A woman went down, her body tumbling from the causeway. A man took a shot to the back, but he made it back on board the shuttle.
Then the slashing metal attackers were onto him. With enemies pressing in, Wake had no choice but to fly.
He raced higher and higher into the air, but instantly the open Venusian sky was a very unfriendly place.
Four or five of them were up in the air with him, striking from different angles, trying to damage his wings, trying to cripple him.
I can run and evade, but what’s the point?
Several others waited on the platform. When the ones in the air were exhausted, they would take their places. Eventually, they’d wear him down.
There were too many of them.
He fired his gun at a flying figure. The magazine did nothing but produce sparks against the Razorman’s chest armor, and then he had to swoop down to avoid the warrior’s reaching hands.
Immediately, he was targeted by two more. One of them grabbed on to his left leg. The other extracted a blade from his wrist with a loud shakk and started slashing at Wake’s wings.
Wake let himself fall out of the path of the flashing blade. Then he took aim with his free foot and landed a punishing kick to the second warrior’s head.
A savage jolt of pain slammed his knee as the kick connected. It should have snapped his neck. But the Razorman didn’t even react. There was still the heavy weight dragging on his left, pulling him back down to the deck.
Panicking, Wake realised that two more Razorman were winging in from the side.
He had to make something happen.
Hands moving with the blind speed of automatic training, he loaded another clip into the Meshuggahtech, and fired downwards.
The bulk of the bullets richoche’d from the Razorman’s skull. Wake felt pain as one gouged a furrow on his left calf on its rebound.
One of them penetrated the base of the Razorman’s neck, and went in deep, leaving a sucking hole of red.
The Razorman gasped as he died, and instantly the grip on Wake’s left leg relaxed.
Free, Wake soared upwards, and the two Razormen attacking from the sides collided in mid-air, their metal barbs clashing sonorously. They awkwardly tumbled to the deck in a tangle of metal and wings.
Now he was in the sky with the one that had tried to cripple his Vyres. Wake ducked a swipe from the guy’s fist, and landed a quick kick to the guy’s ribs. If he couldn’t shoot through their armor, maybe he could wind them, exhaust them.
He immediately regretted it, as the Razorman simply popped out a spike on the right side of his chest. Wake roared with agony as the spike bit deep into his angle, rending his flesh like a metal fang.
“Fuck!” Hitting these guys is nearly as painful as getting hit by them.
The Razorman powered forward then, grabbing Wake by the waist and barreling down blindly to the ground. Wake’s Vyres absorbed most of the impact, but it still knocked most of the wind from his lungs.
A hooked fist blurred towards his face.
Abruptly, it stopped.
With no time to ponder the mystery, he rolled clear,
Two more Razormen charged in.
He opened fire on them again, uselessly, pointlessly. The bullets bounced freely from their bodies, and then they were at close range.
One of them swung a kick at his midsection. As it did, it retracted the hook, leaving just a normal booted foot.
Wake stepped around the kick, trying to wrack his brains for a solution to the mystery.
There was something strange going on here.
Why aren’t they using their blades on me? They’ve had so many opportunities to kill me. Every attack so far has been non-fatal.
Another punch. Again, the metal blade retracted before it connected.
Wake took a glancing blow to the temple, and that cleared his thoughts.
They’re trying to take me alive. Whatever they need me for, they can’t kill me.
Very well.
He changed tactics, and started flying towards them.
Or more particularly, towards the shining points of metal.
Wherever he saw a hook, he tried to impale himself on it. Whenever there was a saw, he tried to guide it into his throat.
As he predicted, they pulled away, veered away. He almost laughed in their faces. These unassailable metal juggernauts were now tripping over each other not to hurt him.
They could not risk their meal ticket getting killed.
Then he broke free of the tangle, and jumped out into the main open area on the platform.
The eight surviving Razormen fanned out to cover him on every side.
With ghostly speed, two of them flitted behind him, obscuring his escape route into the city. Three of them took to the air, blocking an upwards escape.
There was no sign of Vante. He’d made a clean escape, and Wake didn’t blame him. There was no sign of the Sons of the Vanitar. If any had survived his onslaught, they’d taken refuge in the hovering Adagio shuttle that was covering the deck in clouds of dust.
Wake pulled a last, desperate move.
From his belt, he pulled a grenade, armed it, and held it up where they could see.
“Stand back!” he bellowed to the Razormen. “Around me is a circle. If you encroach into this circle, I pull the pin, and kill myself. You goddamn well know I’ll do it.”
Like a magic trick, they froze.
None of them knew where the circle was, or had any way of finding out. They instantly turned from gleaming metal warriors to mannequins. Innocuous, and quiet. Not even the slightest hint of movement in any of their bodies. There wasn’t even signs of breath.
Wake started improvising.
“Tell your bosses to get off that fucking shuttle,” he yelled. “I want to talk to them, man to man. No torture, no threats, no violence. If they have something to say to me, they can do it the proper way.”
Just then, a public address intercom at the bottom boomed.
It was Nolund Esper’s voice, coming from inside the Adagio, amplified to a hundred times life size.
“Your orders have changed. We no longer wish to take Andrei Kazmer alive.”
Wake blanched. The hand holding the grenade wavered.
“Kill him.”
The Razormen rushed in.
Inside the Adagio, Nolund Esper was bleeding badly, and trying to staunch his gunshot wound. Pain whitened his face.
Meanwhile, Saldeen watched the fracas on the deck in a cold fury. Secured at the back was Ubra Zolot.
“We can’t kill him!” hissed Saldeen. “Raya’s instructions were quite specific.”
“We will ignore her instructions because they are stupid,” Nolund says. “He’s not going to come quietly. What’s the point risking more lost soldiers? Just cut him in half. A mishap with one of those blades can be blamed.”
“Don’t you at least want to sat-comm Raya, and get her approval?”
“It takes radio signals six minutes to reach Mars, each way. We don’t have time.”
Ubra was positively smug in her lithostatic handcuffs. “You two should have listened to me from the start. Just snipe him with a self-guided round at two kilometers. Or throw a thresher on to that deck. He wouldn’t have escaped. Now you’ve fucked everything up, you’ve lost men, and you’re having to kill him anyway.”
“Quiet,” Saldeen snapped.
She turned to Nolund. “Mind setting me free? I can help you fight him, and you’re down on numbers at the moment.”
“So’s he,” Saldeen said, taking her eyes back to the battle.
Wake threw the grenade into the thickest knot of them.
The explosion sent a wave of flame washing across the deck. One of the Razormen was caught by inside the blast radius and was instantly incinerated. Another one lost an arm. All the others were flung backwards, and Wake hurtled through the flame-lined gap in their ranks.
He took to the sky, and the battle resumed.
No
w, they were playing for keeps.
Blades slashed and thrummed past his face. Blood began to flow into his eye, and he realised he'd been cut. Against the pounding wind and the adrenaline, he hadn't felt a thing.
Soon one of them will cut me in half, and I won't feel pain there, either,
They were incredibly fast, and moved like a flawless machine, each one a gear or a cog in a greater whole that trapped him in the air, limited his movement, boxing him inside a slashing wheel that grew tighter and tighter.
Only about two or three could easily engage him at once. Any more than that and they started obstructing each other in the air.
And he had the advantage of extensive daily training with the Vyres. These guys were flying just off their natural instincts – and they had no natural instincts. He could outfly any one of them, or any two.
Against three or more, though…
He jinked to avoid a slash, and didn’t quite succeed. A blade raked a gap in his marine armor, scoring him along the ribs. He gasped in pain as more blood started to blow.
Then he flew upwards, away from their slashing pincushion bodies, and fired downwards.
Most of the bullets punched harmlessly off their armor and flesh.
One of them ripped away a wing. The unlucky Razorman plunged straight down to his doom, his remaining wing spinning him in corkscrew patterns as it flapped.
He saw a giant metallic object ascend, behind the swooping and diving bodies.
It was the Adagio.
The shuttle was entering the fight.
The gleaming metal and glass craft obstructed his view, almost seeming to gaze into him, and he realised that its guns were swinging into position.
Thwap.
Thwap.
Black objects unfurled in the air.
Containment nets. Just like the one that had pinned him to a wall.
The pitons whistled as the nets flew through the air, aiming to trap him.
He changed the angle on his Vyres and rapidly lost altitude. The net wrapped around an unwary Razorman, rapidly binding his wings to his body.
It started to plunge downwards. As it did so, its blades expanded outwards, shredding the net into a useless mass of cordage.
Whenever one of them gets netted, they can free themselves and rejoin the fray. As soon as I get netted, I die.
More nets were fired. He evaded, side to side and up and down. Razormen were trapped left and right, only freeing themselves after several seconds of struggle.
He was slow dodging one of them, and the piton struck him in the forehead, leaving a shallow gouge. He blinked back pain, and an abrupt blackness spreading across his vision -
he returned to his senses just to see a blade rushing towards his face!
He raised his Meshuggahtech, and parried it, just two inches from his nose.
Clang!
The metal barrel took the impact off the blade. The Razorman was undeterred, swinging again and again, a flurry of brutally precise blows that forced him into a retreat. Its friends were following up behind. Soon, one of them would gore him in the back, and that would be that.
The Razorman lashed out, then hit him with a vicious crossblow that sent the assault rifle spinning from his hands.
He had no way of seeing whether it had fallen on the deck, and was savable. There was death before him, death behind him, death screeching down from on top of him.
He fell out underneath them, letting them clash into a tangle up overhead.
His feet touched the ground, and he sprinted towards the downed sonic cannon.
It was among a tangle of corpses, a mixture of Sons of the Vanitar and Razormen. If he could not kill them, his only option would be to destabilize them, and hope that the situation corrected itself on its own.
His hand closed on the blue gunstock of the Skortek Sonic Cannon.
He never got a chance to use it. What looked like a slain Razorman sprang to life, lashing out with a hooked kick that tore deeply into his forearm.
He screamed with pain, his blood splashing the concrete. He let go of the sonic cannon as if it had stung him, aware of more Razorman landing on the flaming deck.
I'm finished.
One lunged at him, and although he missed the blades, he was tackled from his feet. He tried to fly again, but the man was too fast, too good.
Then he realised that it wasn't a man, it was a woman.
Her lunged pounded him against a wall, and they began to grapple, desperately. She produced a knife from her left wrist, and slashed it downwards on him. He ducked right, and the knife blade hacked a deep cut into the wall behind him. She punched with a metal-tipped fist. He contorted his torso, and the punch pounded deep into the wall. Mortar dust flew into his face.
Then he seized both of her limbs, and twisted them away from him.
They struggled, the Razorwoman trying to free her hands from his grip. She produced countless small blades from her forearms in the hope of making him let go.
The pain ripping at both his hands only deepened his resolve.
Blood dripped from his wrists as they wavered back and forth. Soon, they they were face to face. Only the mask stopped them from being eye to eye, smelling each other’s' breathe.
He immediately knew that she was going to win.
He was a big man, but she was animated by a strength beyond humanity. Her limbs were like irresistable steel pistons, pushing him around. Although he pressed back from the wall with all his might, she forced her blades inward, penetrating closer and closer as he buckled.
The other Razormen stood at ease, watching her easily overpower him.
Suddenly, a blade just an inch from tearing out his throat, Wake thought he could hear something.
A cawing sound.
Funny. That sounds almost like...
Then huge feathery shapes cast shadows over the scene, and a wailing screech from eleven dinosaur throats obliterated every other sound from the platform. It drowned out the crackling flames, the humming of the Adagio, the pulse pounding inside Wake's head. Everything.
The Quetzals were loose!
The genehacked dinosaurs made sweeps across the deck, tearing Razormen from their feet and ripping them apart in mid-air
There was no resisting them. It was havoc.
The Razorwoman paid no attention to the plight of her comrades. They were not the mission. Wake was the mission.
She pressed further inwards. The blade at Wake's throat was honed to an atom's sharpness, and it drew blood as it slowly cleaved into his neck.
Then, an instant from death, Wake spoke.
“They have a weak spot on the back of their neck.”
The Razorwoman pulled back momentarily. If she could, she would have looked confused.
Who is he talking to?
“Yeah, go for it.” Wake said, in easy tones. “They have a weak spot on the back of their neck.”
Sudden understanding passed through the Razorwoman like a jolt, and she started to turn -
Kablam!
The bullet lanced through the unarmored patch of skin below her hairline, smashing her spinal column to shards and severing the cluster of nerves.,
Her body slumped away, revealing Vante.
The terrified boy was holding Wake's smoking pistol with white knuckles.
Some gifts are too precious to throw away.
The eleven reborn dinosaurs were in a blind, berserk rage. Near starvation, sensing the presence of aliens and foreigners, they crashed into the scene with no goal but to destroy everything that walked on two legs.
Two of the Razormen were mashed to pulp by the ten foot-long beaks. The others either ran or took to the air. The airborne ones found themselves under assault by still more Quetzals.
They whirled around in huge doom-spelling circles, looking for prey. And there was no shortage of targets.
Inside the Adagio, Nolund Esper and Saldeen Zana were aghast.
The dock area was now a blur of feathers and to
rn-apart soldiers. Smoke eddied in crazed circles from the wind of the flapping wings. The situation outside was completely out of control.
“What the hell is this?” screamed Nolund. He was having quite a day. Countless friends and comrades slain, and the odds were increasing that he'd be one of them.
“Dinosaurs,” Saldeen said. “We received intel on this. Some dumbass with more money than sense rented a genomics lab.”
“Fucking kill them all! Tracer guns on full automatic!” bellowed Nolund. He had lost a massive amount of blood, and the stress had burst his wound open again.
“Tracers go through everything,” said Saldeen. “We'll be hurting our own soldiers,”
“I'll hurt you,” he snarled, gesturing out the window at the whirling chaos below. “You see how it is. I don't care if every last one of Raya's stupid freaks die. We need to get this situation back under control.”
“No,” Saldeen said. “We let this play itself out. We're not about to unleash gunship fire on that dock. It'll kill Razormen, it'll kill Wake, and it'll probably kill civilians in the city beyond. The Razormen are tough, they can handle these birds.”
As if to emphasise the point, half of a dismembered Razorman carcass was flung across the cupola. It landed with a splat, a starburst of crushed entrails flying across the cracked glass.
“Stop arguing and get on those guns,” Nolund said.
Then a dark shape loomed in front of the viewing cupola, and a Quetzal crashed into the shuttle. A spiderweb of cracks spread across the supposedly unbreakable glass, and the ground changed orientation by nearly thirty degrees.
Everyone inside screamed, feeling the hovering Adagio lurch and recoil like a punched boxer. The stabilising jets righted the craft, but as the battle on the Zephyr city dock returned to view, they released that they now had a man down.
Nolund had been flung from his feet, and had struck his head against one of the controls. A rivulet of blood was flowing from his temple, and he struggled to regain his feet.
He failed, and crashed into unconsciousness.
“Shit,” Zana said. “We really need a second person on the controls in here..”
Foreverlight (The Consilience War Book 4) Page 14