruptly stopped. Three Gaethe squeezed through the narrow gap where one block didn’t quite meet the wall. Beam weapons leveled at the new arrival, they waved him forward.

  One of them even put out a hand as if to help.

  The limping figure followed one soldier through, the other two at his back. When he was past the barrier and among his white-armored cohorts, he stopped again.

  With no warning at all, the new arrival fired an overpowered shot from his beam weapon right into the power pack of the soldier he had followed. A hard kick came almost at the same time, taking the unsuspecting warrior off his feet. The series of events took less than a second, leaving a trail of light in the air where the widening hole in the power core leaked.

  Jax, as always, timed it perfectly. The soldier landed and exploded just as the suit he piloted overloaded. The dead Gaethe inside and the Sand sheathing him were reduced to a hot cloud of gas.

  I saw all of it, of course. Jax was transmitting to the team.

  We were already running when the detonations happened. In a lovely bit of irony, the blocks of draas served as excellent protection for us, absorbing nearly all the energy of the explosions. I was the first over the barrier, which was waist high on my re-expanded suit. I wanted to be at least the size of my enemies if it came to hand-to-hand fighting.

  I jumped right the hell back over, knocking Rinna and Williams on their asses as I did.