by M. R. Forbes
It was intentional.
Hayden rolled off Pyro, quickly jumping to his feet. The aircraft had stopped too close, hovered too low. Whatever Isabelle had used to blow the RV had enough power that the flames and debris had reached up and caught the airship, sending shrapnel out and into its side. It was smoking and reeling, rolling to the left and losing altitude.
The shooter fell out of the open side and into the river. A few popping sounds followed from the bridge, creaks and groans from the rusted metal supports giving way. Then the whole thing dropped into the water, piling up and blocking it off, and making sure if the Liberators were going to get across, they were going to get wet doing it.
The airship continued to fall, sliding sideways and spinning out of control. It sank toward the building he had climbed to the top of earlier and then slammed into it, creating another small explosion before crashing to the ground.
“Is she gone?” Pyro asked.
Hayden still had the control device in his hand. He glanced down at it. The status light was green.
“No,” he said.
The explosion had silenced the gunfire from the far bank, at least for the moment, but he didn’t think it would last. He turned his attention back toward the bridge. The device claimed Isabelle was still active, but where was she?
He found her on the other side of the riverbank. He didn’t recognize her right away. The heat had melted all of her false human attributes. Her hair, her clothes, her synthetic flesh. She was a humanoid mass of scorched and scraped metal, rising out of the destruction.
Pyro started shooting beside him. He glanced over. She was facing the other way, targeting a group of trife that had tried to sneak up on them. They hissed and made a break for the trees, only to find themselves with bullets in their bodies, the slugs tearing them open and throwing them violently to the ground.
Gus emerged a moment later. He was filthy and bleeding from his head and leg.
“P,” he said.
“Gus,” she replied, happy to see him.
“This isn’t over yet,” Hayden said.
More trife were coming up from the south, another group approaching from the west. There had to be at least a hundred of them, probably twice that.
He realized then that Isabelle hadn’t taken out the bridge to keep the Liberators on the other side. She had done it to keep the trife on this side.
“We have to cross the river,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“Sheriff, the Liberators are at the river’s edge,” Gus said. “They damn near killed me.”
“Those trife will finish the job if we stay here.”
“Good point.”
The three of them went back into the trees, using them as cover as they tried to get to the river again. The gunfire started up again on the other side, but it wasn’t directed at them. It sounded like it was aiming north.
Toward Isabelle.
“Come on, they’re distracted,” he said, moving more boldly through the brush.
Pyro and Gus followed him, and they made it to the bank without being challenged.
Hayden could see the Liberators on the other side. They were taking cover behind the growth, thinking the mongrels had retreated and redirecting toward the threat to the north. Hayden looked that way, but Isabelle was hidden by the vegetation.
“I don’t suppose you two know how to swim?” Hayden asked. He had only learned a couple of months ago, in the shallow waters outside Sanisco. He didn’t know if the water was deep enough they would need to swim, but he didn’t want them to drown.
“Water is one of the best places to escape trife,” Pyro said. “We know how to swim.”
“Good. Let’s try to get across without getting noticed. I don’t know what Izzy’s doing up there, but it’s got their attention.”
He could hear the movement in the trees behind them. The trife were closing in. He moved out into the open, keeping his rifle up until he was sure none of the Liberators had noticed him. He ran to the bank and dropped to his ass, holding the gun over his head and pushing himself forward to slide into the water. He went in nearly silently, careful to keep the weapon dry. It might be water resistant when it was powered off, but he wasn’t about to power it off.
The water came up to his chest, the intense cold soaking through his bodysuit. He gritted his teeth and started across, keeping a careful eye on the soldiers as he took lumbering steps across the muddy bottom.
Pyro and Gus came up behind him, following his lead and entering the same way. Pyro was the shortest of the three, and the water was up to her neck. She decided to dog paddle across, keeping her limbs underwater so she wouldn’t splash.
He kept watching the soldiers, each step bringing him a little closer. If any of the Liberators saw them now, they would be as good as dead.
The soldiers didn’t see them. They sat pressed against the trunks of the trees or on their stomachs behind thick roots. They weren’t shooting at anything. It was as if they were frozen in time, stuck in position while the three of them made their crossing. They had to be watching for Isabelle, waiting for her to come for them. Did they even know what they were up against?
Hayden could hear the gunfire diminishing to the north, the soldiers taken out by the robot one at a time. He didn’t know the full extent of Isabelle’s potential. The Defenders on Proxima were heavily armored and could take a serious pounding before they could be breached. Tinker’s creation was less imposing, but she was also much more advanced. Were her composite materials the same?
He reached the opposite bank without getting spotted. He tossed the HVRG onto the shore and climbed up, grabbing the weapon and ducking behind a tree that was behind the rearmost enemy position. He looked back at the river. Pyro was climbing out. Gus was most of the way across.
The trife came out from the trees, reaching the water. He heard the soldier ahead of him react to the sudden mass of black that appeared at the water’s edge.
“Sarge, we’ve got a whole fucking mess of trife on our flank.”
He couldn’t hear the other end of the conversation. He did hear one of the other soldiers.
“Fuck this. I’m not sitting here… Incoming in the river. They’re crossing the river!”
Damn it.
Hayden swung out from his position. The rear line of soldiers were reacting to the sudden call of alarm, turning to look at the river, where Gus was still working his way across. They started bringing their rifles to bear.
“Here!” Hayden shouted, drawing their attention away from the big man.
He jumped at the nearest soldier, slamming him in the gut with a big fist, pushing him back and knocking him down. He dove behind the tree as the return fire came.
Plasma bolts sizzled through the air, hitting two of the soldiers before they saw Pyro near the bank. They spread their fire, dividing between the targets.
Hayden came out of hiding again, rushing headlong toward the first soldier he saw. The man twisted to get his rifle aimed. Too slow. Hayden shot him, the small flechettes ripping into his gut and dropping him. Hayden circled a tree, coming out close to another soldier. That one fell as a plasma bolt hit him in the chest.
Hayden caught a flash of silver up ahead, the sunlight glinting against Isabelle’s natural form. She was taking advantage of the confusion their appearance had created, and she leaped at one of the soldiers, grabbing his head in her hands and twisting. His neck shattered, and she dropped his corpse to the ground.
Then her head lifted, and she looked directly at him. She waved, wiggling her metal fingers, before charging off to his right. He turned in that direction, able to make out a few of the remaining soldiers running for the truck at the back of the line, the only vehicle that survived the fighting unscathed. He joined her, running after the group, breaking into the open behind them.
He put his rifle up, but he didn’t fire. He wouldn’t shoot them in the back if he didn’t have to.
“Freeze!” he shouted instead. “Don�
�t move!”
Three of the four soldiers came to a stop. The fourth made it to the driver’s side door of the truck before Isabelle grabbed him by the neck, lifting him off the ground and squeezing.
“Izzy, drop him,” Hayden said.
Her hand opened, and he hit the ground.
“Drop your weapons.”
The four soldiers dropped their guns. Pyro and Gus came out of the woods nearby. Gus was limping.
“Izzy, bring that one over to the others.”
Isabelle reached for the soldier. He sprang to his feet and hurried over to join the rest before she could touch him.
Hayden approached them from behind. “Which one of you is the ranking officer?”
The same soldier raised his hand.
“Name and rank,” Hayden ordered.
“Sergeant Wyatt Cooper, sir,” he said. “When General Stacker hears about this, he’s going to—”
“Whatever he’s going to do, he’s going to be too late,” Hayden said. “I know he isn’t at Fort McGuire anymore. I probably know more about his whereabouts than you do. Besides, he’s one of the men I want to see.” He circled to the front of the soldiers. They kept their heads and eyes down.
“Do you know the name of the unit that was out here?”
“Second Battalion, Viper squad, sir.”
“They brought prisoners out this way. Did you know that?”
“Lieutenant Hong ordered them to bring any prisoners we had in the cells out this way and let them go. He said we didn’t need them anymore.”
“Do you know what Viper squad did to them, Sergeant?”
“No, sir.”
“I could show you if my robot here hadn’t blown the bridge and the other side wasn’t slick with trife. Let’s just say they were into some pretty sick shit. Did you know that, Sergeant?”
“No, sir. General Stacker doesn’t stand for that kind of behavior, sir.”
Hayden was glad to hear it. “They probably figured since the general was gone, they could do what they wanted and nobody would be the wiser.”
“That would be my guess, sir.”
“They called you in here because we attacked them. We attacked them because of what they were doing. And now most of your battalion is dead.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How does that feel?”
“Not very good, sir.”
“This gash on my cheek doesn’t feel very good either. And my man over there is limping and shot. I’m not very happy about that.”
“No, sir.”
“You can make it up to me, though. You seem like a reasonable person, and I don’t really want to kill you.”
“No, sir. What can I do for you, sir?”
Hayden looked over at the truck, and then at Isabelle. “Do you remember when I said we weren’t going in through the front gates?”
“Pozz,” she replied. Without her synthetic skin, only a set of micro-motors on her face moved.
“Change of plans.”
Chapter 14
Nathan didn’t get much sleep.
The meeting with Tinker and everything he had seen kept him awake through most of the night, his mind reeling from the potential of it all.
Not one alien race, but two. Three, if Nathan counted the trife separately. Four if the planet the Asteroid Tossers as Tinker called them was inhabited by another intelligent life form.
An interstellar war. A battle for supremacy. A challenge to overcome the trife in exchange for protection from their masters.
It all seemed so ridiculous, but at the same time, made some amount of sense. Before he had left Proxima, he would never have believed in it. He would never have believed what had happened to Earth either until he saw it for himself. And the device Tinker showed him wasn’t made up. It wasn’t a fake. Tinker hadn’t created some kind of elaborate movie to fool him into believing that the Others were real.
He had heard the old saying that truth was stranger than fiction. He knew it was spot on. This truth was insane, but it was also the truth.
He couldn’t relax. He couldn’t stop wondering what would happen if the ATs came back. What if they decided to launch a fresh attack on Earth? What if they learned their efforts to keep humankind planet bound had failed? What if they found out about Proxima? Would they drop trife on that planet too? Or would they use their starships’ weapons to destroy the domes and kill everyone in them?
He had been forced to leave Proxima, but that didn’t mean he had no loyalty to the planet or the people on it. He cared what happened there. He was starting to care what happened here. He couldn’t help it. This was his home now. He couldn’t go back to Proxima, and he wouldn’t if he could. Learning the truth about Niobe had helped him with that, at least.
He didn’t need to go back to his homeworld. He didn’t need to clear his name. He didn’t even need to get revenge on the Trust for taking her life. He had gotten to deal them a blow already when he killed Bennett, and the things he had learned...
It was all so much bigger than he ever imagined. It was all so much more important than revenge. Niobe died to get the key to Tinker because she believed in it. She believed the Others could save them from the ATs, and if it came down to it maybe from Proxima too.
He hoped it wouldn’t come to that. It didn’t make sense for the two planets to fight one another, not when there were other intelligent life forms out there that wanted them hamstrung and shackled to the world instead of traveling the stars.
Not when the universe was so much bigger than he was ready to comprehend.
He felt small. Inconsequential. At the same time, he knew the future of Earth, and maybe of all humankind was at least partially under his control. The question was, what was he going to do with it?
He slid out of bed, padding naked across the floor to the bathroom. He relieved himself and ducked into the shower, forcing himself to only spend a few minutes beneath the warm running water. His apartment was so luxurious, so comfortable it would be easy to get accustomed to it. He didn’t want to let himself get too relaxed. He had learned more about Tinker’s motives, but that didn’t mean he could trust the man.
He got dressed, and then went back out to the patio. The air was cold, spreading goosebumps along his arms. It felt so good to have real, fresh air. Air that wasn’t always exactly one temperature. Air that flowed at variable speeds. He leaned over the railing, looking down at the city. Lights sparkled across the skyline, and he could see the sun rising in the east, out over the endless ocean.
It was amazing.
He stood outside and watched it until the red and orange glow around the water faded into a solid blue, and the sun became a yellow ball in the sky. He kept thinking about Niobe. About Rhonna. About the Others. He even thought about Sheriff Duke. If things had been different, if they had known one another in a different time and place, he believed they could have been friends.
But the sheriff was dead, and he was about to help destroy the world.
A knock on his door got his attention.
He opened the door from the patio to the apartment and stuck his head inside. “Come in.”
Ebion entered. She was wearing in a light pink dress that fell to her ankles and was loose around her mechanically perfect frame. She had a tray of food in her hands.
“General Stacker wanted to be sure you had something to eat before you left,” she said.
“What is it?” he asked, realizing he was hungry.
“Bacon, eggs, and steak,” she said, lowering the tray so he could see it. “All grown here. Delicious.”
“How would you know? You don’t eat.”
She smiled. “It’s not polite to question my diet.”
“You’re a robot.”
“It’s not polite to call me a robot, either.”
“What are you then?”
“I’m a professional companion and bodyguard.”
“A babysitter,” Nathan said, smiling.
“Only where you
’re concerned.”
She placed the tray on a small table near the kitchen. He sat down and started eating, cutting the steak and bringing it to his mouth. It watered from the smell, and when he bit into the steak and started chewing, he started to feel like he was making the wrong decision to help James find the artifact. Maybe he should stay here and gorge himself on real food instead?
He tried the bacon and the eggs. They were just as good as the steak. He lost himself in the meal, finishing it before he realized it was gone. He looked up from the plate. Ebion was staring at him, an appropriately amused expression on her face.
“Well done,” she said. “You ate so quickly. You have ten minutes before I’m scheduled to bring you to the base. What would you like to do?”
“I’m going back out on the balcony,” he said. “Would you like to join me?”
“It’s a date.”
He got up, heading to the balcony. She followed right behind him. He had just gotten outside when he noticed a starship coming down around the spire, landing the same way he had the day before. It wasn’t the Pulse. It was another ship, larger and less refined.
“The first delivery of equipment from Fort McGuire,” Ebion said.
“Do you know how long it will take for the delivery system to be ready?” Nathan asked. “James said a few weeks.”
“One week,” Ebion replied. “Tinker was confident in the last trial, and began making preparations before the efficacy was confirmed.”
One week? That wasn’t a lot of time to locate the artifact. It made sense though. They had two weeks to put everything in motion before anything coming back from Proxima would become a concern.
And once it did?
Tinker believed they would have the Others on their side by then, helping to protect them from reprisal. Nathan wished he could believe it too. It was a better alternative than hesitantly following a potential psychopath.