The team fell in behind Amira and they moved through the jungle together like a plague of locusts, blasting through the air and landing in a high-speed bound. Amira was used to fighting on the steppe, and the jungle offered a stark contrast; toppled trees and shredded landscape sped by, making progress seem faster and more intense. More dangerous
"Two hundred meters to contact," Misha said. "Doesn't look like they see us yet."
The mysterious units appeared as bright blobs of yellow-orange on Amira's display. The tree tops shook at their location, while a silken cloud of steam peeled up and and away into the already muggy air.
"What the fuck are you?" she whispered, then spoke into the comms. "Two teams, loose formations. Team Two, you're on fire support."
Team Two hunkered down while Amira pressed forward with her wingmen in tow. Green leaves and brown trunks rocketed by them, rattling after they passed. A hundred and fifty meters then a hundred remained, and she leapt up and over the jungle's canopy.
The ground shrank away beneath her while her suit's weapons began to charge. She could feel them beginning to quake with stored energy like a panther ready to pounce.
She caught sight of her targets, but there was simply too much heat coming off to make out anything clearly in thermal, so she dropped to regular optics. What she saw sent a shockwave of awe through her body.
The units were monstrous suits of medieval armor, loosely encasing two-story men made of magma. Each had a single red eye that glowed as bright as the late-day sun.
"Fire!" she screamed.
Lances of indigo-tinted light erupted from her team, chased by chains of crackling lightning. Orange sparks exploded from the knights in fountains, and scattered to the ground.
When the sparks were gone and the clouds of dark smoke disintegrated, the black knights stood unharmed. As a group, they'd ducked behind shields on their left arms and weathered the storm there. Then they lowered their shields at once, raised the cannons on their other arms and opened fire.
The air barked around Amira like a rabid rottweiler. Liam Banks' name flashed on her screen, then dimmed and disappeared. As she raced toward the ground, she glanced back just in time to see the clumpy cloud where his MASPEC armor had been.
Amira landed close enough to see the black knights through the bush, and one detail caught her attention. The arm-cannons were her Nikola magnetic rifle, but clumsily scaled up and strapped to the knight's arms.
The knights remained focused on Amira and her team, while her support team's particle beams cut through the forest and stabbed at the them. The attack tore a hole through one knight, causing it to stumble against a tree and fall, while another buckled entirely under the onslaught. It flailed in panic and was torn asunder, the multitude of jagged shards catching fire as they fell away.
"Circle them," she called out.
As her team jetted into action, the knights fired again. The sound was sharp, close, Earth rending, leaving her dislocated and terrified.
A dozen meters in front of her, Misha flew into pieces. His name flashed on her screen and went out.
Flesh and armor mixed together in the blast, raining in every direction.
Amira didn't have time for rage, but it came nonetheless. Her armor's lights came online and turned red. The time for stealth was over.
"Assault profile. Output to full," she barked out to her comrades.
Kerberos had already made the change, and she was running hot. Overspec. She wouldn't be able to keep this up for long—either the battery would give out, or her armor would burn up—so she'd have to make it count.
The headset simultaneously overclocked her brain, and time stretched like honey.
With her thrusters firing at full power, she blasted out on an angle past the targets. Kerberos' control surfaces allowed her to travel parallel to the ground, bouncing along on a high-pressure cushion of air.
The fireteam sent another volley of accelerated particles at the knights, but the towering monsters deflected them easily with their shields. The New Union had come a long way in a short time... But they didn't know the Nikola rifle the way Amira did. There was a reason she'd abandoned the technology.
As she streaked toward the target, she dialed a new setting into her particle rifle and howled madly. Her armor amplified the sound, turning it into a baleful and immortal thing, while her rifle cycled up and fired. The beam it produced this time was an unearthly shade of magenta.
The beam struck the lead knight's shield harmlessly, not even producing a shower of sparks.
Amira's feet touched down twenty meters from her foe, and she dropped into a sprint and crossed the small clearing at speed. The monster loomed up ahead, the intricate motion of its overlapping plates mesmerizing her. She could now more clearly see the glowing matter beneath, and it looked like twisting cords of muscle that glowed like high-performance brake pads.
The knight, whose shoulders were marked with bright yellow accents, turned and targeted her. It leaned forward and raised its cannon, and her moment of truth came.
Amira's eyes went wide, and her heart thumped so hard it rattled her jaw.
The cannon tracked her and paused, then electricity crawled over its outside like a panicked swarm of ants. In another second, the walking machine that'd looked so much like a living creature began to twitch in a way that completely destroyed the illusion, and its cannon exploded in a spherical wave of shrapnel.
Amira's MASPEC produced a series of magnetic fields that were less a shield than a slippery bubble. It couldn't do much against something as powerful as the knight's cannon, but it allowed her to easily slide past the incoming shrapnel.
While the knight staggered drunkenly, she dug her heels into the ground and launched directly toward it. Slicing up from the ground like a rocket, she bent at the waist and latched onto the knight's shield.
The lion had caught her prey.
The wreckage of its cannon fell away leaving a sparking stump, which moved in quickly and bashed Amira while she scrabbled over the shield.
Her armor channeled energy into its reactive superstructure and reinforced the shell. It managed to absorb the blow, but her battery readout dipped in response. It was clear she couldn't take another of those.
She released smoke. Slats opened along her back, spitting out a thick cloud of radar absorbent dust that choked the air and blinded the metal titans.
Before the next blow could come, she vaulted around the shield like a gymnast competing on uneven bars, and heard a hammerblow strike down behind her.
She pulled herself in close behind the shield and examined the machine using an EM scan that revealed its underlying circuitry. She traced the criss-crossing lines and analyzed their patterns, but just couldn't seem to focus in the heat of the moment.
Then she sucked a deep breath in slowly, feeling it rush over her teeth, and finally saw the weak spot.
She drew her fist back and a pair of blades snapped up out of her forearm. Their edges began to glow with a pale-green light, and she struck.
The attack produced a sound like a sedan hitting a trash can, then she levered herself under the shield and pushed against it. Straining hard, she finally caused the metal to screech out and slowly tumbled away.
The knight reacted admirably. As the shield came clear, the other ragged stump rushed in again and hit Amira like a bullet train.
Kerberos poured every last drop of power into its shell, but it wasn't enough. The shockwave tore the armor's weakened tendons and sinews apart.
Amira cartwheeled through the air, the sun flashing over and over in her vision while the shattered and dying pieces of Kerberos spun away.
She rebounded off a tree and tumbled end over end across the ground. Once she finally came to a stop, the remaining large plates of Kerberos expired, crumpled, and fell away.
Amira groaned a single word which her headset dutifully transmitted to her troops: "Fire."
She lay motionless on her back atop a pile of disc
arded technology, and heard the fireteam's beams sear the air. A thump like an illegal firecracker followed.
She shifted and pain came as suddenly as a slammed door. It engulfed her thigh, and muscles everywhere else seized up, trying violently to force the pain back out of her.
Now curled up on her side, she gritted her teeth and growled into the headset. "Induce... a magnetic charge in... the fuckers. Makes the guns glitch."
A strained yelp escaped her lungs, and the display of weakness infuriated her. Swallowing her pride, she dragged herself up against a nearby tree-trunk, then keyed a sequence into the air with her hand.
It was done. Her headset was set to put her out and broadcast an encrypted distress signal, while the bodysuit provided first aid. All neatly automated.
The headset began to feel like it was vibrating slowly, and she drifted off to sleep, making a mental note to try and figure out an answer to that whole pain thing.
Chapter 13
The Open Channel
It had been a bad couple of days for Jack Hernandez and he couldn't tell if things were about to get better or drastically worse. He was leaning against Felix who slumbered peacefully beside him, while their bodyguard, Gordon Wei, slowly paced the clearing in his mottled suit of armor.
The air above had become a living nightmare, strings of explosions flashing across it like a swarm of flying paparazzi. It sounded like a thunderstorm on fast forward, through an overdriven subwoofer.
He checked his rifle and found it just as useless as before. If he actually had to fire on one of the countless deathmachines, the best he could probably hope for was a stray ricochet catching him between the eyes. He didn't particularly relish that he knew that, but there it was.
The tactic Jack decided on instead was much more reasonable. At the first sign of trouble, he'd hide behind that Wei guy and quickly pray to as many gods as he could remember from school.
He heard a strange sound, glanced upward and saw something he might have mistaken for God's wrath. A beam of light cut the sky in half, so bright, so angry that day seemed to dim behind it. Human jets and Oikeyan flyers that had only been near its path burst into bright red blossoms of flame, as if a garden had suddenly sprung up in the clouds.
Jack felt the heat from it on his forehead, nose, lips, and the beam left a thick, pulsating bruise across his vision. He buried his face under his arm and swore.
Wei said, "Be ready, Mr. Hernandez."
"Yeah, yeah," Jack replied, rubbing his eyes. He could sort of make out some trees waving in the distance... unless the trees were Wei, in which case he wasn't making them out all that well after all.
He suddenly became very confident that his day was getting worse.
Jack raised up the rifle but remained pressed against his Yuon Kwon friend, giving his best impression of being ready. He blinked and blinked again, and still couldn't see a damned thing.
"Get up, up," Wei said.
Jack felt the MASPEC troopers hands on his shoulder and back, pushing him away from Felix. What little he could see around him had grown darker, and he could feel winds swishing in multiple directions. Downwash?
Wei tugged his arm and Jack followed, trotting about as quickly as he could manage without twisting an ankle.
He blinked and started to see something recognizable. His head was angled down, and he was looking at the dirt and patchy vegetation under his feet. And his feet, obviously.
He squinted hard one more time, looked up, and nearly fell on his ass.
Something stupidly large was floating in the air in front of him. It was the size of three luxury yachts strapped together into a makeshift trimaran, sixty meters or more from stem to stern.
The design was grotesque and ungainly like something a six year-old might build from plastic blocks, with the starboard side dominated by a cannon in the shape of a yawning alligator clip. The opposite side held a large and mostly featureless brick. A bay had opened on the brick's underside, from which thin manipulator arms dangled down and were in the process of securing Felix.
"What the fuck is that?" Jack shouted over the noise.
"Pegasus," Wei said.
Jack smirked and said, "Ugliest damn pegasus I've ever seen."
The manipulator arms finally got a good grip on Felix and they slowly lifted the sleeping Yuon Kwon inside. Wei pointed to another hatch further along, built into the bottom of some bulbous, warty outgrowth on the ship's belly.
Jack got the drift and nodded sullenly. Then Wei scooped him up in his augmented arms and carried him aboard Pegasus in a few great bounding leaps.
The hatch closed under them, and Jack found himself in one of the most dismal looking rooms he'd ever seen. The walls were a weak shade of strawberry flavored milk, beneath lights the same blue as those tuxedos he'd always refused to wear. A half-dozen of Amira's armors stood facing the outside wall, looking hilariously to Jack like men relieving themselves in private stalls. He managed not to laugh.
While that urge subsided, he gave one of the armors a hard look, and the upholstery inside looked oddly inviting. This suit was more than a simple weapon, though; what Amira had built was a human-shaped engine of mass destruction. In the wrong hands, such a thing could be a hammer of genocide.
Although he'd convinced himself to carry a rifle for protection, that was a far cry from driving a tank, and light years away from becoming this sort of walking atomic bomb. And the thought that terrified him most about it—the one that absolutely shook him to the core—was the possibility that if he so much as stepped inside, he may never want to climb back out.
Wei stepped into a stall, then the back of his armor split apart and he shrugged it off as easily as he might a dusting of snow. Jack had seen Amira and her Fleet allies wrestle themselves free of the older versions, and this was a definite improvement.
Dressed in a navy blue skinsuit, Gordon Wei stretched quickly using forms that looked like Tai Chi. He was a slender and unimposing man, a few years older than Jack with short-cropped hair that had gone grey at the temples. His posture had a certain angular erectness that made him seem intensely awake, quietly ready for the next terrible thing to happen.
"Come on," Gordon said while fixing his wristwatch. "I should probably take you to one of our guest rooms."
Jack shrugged. It didn't seem there was much else for him to do.
Gordon tilted his head to the side and paused the conversation with a finger. "Wait," he said. "Looks like I'm taking you to the bridge instead. Shall we?"
Jack nodded toward the door and motioned for him to lead the way.
They exited the bay into halls that looked like an expensive hospital, and Jack was pleased that the ship's interior matched its exterior so badly. He'd half expected the inside to be an obstacle course.
A long hallway led them directly to a wide staircase, and as they descended the steps, Jack got his first sight of Pegasus' bridge. It was a large chevron-shaped cabin with two split stories, and a great bay of windows that sloped outward. Jack could see most of the ground below them, and the rest of the lumpy Pegasus up above.
He'd never seen a cockpit on the underside of an aircraft as far as he could remember, but he immediately thought the clear view of the ground betrayed something about Amira's focus.
A man was standing at the central console, with salt-and-pepper hair and the beard of a rather meticulous lumberjack. He was stout, barrel-chested, and might have done a bit of boxing in his day, if the crooked nose was any indication. He wore a green jumpsuit that looked identical to the rest of the bridge crew's.
Jack stepped forward. "Jack Hernandez," he said, and offered a hand.
"Tom Greer, Pegasus XO." They shook.
His accent was either Autralian or South African. Jack always confused the two.
One of the seated officers said, "The Yuon Kwon is secure, Tom."
"Let's get under way then."
The few dozen bridge officers were all busy at work on their consoles. Jack was
sure one of them must be steering the ship, but he'd be damned if he could tell which one.
The ground began to shrink away, and as it continued to shrink, Jack grew worried. He pointed to the western jungle. "Sal went that way," he said.
"We're not picking her up."
Jack's face flushed. "Come again?"
The other man looked him up and down, but Jack couldn't read any judgment in the eyes. Good poker face.
Tom said, "We lost contact with her, and she left explicit orders to be carried out in her absence. We're taking you to safety. We'll attempt to rendezvous with any survivors once the mission is complete."
"Take me where exactly?"
Tom ignored the question and turned to look through the front window.
Jack turned too, and the view had changed while he'd been otherwise occupied. Instead of ground, he saw only a sky growing dark and starting to reveal the first few stars hidden behind it.
"Son of a bitch," Jack said under his breath. He didn't call Donovan out by name, but he was sure the meaning was nevertheless clear.
He glanced over his shoulder and saw Gordon Wei, who gave him a friendly nod and patted the sidearm on his thigh. It was an unfamiliar pistol made of too-sharp angles, and Jack had a few guesses what it might do to him. None of them were pretty.
So he hooked his thumbs in his pockets and waited. When the sky had turned totally to darkness marred by countless specks of light, the distant and gibbous moon seemed to swell. It was hypnotic. And that was the moment he realized he was in outer space. Not just skipping along the upper atmosphere like in the old Emergency Response Corps tranzats, but up and away from the Earth completely.
It felt like the first time he watched the coast shrink away from him on a boat ride as a child, but now marred by that touch of cynical disbelief that children never seem to suffer. The feeling was still profound though, jaw-dropping, and he was surprised anything could still have that effect on him.
Tom smiled. "First time, aye?"
"Yeah," Jack said with a nod. "At least you were gentle."
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