by Allen Ivers
Riley might respect the casual question from a civilian, clarification absent imposition or insinuation. Talania had been an egregious offender in this manner. She didn’t conjure that behavior from thin air.
Christopher opened his mouth, “She is a patriot. And begging your pardon, Colonel…” And what if Riley didn’t give it? “What if you’re wrong?”
The people need certainty. The people need certainty. The words positively bellowed in Riley’s ears.
Riley closed his eyes, letting out an exasperated sigh, “I take it you intend to order her release?” Riley asked, refusing to bring his stare on to the human mistake standing in his office.
Christopher mustered his courage before whispering the words. “You are wrong, Marcus. You just are.”
Oh, Christopher.
Riley pushed himself away from his desk, rolling his shoulders as he stood up. Even at his stature, he still towered over the curled frame of the Governor. “Should’ve just made a public statement, Governor,” Riley seethed, “I wouldn’t have been able to stop the flood of public demand. But now...”
The Governor presented his wrists, ready for shackles, with a flicker to his eye as fear and courage fought it out. Perhaps he thought he’d get to be in his daughter’s cell, wait out the disaster while maintaining their high-minded consciences. They’d get a room with a meager view, access to the digital libraries, and receive fan mail about their resistance to the big bad security man.
Riley looked down at the fat hands hanging in the air before him, skin spotted and hanging off of sausage links that had no obvious joints. “Dammit, Chris. I’m not the office you surrender yourself to. People didn’t come into your office to turn themselves in.”
The Governor wavered for a moment, his hands shaking before he lowered them back to his sides.
Riley shook his head. “You’ve done nothing wrong. What in God’s name would I throw you in prison for? Speaking your mind? No, Christopher. No, you’re going to walk these city streets a free man. Hold your head high. Because the Wall is high, our people are strong, and there is no storm we shall not weather together - despite our differences.”
“Because ‘we’re family?’” The Governor scoffed.
“Not the way I’d have said it, but sure.”
Riley clapped the man on the shoulder like they were old friends. He felt the bovine man’s skin crinkle under his fingers, like a younger man who had suffered a particularly crispy sunburn. The last few months had taken a toll on him beyond his years, sapping him of a vitality he had little of.
He guided Christopher towards the door the way he might carry a trash bin to the street, “Take a few days, Governor, and think about all the lives we’ve saved. Then give my office a call, we can set about putting together a public statement.”
“Alright…” Christopher exhaled the words like he was shuffling off to walk his last mile.
His days of relevance had long since past; how much further could that useless morass stumble till there was no reason to keep going. He was waking and eating and speaking more out of habit these days than anything else.
Once the Governor was good and gone, Riley summoned Holmst into the office. He closed the door behind his aide, something that sent Holmst’s eyebrows up, “What’s the thinking, Colonel?”
“Is there a use to Christopher Dedria?”
The Lieutenant tried to hide his eyes widening and his jaw tightening by shifting his stance.
“You disapprove?”
Holmst stiffened back up, “Yes, sir. He’s a bureaucrat, but he knows the Tower. Yeah, he was never one for leadership. More of a functionary.”
“But when does his pain outweigh his function?” Riley asked.
“I don’t see a day that happens, sir.” Holmst hedged his bets.
“Hypothetically,” Riley pursued this, “Let’s say he starts to make a measurable amount of noise. What’s our play?”
Holmst shifted again, uncomfortable with the entire line of questioning, “Sir, you’d be putting two hundred soldiers in the position of martial law, escalating the security responsibilities of an already understaffed garrison.”
“The practicalities aren’t at issue, Lieutenant. Pure hypothetical. Academic exercise.”
Holmst’s eyes darkened, knowing then that this was no exercise. “In any case, you would need to show probable cause he was an immediate and present threat to the colony. There'd be unrest, so we’d need to make our case three times over. We’d have to be able to convict him of crimes unbecoming, absolutely kill him in the court of public opinion, before we even approached a judge, and do so with such certainty that no one could do anything but agree. In short, he’d have to have a bomb strapped to his chest railing about the End Times.”
Riley pursed his lips, like he was savoring the taste of that notion, “We could arrange that.”
20
Aaron
It stared back at them from horizon to horizon, a flickering fortress peeking out over the glassy mirage of the savannah.
Gun towers stood a good twenty feet taller than the palisade, marking the kilometers up and down its length with enormous automated repeaters at their masts. Driven by a targeting algorithm and two technicians, the ninety-two millimeter gaussian rifles threw canisters packed with superheated copper.
The molten slugs hit with enough kinetic energy to flip a tank. If the impact didn’t kill the target, the heated copper would melt through any armor.
Aaron had only heard their chugging sounds once before, pattering away at a Jergad horde with the metronomic rhythm of a hammer to a nail, pounding with all the persistence of a forced morning march. And it had been just as effective, tearing apart the impressive alien beasties like they were but children’s toys.
For their plan to work, they had to breach all three levels of defenses. And they needed an answer to those towers. Aaron had a theory, but it would require some help.
He felt her presence that night, as though he had never left that mesa in the mountains. Those blue eyes looked upon him from some distant peak, making the back of his neck itch.
The Queen had no understanding of technology and had never considered the possibility of sabotage, let alone that she was the sole being alive that might succeed at such an attempt. She withered a bit at the senseless loss of her people’s lives, that this tactic had ever been an option and she had been helplessly blind.
But that soon faded at the prospect of defeating the purveyor of that violence. It was chilling to see.
She would await his call.
How would he signal her, he asked? She made some vague assurances. She would do her part when it was time.
Jensen and Nora that morning returned with the requisite vehicles they would need. And Aaron was almost happy to see the HML 68 Mining Drone. The titan had been scrapped and left to rot in the years before the Wall’s construction.
Now, it was going to ring the doorbell.
Flanked by two land cruisers, they advanced toward the barricades with cautious haste, at a positively hair-raising speed of twenty kilometers an hour. At this rate, they’d be at the Wall next week and the garrison would have time to host a cookout or two.
There certainly was activity at the Wall, as the three-story vehicle lumbered towards their fortifications, a steampunk skeletal land-whale made of rebar and nightmares, with its drill tip hanging low like an elephant’s trunk.
There had to be a mixture of feelings up there, confusion as well as genuine concern. The Miner could absolutely breach the Wall -- but why was it out there and who brought it to heel? What were standing orders around autonomous civilian vehicles assaulting military installations?
Of course, the Rig would never get there. The first line of defense blocked the way.
And here is where stage one of the plan went into effect.
Bray'd asked for some rather suicidal volunteers -- his own words -- to run a ‘wild weasel.’ Aaron had no idea what that meant, and Bray was too n
ervous about his own idea to explain in any depth. Suffice it to say, Bray wanted to stick his head in the lion’s mouth and make it bite on a less interesting target.
Solomon and Keira salivated at the chance to taunt fate. They were always exponentially more frightening when paired together.
Jensen sat atop the rig, a Gearmaster astride his mechanical mammoth. The loose control system he had rigged up gave him the most basic control of the Miner's functions, but Aaron would have to operate the drill from below. And this left Jensen exposed, with a single steel plate as his only cover.
Aaron wasn't much better off, with no hull or bulkheads shielding the beast's interior. Any shrapnel or ricochets were going to be just as deadly as a direct hit. He was in a lethal pinball machine.
Aaron checked the chamber on his rifle, the action slick with freshly brushed lubricant.
What if they shot at him, the people on the Wall? Of course they would, with that cattle prod at their backs. He probably would in their shoes. But could he, without Imperial threats and hate biting at his neck?
Could he kill someone who just wants to go home?
He'll do what he had to and do the calculus later. Killing wasn’t his job today, nestled in a spot where gnashing gears and levers would aggressively press him into a mealy dough.
Killing was just a hazard of his career.
Now the Wall was in a flurry. The distant klaxon could be heard sounding the call to arms. Aaron was a gear rat in the Pits and he was a rat now -- he had to worm his way into a damaged beast and repair battle damage.
The trick would be doing it all without stopping the rig. No matter what happened, the rig could not stop.
Momentum was their ally.
Aaron leaned out of his seat, his shaved head poking out of the side of the rig’s right flank. From his position on the mining rig, Aaron could see Bray’s cruiser peel out of formation and streak ahead, loaded down with the psychopathic couplet.
They were going to die in a gloriously stupid fireball, or this was going to be a helluva light show to kick off the party.
Any attack on the Wall had to first confront several arrays of landmines. After the Thumpers forced the Jergad to the surface, there were shaped charges triggered by the watch commander. They thinned out the horde, often separating them into small platoons that the Repeater towers could decimate.
Those same mines would cripple the exposed treads of the mining rig, and might just send shrapnel up through to the very helpless Aaron and Jensen. They had to be dealt with first.
Keira and Solomon hucked a steel rake off the back of the cruiser. The sudden drag nearly tossed their vehicle end over end, like they were trying to do a backflip and the dust cloud it kicked up was easily four times the height of the cruiser.
And the rake was indeed sweeping up the mines -- two meter wide bricks of steel and industrial hate press-formed into murder boxes. They tossed those charges into the air like the most terrifying confetti. There must’ve been hundreds of the things, ready to shred an encroaching horde.
The commanders must’ve sorted out their priorities. If the sweeper paved a road, the rig would advance unmolested right up to the Wall. Someone somewhere hit the button.
It was like a patriotic display from the West side of Hell.
Explosions lit up the air, masking the cruiser from view, but the continued explosions implied their work continued. Some from the ground, tossing dirt and metal in theatrical outbursts, while others still detonated in futile displays in the air, throwing their payload in random directions.
The explosions finally stopped. The cloud of dirt and smoke hung in the air like a veil.
And that cruiser shot back out of the smoke, a bit more ragged for its journey, humming along with the occasional cough and sputter.
Coated in soot and a bit of blood, Bray stood high like he was a force of nature. Keira cackled from her perch on the rear, an immortal Greco-Roman legend waiting for her place in the stars. And Solomon looked positively nonplussed; Aaron was convinced that Solomon had been dead at least once before as a purely recreational activity. There was nothing for him to fear but familiar roads.
Those three could probably drive a hammer straight through the Gates of St. Peter, and escape naked, coated from head to toe in the blood of their enemies.
Jensen hooted and hollered from above, “You like that?! Well, let's kick it up a notch!”
And with that, Jensen threw the rig into a lower gear. The giant mammoth cut loose a bestial roar, some blend of anger and anticipation. It pressed Aaron into his seat and sped forward toward the Wall. The tread tossed the hardened dirt like it was simply packed snow, leaving a trail that even a dead man could follow.
They were in range now. Those Repeater towers turned to bear down on the Rig. All Aaron could remember was the slurry of meat and blood those guns had left their subjects in.
These Repeaters were pre-packaged flak cannons hot from a shipyard and refit for ground-based anti-material work. A single canister would impact the outer hull, and superheated copper would spray through the interior -- killing drivers, maiming machinery, and igniting munitions in a hostile carrier.
The miner was not nearly so sturdy. In terms of effectiveness, they were duck-hunting with a bazooka.
Now or never, bug lady.
Aaron closed his eyes, and behind his lids, he found that piercing blue gaze. It called to mind the idea of changing the channel, away from the battlefield and to this strange communication. He didn’t say anything, and neither did she. But he felt her influence. It hurt, at first. Like a headache that thrummed behind the eyes and at the bridge of the nose. If all the theories were correct, the Queen could bend the magnetic field of a planet enough to communicate.
And enough to flummox a targeting computer.
The first shot came.
Aaron saw the muzzle flash from the distant barrel a millisecond after he heard the 92mm canister howl past him. It whistled close enough for him to see the burning sulfur endcap tracing its white line across the sky onward to land harmlessly in the dirt almost half a mile behind them. It felt like an eternity before the second one came, zipping past the enormous rig, missing by a good dozen feet.
The rig was no small target. These turrets were, quite literally, missing the broad side of a barn.
It almost felt like the shots were bending courteously out of the way. Shot after shot sailed in, four or five per second, and all of them wildly off center.
“Alright, everybody, welcome to the Devil’s Circus!” Jensen crowed over the radio, “Bray’s car to the left, Eden on the right. Watch the rampart for snipers. Aaron, prime that drill. We’re going in dry!”
Gross, man.
Aaron slung his rifle and began to worm his way forward. The engineers that built the rig did not plan for a human to be wriggling through the innards while it was active, but there was a designed pathway for technicians to go station to station, and Aaron was a small man.
Pistons mashed and gears ground all around him as he picked his moments to squeeze through gaps and passed swinging pendulums like the most spiteful obstacle course.
He couldn’t see outside anymore, but he could hear the gunshots over the groaning joints, and the obstinate echoes of the Repeaters heralded doom with every drumbeat, coupled with the yawning whistle of the incoming and outgoing. Louder cracks of gunfire circled the rig, as Jensen and the others traded volleys with the garrison.
His radio chattered with ambient chaos: “High left, tap tap!” “I see him!” “Eden, don’t get so close!” “Loading!” “Rampart, right. They’re bringing up rockets!”
He found daylight again at the maw of the beast, the tilted drill bit exposed to the world. Aaron perched across the drill’s shank, careful not to rest any of his weight on the three-foot-wide neck.
The bit itself was nearly ten feet across, all metal teeth and circular jaw, like an enormous steel wyrm that fed on anything in its path. He could stand upright in the sp
ace, with every moving part twice his size and ten times his weight.
Taming a dragon.
Sparks shot off the bit, coupled with the rings and gongs of ricocheting metal. Had something broken? No, someone was shooting at him.
Aaron tucked himself back for a moment, out of sight, before leaning forward with rifle shouldered. He craned his neck looking for the source.
The face said young, angry, even thrilled. The uniform said Capital. The gun said hostile.
Shoot him, Aaron. Do it.
He thinks killing means his freedom. He has no idea they’re lying to him, and that freedom can’t be bought, no matter how much blood he brings them.
His life is not for sale.
Aaron pulled the trigger, the shot skipping off to the side and lodging in the concrete. The offending Capital ducked for cover, out and away.
The frenzy and excitement of battle blinded the Capital. He had no idea that Aaron had simply missed. Aaron breathed a sigh of relief, shaking out the tension in his everything.
“Heavy ordinance!” Bray shouted over the comms, “Drop that son of a bitch! Now!”
Jensen could only get a few words out, “Fire in the hole!”
They were mere feet from the Wall when the explosion hit, flames licking the rig’s innards for half a second before the shockwave snuffed them out. Skipping metal and screaming gears burned Aaron’s ears.
He felt the shard of metal knick his arm. The mild and brief gong of warping metal was his only confirmation he hadn’t imagined it, although the trickling of warm moisture down his cheek was a more morbid corroboration. He rubbed his cheek: just oil spatter.
“Aaron !” Jensen called out, “You alright down there?”
“Yeah!” Aaron called out, “Rang my bell though!”
“My girl’s whining. Sounds like the drive shaft!”