by Rick Partlow
Sliding the door aside, I shot across the hallway, taking in the scene around me in the second I was out in the open. There were seven of them at the end of the hallway, firing at my patrol crews across the street, none of them noticing me flying across the hall to crash into the basement door shoulder-first. I'd been taking a calculated risk that the door wasn't reinforced duralloy---if it had been, I would've looked pretty damn stupid bouncing off of it.
But my infamous luck held, and the door was cheap plastic, mounted with cheap aluminum fasteners in a cheap building. I slammed into it, knocked it off its hinges and carried it down a long set of stairs into the darkened basement, my stomach leaping into my throat as I rode the impromptu bobsled. The floor rushed up, seeking to meet my face, but I twisted in midair, introducing it to my feet instead.
I'd barely turned to head back up the stairs when Kara McIntire flew down them feet-first, landing in a crouch beside me. I didn't have a chance to compliment her on her acrobatics, because one of the invaders chose to stick his head through the basement doorway, and I chose to blow it off with a heavy, tungsten slug.
"Quick, the maintenance hatch." I took the laser carbine back and she headed deeper into the darkened clutter of the storage basement while I watched the door.
The body of the beheaded gunman was dragged back from the doorway, and I braced myself for the next attack. To give the Gomers credit, they attempted the right tactic---a grenade. A helmeted gunman flashed into the open for only a fraction of a second, poised to throw the bomb, but it was enough time for me to squeeze off a burst of laserfire from the carbine.
I heard a muted scream and saw the grenade and his hand drop separately before I threw myself down. The explosion from the weapon blew out half of the wall to the left of the basement doorway, showering me and everything else in the front section of the basement with smoldering buildfoam and burning plastic. It would have blown out my eardrums if they hadn't been protected by the handy gadgets of the Fleet research boys, which was why I was able to hear McIntire when she yelled at me to "Come on!" from the back of the basement.
Brushing bits of hot buildfoam off myself, I jumped to my feet, danced carefully through the overturned boxes and furniture stored in the basement, and found my way to where Captain McIntire was lifting up a heavy alloy hatch imbedded in a corner of the basement floor.
She quickly dropped through it, and I followed her just as another grenade flew in through the gap in the wall. I landed ankle-deep in sewer water in the middle of a narrow, rounded tunnel walled with thick plasticrete, had to steady myself with a hand against the wall as the explosion from the grenade shook the ground.
Cal, I heard Jason transmit as I followed McIntire, I'm coming in with six hoppers full of STAT squads---we're about thirty seconds out.
Hit it hard, I directed him. We're clear---we're in the sewer, heading for a street exit.
Gotcha, boss. We'll be looking for you.
You worry about the Gomers, I said. I can take care of myself.
I know that for certain. Take care, buddy.
We were almost fifty meters down the tunnel when my sensor net picked up movement behind us. I pulled McIntire against the wall, aiming a one-handed shot back at the three bad guys coming down the ladder into the tunnel.
"Go!" I urged the scout captain, hosing the area around the ladder with a magazine-draining burst before taking off after her.
Reloading as I ran, I tossed the spent clip into the water and slammed the new one home. I ran hunched over, half-expecting to catch a burst in the back, but I must have hit something with the diversion fire. I caught up with McIntire quickly, despite the fact that she was sprinting at something near forty-five klicks an hour. Whatever it was she had, it was pretty impressive.
At that speed, it took us less than a minute to make it to the first surface access hatch. McIntire threw herself up the ladder in a spray of water, grabbed the top rung with her left hand and swung her body upward, pumping both her legs up to slam the hatch out, then twisted her body through it with the grace of a gymnast.
I was about to follow her up when a hail of laserpulses cut through the air around me, blowing fist-sized chunks out of the plasticrete wall. I dropped prone, suddenly up to my ears and armpits in scummy sewer water, and decided not to breathe for a few minutes. There were four of them, hugging the sides of the tunnel wall, visible to me on thermal as pale yellow and orange human shapes, decorated by the dull-red glow of overheated lasing rods. I tried to bring around my carbine, but before I could get it in front of me they cut loose again, putting their shots low into the water around me. The multikilojoule pulses vaporized gallons of sewage, sending up gouts of steam that filled the tunnel, obscuring my thermal vision.
I dropped the carbine---the thickening haze around me would absorb too much light energy---and pulled my slug pistol, squeezing off a couple of rounds to keep them honest. I rolled to the right just before they poured a long burst into the spot where I'd recently resided. I was considering trying to take advantage of the steam to low-crawl down there and take them out when a grey-clad figure dropped into the tunnel beside me, hands filled with a heavy disruptor rifle. The armored, helmeted figure hosed a long burst down the tunnel, the maser beam only discernable by the crackling in the air as it cut through the steam. The targets of the beam found it a bit more substantial, as it exploded their cells from within, their ceramic armor worse than useless against it. If they'd had so much as an alloy-reinforced vest, it would have at least partially reflected the microwaves, but the ceramics actually acted as a kind of oven, trapping the heat from the maser until it blew their flash-boiled bodily fluids out through their chests. The maser caught three of them, and I targeted the last with a heavy, hypersonic slug from my Gauss pistol.
We waited for a moment, but heard and saw no more activity, and finally got to our feet. The grey-armored figure waved me up the ladder, covering the tunnel with his disruptor. I jumped through the hatchway, landed on the street above in a crouch, finally let myself take another breath...and instantly regretted it. I smelled like I'd been face-down in a sewer---which, of course, I had.
Looking around, I found myself about three blocks down from Cutter's chop shop, standing in the middle of the street, surrounded by half-a-dozen grey-armored STAT troopers. The bulbous, dull-grey shape of a Constabulary hopper squatted in the background, blocking traffic, its belly fans idling with a low-pitched hum. A basic, no-frills, ducted-fan hovercraft, it had been obsolete since before the war, but we couldn't afford better. Kara McIntire was seated on the ground, bared to the waist while a medic checked what looked like a shrapnel wound on her shoulder. Fighting to keep myself from staring at her, I turned instead back to the access hatch, offering a hand up to the STAT troop who'd helped me.
Shifting his maser rifle to his left hand, he grabbed my wrist with his right and I lifted him clear of the hole, setting him up on his feet. He set down his weapon and pulled off his dark-visored helmet to reveal a mop of unruly blond hair, and a face that was a younger, slightly leaner version of mine.
"You okay, Cal?" Pete Mitchell, my little brother, asked breathlessly, wiping sweat and hair out of his eyes.
"Thanks to you, kid," I grabbed him in a quick hug, pounding him on the back.
"Damn," he pushed me away, holding his nose. "Did you have to go swimming in that toilet?"
"Don't get too sentimental on me, Pete," I laughed. "Where's Jason?"
"Still in the building." He waved at the chopshop down the street. "He's supervising a final search-through, but he sent me down to make sure you were all right."
"Well," I shook my head, "Jase never was one for obeying orders. But then, neither was I."
I was about to try to contact Jason over my neurolink, but he beat me to the punch.
Cal, he called me, do you read?
I'm here, Jason, I replied. Everything secured?
All locked down. We've got a total of twenty enemy casualties, about thirty-
five dead Skinners and jackheads.
Holy shit, I shook my head. They put a whole platoon in there. Who the hell would go to that much trouble?
Yeah, well, there's something here you need to see, Cal.
Problem? I frowned.
Maybe.
I'm on my way.
Leaving Pete in charge of directing the incoming ambulances, I brushed aside the medic's attempts to have a look at my leg and headed back up the street. The front of the building was a slaughterhouse, with four of the Skinners sprawled out, gaping holes blown out of them from multiple laser hits. The junctures of their cybernetic and organic parts lay obscenely exposed, charred and bloody muscle and bone melding to splintered ceramic and metal in an inhuman, gut-twisting marriage. Bodies littered the hallways---more Skinners killed defending their turf, some literally torn apart, their Kick high keeping them going through the first few shots. ViR addicts had been shot where they lay, still plugged into their machines, and the smell of burned flesh was thick in the air.
I had a sudden, powerful flashback to the war, to other fortresses on other worlds, littered with the bodies of Tahni soldiers...soldiers I had killed, staring up at me with accusing glares, blood pooled around the ruins of their throats. I had no illusions of what I had been or what I was: a killer, a cold-blooded assassin designed and built to spread terror in the enemy ranks.
There had been a dozen of us at the start, all of us little more than children, none older than twenty-one. The Frankensteins of Fleet Intelligence transformed us through the implants, the training, the psychological programming into the ultimate psychwar weapon---the living manifestation of the Tahni death spirits, their version of the bogeyman.
Clad in faceless, black combat suits, camouflaged by holographic fields, we would appear from thin air in the midst of the enemy camp and assassinate the highest-ranking officers, ripping their throats out with our talons and always, always spreading the fear. Sabotage, intelligence-gathering---those came later, gravy to the real meat of our existence. We were killers, first and last. It had taken a lot of work to pull myself back from that, to become a real person again, and that preprogrammed Killing Machine still lurked somewhere in the darkness of my soul, waiting for me to slip up so it could erupt screaming from my chest. I could hear its breath in my ear as I stepped over the mangled corpses, felt it clawing at the fringes of my psyche.
The Machine is dead, I chanted silently. I am not the Machine.
I nearly slipped in the blood pooled on the floor at the mouth of the rear exit hallway, and had to catch myself against the wall. The bulk of the STAT team was in there, gathered amidst nearly a dozen dead attackers, their corpses exploded from the inside by our maser weapons. Usually the disruptors were set to disable targets selectively by destroying hemoglobin in their blood and rendering them unconscious due to acute cyanosis---preventing enough oxygen from reaching their brains. But these guys were too dangerous to take the chance; for all we knew, they were augmented, with an alternate biomechanical method for delivering oxygen to their organs.
Jase was standing over one of the bodies, his sidearm dangling carelessly at his side. Jason Chen's height marked him as an Offworlder---he was very near two meters, and a bit under one hundred kilos---but he had lived on Canaan since he was ten, and had been my closest friend for that whole stretch of three decades. When we'd both returned after the War, it had seemed a natural thing for him to take the position as my chief deputy. His lean, pale face was twisted into a thoughtful frown as he nudged the fallen pulse carbine next to the corpse. His head turned as he noticed me walking up, and his frown deepened.
"You okay?" He was looking at the wound on my leg.
I shrugged it off. "Just a burn. You wanted to show me something?"
"Most of the Gomers were pretty fucked up by the disruptors," he said, gesturing at the exploded torso of one of the corpses. "This guy I got with a shot from my pulse pistol," he nodded at the one at his feet.
I stepped around him to get a better look at the invader. Someone had stripped his helmet and chest armor off, revealing...motherfuck. Revealing an acolyte of the Predecessor cult. There was no mistaking it. Another, perhaps, might have had a similar swept-back hairstyle, and certainly there were many others with the cloned muscle implants and body restruct job. But the cosmetic holographic inlay of a stylized dual-star system across his chest was the signature of the Cult, a representation of the Alpha Centauri system, where the wormhole map was discovered.
"Goddamn," I said softly.
Jason nodded. "Exactly. We knew they were buying weapons; we just didn't know what for."
"But why now? They have a major deal set up in less than a week---why blow it all on an attack now?"
"Maybe there was someone here they wanted out of the way," Jase suggested. "Did Cutter give you any possible answer before they got him?"
I chewed my lip, thinking that yes, he actually might have given me the very reason.
"When you get through here," I told him, "find me at the station in New Jerusalem. There's someone you need to meet."
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