by John Mierau
Ivy’s head swam in a fog. Her neural interface was gone. She opened her eyes, realized she was coughing on something foul: suspension foam had filled the interior of the mech. Designed to protect her from the impact of her landing, it was also suffocating her. She spat out the foam, got her head above the stuff, and slapped controls inside her pilot’s cocoon to no avail: the mech was dead.
And the floor beneath her giant metal war machine was shuddering.
Eyes widening, Ivy struggled to drag her hands out of their sleeves. Her left came free, but something had crushed the sleeve around her right. The mech lurched, dropping a foot or two. With a roar of effort, Noelle braced her knees and tore her right arm free. Blood welled up on her forearm as she reached her left hand down and pulled the cockpit's manual release.
She put her back against the emergency exit and it separated from the mech. She scrambled up and out of the mech as the floor groaned and gave way under its weight. She leaped off an armoured leg just before it plummeted through the floor.
She landed hard and clawed her way to her feet, stumbling past the hole her mech had made in the interior wall to sag in a doorframe and catch her breath.
Her head was spinning. Black spots. She reached for her neck, but the thin plastic tubing of her nasal cannula was gone. She slowed her breathing, fought for calm before the spots ate away more of what little oxygen Reach’s atmosphere could offer.
Her left arm was bleeding steadily, but nothing life-threatening. She dug in a utility pocket on her leg for a Shock-Exposure-Infection capsule. She crushed it against her arm, felt the single-use nozzle propel its contents into her body. Her head cleared immediately, the tradeoff being instant, severe tingling in her hands and feet. She was alive though and had time to find enough ox to stay that way.
She dug out a field dressing and rolled it over the gash in her forearm, all the while listening for the clank of a mech coming to finish her off. The dressing warmed as it self-adhered to her skin and released a second batch of chemicals into her bloodstream. Less than a minute after Noelle’s mech had crashed into the grand building—she was guessing ‘library’ from the rows of books surrounding her—she pushed herself up against the doorframe and turned to the windows in the outer room.
She froze, disbelieving.
A wall of rippling crysteel had filled the hole she’d arrived through. Seeped through a dozen other cracks. Covered and shattered floor to ceiling windows from one side of the building to the other.
The freshly generated crysteel matrix was a deep blue. Thick enough to block out the sunlight. Thick enough, also, to block the wail of a siren and wash of jet engines seeping through the library’s other walls.
Noelle needed to report in to—she drew a deep breath, remembering Commander Winter’s brains now coated his office walls.
There was no one to report in to.
She was in charge now.
Noelle jogged for the stairs.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The ground shook all the way out to the metro station barricade.
Past the tower, Jake watched lightning flash and thunder boom and then—presto! A river of blue bubbled up from nothing.
“That’s them!” Jake whooped on a private channel to Tsu, and clicked over to address Wicker and Dangers’ teams.
“Kids, our own Captain Zhang blew up that beach ball! It means he punched the ticket of the Row’s Commander and ‘Operation Sinkhole’ is about to commence!”
“Without us!” someone growled. The collective profanity of ten soldiers riding the bench before the big game polluted the channel.
“What’s this? Am I to understand you uglies are not content to sit out what may be the very last combat operation of this war?”
“Affirmative, sir!”
“Not happy, sir!”
“Fuckin’ A right! Sir!”
The last came from ‘Danger’ of course. Jake grinned.
“That’s too bad, because our orders are to haul ass to the far side of the Row. ‘Course, by the time we circle around, all the fun will already be over.” Jake stomped back to his soldiers, making a show of spinning up his tri-cannons and wiggling the missile pods on his shoulders.
More creative cussing, with even more energy now: the team could tell Jake had something planned, and they were getting eager.
“You don’t like the sound of that, huh? Well, good!” Jake roared as he walked down the line, bumping his mech up against each soldier. “Because neither do I!”
A riot of crude agreement crowded the channel. Jake reached the end of the line, turned around, and bumped his way back again.
“So which of you life-takers is stupid enough to take a stroll with me right down the center of the Row?”
A stunned second of silence as Jake’s words were processed, as each soldier did a gut check to decide if they were ready to storm through the most heavily defended territory on the planet. The silence was followed by a roar that overloaded the speakers in Jake’s helmet, as every soldier shouted an affirmative.
“What’s the plan, Sarge?” Corporal D’Angery asked, running up with extra clips for Jake’s right-side small-calibre machine gun. Where Danger got all the extra clips from was a mystery, but Jake would swore he’d never seen the kid run dry.
He took the clips and thumped Danger on one massive, armoured shoulder. “Ghost did a little extra credit work after settling Paladin in,” he informed the team. “Look, it will be dangerous. We’ll be hopping through enemy territory just to make it to the apocalypse on time, but the Row’s got no comms and no one calling the shots. I’ll bet they stacked that platform we hit too thick after we sweated them, and now they'll be stepping on each other's toes. So here’s the plan: we break through, wee rendezvous with Paladin and Ghost and make a path across the Row.”
Jake hope he sounded confident. In truth, he didn’t know if Lee was still alive. The captain had no idea about this little rescue plan. Sameen and he had agreed to it after Zhang volunteered to get himself killed. They figured they owed their boss eight or ten saves each, and Jake would be damned if he’d live another thirty regretting not making good on the debt when he’d had the chance.
Wicker came on the channel. “They call us Fleas?” Jake looked up and saw her salute down at him as from halfway up the hill. “Let’s make ‘em itch!”
The channel exploded again with bloodthirsty roars of agreement.
Jake picked out suits, looking for the one without a name or image etched in the collarbone. “Bowen, you’re on my six.”
He wanted the kid close for this first part. The hairiest part.
A moment of silence. “Yes, Sergeant! Thank you, sir, I won’t let you down.”
Jake shook his head. “Don’t thank me yet, Bone.”
The first order of business was surviving the weapons platform at the base of the tower a second time. They’d be alert, armed to the teeth, but Jake wasn’t blowing hot air when he told his men he expected the Earthers would be too thick on the ground to work effectively. He’d gone up against the Row before, and most Earth soldiers serving here never got into the field. Without experience, they trusted the rulebook, and when things went pear-shaped—and they always went pear-shaped—they just couldn’t adapt fast enough. Jake was counting on that—along with a few party favours he’d left behind during their first assault.
The dropship was hovering overtop of the men again. Tsu’s voice bloomed in Jake’s helmet. “If you think you’re leaving without—”
Jake sent a squelch out on the line to shut the pilot up. “You’ll get your chance to help.” A lie, but he was okay with that. “For now, you wait.”
The dropship hovered. The radio remained silent while the soldiers slapped each other’s packs, inspected each other’s suits…and prayed.
“You’re the boss,” Tsu grumbled.
Jake nodded. For the moment, yeah, he was the boss. Until he found Lee and Sameen. Then came the teary reunion, then came hauling ass across
to cross the Row without getting their ass shot off to add their firepower to the last hurrah.
Causing maximum damage all the way, of course.
“Let’s finish this,” he growled to himself, alone inside his suit, and walked to the front of the line.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Noelle stumbled down the stairs into the library foyer. Her entire body tingled from the emergency injection, and her vision had narrowed to a blurry path from oxygen deprivation. She stumbled to the door and cracked open the same white case with stylized blue ‘O’ that sat beside every pressure door on Reach. As soon as she snapped the mask over her face, warm, humid oxygen began to flow. She sagged against the building’s inner pressure door and let the oxygen do its thing. In a few deep breaths, her vision came back. A few shuddering breaths later, she could string thoughts together. Out the window, she saw a wild, thorny bloom of blue covering the roof of the next building over, and mushrooming out to stab into this one.
She climbed back to her feet and removed one of several waist-belts and ox-bottles stacked in the white box. Noelle clipped the ox-bottle around to waist, fished out the thin tubing and snugged the feeds in her nostrils. With a grunt, she popped the manual release on the inner door.
She jogged down the old stone steps, sidestepping once around a massive crysteel dripping from the clever ambush above. Her head whipped left and right. No sign of intruders—no sign of anyone—but something felt wrong.
She looked up and gasped.
Something was wrong with the sky.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Lee woke up screaming.
Four different alarms were piling on his ears and a needle stabbed through his right thigh, injecting what felt like battery acid and rocket fuel.
He shook his head hard enough to make the HUD projected onto his retina wobble. He tried to move the rest of him, but couldn’t. He could smell ozone and burnt rubber. He wasn’t sure if the suit was broken, or he was.
Whatever was in that needle burned like fire, but he could function again. Finger-twitches pulled up diagnostics screens and revealed the problem: the suit was offline, except for a tiny rechargeable battery accessing the computer systems. Main and redundant systems had both failed. Sensors and tracking systems were down, neural interface was down, locomotion was down—and there was no way he was going to move the thing with his plucky spirit.
Worse yet, the suit had landed on its back, and Peter Cloke was staring down at him—or rather the commemorative statue of Peter Cloke, commander of the first manned mission to Reach, was doing the staring. The statue’s face was wedged against his mech’s shoulder-mounted-sensor-package. The body of the statue had fallen on the suit’s chest, trapping it in place with the cockpit doors wedged shut against the ground.
He tore apart the cocoon suspending him in the center of the cockpit, and eased his aching body against the back wall. He tried the manual release, but it wouldn’t budge.
He was trapped in his suit, pinned down at the base of the very building he’d attacked from. Lee wouldn’t last very long if he didn’t put get moving.
He moved his nasal cannula over his ears and up his nose, then twisted the air flow on. That done, Lee twisted around to face the mech’s left ‘armpit’ and grabbed the lever on the center of a panel trimmed in yellow. He put both hands on the lever and pulled. The secondary emergency hatch hissed and fell outward.
Only to slam against the waistline Of Peter Cloke's stone gut.
Lee balled both fists and sucked in a deep breath to scream again…only to choke on the chilled, thin atmosphere rapidly drying his throat. He shut his mouth and kept it shut as spasms sent bolts of fire through his chest. Everyone on Reach baked their throat, and he knew it would pass.
He snatched up an emergency pack, machine gun, and a flare pistol while waiting for the racking cough to end. He unsealed the water bladder in his bag and soothed his throat with a few precious sips.
Then there was nothing left to do but run for it.
Lee stuck his head out of the small opening.
He squeezed his head through and scanned all around. This part of the plaza was empty—just him and stone Pete—but he couldn’t count on that piece of luck holding for long. He pushed himself through the hatch but got jammed just past his collarbone. The statue pinning his mech down wouldn’t budge. He felt a tightness in his chest at the idea of being stuck here, trapped in a lifeless mech until an Earther came by to put him out of his misery, and pushed again and again.
The door didn’t budge. Pain flared in his ribs. Something cracked.
He was trapped.
Helplessness and pain raged out of his mouth in a single scream before he stuffed his fist in his mouth. The ace mech pilot didn’t get him, but his own ice bomb did? He threw his face up to the heavens, wondering who was in charge of this shit show.
His body froze. His emotions froze. His mind froze.
The sky. Someone had broken the sky.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Noelle couldn’t tear her eyes from the sky even to blink, despite the pain in her drying eyes.
Rivers of violets, blues, and green rushed past above, dancing and curling around each other like living, dancing spirits. Impossibly bright, magical things.
She wondered if she hadn’t gotten ox in time, or if the impact foam hadn’t been enough to protect the pudding between her ears.
She shook her head feebly a few times, trying to get thoughts flowing, but the wonder above her defied her understanding.
Until the repetitive thumping sound her ears were ignoring vibrated up through her feet.
She whirled her head over her right shoulder: in a small window between the nightmare crysteel above her and the roof of the next building over, she saw smoke, and the reflected bloom of explosions.
The Reachers were invading.
She understood then what was firing up the skies: charged protons and electrons colliding with atoms and gases in Reach’s atmosphere.
The convoy had arrived!
She wedged her eyes shut against a world mad with color.
Time to execute, girl.
She had no comms and no troops in sight. Somehow, she had to get to the front and help hold the Row!
A single, mournful scream ripped through the thin air, dragging Noelle's eyes to the corner of the building ahead of her.
The scream came from the other side of it.
She saw red. Not in the sky, but in her mind: the commander’s blood dripping down the wall.
Noelle ran towards the scream.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
At the very moment Jake rocketed over the hill the sky erupted in vivid, rippling colors.
PFC Bowen and he had jumped from the top of the crysteel barrier burning a quarter of each mech’s fuel supply to rocket them up to the fourth floor.
Not one of the spiky crysteel gun placements grown on the sides of the towers fired a shot before Grunt and Bone exhausted the missile pods on their shoulders. Grunt took the tower to the left of the weapons platform they’d hit earlier; Bone, the one on the right.
Entire floors disappeared behind explosions. Room-sized chunks were vaporized. A lethal hail of stone and crysteel shards blasted outwards half a klick in every direction, but by then the two mechs were falling between the towers and insulated by the barrage they’d unleashed.
Commitment to action also insulated the two soldiers from the paralysis gripping the Earthers below, who stared up frozen at the flood of color.
Automatic firing systems didn’t get surprised, however, and five defensive batteries targeted the returning Reachers for a warm welcome.
Jake had always planned a return trip into the Row, and had instructed his team to scatter dozens of ‘chiggers’ between the towers during the first run. Chiggers were fist-sized drones, each carrying nine finger-sized missiles. The small drones crawled into any holes and crevices they could find. They burrowed beneath sand or squeezed themselves into shadowy corne
rs. On any other day, it would have been a horrendous waste of munitions, due to Earth's vastly superior scan-and-detect capabilities. On this day, with the Row’s satellites hijacked and networks scrambled, the chiggers remained undetected. The weapon platform had gone back online, its operators none the wiser to the multiple threats hidden only feet away.
A simple thought, captured by Jake’s interface crown, activated them all at once.
In an instant, ten dozen chiggers sprang into the clear and fired over a thousand missiles. Some of the missiles took lives. Some destroyed the heavy weapons readying to fire. Some detonated inside crates filled with munitions, igniting a bloom of heat and pressure that slammed Grunt and Bone through the walls of the two towers, and several rooms deep.
Jake was still laughing and pumping his mech’s gigantic fist when he tumbled to a stop, deep inside the building.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Lee grit his teeth and pushed against the muzzle of the rifle, groaning in pain and growing frustration. The escape hatch didn’t budge. The stock of the unloaded rifle started to bend.
He dragged the gun’s barrel out of the emergency hatch and smashed it against the dead machinery lining the cockpit.
He could hear explosions and buildings tumbling apart. He could feel the ground quake as the sustained bombardment continued. Ethereal light drifted through the half-open escape hatch: green, then blue, then green again. Operation Sinkhole had begun just as the Fold convoy had arrived, carrying reinforcements from Earth.
A virtual horse-race, with the future of the planet going to the victors…and Lee was stuck in a powered-down tin can in Gov’s backyard.
As Lee watched, the middle tower to the East collapsed. The ground didn’t stop rumbling in between explosions anymore and the weirdly coloured sky was growing darker under a cloud of smoke. In the distance, he saw gunships streaking closer to the Row.