by Rick Partlow
“Break contact!” I yelled the command even though I didn’t need to; Bobbi and the others would get it over their helmet receivers from my ‘link and Calderon and his people wouldn’t be able to hear me over the gunfire. I just hoped they had the sense to follow us.
Victor grabbed Marquette by the back of his jacket’s collar and dragged him back across the ground, below the level of the wall, and I followed them as they crawled out of the cone of fire. Lasers were cutting through the wall, near the top, passing just over our heads in sprays of hot gas and molten rock and I bit off a curse as a speck of the white-hot material grazed the back of my neck. I wished for about the hundredth time that I had my helmet back, but that ship had sailed, so I just kept high-crawling and resisted the urge to rub my neck.
“Munroe,” Bobbi’s voice sounded in my ear bud. “Go!”
I heard Gauss rifles discharging and I knew that meant that Bobbi’s team had made it out of the enemy’s cone of fire and were laying down a covering barrage for us. Kurt was already pulling Marquette to his feet, and I saw Vilberg running across from the decorative fountain where he’d sheltered. I jogged way too slow, staying behind Marquette to watch Kurt’s back and imagining I could feel the lasers slicing the air centimeters behind me.
Nothing hit us, though, and in seconds we were running around the far side of one of the two warehouses, trying to put distance between us and the Cultists. There were bodies and pieces of bodies littering the next street over, strewn about like trash thrown into the street. Their blood stained the pavement, and steam rose off still-warm corpses into the cold morning air. Some were Cultists, but most were Skingangers, unarmored except for their bionics and those had proven inadequate protection against military-grade lasers.
I tried not to look at them, but I couldn’t help myself; there was no way to avoid it if I wanted to avoid stepping on them. The flesh was burned away from the cybernetics, and in death, they seemed even more machine than human. Calderon paused by one of the bodies, picking up a rocket carbine that had fallen beside the cyborg, and pocketing a couple spare magazines.
“Gurley,” he ordered the corporal, who only had a sidearm, “find a weapon.”
The corporal nodded, shoving his pulse pistol into its holster and bending down to try to take a carbine off a Skinganger with a bloody, ragged hole through the right side of his chest. He nearly had it clear when a metal hand seized his wrist and he yelled in shock. I swung my Gauss rifle around, but the wounded cyborg wasn’t attacking, just holding him in place. The Skinganger raised his head, all organic except for one bionic eye that glowed green. His mouth was twisted into a grimace of pain and hopelessness and he licked uselessly at dry lips.
“Don’t…” He tried to talk, wheezing and gurgling with one lung filling with blood and the other burned away. “Don’t want to die…”
I grunted softly. I’d figured these guys wouldn’t care much about living or dying, but I guess that was one bit of humanity they couldn’t replace.
“Flesh…” the cyborg rasped his last breath. “Too soft…”
His hand slipped off of Gurley’s and the man jerked away reflexively, taking the carbine. He looked down and gingerly pulled a few spare magazines from the dead cyborg’s chest pouch, then quickly stepped away, muttering curses under his breath.
“We’re less than a kilometer from Koji’s warehouse,” Bobbi said over her external speakers. “Keep moving.”
I scanned the streets behind us carefully, watching for threats and also, curious, watching for any sign of civilians. I hadn’t noticed any among the dead; maybe by now, they knew enough to keep their heads down. I didn’t see any of them out, and hadn’t noticed any sign of habitation in the few houses crammed into the gaps in the industrial and entertainment districts---the ones that weren’t already destroyed, anyway. If they were home, they were hunkered down.
“What the hell’s that noise?” It was Vilberg talking, and he was wearing a helmet, so he heard the sounds over its augmented sensors before I did. “This HUD is saying it’s maybe a hopper, but who’d be dumb enough to fly one right now?”
Shit.
“Get to cover!” I yelled, and I realized Bobbi was saying the same thing over my ‘link.
I pushed Kurt and Marquette towards the open doorway of a workshop that had half collapsed, but it was too late. I could see it now, coming in low over the rooftops, the grey of its skin blending in with the low clouds.
It was a drop pod, like the ones Savage/Slaughter had used on that moon, and it was heading straight for us, its chin turret already turning our way. This building wouldn’t be any cover at all for the weapons it would be carrying unless we could find a basement, and we didn’t have time for that. We had seconds left to live.
Chapter Thirteen
“Kurt,” I yelled at the big man, who was guiding Marquette by the scruff of the neck, “take him and run! Vilberg, help me shoot this fucking thing down!”
I crouched down more from instinct than anything else, knowing it wouldn’t do a damned bit of good, and I opened fire as soon as the lightly-armored ducted-fan hovercraft appeared in the Gauss rifle’s sights. The buttstock of the rifle punched at my shoulder with bruising force as I fired off ten rounds on full-auto; I saw the drop pod jink right out of the sighting camera and I knew I must have hit it. I looked up over the weapon’s sight and tried to get a bead on the thing, but it was dancing across the sky with more agility than I could follow using what the Marines had called the MK-I eyeball.
Vilberg tried to shoot at it, but I knew he missed because I knew I would miss and I was pretty damned confident I was the better shot of the two of us. Maybe if we could keep it trying to outmaneuver us, though, it wouldn’t have time to target us. Then I saw the puff of light smoke from its chin cannon and I dove away from the front of the shop doorway, hands covering my head as I hit the pavement.
The abandoned shop exploded outward in a shower of wood, buildfoam and cement, and a concussive wave slammed into me hard enough to roll me across the pavement. The breath went out of me and I gasped it back into my lungs as I dug a hand into the gravel and got my feet underneath me. I ran, not knowing if Vilberg was following me or even alive, not knowing which direction the others had gone. More explosions rattled the walls of the buildings around me, shifting rubble and starting new fires to char what was already burned.
I wasn’t in a panic, but I was damned close. I knew splitting up was the only way to keep that drop pod from getting us all with one volley, and I’d made myself a target to keep the others safe, but on the other hand, Shit, I’d made myself a target…
I wasn’t quite running blind. I had a good idea of which direction we’d been heading, and I was trying really hard with every turn I made to stay on a general course for Koji’s warehouse while still staying out of the pod’s targeting systems. It wasn’t easy; he was alternating between chasing me down every street at below rooftop level, or hopping over buildings and dropping bursts of grenade cannon fire down on top of me.
Everything was chaos and clamor and light and heat, and my legs were burning and sweat was pouring off of me despite the cold against my bare face. Buildings flashed by me on either side, warehouses and workshops and store-fronts and row-houses, most of them damaged, many destroyed, and I only took note of them in surveying glances so cursory they were almost futile. If the enemy, or even an enemy was lying in wait for me in one of the buildings, then I was dead twice over, because pausing to deal with them would give the damn drop pod time to catch up to me.
Every time the thing dropped out of my sightlines, I searched desperately, looking for somewhere I could hide not just from visual sensors but thermal ones. If I’d been wearing a helmet, I would have had some protection from thermal detection, but for the moment I was a literal hothead, not just a figurative one the way my mother had always said. And there was nowhere obvious to conceal myself. Maybe the buildings yawning broken and open around me had basements and maybe they did
n’t, but I didn’t have time to search through them and kick open locked doors.
And I was getting tired. I gave myself a dose of stimulants from my pharmacy organ and felt the fatigue falling away beneath a haze of energy; but it had the dirty, greasy patina of the artificial, and it wouldn’t last long. When I came down, the weariness would be back twice as bad as before.
I flinched away from an explosion that tore the corner off of the wooden patio of a building only twenty meters away, and saw the drop pod hanging in the air at the other end of the street I was crossing. I didn’t have the breath to curse or the time to return fire so I just drew on reserves that came from a miniature pharmaceutical plant beside my stomach and robbed a biochemical Peter to pay a biological Paul. I felt the burst of speed carrying me across the street like it was someone else pushing me from behind, and then I was in the alleyway between a fabricator shop and something that might have been a theater before the roof had collapsed.
At the other end of that alley was a fire team of Predecessor Cultists. The pod’s pilot had to have been calling them in, and I kicked myself in the ass for assuming that they wouldn’t have EM communications just because they were jamming ours. There wasn’t time to bring my rifle to my shoulder, but my contact lens was connected to its sight, so I was able to put the targeting reticle in the general area of the center of mass of the closest of them, about thirty meters away. I braced the stock against my side, clamped down on the vertical foregrip and sprayed out half a magazine on full-auto.
The Gauss rifle’s rate of fire wasn’t anything to write home about, not like the electromagnetic needle-guns the Tahni had used in the war, but it made up for that by its recoil making it damn near uncontrollable on full auto. I don’t know why the hell the designers had included the option, because the Marine Drill Instructors had made clear in very obscene terms during Boot Camp that we were never to use it.
The kick and the muzzle rise almost tore the rifle out of my hands, and I’m fairly sure the last three rounds went somewhere into the woods a couple kilometers past the city, but the burst had the desired effect: the Cultists hit the dirt. Two of them hit it permanently, with massive wounds through their chests, and I thought I might have hit one or two more but I didn’t stick around to find out.
I had a microsecond’s mental debate about whether they’d be expecting me to run back the way I’d come and I decided it was what made the most sense and that the pod would likely be sitting back there waiting for me. Instead of doing that, I ran right into the teeth of the fire team, dancing between them where they’d tried to take up prone firing positions. Two of them tried to get up as I passed, attempting to swing their carbines around, but I smashed the butt of my rifle into the neck of one of them, then caught the other just under the helmet with a kick from the armored toe of my combat boot.
Both of them sprawled backwards and then I was through them and sprinting out the other side of the alley, swapping out magazines for my rifle with motions practiced enough to become instinctive. The others were firing at me now, if rather panicked and inaccurately, so I cut right and headed down the next street over to get out of their line of sight. I didn’t see anyone on my team, even though I knew I was getting close to Koji’s place by now.
Where the hell were they?
Then I cut through to the next street over and skidded to a halt, eyes going wide. I didn’t recognize it at first, because there wasn’t much left to recognize. It had taken at least three or four proton blasts to do it, I figured, but it didn’t look like they were stingy about those. Smoke billowed off the wreckage, and it was scattered so far and so small that there must have been secondary explosions from the ammo Koji had stored there.
“And that’s the end of plan B,” I muttered.
I wondered if the cagey little bastard had made it out, then decided that of course he had. He was a cockroach, like the Sung Brothers…like Mother. They never got what they deserved and they always survived.
A whining hum broke me out of my reverie and I snapped around and saw the drop pod coming over the rooftops about a kilometer behind me. The damn thing was like a tick on a dog, except in this case the tick was bigger than the damn dog.
Shit. I didn’t even know which way to run anymore.
“This way!”
I blinked, half sure I’d imagined the voice. I looked around and saw a hint of movement in the doorway of a small building, maybe a workshop, with half the roof collapsed. Then my contact lens adjusted to the dimmer light inside and I saw it was a kid…the kid. It was the boy from the first night, the one we’d saved from the mercenaries. He was waving at me from shelter, too cautious or too afraid to leave it.
There wasn’t really any other choice. I ducked through the partially blocked doorway and into the shadows, hoping I wasn’t leaving the frying pan for a quick trip into the fire.
***
The sheet metal stairway was dark and narrow and so long that I was beginning to wonder how far down this basement was. I didn’t ask the kid; he hadn’t offered another word after the yell that had led me in here. I thought perhaps he was afraid the Cult would have detected it, and maybe he wasn’t wrong. When we came out at the bottom, it wasn’t a basement after all; it was a tunnel, dug into the rock coarsely enough that I thought it had to have been done by primitive machinery and not an excavation laser.
Chemical strip lights lined the walls, along with what seemed like a constant, moist slime that radiated a damp chill even through my armor. As we stepped away from the concrete slab of the stairway landing, I could hear, if not feel, my boots splashing in shallow puddles of water.
“Where are we heading?” I asked the kid, risking the words now that we were at least twenty meters underground.
“We’re almost there,” he promised me, not wanting to slow down.
It was only another thirty or forty meters before we came to the chamber. It was up a short set of steps carved into the rock, and out of the water, and it was brighter lit than the tunnel. Inside it were a line of plastic cots, a few folding tables and chairs, some generic storage totes…and Bobbi, Calderon, Marquette and everyone else. Except Vilberg. He wasn’t in the room, and I wondered if he’d made it out of the initial drop pod attack.
“Good to see you, Munroe,” Bobbi said. She had her helmet off and I could see the worry in the set of her mouth. “Thanks, kid.” She nodded to the boy, but he didn’t respond.
“Anyone know what happened to Vilberg?” I asked her.
“Last I saw him, he was with you,” she replied, raising her hands palm-out. She didn’t seem too broken up about it, but then Bobbi wasn’t quick to make new friends.
Shit. I didn’t feel right leaving him behind, but where the hell would I look for him? I’d covered at least ten square kilometers getting here.
“What is this place?” I asked the boy.
He didn’t look at me when he answered, an expression on his face like a perpetually abused animal.
“It’s a bratva hide-out,” he told me, his voice barely above a whisper. “My mom told me about it. She used to work for them before she had us.”
“Us,” he’d said. I didn’t want to ask who “us” was, not after he’d told me before that he was alone now.
“Why weren’t you hiding out here the whole time?” I wondered.
“It took me a while to find it,” he admitted. His eyes flickered my way, grey and slitted, then looked away again just as quickly. “When I did, the door was locked.” He shrugged. “The next time I came by, there wasn’t a door anymore.”
I looked back the way we’d come. “Is there another way out?”
He nodded, motioning farther down the tunnel from the chamber. “It starts going up again in a bit. Comes out a couple streets over in a bar.” He shrugged in his oversized, ripped jacket. “What’s left of a bar.”
“This is a good place to wait it out,” Calderon declared from where he sat on one of the cots. “We only have a few hours until yo
ur ship gets back, right?”
I nodded, moving deeper into the chamber and setting my Gauss rifle down on one of the tables. Marquette was lying on the next cot over from Calderon, not asleep but collapsed in exhaustion.
“Are you sure this is safe?” I asked the kid. “I mean, for you. You aren’t going to wind up in trouble with the bratva because you brought us here, are you?”
“He has my permission.”
I had nearly ten years of instincts and habits ingrained into me and my pistol was in my hand and pointed at the entrance to the chamber before my brain had recognized the vaguely machine-like tone of the voice. I still almost put a round through Anatoly’s face before I realized it was him. The cyborg had seen better days. His clothes were charred and torn, and he had dried blood crusted on the left side of his face from a pressure cut.
“Hello, Mr. Munroe,” he said, stepping up into the chamber. He barely fit through the door.
The others didn’t seem surprised, so I assumed they’d known he was here.
“Anatoly.” I nodded to him, lowering my handgun but not re-holstering it. “Things don’t look so good out there.”
“You have a gift for understatement, Munroe.” He put his back to one of the carved stone walls and locked his legs in place, the cyborg equivalent of sitting down and making himself comfortable. “In the last six hours, the Predecessor Cult has killed at least half my people and, as your Marines might put it, destroyed the unit cohesion of the rest.”
He paused, and I had the feeling that, if he’d still had biological eyes, they would have been closed.
“They overran my offices two hours ago,” he went on softly in that incongruously melodic voice of his. “Killed everyone there and took the artifact. I thought that’s what they wanted, but they haven’t stopped.”