Measures of Absolution

by Marko Kloos

  “Last chance,” the enemy commander’s voice comes over the public address system. “Surrender your weapons, or we’ll come and take them.”

  Across the core, a lot of rifles are aimed in Jackson’s direction now, and a lot of them look like military hardware.

  But they don’t have battle armor, Jackson thinks.

  None of the civvies have the sealed armor to go with those stolen military rifles, and she wants to bet they’re a little short on augmentation too, because nobody over there seems to be wearing a helmet.

  “Launchers,” she tells her squad in a low voice. “All gas grenades. Lob ‘em over the barrier and onto the other side. Give me a volley on my mark.”

  Her squad obeys. They take buckshot shells out of launchers and replace them with riot gas canisters. Kelly almost fumbles her reload, then readies her grenade launcher and looks at Jackson with wide, fearful eyes.

  “Left side shoots left, right shoots right,” Jackson orders. “Kelly, shoot straight across with me. On three. Two. One. Fire in the hole!”

  Nine launchers thump in a short, stuttering drumroll. Two of the gas grenades clatter against the polyplast barrier on the other side of the chasm and careen off, then fall down into the core spewing smoke. The other seven grenades drop into the gallery space beyond and burst apart. Within a few seconds, the other side of the gallery is blanketed with riot gas.

  To a trooper in sealed armor, a gas grenade is just a minor inconvenience. The helmet keeps out the chemicals, and the augmented vision from the sensors cuts through the smoke. To an unprotected civvie, however, it’s like getting your face doused with alcohol and set on fire.

  Instantly, there are screams of anger and pain coming from the far side. Jackson can see people hunching over or dropping to their knees in the noxious white cloud her squad just conjured with their launchers.

  “Flank and flush,” Jackson orders. “Southeast corner, doubletime.”

  She rushes her squad to the corner of the gallery, then turns left to cover the stretch of garbage-strewn concrete that is the south side of the gallery. Then she’s at the southeast corner. She looks around the edge of the concrete retaining wall to see the armed civvies retching in the chem cloud. The stuff is pretty persistent, but it won’t keep them suppressed for more than a few minutes. Until then, they’re blind and in no shape for fighting.

  Jackson draws first blood. In the mouth of a hallway ten yards in front of her, two of the armed civvies are still alert and on their feet, at the far edge of the chem cloud. They see her and raise their rifles. She shoots first, letting her computer select the burst length as she sweeps thecivvies with her muzzle and holds her trigger down. The M-66 pumps out two three-round bursts, and both civvies fall over. Their rifles clatter to the floor as they die silently.

  When Jackson looks to her left again, the remaining civvies have retreated into the vestibules and hallways of the floor beyond the gallery again. She wishes she had some HE or frag grenades to bank off these walls and bounce after them, but the ammo loads for the mission were limited to nonlethal and buckshot for the launchers. Nobody anticipated having to use high explosives for a simple public safety sweep assist. The world seems to have gone nuts since last week.

  She has never missed that heavy, unwieldy piece-of-shit MARS launcher more in her life. With armor-piercing rockets or thermobarics, she could crack these walls like eggshells, blast a hole into the exterior wall, radio the drop ship, get out of this mess.

  “Back to the hallway,” she tells her troops and points at the wide main hallway on the south side. The fire-proof door isn’t down yet, and the main hallways lead straight to the main staircases. They rush over to the south side, trying to cover in all directions.

  Just as they reach the mouth of the hallway, the elevator bank nearby chimes, and the doors open. Jackson and her squad are maybe fifteen meters away as the elevator disgorges a squad or more of civvies with weapons. They see her group and raise their guns just as Jackson’s squad bring up theirs.

  She wants to stop time at that moment. She knows what is going to happen, but she’s powerless to avoid it. It’s that freeze frame of mental acuity when that trigger has been pulled and the striker is racing toward the primer of the cartridge. The civvie in the lead starts to shout something, but Jackson can’t understand it, and it doesn’t matter in the end anyway.

  Oh, shit.

  Then everyone opens fire seemingly at once.

  Jackson dives out of the way to the left, into the hallway and away from the elevators. She fires her rifle from the hip, into the tightly packed group of civvies coming off the elevators. As fast as she gets out of the way, a burst of flechettes still rakes her arm and right side. Behind her, the squad is out in the open, without the time to get to cover.

  At a short range like this, a firefight between two squads with automatic rifles is like a knife fight in a boot camp locker. People scream and fall. Flechettes are piercing armor and flesh, ricocheting off hard surfaces and spraying apart in tiny splinters. Eighteen, twenty rifles firing in rapid cadence. Jackson has never been in the middle of such a hail, not even back in Detroit.

  Her rifle’s target reticle disappears from her helmet display. She pays it no mind, just keeps firing her rifle from the hip. Hard to miss at this range. People are on the ground, others are madly scrambling for distance and cover. This isn’t holding the line. This isn’t a heroic last stand against the odds. It’s naked, bloody slaughter.

  Jackson’s rifle stops firing. She automatically ejects her magazine and reaches for a new one on her harness, reloads, keeps firing.

  She catches the movement above out of the corner of her eye. Reflexively, she throws herself backward. Overhead, the heavy steel-and-ceramic fire door of the main hallway entrance comes down quickly and silently. It slams into the concrete floor in front of her with a resounding crash that makes the floor shake. One meter to the right, and she would have been bisected by the hatch that locks into place not five inches from her right boot.

  She is alone in the dark. Everyone else, her squad and all their enemies, are on the other side of the fire door.

  Jackson screams in rage and frustration. She slams the unyielding laminate of the fire door with her fist. On the other side, the gunfire sounds muffled now, but rifles are still firing on full auto, and people are still shouting and screaming. Her people, her squad. Her responsibility.

  “I’m locked in,” she shouts into the squad channel. “Covering fire, and retreat to the breech we made.”

  Nobody replies. She pounds the fire hatch again, and this time there’s a sharp pain in her hand that shoots all the way up to her elbow. She examines her hand in the green-tinted augmentation of her helmet’s sensors. One of the flechettes from the enemy fire hit her armored glove and shattered. A shard of it must have pierced the armor and gone up her forearm. She can feel the blood running down the inside of the suit even as the armor’s computer works on stemming the blood flow with its integrated trauma kit.

  There are more holes in her armor, on her right side. Jackson isn’t in pain, but her side feels numb, which is bad news. It means she’s wounded badly enough for her suit to numb her up. Still, she has her legs, arms, and hands, and everything still works.

  There’s no way through that hatch except for blowing it up with a MARS rocket, which she doesn’t have. Jackson checks her rifle—180 rounds remaining—and her spare magazines. Three left, plus the one in the gun. Maybe enough to fight her way out of here.

  The corridor behind her is deserted as well. A whole floor of a welfare high-rise, and it’s empty. Jackson wonders how far down they’ve evacuated. The floor below, five floors, ten? Where did all those people go? And how did these welfare rats become so organized?

  On the other side of the fire door, the muffled sounds of automatic rifle fire cease. She tries the squad channel again. No reply.

  Jackson replaces the partial magazine in her rifle with a full one and tucks away the parti
al in one of her magazine pouches. Then she moves down the hallway, away from the heavy fire door that traps her in this section.

  The dark hallways of the apartment floor are eerily quiet and empty. Jackson clears the corridor, doorway by doorway, eighty meters of grungy rat warren without any rats inside.

  At the end of the next hallway, there’s an escape door to a stairwell. The green fire escape sign glows in the dark like a dim beacon. Jackson walks up to the door and pushes the panic bar down to open it. It doesn’t budge.

  There are two buckshot grenades left on her harness. She stuffs one into her launcher’s chamber, steps back, and blows the lock assembly to scrap with a thousand grains of polymer-coated tungsten shot. Then she kicks the door open.

  The staircase is dark and empty. It’s 99 floors down to the atrium level, and she doesn’t really want to go down to where her whole platoon just got bagged by the locals without firing a shot, but there’s no other way out of this trap. She could hole up in one of the empty apartments and wait for them to come and find her, but she will not be pried out of a hiding hole like vermin.

  The pain in her side is burning through the local anesthetic. The suit’s autodoc is keeping her from bleeding out, but she knows that she needs to get to a medical center soon.

  She makes it almost ten floors down before she hears fire doors slamming open above and below her. It’s a trap, and she has walked into it willingly.

  Jackson retreats to a corner of the stairwell and brings up her rifle. The optic on top of her M-66 is shattered, probably taken out by the same burst of flechette fire that tore up her side. The IR aiming laser still works, though. She puts the green dot of the laser on the first silhouette to appear on the staircase above, and pulls the trigger for a burst, then another. The silhouette disappears. The civvies carry high-powered weapon lights on their rifles, and the beams tear through the dark, casting harsh shadows on walls and ceilings.

  Then she takes fire from the staircase below. She replies in kind, sending a few bursts downstairs. The ammo counter readout on her helmet screen goes from 250 to 210 in a blink. The civvies above her pop off a few bursts of un-aimed fire, holding their rifles over the railings without sticking their heads out.

  Two grenades come flying down the stairs. They clatter on the concrete, bounce off the floor and walls, go in two different directions. Jackson rushes for one, kicks it down the stairs, knows that she doesn’t have the time to reach the second one. But she tries anyway.

  She kicks the second grenade, and it flies off and hits one of the steel posts for the handrail of the staircase. It deflects at an angle and lands in the space to her right, where she can’t reach it without running right in front of the guns of the civvies down the stairs. It never comes to rest before it explodes.

  Jackson is thrown backwards against the unyielding concrete of the staircase wall. Then she’s on her side down on the dirty concrete of the sub-landing. She gropes for her rifle, but it’s gone, blown from her hands. She feels the air leaking out of her, takes another breath, can’t get her lungs to respond the way they should. There are footsteps above and below her in the dark. She gives up her search for the M-66 and fumbles for the knife strapped to her harness even as she feels her consciousness slipping away. Then there’s just silence and darkness.

  Chapter Seven

  Lazarus

  Jackson wakes up and immediately wishes she hadn’t.

  There’s a bright light above her head that’s hurting her eyes, and she is thirsty, thirstier than she has ever been in her life. She turns her head sideways to avoid the painful glare of the light above. She’s in a room with unwashed floors and unpainted walls, dirty concrete. The merciless glare from the light fixture on the ceiling makes the place look inhospitable, pointing out every pockmark in the walls and mold spot on the ceiling as it does.

  Her right arm is bandaged from fingertips to elbow. There’s a dull ache throbbing underneath the antiseptic gauze, but when she tries to flex her fingers, they obey. She uses her left hand to check the right side of her body. More bandages, taped to her skin, worse aching underneath. She feels like absolute shit, like she just woke up with the world’s worst hangover.

  The room is small, just the overhead light, a toilet, and the bed in it. Her bedroom back home in Atlanta was smaller still, but not by much. Jackson checks the bed and sees that it’s bolted to the concrete floor in typical welfare housing fashion. She throws aside the thin blanket covering her and sees that she’s in a set of military issue underwear that aren’t the ones she put on when she left for this fucked-up drop. Both her ankles are tied together with polyplast restraints, and there’s a strand of it connecting her shackles to the bed frame. At the far end of the room, there’s a steel door, but Jackson doesn’t even have to try to know that her tether is just long enough for her to use the toilet, but too short to let her reach that door.

  She sits up, ignoring the pain that shoots up her side, and clears her throat. There’s nothing in the room she can use as a weapon, and without a good knife, she can’t get rid of the plastic shackles that keep her feet together.

  She clears her throat again. Her mouth is so dry that it feels like she’s gargling with wood splinters.

  “Hey,” she shouts toward the door. Then again, louder. “Hey!”

  She doesn’t have to wait long. On the other side of the steel door, there’s shuffling, someone getting out of a chair maybe. Then the door opens, and a surly civvie in combat fatigues looks at her without expression. He doesn’t say anything, just studies her for a moment. Then he closes the door again.

  Jackson sits and waits.

  Two minutes later, the door opens again, and someone else walks in.

  The man who steps into the room is tall and lean. His skin is almost as brown as Jackson’s. He wears his hair in a military cut, shorn close to the skull on the sides and left just a little longer on top. From his bearing, the economy of his movements, Jackson knows that this man is a combat trooper.

  “Good evening, Corporal,” he says to her, and it’s the same voice she heard over the security feed in the residence tower before things went all to shit. It’s silky and sonorous, and it carries the air of authority.

  The man carries a plastic cup. He walks up to the bed and hands it to her, along with a handful of pills. She takes them without taking her eyes off his face. He has a closely cropped beard and mustache, shaved so thin it’s barely more than a black circle around his mouth.

  She takes a sip from the cup. It’s water—warm and with a slightly rusty smell to it, but liquid to get the tissues in her mouth and throat back into speaking shape. Jackson downs the contents of the cup briskly.

  “Where’s my squad?” she asks him.

  He regards her with a faint smile.

  “No ‘where am I’, no ‘who are you’, or ‘how long have I been under.’ Just concern for your troopers. I appreciate a combat leader with her priorities in the right order.”

  She doesn’t reply, just looks at him without expression. She has already sized him up to see if she can take him down, and concluded that she can’t. He has stepped back just enough out of reach that she won’t be able to launch a surprise attack, as if he doesn’t even want to tempt her into trying. Jackson can tell that this man is as tightly wound as a steel spring underneath his clean fatigues. He radiates a sort of latent, barely restrained energy that reminds her of Sergeant Fallon, who looks like she’s always half a second away from unleashing violence.

  “Your squad fought well, but they got the short end of the stick in the exchange,” her visitor continues. “Five were killed in action. The other three should be back with their unit right now.”

  “Bullshit,” Jackson says flatly.

  “We took their guns and gear and let them go,” he says. His clinical, calm tone tells her that he doesn’t give a shit whether she believes him or not.

  “Why would you do that?” she asks. “Let them go when you know they’ll be back
with new guns soon.”

  “Because we don’t kill people unless we have to, and because I have no interest in going into the prison business. Too many mouths to feed around here as it is.”

  Five dead, Jackson thinks. Because I told them to fight, and they listened.

  “What about the rest of the platoon?”

  “A mixed bag,” her visitor says. “Most were let go. A few of them accepted our invitation to stay. Nobody was harmed. We had a full company in the atrium, and crew-served weapons. Your platoon commander had the good sense to recognize an unwinnable scenario, unlike you.”

  He clasps his hands in front of his chest and pauses briefly.

  “I do admire your initiative and your fighting skills. After you turned down my offer, you managed to keep an entire platoon busy trying to flush you out. And your squad killed seven of my troops and wounded eight more. But you pissed away the lives of your troopers for nothing at all.”

  “Not for nothing,” she says. “Can’t just surrender to everyone who asks. Sets a bad example.”

  He looks at her with that intense gaze, his face perfectly expressionless.

  “I suppose it would,” he says.

  He takes the chair out of the corner of the room and puts it next to the bed. Then he sits down, just out of her reach, and folds his hands.

  “Where did you serve?” she asks him point-blank. He doesn’t even raise an eyebrow, just smiles faintly.