by John Mierau
Willard held up a hand. “Janeen is coming back. We can recover from overdose and exhaustion, but I don’t think even Carina Mentel can glue our heads and arms back on.” He blinked. “Can she?”
Something in Lee woke up, and ended the discussion. “The doctors all take stims. Bowen, too,” he decided. Willard nodded. Dr. Lachman stared at him in surprise, having never heard him assume authority before. “We’ll carry some just in case, but we can boost our adrenals and block pain receptors without giving us worse shakes. Guns only work when you can aim straight.”
“Small problem,” Willard said. “My implant’s geared for flying. Whatever cockpit I’m flying handles my adrenal and pain responses.”
“Stand still,” Lee said, reaching his hand behind Willard’s head and pressing his wrist against the back of his head. His long fingers laying against the ear on the other side of his friend’s head.
Willard flinched but stayed put. He wavered on his feet when the secondary implant under the skin of his wrist accessed Willard’s.
The sandbox hallucination connecting Lee’s brain and implant filled with code, commands, and overrides.
“What are you…?” Willard hissed as Lee spliced new data into his head. “How are you…?”
“Doctor, a hand?”
“Breathe,” Dr. Lachman said, putting a hand on Willard’s shoulder. “It’s the same as any patch update. You have to accept the input.”
Lee felt Willard accept the connection, felt the patch go active. Instantly, his friend’s pupils dilated and his body relaxed. “You gotta be shitting me,” he sighed.
Lee disconnected and pulled his hand away. “Better?”
Willard shuddered. “Way better. Was—was that the override?”
Lee shook his head. “I won’t do that. I waited until you allowed access.”
Willard rolled his neck and shoulders. “Right.” His eyes darted to Lee and away. “But you could, yeah?”
Lee remembered the message from Janeen.
They can never control you again.
He clamped his jaw tight. “Pack up, people, we move in five!”
Lee studied in his team. Scott Kincaid had one hand ready at the door and wiped sweat from his face with the other. Angel crouched a foot behind, weapon hot. Doctors Bonner and Lachman fell in line on either side of Bone. “I c’n walk,” Bowen slurred down at Dr. Bonner. His current walking partner was red-faced and straining under Bone’s outstretched shoulder, but Lee could see the soldier was struggling just to stay conscious.
“Stow it, Bone,” Lee ordered.
Bowen stowed it. “Yes’r.”
Lee pointed at Scott. The terrified doctor cracked the door wide, then jumped back as Willard limped out, weapon sweeping up and all around. Sweep complete, Willard nodded back at Lee.
“Go, go, go!” Lee whispered, putting some steel in his voice. The line moved out the door.
Lee balanced in a low crouch, turning three hundred and sixty degrees.
The roof of the pod was empty, as were the spaces around the pods to the left and right. By previous agreement, the group crossed straight to the far wall. Dr. Lachman quickly skirted under Bowen’s shoulder, replacing Dr. Bonner as human crutch, and the group continued left along the inner wall toward Spoke 3.
Before leaving the pod, Lee pressed his secondary wrist implant against a data screen to call up the wheel’s access logs. None of the pressure doors had opened or closed since Willard and Bowen’s arrival.
Janeen and her favourite doctor were both hiding out somewhere on the wheel.
Once they escaped the Wheel to where wireless worked again, they would call for reinforcements, evacuate the doctors to the tender docked below and order Angel to fly the passengers to safety.
Mentel was a genius, but Lee wouldn’t risk the safety of the entire team to save her. Mentel might already be a pincushion, he reasoned, in which case getting these three doctors and their critical knowledge to safety was the new objective. Once the tender was away with the others aboard, Lee would return to the wheel alone to retrieve Dr. Mentel.
He’d even bring her out alive when he found her.
At the foot Spoke 3, Scott triggered the pressure door. He sidestepped out of Willard’s way, then circled back to take Dr. Lachman’s place supporting Bowen.
“Thanks, Scotty,” Bowen said, head lolling.
‘Scotty’ let the concern in his eyes show only to Lee as he took more of Bowen’s weight. “No problem,” he groaned. “Wait’ll you see my bill.”
The group moved into Spoke 3. Gun still levelled, Lee slapped his palm over the interior control panel and the door reversed its upward climb to close without incident. Lee still kept his gaze—and his aim—on the door, until they made their way past the second of the spoke’s three pressure doors,. Then he kept his focus on that door, while the group moved slowly on down the corridor.
“I’m good,” Scotty grunted, waving the overweight Dr. Bonner off and extending his turn as Bowen's walking partner. “Kill for a whisky, though,” he told Lee with a ragged grin.
Lee kept pace, but offered only silent rebuke to the younger man’s attempt to connect.
Lee kept walking sideways with his upper body turned sideways and the butt of the assault weapon against his shoulder. He lowered the volume on the pain receptors on his collarbone, where the weapon rubbed against an implanted disk
A vision of some time in the past flashed in his mind, of Scotty dabbing antibiotic ointment over that very emitter. “This should help,” the doctor had murmured, very gently cleaning the festering wound.
“I’ll buy the second round,” Lee grunted a moment later.
Scotty flashed him a look of relief and gratitude. “That’d be great,” he said, trying to play down his emotions.
“Owe me one too, doc,” Bowen grunted, “way y’feeling me up.”
Lee and Scotty both grinned. “Stow it, Bone,” they said together.
The door ahead roared to life, grinding upwards. Willard clotheslined Bonner and Lachman to the right of the corridor and pressed down in front of them. Scotty helped Lee drag Bowen to the left, then made himself small behind the Lieutenant.
A medium-sized pair of spacer boots appeared in front of Lee. To Lee’s side of the slowly rising curtain of the pressure door, a pair of gigantic metal dinosaur feet appeared.
A voice boomed from above the dinosaur feet. “You only have the hots for Angel ‘cause he’s got a wife back ho—”
A playfully annoyed woman’s voice interrupted the amplified man’s. “Shut your wrong-ass mouth, Corporal, sir! And no, I’m not ‘secretly into’ you either—”
The woman bent low and ducked under the pressure door long before her mech-wearing partner could follow.
She’d be dead if we were Janeen, Lee thought, watching the smile freeze on her face. A spark of shock replaced the smile, and she dropped and rolled back under the door.
“Threat, threat, threat!” she barked, leaping to her feet and taking cover behind the mech’s legs.
Not bad, Lee thought, revising his opinion of the Private First Class with the nametag Padalecki on the front of her suit. Fast reflexes, and her first act was to notify her partner. Didn’t have any ego about diving behind the mech’s armoured legs either—that was the smart move, but sometimes cocky soldiers chose what they thought was brave over what kept them alive.
“Stand down! This is Angel! Stand down!”
The mech’s arms had centred over Lee and Willard’s cluster of bodies, but hadn’t fired. Lee stared at the bulky crysteel canisters and glowing wave emitters mounted in the place of the usual tri-cannons. In an enclosed space like this, even a short squirt from primitive equipment like that could have been lethal.
Willard was on his feet, hands raised, weapon swinging on its sling under his arm. “Good to see you Tyler, Padalecki.” He rubbed his palms on the front of the insulated fatigues he wore. “Top marks on your fire control.”
The cockpit
of the mech was sloped and the clear crysteel screen retracted, revealing a very surprised man inside. “Uh, you coming in hot, Lieutenant?”
The woman crouched behind the mech stood up, face flaming red. Lee could imagine what was going through her mind. Doing the right thing taking cover didn’t necessarily feel like the right thing when a senior officer was there to catch the whole thing.
Lee was surprised to see Willard also caught on to that. “Swift report and sound retreat to cover, Padalecki,” Willard offered casually before continuing to answer Corporal Tyler’s question. “Assume it’s so, Corporal. Button up and take rear guard.”
The mech’s cockpit snapped shut and the legs were moving before the last word left Willard’s mouth.
Not quite the same man, Lee judged, surprised and impressed by his old unit’s pilot. “Let’s keep moving,” he ordered.
PFC Padalecki stared coolly at Lee, then looked back to Willard to take her cue.
“This is Captain Lee Zhang,” Willard confirmed. “He has command.”
“Yes, sir.” Erin stood at attention facing Lee. “Captain.” She whipped off a smart salute. Then her professionalism broke when she realized the lines in Lee’s skull were ugly, puckered scars.
“As you were, Padalecki,” Lee said gruffly, turning before he saw something in her face he wouldn’t like. He helped Scotty lift Bowen to his feet.
Bowen waved off Padalecki’s gasp with his one good hand. “Jesus, Er’n. Never… seen’a papercut… bef’r?”
They moved faster with Padalecki’s help. By the time they got close to the spoke’s third and final pressure door, Lee had seen her twice refuse a direct order from Willard to give the doctors a turn supporting the Lieutenant. PFC Padalecki was strong, determined, and obviously dedicated to Bowen.
Lee and Willard quickly explained the soup sandwich they were trying to escape.
“There’s a small weapons cache in the hub,” Willard said at the end of the description of the day’s fun. Until then, eyes peeled.
“Sirs,” Tyler’s voice rose from speaker vanes along the back of his suit. “Unless a wielder implant requires a new model of mech, the captain can steer mine. I’m rated with heavy weapons if you’d make better use of the suit, sir.”
Lee realized he’d never countermanded Willard’s order before putting stepping out past the mech at the rear of the line. The pilot was bending over backwards not to tell him to get the hell out of the way before trouble found them and Lee got iced in the ensuing firefight.
“I’ll take rear-guard. You stay close in case I need backup.”
“Begging the captain’s pardon—”
“Sorry, Corporal. This looks foolhardy, yes?”
Corporal Tyler chose silence over insubordination.
“Cough up a 'blue' charge, Corporal,” Lee ordered, dropping his weapon to hang on its underarm sling. “Right side toaster, please.”
The rectangular ammo feeder or ‘toaster’ on the right side of the battle suit whirred, and a small, horizontally convex container was fed out the top.
Lee grabbed the crysteel mine and held it aloft. He looked back. When Padalecki was watching too, he willed a flat, crystalline blade to grow from his left wrist.
Padalecki and Tyler shouted over each other, making the words a jumble. When Lee's implant-controlled crysteel blade sliced open the casing and shook the heavy, cake-like mix of crystalline powder and sand-sized alloy pellets out, Padalecki screamed and Tyler swore.
Lee sent a surge of energy through the wave emitters on both hands. Blue light rippled down, converting the components into a shining curtain of blue. He raised his hands and willed the thin layer of crysteel into two squares, the barest blue rippling strand still connecting the two uniformed matrices of crysteel to the wrist emitters.
“Thanks for the offer, Corporal, but I’m fine out here.”
“How do you sustain the reaction?” PFC Padalecki called out, her voice slow, awed but still curious.
“Batteries fused into my spine,” he said casually, “and a few other porous bones.”
“Oh,” Padalecki said in a small voice.
Lee pushed dramatically with his hands and the two squares rippled, almost like pixelating images. After the ripple, they were twice the size.
“How do you keep the lattices so small?” Corporal Tyler asked. “Even second-gen wielder mechs can’t manage it with onboard computers.”
“That’s classified,” Scotty said softly beside him.
“The batteries in my bones double as co-processors,” he said loudly, in a fit of petulant rebellion. “They’re constantly re-scaling the reaction to keep the particles from fully forming. I’ve also got more powerful emitters.” He stiffened, drawing in some of the latticed material. It burned up his arms, until he let it out through emitters on his forearms, behind his elbows, cut into his shoulder blades. Four geometrically perfect squares rotated in the air along each arm now.
“Now you’re just showing off, Lee,” Scotty said in a quiet tone, “and you’re going to burn through your stored power.”
“Alright, Doc,” Lee said, closing his eyes and drawing a huge breath. The stream fell in on itself and disappeared into his arms. He shrugged his shoulders and shook out his arms. “Kinda tingles,” he kidded. It hurt, in fact, but his interface could dial the sensation down.
“Let’s keep mo—”
The pressure door exploded. A shaped charge propelled a jagged rectangle of metal straight for the group. A corner of it slammed into Tyler’s neck, knocking his mech back against a wall and sending the door hurtling safely over everyone’s heads. Lee tugged Padalecki to the ground and shaped a shield of crysteel between them just as a heavy assault rifle erupted.
Lee heard Willard shouting over the shattering sounds of crysteel being chipped from his shield.The chubby doctor, Bonner, screamed. Lee saw blood spurting out of his arm.
The attacker was coming closer.
With a thought, a small slot appeared at eye level in his shield. He peeked through and closed the hole just before the next barrage of bullets landed.
“Janeen! It’s Lee, stand down! These are civilians!”
The firing ceased.
“Phoenix?”
Lee stood up. Tyler’s mech was flattened against the side of the corridor. Spikes of intent crysteel had torn through the cockpit. Blood seeped down their lengths and trickled to the floor.
Padalecki saw what had happened to Tyler and whirled to face Janeen. “You goddamn fucking—”
Lee slapped her hard enough to turn her. She froze in shock. He pushed her back towards the doctors. “Keep them safe,” he ordered.
The private blinked away tears and nodded, turning and jogging back to her charges.
Lee summoned all of the crysteel he got from Tyler, and a wall surged up behind him.
“Captain!” Willard roared, before the wall sealed up and blocked off all sound.
He terminated the field sustaining the crysteel in its matrix form. The fully solid crysteel wall crackled as the pressures within it shifted.
Janeen wore some of Dr. Mentel’s fashionable workout clothes. Dropped the rifle to the ground and gestured at herself with both hands. “I clean up nice, huh?” She smiled through the blood caked to her face.
“Did we all make it?” she asked.
Lee nodded. “Baako, Thatcher, and Steeps are still under.”
“Let’s wake ‘em up and hunt that bitch! She’s still here somewhere, I can smell evil.” Janeen grinned. “Remember how she made me hop on one foot until I cracked three bones? I’m gonna crack all of her bones before I—”
“We can’t. Not until she gets a look at the Takers. We need her alive until then.”
“NO!” Janeen raged. Crysteel spiked out of the folds of her clothes, behind her back, along her arms. “She dies! She dies today!”
Face and heart twisted, Lee flicked a wire-thin length of crysteel from his wrist implant. Janeen froze in mid-rage as he sh
redded her heart. He got to her before she fell and eased her down to the floor.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. The words were useless and made him feel ugly inside.
She laughed. “Don’t be. Didn’t wanna live if she was still breathing.” Her face squirmed, and she flopped her hand behind his head. “Watch her close, Phoenix.”
Her hand grabbed the back of his head. He felt her implant knocking. He started to pull back, but her eyes pleaded.
“Let me get you…off her leash.”
Dr. Mentel stepped through the hole in the pressure door, a familiar white and blue, double-thick screen in her hands. Her ‘leash.’
“Stop!”
He stared her and snarled. He gave Janeen access to his implant. Code instantly flew into his head.
“Stand up!” Dr. Mentel commanded.
Lee’s body jerked to his feet, still dizzy as Janeen’s code filtered into his implant.
Mentel walked forward. “Take down your wall.”
Still facing her, Lee built a filament of blue. It spiralled through the air and touched the wall.
The dizziness passed. Janeen’s code had rooted and come online. He stood straight again.
“Bring it down,” she said. Her chin jutted up. “Make me an impressive entrance.”
Physically connected to the wall, it took Lee only a thought.
The wall instantly collapsed, looking for all the worlds like a wave of water. The wave rushed towards Lee, concentrating its mass, swirling around him as it disappeared back inside him.
He groaned in pain with the effort.
“Hold it right there!” Willard screamed. “Drop what’s in your hands, Dr. Mentel!”
Sweet as sugar, Mentel knelt and placed the tablet on the ground.
“Disarm them, Zhang,” she whispered.
Lee whipped a hand towards her. A blue scythe flew toward at her face and slashed her cheek. She screamed and staggered back, a hand pressed to her face.
He whipped his hand. The scythe fell on the blue and white screen, cleaving it into sparking pieces.