by Drew Avera
The gunfire slacked off as the soldiers withdrew and Nate edged forward, Svetlana’s hand on his shoulder, her gun pointed the other direction to cover them.
“I should go first,” Svetlana said quietly.
“You’ve probably forgotten more about Close Quarters Battle tactics than any version of me has ever known,” he agreed. “But I got this face,” he brushed a finger across his cheek, “and them seeing it first might buy us an extra second.”
“Yes,” she said dryly, a hint of a grin passing across her face, “I’m sure that’s the reason you want to go first.”
She was probably right, he had to admit. It was likely some residual chivalry left over not from his Prime, but his Prime’s father, or grandfather. But whatever the reason, he dashed across the charred and stained concrete slab floor, the soles of his boots smacking flat-footed with impacts as loud as gunshots.
The Hellfires were each stored in a maintenance gantry bolted into the floor and the nearest of them was empty, but the skeletal metal gridwork made handy cover, and he slid in behind it, keeping his gun aimed down the broad corridor between the rows. Nothing reacted to his movement so he waved for Svetlana to join him.
“They were just shooting a second ago,” he murmured, searching for movement somewhere down the rows and seeing nothing. He felt as if he could still hear the echoes of the gunfire. “Where the hell did they go?”
Nate jumped at a metallic grinding ahead of them and off to the right and he realized how appallingly close he’d come to firing off a shot in reaction. He forced his trigger finger straight along the pistol’s slide and tried to peer through the jungle of metal to the cause of the sound. A hollow drumbeat, the booming Lambeg of the old Scottish clans, then more, echoing through the vast expanse of the assembly level and the storage racks, and the hackles rose on Nate’s neck at the eerie familiarity of it all.
“The mechs,” he told Svetlana, strident urgency in his voice. “They’re taking the mechs.”
“We have to get over there!” she said, pushing at his shoulder. “We can’t let them get out of here!”
He wasn’t sure what she expected him to do about the ones who were already in the Hellfires, but he sprinted down the row of empty gantries, eyes flickering from side to side, sure he was going to run right into an ambush. He could see mechs lurching away from their maintenance racks, pulling free from electrical leads and fluid recharge stations with sprays of lubricant and coolant and crackling sparks, like a hospital patient ripping out his IV and leaving rows of metal nurses watching in stunned silence. The Hellfires stomped away from the direction of his approach, heading for the other end of the chamber, where the cargo exit awaited.
One after another followed, soldiers in a parade, starting at the far end of the storage area, over two hundred meters down from where they were, and stretching back toward them even as they ran to meet it. Nate had a gone feeling in his gut, the dolorous conviction they weren’t going to be able to stop any of the dupes in time, and so absorbed was he in watching the departing mechs that he almost ran headlong into a younger version of himself.
The dupe was emerging from behind the leg of a Hellfire, in the process of grabbing at the boarding ladder to pull himself up between his legs into the cockpit when Nate pulled up short only a meter away. It wasn’t quite like looking in a mirror, or even watching a video of himself, because the dupe was newly incubated and looked younger, less weathered, without the lines of stress and pain Nate had earned in the last eight years. But apparently there was enough of an immediate resemblance for the dupe to hesitate.
“Why are you wearing…?” the dupe began before his eyes widened as Svetlana came up on Nate’s heels.
The dupe clawed at the gun he wore in a shoulder holster and Nate acted on instinct and swung the SIG backhand, slamming the butt of the gun into the duplicate’s jaw with a crack loud enough he thought he’d broken the gun…or the other Nate’s jaw. The dupe collapsed like a marionette with its strings cut and Nate lunged forward, grabbing the gun out of the dupe’s holster…and winding up with neither of the weapons he held pointing in the right direction when a second dupe began running towards them, shouting something angry and incoherent.
Nate wondered if he could have shot himself, face to face, but he didn’t have to find out. Svetlana had no compunctions at all and shot the dupe through the forehead at ten meters. Nate winced at the explosion of sound only a meter from his ear, at the spray of blood, at the sudden deadness to the eyes, to his eyes as the dupe fell forward. He shook the feelings away, putting a knee between the stunned dupe’s shoulder blades and keeping the pistol in his right hand trained the way the two of them had come, waiting for more of his own twisted spawn to come at them in a nightmare horde and overwhelm them.
None came. Svetlana pushed him off the dupe and secured the man’s hands with a zip-tie. Nate didn’t ask where she’d gotten it or why she’d brought it. It was Svetlana, after all.
“Keep watch,” she told him in a tone that would brook no argument.
He aimed his gun out into the corridor, wondering if this was it or if the rest had already stolen their mechs and left. What would happen if the soldiers came back? What the hell would he tell them? How could he explain that all the people who’d been shooting at them looked like him, except he was a good guy?
He heard a slap behind him, the meaty sound of a palm striking a face. Another, and then moaning.
“Wake up, asshole,” she hissed at the dupe. “Open your eyes or I’ll cut your fucking balls off and feed them to you.”
“Who…who the fuck are you?”
Nate felt bugs crawling beneath his skin at the sound of his own voice. A little bit less of a rasp, since this guy hadn’t been smoking for the last four years, but still, unmistakably his voice.
“I’m the last person you’re ever going to see alive if you don’t tell me where you and the other dupes are going with these mechs.”
“I’m not gonna tell you shit, bitch…Agghh!”
Nate half turned, caught a glimpse of a knife blade wet with blood, but Svetlana snapped at him.
“Eyes front!”
He obeyed, not really wanting to see what she’d done. The dupe was gasping for agonized breath.
“That is just a taste, you cheap copy. Tell me where they’re going or I’ll slice off something much more important to you.”
“Oh Jesus…,” the dupe moaned. “Please don’t…”
Another scream, higher pitched this time and Nate was ready to tell her to stop, that it wasn’t worth this, but his dupe broke a moment before he did.
“The old Air Force Academy!” he screeched in obvious desperation. “That’s where the Russians are meeting the US delegation! Only it’s not the US, it’s Robert Franklin! He’s going to kill them! And the US leadership here! He’s going to get rid of them all!”
“Good. Very good. Now one last question and I’ll let you go. Where is the lab? The one where you were created?”
“It’s an old warehouse, some kind of farm thing!” He was talking fast, wanting to avoid more pain so much more than he was worried about betraying Bob. Nate supposed there was a limit to the loyalty the doctored memories could provide. “It’s out on Wyman Lane outside of Colorado Springs! You can’t miss it, it’s the only place with power for ten klicks in any direction.”
“Thank you,” Svetlana said, her voice almost a purr. “You’ve been very cooperative.”
A squishing sound, one Nate didn’t think he’d ever forget if he lived to be a thousand, and the dupe’s labored breathing ceased so abruptly he knew Svetlana had to have stabbed him through the eye into the brain. He nearly jumped at the feel of her hand on his shoulder, but he didn’t turn around. He didn’t want to see.
“We need to get to the Air Force Academy, and we need to get there fast.”
“The mechs,” he said, gesturing at a pair of them still in their maintenance gantry. “We’ll have to take two, but I can fly y
ours remotely…”
“I know how to pilot a mech, Nathan,” she told him, her face neutral as she wiped the blade clean on the chest of her victim, then resheathed it. “I know how to do many things. And I will do whatever I have to in order to kill Robert Franklin.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Where the hell did these assholes come from?” Colonel Piotr Sverdlov growled, and for one moment, Anton Varlamov thought the man was blathering on the open channel for all to hear, but then he saw it was their private net.
Anton didn’t answer immediately, pulling his Tagan into a tight turn to avoid an unguided rocket. The weapons were crude and simplistic, but they were still firing and his MJK-38F missile launchers were empty. All he had left was his chain gun and antipersonnel machineguns, and he couldn’t sit still long enough to use either one. There were only twenty-five or thirty of the mechs, and some had the pattern of flight of U-mechs, mirroring their master, but they seemed to be everywhere.
“I don’t know,” he admitted, then grunted with the impact as his mech’s footpads slammed into the pavement. He ran forward ten steps before launching himself into the air again, into the chaotic madness of this battle. “But they knew we were coming. They had to have!”
“Bullshit!” Sverdlov said, though there was more desperation than conviction in his voice, Anton thought. “How?”
“Franklin!” The answer was reflexive, though he knew it made him sound like a Russian Captain Ahab to Franklin’s White Whale. “It has to be! Someone in Popov’s cabinet must have warned him!”
“Bullshit, there’s no way….” Sverdlov trailed off and Anton didn’t question the man’s silence due to his own sudden preoccupation.
He was swooping low past the bare granite of the mountainside, chased by a spray of unguided rockets, their chain eruptions sending sprays of rock out behind him, getting closer with each second. The last explosion was too damned close and a shockwave of concussion threw his mech forward, nearly out of control. He cut the thrusters and landed hard, slamming his helmet into the cushioning around his pilot’s seat. Stars danced in his vision and dull pain sank into his chest, squeezing the air out of him.
He spun the mech on a heel and opened fire with his 25mm chain gun, the deep-throated roar of the weapon rattling through the cockpit for the space of two seconds, as long of a burst as he could afford with limited ammo and this many enemies. One of the Hellfires had screwed up, let themselves get too close, moving too slow. It was an easy mistake to make with the battlespace this crowded, but his chain gun made them pay for it. The heavy, armor-piercing rounds punched through the Hellfire’s left hip and the mech slewed counterclockwise, spinning out of the air and trying to land at the edge of the highway on its one good leg, bouncing fitfully to a halt and swaying back and forth unsteadily.
Anton shifted his aim, traversing his Tagan’s torso around to try to finish off the Hellfire, but the American mech hit its thrusters just as he lined up his reticle. The damaged machine blasted off sideways, half out of control, crashing through some of the young pines lining the road and tumbling into the culvert in a cloud of dust. He tried to follow its direction of travel, making sure it was too damaged to come back into the fight, ready to fire another burst if it did.
Which was the only reason he happened to be looking in the right direction to see the squadron of Hellfires flying out from the base’s cargo entrance at top speed, heading northeast. And the only thing northeast of them was…
“Colonel Sverdlov!” he yelled into his helmet microphone, wincing at his own unprofessionalism. He knew better than anyone how irritating the burst of static from someone yelling into the radio could be. “We have enemy mechs flying northeast towards Colorado Springs!”
Sverdlov said nothing and Anton checked his IFF transponder feeds, saw that the man was engaged with two enemy mechs, “latched,” as his pilot friends liked to say. The sensor readouts were an Escher painting, folding in on themselves in a never-ending pattern he couldn’t force into something that made sense. He wasn’t a mech pilot, was of little use in this fight other than as a distraction, but he knew where he would be of use.
“Colonel, I am going after the squadron of enemy mechs,” he announced, stamping down on the thruster controls, sending his Tagan leaping into the air on columns of fire. “They have to be heading to the Air Force Academy.”
Even after so many days in the Tagan, something so large and ungainly flying through the air seemed unnatural to him, like a fantasy of his youth with superheroes and villains crossing the sky on red capes.
“Negative, Varlamov!” Sverdlov finally responded. “Negative! We have a battle to fight here!”
“Do we have mechs at the meeting site?” Varlamov demanded. “Because I just saw five of theirs heading that way!” His targeting alert beeped at him and his eyes went to the sensor screen automatically. “Damn it, there’s two more of them! Sorry, Colonel, but someone has to protect General Antonov!”
Something full of static and nearly unintelligible blared from Anton’s headphones, finally coalescing into a stream-of-consciousness rain of profanity in three different languages from Sverdlov.
“Goddamn you spec ops cowboys!” he thundered. “Fine! Second strike wing, Third Squadron, Lt. Chapayev! Go with Colonel Varlamov and intercept those Hellfires before they reach the summit!”
“Roger that, sir,” Chapayev replied, wisely not commenting on Sverdlov’s tone or his obscenity. “Third Squadron, follow me.”
Varlamov didn’t stop to thank him, just gunned the throttle and headed after the Hellfires at top speed, trusting Chapayev and her people to keep up.
“I hope you’re fucking happy, Anton!” Sverdlov’s voice chased after him even as he left the man and the battle far behind. “You wanted to kill that bastard Franklin and here’s your chance! Don’t fuck it up!”
“Olivia’s down!” Bubba Brooks yelled. “Goddammit, Olivia’s down! Can anyone see her?”
“She went down in the trees, Bubba,” one of the Die Valkyrie pilots answered.
Roach couldn’t recognize the voice and wouldn’t have remembered the name even if she had, but she could hear the fear and desperation. Olivia Savage was Brooks’ second in command and his wife, or something. She hadn’t asked and they hadn’t volunteered the nature of their relationship.
Their voices seemed disconnected from the reality around her, describing a scene she couldn’t see or even imagine. Her world was a collage of sky and mountain, the glint of sun off metal and the glowing haze of missile and rocket trails in a white crosshatch of screaming death. Tagans were everywhere, red icons on her sensor screen swarming like mosquitoes on a summer morning in the marshes near the Virginia coast, and her own forces glowed blue in the midst of them, staying in the center of the swarm.
It was a risky strategy and one she was fairly sure no one had consciously decided on, certainly not her. They were at the center of a circular firing squad, huddled together in the air to keep the Russians from firing indiscriminately for fear of hitting their own Tagans, until too many of the mercenary Hellfires got too close to overheating, then descending as one when the first of them had to cut their thrusters. On the ground, they occupied the broad spot in the highway where the road turned on to the main entrance ramp into Cheyenne Mountain’s vehicle gate, laagered into a circle, facing out to deal with incoming missiles…as long as their machinegun ammo held out.
“We’ll send someone out to look for her after the battle,” she promised, surprised at how calm she sounded, given how close they all were to death. “Stay in formation!” Because it’s working, Goddammit and let’s not fuck with success.
“We got Hellfires coming out of the Mountain!” That voice she did recognize. It was James Fuller, and he didn’t sound as excited as he might have about the news. “I ain’t got no way of knowing if that’s the Army or Franklin’s people!”
Roach triggered a burst of rockets at a Tagan that had drifted too close and exulte
d as the warheads peppered the machine’s legs, blasting away chunks of metal and electrofiber cable muscle. The damage wouldn’t put the Tagan out of the fight permanently, but once it had to land, it would be easy meat for someone else.
It felt like quick and certain suicide, but she took her attention off the Tagans for just a moment, switching her communications to the general military net.
“Attention US Army forces at Cheyenne Mountain,” she said, trying to let the words flow naturally without thinking about them, keeping her concentration on incoming enemy fire. “This is Warrant Officer First Class Rachel Mata of the registered PMC Broken Arrow Mercenary Force, callsign Roach. We are engaged with the enemy Tagans attacking the base. Do you read, US Army forces?”
She could see the heat signatures of the two squadrons of Hellfires jetting up from the main entrance and wondered for a single, bone-chilling second if they were going to wind up having to fight them as well as the Tagans.
“Roach, this is Captain Church, Third Squadron, First Mech Wing. I don’t know how the hell a merc unit from the coast got all the way to Colorado, but we’re glad to have you!”
“Church, you may not be so glad when I tell you why we’re here. You have an infiltration ongoing by agents of a traitor. Robert Franklin is a double-agent and he’s planning on taking out your leadership inside Cheyenne Mountain. You need to get the President and her cabinet under maximum guard right now!”
“Ah, I’m afraid the President died a couple days ago…heart attack they said. But I’ll relay your warning inside. Not that I think they’ll need any urging to get to a shelter with the attack and all.”
“Shit,” she moaned. Franklin had already got the President. “Church, we’re going to stay in the center and keep them drawn in as much as we can. You guys scrape them off the sides and when they turn on you, we’ll take them from behind.”