“Urgh!”
“Jezzy!” Solomon shouted, skidding along the floor to her and looking up as he raised his pistol down the corridor—
But was too shocked to fire at what he saw. What? His mind blanked at the sight, trying to register what on earth had shot one of his squad members.
“What IS that!?” he shouted, before firing.
It was humanoid, that much was certain, but that was where any and all likeness to humanity stopped. If anything, the creature coming towards them looked more like Malady than it ever could Solomon or Jezzy, as it seemed to be partly enclosed in plates of white and gray steel, with servo-assisted joints at the knees, elbows, and even some sort of rudimentary battle harness at its waist and forming the support for the breastplate on its chest.
Like power armor. Confederate Marine power armor, Solomon realized, until he saw the thing’s head. It was a bald human head, but its skin was a pallid gray, and one entire half was made of the same sophisticated steel plates. He was reminded, momentarily, once again of Malady, as the creature had its ‘human’ eye closed as if it were asleep—or dead—but on the robotic side of its head was a gleaming purple diode in place of an eye.
Its articulated left arm ended in a particle weapon, similar to the sort that Malady was able to use. Solomon could see the multiple spinning wheels moving, sparking with static electricity like tiny lightning bolts as it powered up the device to fire again.
But particle weapons are insane, Solomon knew. They were only used in industrial contexts to forge and cut poly metals, or else in place on large pieces of heavy infrastructure like ships and transporters. The only reason that Malady was able to carry one into battle was that he was nearly the size of a tank and had the reserve power ready to use one.
BLAM-BLAM-BLAM! Solomon fired, seeing the bullets ricochet and spark off the thing’s metal hide, one of them spinning it half around as it found a bare, fleshy shoulder.
“Gotcha!” he growled in feral joy as he spared Jezzy a look beside him. She was still alive, breathing shallowly, and her own shoulder held a blackened mark just under her collarbone. Thank the stars that energy weapon cauterized the wound, Solomon saw.
“Commander!?” It was Karamov, moving in front of Solomon and firing his own pistol at the thing. More sounds of metal striking metal and the almost musical tones of the bullets shattering or ricocheting off the creature. The onslaught had forced it to its knees, before finally knocking it to the side of the corridor.
“It’s down!” Karamov said, his voice wavering with astonishment and anxiety. As well it might, Solomon thought. They had never faced anything like that. Was it some new kind of full tactical suit? Like the one that Malady was encased in, but this time not an all-encompassing shell?
“Kol!?” Solomon snarled.
“Almost, Commander! One more minute…” the young specialist breathed as Cready saw him hurriedly reattaching wires to Marshal’s gizmo, now secured into the walls of the Arceos Generator itself.
“Just hurry it up! We need to get Jezzy out of here!” Solomon said.
“Sir… The mission…” Karamov was saying, sparing a worried glance at Wen. “We can’t abandon it when we’re so close…”
Dammit. Solomon gritted his teeth and snarled. Wasn’t it enough to turn off the Arceos District, the headquarters of the Chosen? Wouldn’t that give the Confederacy the advantage they needed?
No. Solomon knew. The Chosen would undo whatever it was that Marshal’s gadget had done, and that would only mean that the war would be inevitable. And now with this thing—
Solomon looked down the corridor, expecting to see the body of the cyborg-type creation—only for there to be nothing but blackened scorch marks on the walls. It was gone.
“What the—” Karamov had followed his commander’s stare to see the same impossibility. “I dropped it, Commander, I swear. I saw at least two bullets hit the thing’s flesh, one in the head…”
“Well, it’s certainly not there now, is it?” Solomon was caught between two evils. His combat specialist was out of action and needed help, but he needed to finish the mission and steal the Chosen’s data.
And I have some killer cyborg thing on the loose. “This must be the Chosen’s secret weapon. Some new type of Power Armor…” Solomon was saying as his mind raced to a decision.
Frack it, he thought.
“Kol, I want you to get Jezzy out of here. Get her back up to the city and make your way out. I don’t care how. Just make sure that her suit is sealed and that you both have helmets. Get yourself out into the Red and I’ll send Malady to pick you up.”
“Aye, sir,” Kol said immediately, already putting his tools away as the wall behind him started to light up with multiple green lights. “And, uh…whatever else is happening, Commander, we’d all better get out of here, because the Arceos batteries are going to blow as Marshal’s gadget overloads the generators.”
“Go back and use the Chosen suits back there for Jezzy,” Solomon ordered. Kol was already moving, and Solomon leaned over his combat specialist.
“We’re going to get you out of this, soldier,” he whispered.
“Just…keep your promise…” The Commander of Gold Squad was surprised to hear her cough and groan as Jezzy’s eyes fluttered open, clouded with pain. For a moment, Solomon thought that she meant the promise to steal the Chosen’s data—until, of course, he realized precisely what she meant.
“My father…” Jezzy coughed, wincing as Kol slid his arms under her shoulders and tried his best to get her to her feet without causing too much pain. He failed.
“I promise, Jezzy. And you’re going to be around to see him again yourself, so just do as Kol says!” Solomon ordered, watching as his technical specialist half-supported, half-carried the limping and slouching combat specialist back the way they had come.
“Sir?” It was Karamov, standing guard over the only other exit where the cyborg had so recently and mysteriously vanished from.
Solomon spared a look at the walls of the Arceos Generator, now a lot brighter with more flickering voltage lights than it had before. And making a heck of a lot more noise. It wouldn’t take long, he knew. “We’d better go. With me, Marine,” Solomon growled as he ran down the corridor, pistol high.
“I don’t get it. What WAS that thing?” Karamov at his side was saying as they raced past where the cyborg had been. Solomon knew that they didn’t have any time to pause, but he forced himself to scan the floor and walls for signs of a hatchway or secret exit. There was nothing.
“I don’t know, Marine,” Solomon muttered, before catching sight of something on the stone floor. Tiny black drops, like blood.
“That’s not blood.” Karamov had spotted the same and knelt, touching the substance lightly with his gloves and examining it. “If I didn’t know any better, then I would have said that it’s…” He looked up at his commander with surprise. “…engine oil?”
This is getting weirder and weirder… Solomon growled, nodding further ahead of them, where the spatters of black oil appeared to be heading. He didn’t want to stop to think about the fact that the creature had taken at least three direct flesh wounds from the combined firepower of both him and Karamov, and yet it was still alive! “Come on.”
The corridor started to turn, leading upwards until they saw flashes of light overhead. Grills in the ceilings. Ventilation vents…
“Marine? I don’t think we want to follow this tunnel to wherever it leads,” Solomon made the decision. “Because that thing is sure to be waiting for us, with whatever friends it has…”
Karamov immediately saw the commander’s plan, reaching up to the nearest vent where he could just touch it with the tip of his pistol. “Hang on,” Karamov said, kneeling so that the commander could climb onto his back before standing up. Solomon splayed his hands to the side of the vent and peered through, to see the gathering gloom of a Martian night, the glow of neon lights, and the edges of corrugated metal buildings.
“Okay, no point waiting down here to get shot or blown up…” Solomon started to hit the side of the grate where it latched to its frame, using the butt of his pistol.
WHACK! WHACK!
The whine behind them was getting louder, reaching that worrying, shrieking level of a protesting machine about to give up in explosive style.
CRACK! The latch broke, dropping to the floor beside Karamov, and Solomon pushed up on the stiff grate, feeling all the muscles in his shoulders and back bunch and tighten…
“Ugh!” The grate lifted, flipping open into the Martian night with a scrape, making Solomon hiss in annoyance.
“So much for subterfuge, Commander…” Karamov grunted beneath him.
“Frack subterfuge, Specialist,” Solomon growled, seizing the surface of Armstrong Habitat and hauling himself up. “So far, I’ve blown a hole through an entire habitat, and we’re about to blow up a generator underneath the habitat…” He rolled across the cold cobbles, seeing that he had been right—this was indeed some kind of industrial park in the heart of the Arceos District, with featureless corrugated warehouses sitting in grid-like fashion, side by side.
Moving quickly, Solomon reached back into the hole to seize his specialist’s upraised arm before bracing his feet against the edge of the ventilation grill on the floor and heaving as Karmov jumped.
“Ooof!” They both sprawled onto the floor of the Arceos District after a desperate scrabble, panting and exhausted.
“But…where’s the Chosen’s hideout, sir?” Karamov was saying, looking around from one exactly the same warehouse to the next.
“My guess is that it’s the very one that the tunnel was heading towards,” Solomon said. And where that cyborg must have been going… He nodded at the nearest warehouse directly in front of them, again without signs of insignia or announcement boards to indicate who owned it or anything about what might be contained inside.
Just as floodlights around them exploded into life.
“HALT! In the name of Mars!”
12
All Red Underneath
Jezzy and Kol struggled past the crates of elicit Marine Corps equipment and through the gate, past the body of the Chosen guard that Solomon had killed. Behind them, the whumping sound of the Arceos Generator was getting louder and more insistent, turning into a fast-paced, high-pitched whine.
“So…exactly how long have we got until that thing blows?” Jezzy managed to cough. Her shoulder was on fire, and the pain was spreading down her right side as if someone was pouring molten glass over one half of her. Secondary aches and pains were spreading to her chest and legs, which Jezzy knew was just her body trying to alert her to the serious amount of damage she had sustained.
“Ach… Wait a minute… Stimulants…” she croaked, reaching for her belt to pull the only injector pen she had and jamming it into her wrist. Within a moment, the molten-glass pain receded until the agony was just radiating from her shoulder once again.
Can I even move my arm? She tried to flex her fingers. “Ach!” She could, but it hurt. A lot. Okay. I’ve got movement. I’ll be able to do this… she thought.
“The generator? Well…it’s not in very good health at all…” Kol said distractedly as they paused at the T-Junction where their gunfight had taken place, looking both right and left before picking right.
“This isn’t the way we went before…” Jezzy said blearily, the painkillers not only dulling her pain but also her senses. It was one of the reasons why she didn’t like taking them. Her Yakuza training had left her with an iron resolve and an unflinching belief in her own abilities. Not only had she been schooled in various martial arts and numerous weapons, but a part of her training had been kneeling on the edge of freezing cold lakes through long winter nights, or being hit by bamboo canes repeatedly in the stomach until she collapsed.
I should be able to take this pain. It’s only pain. It’s not real, she thought. She told herself. She tried to make herself believe.
It wasn’t working. Even a feared Yakuza Executioner had to have pain relief sometimes, she admitted.
“Yeah, this way is quicker…” Kol was saying, hauling toward a patch of light at the end of the tunnel.
“How do you know?” Jezzy managed to ask as they shuffled.
“Well, the transistor is making sure that the batteries are receiving, like, a hundred and thirty percent power when they only technically receive a hundred percent conversion, but in actual reality that goes down to something like eighty-five percent when you take into account all the normal buffers and limiters and what have you…” Kol said. “So, that’s what…fifty percent more power than the batteries can handle? They’ll short, send a massive surge of power to all the district fuse systems…”
“I wasn’t talking about the generator, genius,” Jezzy groaned, thinking that hearing just how near to an explosion they still were wasn’t really doing her worries any favors. “I meant how did you know that this was the better tunnel to take?”
“Ah. Didn’t you know?” Kol said as he moved quickly towards the light. It was a grate set in the ceiling, through which a slatted square of neon light from the nighttime of Mars was pouring through.
“Know what?” Jezzy wheezed. At least the conversation took her mind off the pain.
“My uncle was a Martian. One of the first to settle, actually, back in the twenty-first century,” Kol said.
“Ah.” That would explain why Kol had been so annoyed at the commander for shooting a hole through the habitat. She had previously just thought it was his technical mind’s outrage at having a sophisticated instrument so easily tampered with.
But that can’t be true, can it? He’s just turned a generator for an entire city district into a ticking timebomb, she told herself, before realizing that her thoughts were babbling. She wasn’t used to the painkillers, and they were dulling her edges.
“Really?” She tried to focus on the technical specialist’s words as he set her down against the wall and reached up to the grate…
“Damn!” He couldn’t reach it. Jezzy heard him hiss through his teeth, and she couldn’t see his forehead as it was in shadow behind the ridiculous bubble-helmet that he was still wearing, but she was sure that it would be glistening with sweat as they were both very aware of the time that this was taking.
“I’ll help you up…” Jezzy offered, raising her arms to form a step for his boot…until her arm flinched with pain. “Ach!”
“No, you won’t,” Kol said, frowning. “But that’s okay. I got a solve for this…” He fished around in his belt to pull out his technical specialist’s toolbelt, carefully extracting a small, dark block attached to wires.
“What’s that?”
“Battery packs, and…” He unclipped a few rounds from his pistol, carefully winding the wires around and adding small gobbets of something that looked like plasticine.
“Oh… A charge?” Jezzy whispered at the side of the wall as Kol jumped, managing to grab the small rail on the inside of the hatch and hang there a foot or so from the floor, reaching up with the other hand to affix the bullet and batteries to the inside of the latch.
“Oof!” He landed again, turning to hunch over Jezzy. “Close your eyes. It’ll take a minute…”
“Have we got a minute?” Jezzy said, her thoughts returning to the whining generator behind them. Something was bothering her, but she couldn’t remember what it was. Now she wished that she hadn’t taken those painkillers.
FZZZZT! A bright flash and bang as the batteries ignited the tiny amount of charge and the bullet blew, buckling the latch above and filling the tunnel with black smoke that smelled of cordite, but tha
nkfully dissipated quickly.
“Gotcha.” Kol seemed inordinately pleased with himself. “I should be able to jump up and grab the lip now, haul myself up, and…”
Something was still bothering Jezzy though, and she finally remembered what it had to be. Kol had said his uncle was a Martian…but what did that have to do with him knowing which way to go in the underground ventilation tunnels of Armstrong?
“Was he an architect? Worked on Armstrong like Marshal?” Jezzy said.
“Ah,” Kol said, slowing down from where he was busy securing all of his tools on his belt, ready for the leap. “I was hoping that you wouldn’t ask that,” he said, and his voice sounded thick, different somehow.
“Why? You two don’t get on?” Jezzy was pushing herself to her feet, tottering as one side of her body was now starting to feel like warmed-up rubber from the painkillers.
“Not at all. In fact, we get on just famously…” Kol said, jamming the painkiller injector pen that he had been supplied with into Jezzy’s neck.
“Ach!” Jezzy lurched, spinning out with her good fist in a backhanded swipe.
“Urk!” Even when under the influence and in pain, it seemed that not all of her training had been overridden…
“Stars damn it!” Kol wheezed, coughing. Her strike had managed to fracture his bubble-helmet, but he was lucky that he was wearing it at all. If he hadn’t, he’d probably have ended up with a collapsed larynx. “What did you do that for?” Kol hissed.
“Me?” Jezzy was struggling to push herself upright again. Now the rest of her body was starting to feel like warm rubber. “You’re the one who stuck me with that…that…” Blackness was swirling around the edges of her vision. The laser shot in her shoulder and the painkillers coursing through her body was too much for her to bear…
But despite these difficulties, she was still alert enough to hear the click of a pistol. A Marine Corps pistol as Kol leveled his firearm against her.
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