As the reality of what had just happened dawned on him, Hatch gawked up at the sergeant. “You’re not as dumb as you look,” he said.
“I keep telling you that,” said Stug, his voice burdened with the weight of the unappreciated.
The buzz of the AAB’s engine competed with the soldier’s gasping as it pinned him to the wall. Pusher lay across the corpses, took aim, and fired. Only the sound of the purring engine remained.
“We better get that box and get out of here,” said Hatch, “before more bad guys show up.”
Outside, they heard shouts and the rapid fire of a Transport drone’s Gatling laser.
Stug’s shoulders sagged. Just once, he thought. “Too late.”
Bracer fell flat on his face. He felt more than saw Hawkeye go for his weapon, but the spotter first had to let go of his omni-lens, then kneel and draw. The drone shot him in the chest before his knee even hit the roof.
Bringing his rifle to bear, Bracer rolled left. The drone redirected its targeting sensors, tracing its fire across the gritty roof, ranging in on him. Bracer stopped, breathed, and sighted. One long, straight beam of laser fire hit the drone’s camera eye.
The blast overloaded its circuitry and the resulting explosion showered the roof with white-hot metal. Bracer hissed in pain as a chunk of shrapnel took him in the upper thigh. Metal, wiring, and one heavy Gatling laser rained down on the alleyway below.
“Hawkeye!”
Bracer crawled across the rooftop to reach his friend, pain arcing like lightning in his left leg. The spotter’s eagle eyes had saved the members of Alpha Squad and others in B Company more times than they could count. His squadmates often joked over drinks after an engagement about how Ole One Eye had kept them from being overrun or flanked. Hawkeye hated the moniker and its double entendre, but that just made his fellow soldiers, especially the women, laugh all the harder. His usual response was, “Well, maybe when I’m dead, you’ll stop calling me that goddamned awful name.”
As he pulled himself up next to his friend, Bracer feared Hawkeye would get his wish. The spotter lay motionless, his omni-lens shattered and hanging uselessly around his neck.
The explosion knocked both of them back into their respective doorways. Transport had thrown a frag grenade, an almost passé weapon in an era of sonic grenades and laser rifles. Neither Logan nor the QB had expected it. The blast had taken out half the wall on either side of the corridor, its radius rocking everything for fifty feet in all directions.
The captain’s inner ear hummed with the heavy concussive shock. She moved slowly, randomly, like each of her limbs had a mind of its own. Slow and clumsy, she tried to focus her brain on reality and get her arms and legs to respond. Her ears felt thick, like her head did on the morning after a bout of heavy drinking. Her brain seemed to be floating inside her skull. She knew she needed to move, to grab her rifle and prepare. Transport had thrown the frag grenade to put them on their asses. They were coming.
Weakly, her eyesight teary and unfocused, she saw that Logan had gotten it worse. He moved, but even more slowly than she did. Mary knew she had to get to him, to defend him. He was the only real leader the Wild Ones had. And if they were to be allies to TRACE, that made him more valuable in the struggle against Transport than she was. She had to protect him.
She could hear the grinding stomp of boots on the ground, stepping through debris. They echoed from what seemed like a hundred miles away. The QB’s training took over. Muscle memory alone pulled the third and final sonic grenade from her belt.
Her numb fingers could barely hold on to its slick metal surface. She pulled the pin with her teeth. With a lethargic lob, she threw it at the star-like blast of black that scorched the walls. The enemy was almost on top of her.
The grenade landed behind their line of advance. Yelling. Scrambling. Boots moving quickly, crushing fallout from the earlier blast in their haste.
The QB covered her ears and turned her face away. It felt like an eternity to her: the covering, the turning, the waiting.
The grenade failed to go off. It was a dud.
She glanced back to find the enemy realizing the same thing at the same moment. Anger fired her limbs—anger at the tech’s failure, at their desperate situation. Her ever-present, simmering hatred for Transport erupted, shooting adrenaline into her veins. She took a deep breath, her legendary calmness and hyper-awareness brought to bear on the task before her.
Mary screamed. But it was not the high-pitched cry of a woman forced into powerless paralysis by a fate beyond her control. Her Amazonian voice, strained and feral, carried a hate-filled promise of justice without mercy for her enemies.
That mortal wail filled the corridor as the QB leveled her laser rifle and fired, precise and deadly, at everything in front of her. Answering shots hit the walls and floor around her, but they were hurried and far less accurate. She ignored the death they carried. Her voice cut through the smoke and thorny burn of heavy laser fire in the air. Though her assault upon the enemy seemed to go on for hours, her shrill scream lasted less than thirty seconds. When there were no targets left, the captain’s finger released the trigger by reflex. Her voice trailed away, its fury dying on the scorched walls.
The fog of smoking wounds choked the corridor. It was like the spirits of the dead hovered in the haze, releasing their mortal coils.
Mary crawled across the hall to Logan, heedless of the threat should more of the enemy come around the corner. But nothing living moved, save her.
“We’re out of time!” said Hatch. “Get that goddamned box moving!”
Stug was at its controls, reprogramming it to auto-follow his biosign. Pusher guarded the hallway, allowing him to work.
Hatch moved back to the red door, sheltering behind it as pieces of a Transport drone hit the ground in front of him. He searched the roof across the alley but could see nothing of his squadmates. For all he knew, Transport had an entire squadron of drones inbound, and Alpha Squad had no cover on the roof.
Damn it, boys, where the hell are you?
He heard the thready vibration of the AAB as it followed Stug to his position. Pusher jogged backward behind it, guarding their rear. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on out there. We need to make a run for it. Get that damned box down into the sewer,” he ordered.
“Yes, sir,” Stug acknowledged, all business. “Pusher, with me.”
Hatch became the rear guard, scanning the armory behind them. For now, Transport had run out of soldiers to feed TRACE’s gristmill.
Stug scouted the alleyway. “Looks clear,” he grumbled.
“Go!”
The big man sprinted, the AAB following close on his heels. Pusher resumed her rearguard duty, backstepping and scanning for enemy intervention from behind. Stug dropped feet-first through the manhole despite the distance to the sewer below. His thick legs absorbed the jump, and he looked up expectantly. The airbox hovered, appearing confused, until its tracking sensors and algorithms determined how to reach Stug. It turned ninety degrees, faced perpendicular to the ground, and glided straight through the hole. Pusher followed.
Hatch observed the roof of the flophouse again. He still couldn’t find his team stationed there.
Now I’m officially worried.
Her head was finally starting to clear, and Logan was coming around. He struggled, tried to blink away the effects of the blast.
The QB reconnoitered around the corner. Hazy and filled with dead Transport soldiers, the corridor was still clear. But they were out of time. More porters would be arriving any minute, recalled from the explosions throughout the City to re-secure the armory.
She slapped Logan across the face. And again. When her arm swung at him a third time, he caught it by the wrist.
“The joke wasn’t that bad,” he mumbled.
“How many fingers am I holding up?”
He peered at her hand, then squinted to make sure. “One. And the same to you.”
“On your feet
, soldier.”
“I’m a spy, remember?”
“Today, it’s the same thing.”
Logan stood up warily, as if trying out a new set of legs. She heard the crunching then. Boots again, pressing fragments of wall and bloody viscera into the floor.
“Crap.”
“What?”
“Go.”
The QB unslung the laser rifle she’d taken off the dead porter and handed it to him. He took it without thinking and shoved it in his netting bag, then realized what she was doing.
“Now wait a minute—”
“No time! This is our mission!” she hissed. “Remember those children in Bedrock? Now go!” After a moment’s hesitation, she handed him her own half-drained rifle as well. “Hurry!”
Reluctant but accepting, Logan backed away from her, moving as fast up the stairs as his unsteady legs, burdened by four laser rifles, would carry him. Mary watched him go, then grabbed at her uniform before she remembered she was out of grenades. Cursing silently, she pulled her .50-caliber sidearm.
This is it then, her inner voice said. Composed. Resolved. She settled into herself, felt the pit of her stomach harden. In that moment, she became the QB—mind, body, and soul.
She thumbed the pistol’s safety off, kneeled, pointed her arm and one eye down the hallway. She didn’t lack for targets. One enemy saw her weapon and shouted, raising his rifle.
Mary fired.
“Lieutenant!”
Bracer was limping from the doorway of the flophouse and into the alley. He had Hawkeye slung across his shoulder.
He must’ve carried him from the roof, Hatch thought. Jesus, is he—
“Wounded. Took a drone blast straight to the chest,” reported Bracer. “Saved by his damned omni-lens, of all things.”
Hatch allowed himself half a breath of thankful relief. Then he heard the Gatling lasers not far away. Transport was bringing its drones home to secure the armory, and they were cleaning up any problems along the way, it sounded like.
“Get below,” he ordered Bracer, motioning to the sewer entrance.
“The others?”
“Stug and Pusher have the objective. Come on, I’ll help you with Hawkeye.”
Bracer nodded, moving toward the manhole. He leapt below, landing with a grunt of pain. Hatch fed the spotter’s body through the hole until Bracer confirmed he could break Hawkeye’s fall. Then they were gone into the sewer, and Hatch turned his attention back to the armory. Somewhere inside, his captain and their ally were still fighting. And that was the best-case scenario.
His quickest ingress to their position was the same way they’d gone in: leaping from the flophouse roof to the armory’s, then down the stairs. But before he could move, he saw a drone fly past on the street at the other end of the alley. He sheltered in the back door to the flophouse and peered around the corner. Sure enough, the drone had stopped, reversed, and was now coming slowly up the alley toward his position.
Hatch felt movement behind him. He rounded quickly, bringing his rifle up.
“Lieutenant…” said the tired voice, out of breath. Logan stepped from the shadows of the flophouse kitchen and fell forward into Hatch’s arms.
Hatch caught him, bore him up. “Where’s the captain?” he asked immediately.
Logan couldn’t speak. Weighed down by the laser rifles on his back, he was exhausted, disoriented.
“Logan!” Hatch shook him hard. He could hear a low hum thrumming off the sweating stone of the alley walls. “Where is she? Where’s Mary?”
“Back there,” he breathed, motioning upward.
“She’s on the roof?”
Logan shook his head. He remembered where he was now. Where she was. “No. Armory, second floor.”
“You left her there?”
Still shaking his head, the ex-spy said, “She insisted I go. For my people.”
Hatch felt exasperation rising in him. Frustration. Anger. Fear.
Sounds like something she’d do, goddamnit.
The humming was closer. Hatch actually heard the drone’s camera eye clicking its focal shutters as it read their heat sigs. He pushed Logan hard against the wall, turned, and swept a rapid burst from his laser rifle until it found its mark. The drone shook, sputtered, and exploded. Glancing down the alley, Hatch saw another coming to take its place. And another behind that. And they were coming faster. The first must have reported what it found before ceasing to function.
“Get down into the sewer, Logan, now!” Hatch took half of Logan’s load of rifles from him and pushed him toward the manhole. “Don’t wait for me! Run!”
Propelled by Hatch, the salvager lurched toward the hole. The lead drone started to fire, but thanks to his uneven, staggering gait, Logan was lucky enough to evade it.
Hatch slung his new load over his head. Then he knelt, took careful aim, released a breath, and fired. He missed.
Logan bent over the hole, dropped his captured rifles below, and lowered himself down. It all moved too slowly for Hatch, but had Logan moved any faster, he’d likely have injured himself and become even more of a liability than he already was. At last Logan was through the hole and out of sight.
Hatch sighted in again. The drone was less than fifty feet away. It had the advantage of seeing his infrared signature inside the flophouse. He had no such advantage for seeing around corners with his human eyes.
Before he could fire, the drone’s Gatling laser spat beams at the wall that hid him, spraying Hatch with stone and concrete. One small piece caught him mid-forehead. Another centimeter down, and he would’ve lost an eye. He retreated into the building, brushing brick and mortar from his face. The drone obliterated the doorway behind him, carving its own entryway into the flophouse.
Hatch paused behind the stoves. He wanted to go after Mary.
If she’s even still alive, his training argued.
She’s alive. His voice was savage and coarse in his own head. But if he were honest with himself, he only half believed she might still be living. She’d never surrender. And Transport wasn’t known for taking prisoners.
The drone blasted the doorway to the kitchen, creating a flight path. Hatch ducked and scampered backward, using the cooking surfaces and cabinets for cover.
If you stay, you die, his training argued. More are coming. Assuming she’s still alive, you’ll never have the chance to rescue her if you’re dead.
That was a simple truth. The TRACER drones would bring down the entire building, killing everyone in it, to achieve their rather simple objective: Kill TRACE Operatives. And Mary would never sanction that kind of sacrifice simply for a chance to save her life.
“Another day, then,” Hatch whispered. He chanced a glance over the metal counter. The drone seemed distracted, perhaps honing in on another heat sig beyond the kitchen wall, an unknowing resident of the flophouse who’d done nothing more than be unlucky enough to be enslaved for next-to-nothing wages in the service of Transport.
He aimed his rifle, shouted, and fired. The drone jerked its red eye toward him, but his blast took it squarely in its gravimetric regulator. He ducked back into cover as the drone began an electronic coughing fit and dropped to the floor, unable to fly. Behind it, he saw its companion begin to enter the building. Then he heard the build-up in the first TRACER and hunkered down harder. An electronic scream, a flare of light, and the drone on the floor exploded, taking out the second machine hovering above.
Metal casing ricocheted off the kitchen’s countertops, clanging and ringing. The hiss of dying electronics whizzed and popped until it fizzled out. Hatch looked up from his hiding place. What remained of the two drones was scattered across the kitchen.
He paused at the obliterated doorway. From across the alley, he could hear Transport reinforcements landing on the roof of the armory. It would be secured now, and Mary either dead or in airtight custody. But his route to freedom was clear. One piece of good luck in an otherwise craptastic operation.
You should
’ve listened to me, he thought petulantly, angry with her for being lost to him. Angry with Transport for existing. And feeling an impotent fury at himself for failing Mary now.
Hatch took a deep breath. Then another. He sprinted for the manhole, pausing only long enough to lower himself down without injury. Once below, he angled his gaze toward the facility where his former lover and commanding officer remained, dead or alive. Leaving her there was the single hardest decision he had ever made in his life.
Another day, he promised.
Guns and Butter and Bourbon
“You have to let us go back,” Hatch insisted. It was barely dawn, and he’d rushed to Colonel Neville’s office to make his report as soon as Alpha Squad, Pusher, and Logan had returned to Little Gibraltar.
After field dressing Bracer’s wound and assessing Hawkeye’s condition as superficial, they’d waited in the sewer till close to dawn, hiding with their prize of twenty-four fully powered laser rifles. Hatch had paced nervously, itching to effect an immediate rescue. Logan and Stug had restrained him with logic and muscle, respectively. The pre-dawn return on the Pittsburgh had been quiet and uncomfortable. They all hated leaving her behind.
Now Neville was attempting to restrain him with the military chain of command. “You seem to forget, Lieutenant. This isn’t a democracy. And one officer is not worth risking TRACE resources and personnel to recover. No matter who she might be.”
Colonel Neville’s tone was serious, perhaps even sincere, if Hatch stretched his imagination. But to Hatch it sounded like he was reading from a field manual, specifically from the chapter titled “How to Console Troops When Their Commander Has Been Lost.” Just one more example of O-ba-di-ah’s placing form over substance and calling it leadership.
“In a way, she got what she deserved,” the colonel muttered. “I’ve told her before about being impetuous. About not consulting with me before running off half-cocked. Had she done so, perhaps we could’ve had a more positive outcome.”
Tales of B-Company: The Complete Collection Page 16