I’m looking at my friends, thinking about Kendricks’ math, that I’m going to have to kill a lot of people to save two. When I was mortal, that wouldn’t have bothered me: anyone willing to bring violence against me or mine or any innocent was promptly fed into the meat grinder of my rage without pause or much regret, but now…
“Down!” I yell at Horst, leaping over his barricade. I tear aside the sliding screen, revealing a tight tunnel through the rock. I can see the heat of the enemy less than ten meters down it, hesitating now at the sight of me. I jump up, grab hold of the frame supporting the ceiling, and pull. Of course it doesn’t give—I don’t have the leverage—so, hanging onto the beam, I flip myself inverted, plant my boots against the roof and start kicking hard enough to fracture the seal holding the stones together, then put everything I’ve got into what’s basically an upside-down dead lift. The beam groans, snaps and tears free, throwing me back-first into the floor, knocking the wind out of me. I barely roll out before the ceiling starts falling down on me as a rain of large rocks. A few punches into either side-wall finish the collapse. The Sons take a few shots at me that do nothing other than smack off my armor.
The tunnel is blocked, but not completely. I dash over to one of the stunned fighters, grab a grenade from his bandoleer, and show it to the gunmen in the tunnel before I toss it into the gap. I hear them scramble before it blows, the blast finishing my demolition work. But I still have another tunnel, and I’ve wasted too many seconds on this one.
The Sons coming in from the other side decide the safest tactic is to start spraying blind through the panel blocking their entrance, shredding a perfectly good rendition of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Lyra’s thankfully down on the deck with Horst, so the barrage just perforates the furniture over their heads.
With no time or space to repeat my wrecking stunt, I grab the nearest bench and charge them, charge into the blind gunfire, ramming it through the well-perforated plastic panel. I feel the bench hit guns and meat, and start slamming it down the tunnel like a ramrod packing a cannon as they continue to shoot me. I know the slightest miscalculation on my part will be lethal—a little too strong, a little too fast—but I keep battering, pushing them back over each other. The panel between us comes apart, falls away. They get hold of the bench, try to wrench it free of my grip in a tug-of-war, and I let them have it. As they stumble backwards into a pile of tangled limbs in the narrow passage, I run into them, swatting aside their weapons and using a trick Lux taught me, charging my fingers so that my touch sends enough current through their skulls to knock them cold, hopefully without doing permanent damage.
The effort leaves me exhausted, my gauges demanding resources. I’d already gone a long way to deplete myself healing and repairing after I let the Sons unload on me outside. I know full well I’m standing on a pile of exactly what I need, but I’m not eating these people.
I stagger back out of the tunnel and into the light. I’m peppered with dozens of rounds, probably looking like I’d lost the fight. Horst and Lyra give me stunned looks that I’m not sure are more shock or concern.
“America… Fuck yeah…” I mutter, somewhere beyond punchy. Horst shakes his head and rolls his eyes like I’ve lost it. I focus:
“This way!” I prompt them to follow me. And I lead them through the dark narrow tunnel, over the partial plug of unconscious Sons, and finally out through an open hatch and into a smaller chamber that looks like a storeroom. It’s stocked with sacks of Graingrass seeds and crates of what look like either locally collected or—more likely from the quality—farmed produce. There are also plump loaves of grainy bread that smell distinctively like sourdough. And pressurized drums fit with spigots that spew what’s immediately recognizable as beer when opened. I grab a loaf of bread and start ripping into it, then get my face under one of the spigots to wash it down, gorging myself like a starving wild man. It’s not what I really need, but it will help. As I eat, I quickly take in our new situation.
There are no more Sons—I seem to have dealt with the teams sent after us. There’s a hatch I assume leads back outside. I signal Horst to seal us in this section, shutting the hatch behind us, then I find the valve to bleed the air to equalization before I carefully take a look outside.
I’m immediately seen by two guards just on the other side of the hatchway, and I slam it shut, hold it shut. I know I could take them out easily enough, but we’d still have to cross the “square” and get back up-slope, get back to the pass through the crater rim, and there are over a hundred Liberty guns between us and that exit.
I’m thinking my best and only option is to have my fragile friends stay here while I wade out and try to single-handedly beat the entire Sons of Liberty army into submission, when I hear the chaos outside shift. They’re ignoring the hatch, ignoring us. There’s suddenly more screaming, panic, and the gunfire actually intensifies. I hear grenades blow close—it sounds like there’s a battle inside the “square”. Have the Knights moved in for a rescue?
But then I hear the sound of familiar treads and motors.
I rip open the hatch and fly out through it. The guards have their backs to me, hunkered for cover in the stone niche of the entry passage, firing into the square. I catch them before they can react, picking them up by their jackets and throwing them out into the clearing, where they immediately have to scramble out of the way of the spinning, rolling Box.
It’s tearing around the haze-filled square, careening through the Sons, scattering them, breaking their lines. They shoot at it, but even when they hit it, their small-arms are no match for its armor, and it’s too fast for grenades. It doesn’t have live guns to shoot back, and it doesn’t need them. It’s doing just fine being a big, fast, agile mass of shifting metal.
I look back after my friends and see that Lyra’s done something smart while I’ve been staring slack-jawed at our unexpected rescuer: She’s stripped the fallen Sons of a pair of jackets, scarves and cowls, and hands one set to Horst. I give her a nod to accept her plan: they’ll make a run through the midst of the panicked, distracted Liberty forces dressed as two of their own. She’s also taken their link gear, so she can hear if the Sons see through the ruse.
“We’ll drop these once we’re clear,” Horst confirms. “We don’t want to get shot by the other side—I’m assuming they’re friendlies?”
“New Knights,” I tell him.
“The ones the Avalon Order was looking for?” he remembers.
“Found. Long story.”
“Bad ending,” he finishes, borrowing my phrasing, getting his costume set.
I notice he never assumed that the incoming fire was from the rest of the ‘Horse crew, probably because he knows the only ones on the team capable of making the shots he’s seen are Lyra and himself.
“Head for the gap,” I tell him. “Back to the ‘Horse. We need to break silence, get a signal out any way we can—smoke signals, anything to convince them not to obliterate this place. I’ll keep them off you.”
“How?” Lyra worries.
“They seem to enjoy shooting me.”
As I dash outside, I see two of the Liberty fighters have made it to the rover and are trying to get the guns to work manually. The multicolored fog I impulsively blew all over is still thick enough that the Box keeps spinning in-and-out of sight as it circles the village, drawing fire and looking for new targets to collide with. I see dozens of fighters down, others trying to drag and limp themselves to cover, battered and broken. Thankfully it looks like the families got themselves to shelter and out of the chaotic crossfire.
The pair on the rover can’t get the guns working, and the Box doesn’t wait for them to. It plows into them, slamming them through the air as it breaks and crushes the rover’s turret, but it doesn’t run them down, doesn’t try to crush them under its weight. In fact, when it does run over someone, it just takes a limb. It’s only trying to disable, not kill.
I let the bot see me, show it my emp
ty hands. It pauses, scans me with one of its sensor heads and seems to recognize me, and I give it a grin and a nod. It bobs its sensor head on its retraction motors, mimicking the gesture. Then it heads for another group of gunmen hunkered in the rocks on the periphery of their village.
Lyra and Horst make their run for it in the confusion. I decide to add to it by going semi-cloaked—enough that they can see me moving like a shimmering ghost but not enough to give them a clear target—and start charging into their fire, running into them and stunning them as I reach them. It’s a slow process, and exhausting, and I lose track of how many times I get shot. I’m seriously craving more heirloom sourdough and homebrew (and preferably a nice Pax steak to go with it).
Whenever I can, I check on Horst and Lyra’s progress up for the gap. Once they’ve made it well past the Liberty perimeter—or at least beyond their effective marksmanship range—I signal the Knights on their short-range link channel to expect them, let them pass through and cover them. Kendricks sends me back their confirmation.
As I run around from shooter-to-shooter like some crazed game of tag, I find their apparent leader again: He’s down in one of the ditches that was dug as fortification, protected by two riflemen who do me some abuse before I take them out. He himself looks like he’s nursing several broken bones, probably from trying to stand up to the Box, but he still tries to point a pistol at me before I take it away from him.
“Listen to me! This place has been painted, marked. You either need to evacuate or visibly surrender before the UN blows this place from orbit or air. They have tactical nukes and rail-guns—they’ll make this whole place a crater before you know what hit you. They’ll do it from well out of your reach. You won’t have a chance.”
“We… Don’t… Run…” he measures out his words, spitting blood into his mask. “Never… Run… Never… Bow…”
“Then you’re stupid and you’ll all die,” I growl at him. “Be smart and live. Fight another fucking day.”
Despite the fact that I’m obviously so much stronger than he is, despite his broken bones, he continues to struggle against me. I can feel his fractures grind, his joints threatening to pop in my grip. He doesn’t care how badly he hurts himself. He’s not giving up.
I consider killing him in hopes that a saner mind might take command, but I’m certain that would only harden their resolve.
“Get your people out of here! Now!” I give him a last warning without any confidence he’ll listen, then I get up off of him. I give him a hard look and go, walk away, letting him shoot me in the back to his heart’s content.
I get the Box’s attention with a gesture, and wave for it to leave, to head with me for the gap. It takes one last small circle around the wreck of the rover, as if to challenge anyone to take a shot at it, then it spins after me.
“Kendricks, Baker…” I call on their channel, hoping the Sons are listening in. “That smoke I used will paint the site as a target for UNMAC. I hope they decide to take a good look before they blow it to hell, but you better get your people away, get to the other side of the crater rim. I already warned the Liberty leader, but he’s being stubborn.”
“Can you call it off?” Kendricks asks desperately.
“I’m going to try to signal them, but they cut all of their long-range comms after Asmodeus used their uplinks for cyber-attack. I may have better luck if I can make it back to the track in time.”
Silence. Then:
“Good luck, Colonel,” he wishes me honestly.
As I run up-slope, scramble over rocks in the dark with the random round smacking near me, I listen… I can hear Orbit now, but all I get are brief coded pulses. I either don’t have the software to crack it or I need a much larger sample to work out a decryption. Maybe there’s an algorithm in the ‘Horse’s comm systems.
“This is Colonel Ram, calling UNMAC Planetary Command,” I try anyway, sending on every channel I know they’ve used. “The target marker northeast of Liberty Crater is painting a colonial group that stole our rover. They are not aligned with Asmodeus. They’re just people. Do not fire on them. Do not fire.”
I don’t hear any change in the signals overhead. Either they didn’t hear or they’re shutting me out. I set the message to repeat like a mantra in the back of my mind.
My gauges are all dipping into the red. I’m depleted, dehydrated, hurting. I need resources and water and time. I’m not even sure if I have enough power to transmit to Orbit, and with the uplinks down, I have no way to bounce a signal to the Grave Base without sight-line.
Maybe we can push a message from the ‘Horse through whatever aircraft they send for recon (assuming they send aircraft first, and not just hit from orbit), hopefully one they’ll listen to. Maybe Corso can get them to listen, maybe she has recognition codes that they’ll accept, or at least a smoke code for an abort.
I’m falling over myself by the time I get over the hump of the narrow pass. I’ve been ripping up fistfuls of plants as I go, sucking them dry, but it’s barely enough to keep me going. The Box is following behind me, as if watching over me. I can hear the Knights from time-to-time above me, ordering fall-back. But I also hear one other signal: It’s Baker, calling on a spread of channels, trying to convince the Sons to evacuate. His voice fades and breaks the farther down the gap I get, telling me he’s stayed behind, not giving up.
I shout for him to get out of there, but I doubt I have enough energy left to make him hear. Not that he’d listen anyway.
I don’t catch up to Horst and Lyra. That tells me they’re staying on-mission, not waiting for me. But that also tells me I’m too impaired to overtake a pair of battered, exhausted Normals.
It takes me hours to get back through the gap and down into the bowl of the crater. The sun will be coming up in a few more. And that means flyo…
I hear the roar of AAV engines. They echo in the crater bowl, distorted. I can’t see them against the night sky, not even switching to a heat scan, which means they’re out of sight, but they sound like they’re coming closer.
I look back over the rim, back toward Liberty. Shift spectrums. I see the glowing haze of the isotope smoke, billowing thinly but visibly up toward the atmosphere net. It could be detectable for dozens of kilometers with the right sensor gear.
The engine noise passes south of the crater. I run.
I’m trying to make sense out of what I don’t know as I run in the dark. If Orbit saw the smoke—and they certainly did—if they thought it meant Asmodeus had the ‘Horse and its nukes, they would have hit it from space as soon as they could load, aim and charge a mass driver. Unless they wanted a closer look first, risking a night flight.
But if what Dee (or Yod) told me yesterday morning is true, and links with Orbit are still all cut, then Grave Base must have seen the smoke as it rose, maybe on a remote sentry, and that means this is Jackson sending out his own high-risk low-altitude night recon with no satellite eyes on the target zone. (But that also means Orbit may have taken their look and chosen to hold fire.)
The engine noise has circled the crater counter-clockwise. If I’m tracking right, they’ve made one pass over the colony site by now. If the Sons of Liberty haven’t gone to ground, their heat will be visible, but there will be no easy way to tell live human being from animated corpse in the dark, especially if the Sons are stubborn enough to shoot at the perceived threat.
I’m still sending my hold-fire message, still receiving no reply.
I also still haven’t caught up to Horst and Lyra. I’ve been scanning for their heat—I don’t think I passed them. I start imagining bad possibilities on top of a bad situation.
I run past where they were originally taken, then over the rise to where I left the…
The Warhorse is gone.
Starving for every resource I have a meter for, I run around in a panic, and find tracks. Corso didn’t stay put. She kept the rig moving forward.
I’ve wasted precious time and resources. I scream a stream of
obscenities at nothing and no one as I run following the tracks. It’s more of a stagger—I can barely keep my legs moving. I’m feeling every injury, every bullet I took like I’ve been worked over by a gang wielding hammers.
The ‘Horse is following the course we’d planned, east and a few degrees south-southeast. Lyra had taken Liberty link gear—she or Horst may have been able to re-tune it to the ‘Horse and guide them home.
“Corso! Lyra! Horst!” I call out on every channel.
The engine noises have been circling back and forth roughly over Liberty. If there’s been any shooting, the rim between us is damping the gunshots. At least I haven’t heard explosions.
I see the faint heat of the ‘Horse a few hundred meters ahead of me, which in my current condition feels like a few hundred klicks.
“Corso! Horst! Ram to Warhorse! If you can hear me, we need to…”
The engine noise changes, gets louder. Much louder. The AAVs have come over the rim, heading straight west, burning fast for home. They whip over my head in seconds and keep going. They’ve dropped low into the bowl, low enough to put the crater rim between them and…
“RAM TO JACKSON!!! ABORT!!!”
I’m shouting on every channel at the AAVs as they leave me behind.
“ABORT!!! ABORT!!! THOSE ARE…”
The sky over the northeast rim of the crater goes bright white, lighting up the whole world. I feel the tingle of EMP in every cell, and my enhancements go fuzzy. But even impaired, my neuro-processing automatically speeds up, so I see it happen in slow motion. The sun-like ball of brilliant white swells, rises skyward. Only my built-in filters keep me from being blinded.
I can see the shockwave rolling at me, hot and angry, scouring everything in its path. It takes several seconds to get here, even in realtime. It washes over the ‘Horse first, then hits me with a shotgun spray of sand, gravel and plant matter. I don’t try to duck and cover—I take it face-on, too angry to care about self-preservation.
The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming Page 31