by Drew Avera
Two Hellfires remained, but the one Anton had slammed into was staggering backwards, its cockpit partially crushed, the canopy fractured and flaking off, and he judged that the pilot was at least stunned, possibly injured. The other American mech was damaged but still on its feet, and before Anton could move, it put a burst of 20mm through Chapayev’s cockpit. Blood splashed against the interior of the young officer’s canopy and his mech went immobile, his hands falling away from the controls.
Anton had no special love for Chapayev, couldn’t remember saying more than two words to the man during their trip, yet he felt a stab of almost physical pain in his chest at the officer’s death and swore in frustration at the time it took him to line up a shot with his chain gun without the aid of his malfunctioning targeting system. The Hellfire’s upper torso was spinning towards him, and Anton figured he was close enough and squeezed the trigger reflexively, holding it down as he swept the muzzle across the enemy’s torso. 25mm slugs punched through the armor at close range, each hitting with a flare of metal turning to plasma with the heat of the kinetic energy, and the Hellfire froze with the death of its pilot.
Anton ground his teeth and traversed the torso of his Tagan around, putting the last of the ammunition for his 25mm into the Hellfire he’d rammed, finishing it off. He let off the trigger slowly, letting out a ragged, rasping breath. He turned back towards the chapel and thought sure he saw movement from behind it, across the lawn to the next building over.
Franklin.
This wasn’t over yet.
Svetlana Grigoryeva was, she was convinced, getting out of shape. It was bound to happen after so much time spent in the field without the opportunity to run unless she was running from something, without the facilities to work out. But it still annoyed her. She’d survived this long through ruthlessness and dedication and the ability to outlast her enemies. Now, she was winded from just a hundred meters or so of sprinting.
What was even more embarrassing was that Nathan was behind her, not seeming tired at all, though that might be the adrenaline. It would surely be running hotter for him than for her. He was at home in a mech, while this was her field. And Robert Franklin was going to regret ever betraying her.
It shocked her how much that mattered. More than the death of her country’s military leader Antonov, more than the attempt Franklin was making to take over the governments of the United States and Russia, more than even what he had done to Nate, the man had presented himself as a surrogate father to her and then betrayed her, abandoned her the same way her biological father had.
Franklin was just ahead of her, not fifty meters away as she emerged from the rear exit of the Academy chapel and onto what had once been a lawn but was currently dead, dried out summer grass. Franklin and the Nate dupe he’d brought with him as an assistant were racing into the open door of the next building over. She had no idea what it had once been, but it was several stories tall with walls made from panes of blue glass. Most were still intact, but some had been cracked and splintered and the front door was off its hinges. The two men ducked through and she cursed, knowing they’d be armed and waiting for her and Nate, and knowing if she hesitated, Franklin could still get away.
There was one way to handle a dynamic entry when the enemy knew you were coming, and that was recon by fire. She raised her sidearm to shoulder level as she ran, her breath coming hard. There’d been a time when she could have shot a man through the eye while sprinting faster than this, but then, she wasn’t actually trying to hit anything.
She waited until she was only ten meters from the doorway before she opened fire, spraying the full magazine of .40 rounds as she swept the muzzle from one side of the entrance to the other at chest level. She ejected the spent magazine with a push of her thumb on the release, her left hand snagging a fresh load from the pouch attached to her tactical vest beside her chest holster. The heel of her hand slammed the loaded magazine home with a solid click and she hit the slide release and chambered a fresh round, and then she was through the door and inside.
Shadows replaced the mid-morning light and she wished she had the time to let her eyes adjust, comforting herself with the knowledge that Franklin would have the same problem.
It rains on the just and the unjust, Mom used to say. When she was sober.
“Go right!” she yelled at Nate, cutting left as she passed into the room.
It was large and had once been open, some sort of lobby for an administration building or classrooms or some such thing. But the ceiling had collapsed, cutting off part of the lobby space, creating a narrow corridor clear of debris, maybe three meters wide. When she tried to move too far to the left, she nearly tripped over twisted metal and rotten wood and barely caught herself in time, twisting back onto the cleared path with a ballerina’s pirouette.
Nate was not so graceful. He took a fallen crossbeam at shin level and went down in a heap, his pistol dropping from his hand as he hit on his right shoulder, a whoosh of air going out of him. Standing five meters in front of him was a younger version of Nathan Stout, dressed in a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and slacks stained dark red with blood, only a hint of their original grey showing at the back of the legs. He wore a maniacal grin and had a compact pistol in his hand, pointed at Nate.
Five meters farther back, near the remains of some sort of reception desk, wreathed in darkness, was Robert Franklin. His hair was unruly, matted in sweat, and his normally spotless business suit was stained and ripped, the gun in his hand seeming out of place, yet somehow he still exuded an air of calm authority, as if he’d planned for all of this and it was unwinding just as he’d intended. She wanted more than life itself to put a bullet in his head, to end all this once and for all.
More than her life, but, she discovered almost to her shock, not more than Nate’s life. She shifted her aim from Franklin to the Nathan dupe, firing an instinctive Mozambique Drill, two to the chest and one to the head. This might have been a version of Nate, but there was enough of a difference that killing him didn’t bother her, not the way she thought it might. The dupe jerked spastically at the double impact through his torso, ragged dark holes ripping through that white shirt, before his head snapped backward. All those carefully-selected memories that had made him the perfect pawn for Robert Franklin splattered across the tile floor and yet another version in a long line of Nathan Stouts died in battle.
The remaining version, the only one she cared about, was struggling to his feet, one hand pushing himself up, the other feeling through the rubble for the pistol he’d dropped. She shouldn’t have looked at him, but she hadn’t been able to help herself. She should have been paying attention to the remaining threat, to Robert Franklin. She’d only looked away from him for the space of a second, but it had been enough. When she turned back to him, his gun was raised.
She might, she thought in the fraction of a second between seeing the muzzle of the gun pointed her way and the flash of the shot, have expected Franklin, ever the drama queen, to say something momentous, something condescending about how he was disappointed in her. For once, he kept his mouth shut and went about his business.
The gunshot sounded oddly distant, as if it were outside the building somewhere, and the impact felt as if someone had punched her in the chest. Once upon a time, the girl Svetlana had been might have thought she was fine, might have assumed the shot had missed, might not have read all the signs for what they really meant. She wasn’t that girl anymore, and she knew exactly what the dull pain in her chest meant, the liquid filling the back of her throat.
Svetlana tried to move, tried to point her gun at Franklin, but it slipped from her fingers and she fell forward to her knees, then down onto her side, lacking even the strength to bring her hands up to the wound in the center of her chest. Warmth poured from it, wringing the life from her and spilling it out onto the dead ground of a dead world.
Everything was on its side and she wanted to close her eyes, didn’t want to watch Fran
klin win. Didn’t want to watch him kill Nate. But she couldn’t. She had to see, had to know. It was her curse. She watched as the man stepped away from the old reception desk and aimed his gun at Nate, who was halfway to his feet, still unable to find the gun he’d dropped. The look on his face told her everything, told her he knew this was the end.
The Tagan smashed through the glass walls like a monster in the stories her mother had told her as a child, an avenging angel, bringing down the building in its wrath. Beams crashed down from the ceiling and Svetlana wondered if one would finish her off, finish what the bullet had begun, but instead, the debris hit Robert Franklin. The gun fell from his hand and he stumbled forward, off-balance and stunned, blood trickling from a cut over his eye.
Nate was on him, not giving in to the distraction of the mech or the collapse of the wall. He threw himself across the meters between them, slamming into Robert Franklin with his shoulder against the man’s sternum and bearing him to the ground. The reincarnated warrior came down on the reincarnated puppet-master, knees pressing into the man’s chest, fists flashing over and over into Franklin’s face. Blood spattered across Nate Stout’s flight suit, Rorschach patterns of hatred and resentment and Karma built up over so many lives, so much pain.
Nate paused, looking down at what was left of Franklin. Svetlana couldn’t see the older man’s face, but she could see his chest still rising and falling. Not dead yet. Nate didn’t seem satisfied with that and he stumbled off of the man, grabbing on the tile floor for the gun Franklin had dropped then standing over him, aiming it down at his face.
“No.”
The word was English but the accent was Russian. It was the pilot of the Tagan, helmet off, his dark, bushy hair dripping sweat. He didn’t have the face of a pilot. He had the pugnacious, rough face of one of the bruisers who’d worked as muscle for the men who’d bought and sold her as a girl, and the gun in his hand seemed natural there. He was a man of violence, though perhaps not a bad man. She thought she could see something honest in those dark eyes.
“He’s mine,” the Russian said. “I have come a long way to kill Robert Franklin.”
Nate laughed then, and it was a sound without humor, without anything other than well-earned hatred.
“Not as far as I’ve come,” he said.
Without looking away from the Russian, Nate fired a round into Robert Franklin’s head. Blood splashed upward and the man who would have been king of the new world died in the wreckage of the old.
Svetlana was afraid for a moment that the Russian would kill Nate for the slight, but instead, the man looked deflated somehow, robbed. He let his gun hand fall to his side, as if he didn’t care what happened to him now. Nate looked down at the gun in his hand, at what it had done to Robert Franklin, and tucked the compact weapon into a pocket.
She finally closed her eyes, unable to keep them open against the weight of a world pressing down on her eyelids, and she was sure she’d never open them again.
“Svet. Svet, it’s me.”
Somehow, Nate was beside her, his hand pressed into hers. His face swam into focus and she saw he was crying. She wondered if it was for her.
“We’ll get you to a medic,” he was saying, pressing at her chest, trying to stop the flow of blood.
“Not in time, I think.” She couldn’t manage more than a whisper. “Not here.”
He was sobbing now, though he was obviously trying to hold it in, trying not to lose it in front of her.
“It’s okay to cry,” she told him. “I’m glad there’s someone in the world who’ll still cry for me. But don’t cry forever, Nathan.”
“I don’t have forever,” he reminded her, his voice breaking. “I just wanted to spend the time I had left with you.”
“You have longer than you think.” This was important. She had to hold on for this. “Franklin’s lab. You heard where it was. You need to go there.”
“I will,” he promised. “He probably has his DNA and memories stored there. I promise, I’ll make sure there’s never another dupe of Franklin made. He’ll stay dead.”
“Yes,” she said, and it seemed to be taking every bit of energy she had simply to speak. She coughed and blood flecked on her lips, pain wracking her, but she squeezed it all away, putting everything she had into her next words. “Kill Franklin, but save yourself. Get his researchers to reteleromize your DNA. It’s what he did to extend his life. You can live…normal life.”
She saw the doubt in his eyes before he spoke.
“Is it worth it?” he wondered, his voice bleak and hopeless. “You’re the only good thing that’s happened in any of the lives I remember.”
Anger gave her strength to grab the front of his flight suit in a last, desperate grasp and he looked down at her in surprise.
“Promise me,” she hissed at him, blood gurgling in the back of her throat. “Promise me. This is a bad world, Nate, but there are good people in it. They need people like you to fight for them. Promise me.”
“All right, Svet,” he said, putting a hand over hers, holding it to his chest. “I promise.”
She couldn’t tell if he was just saying what she wanted to hear, but it would have to be good enough. Her strength was slipping away, and she couldn’t keep her eyes open. Things went dark, but somewhere in the darkness she heard a voice, soft and comforting.
“Dochenka,” it said, Russian for “daughter. “Do not cry. All will be well.”
She smiled, feeling the warmth in the words.
“Mother.”
Darkness embraced her in its loving arms and held her forever.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Rachel Mata had been in a lot of fights in her life. She’d considered herself a veteran, toughened in combat and hardened by loss. She’d been lying to herself. She’d never known a true battle before this day, never seen true devastation.
The sun was high over Cheyenne Mountain, glaring and obscenely bright, casting a spotlight on every pile of smoking wreckage, on every bulky humanoid shape twisted into something unrecognizable, turned into a cairn, a grave-marker for the men and women who’d given their lives in the carnage and confusion. Smoke drifted away from a dozen brushfires all beginning to move toward one another now. Someone would have to see to that, she thought, before it spread to the town.
Not her, but someone.
Roach brought her Hellfire to the pavement just outside the cargo entrance to the base, ignoring the flashing yellow and red damage indicators, ignoring the dull ache in her back and legs and shoulders, ignoring the hollow pain in her chest. She needed to move, needed to check on the survivors, but she had nothing left. No ammunition, no armor, no energy, not an ounce of will. The battle had taken it all, had stripped away her soul one IFF transponder code at a time, as one after another had gone dark.
“Roach,” James Fuller said, his voice as grim as her soul. “We got one left over here.”
She found the signal for his mech on her screen and began hobbling toward him, favoring her Hellfire’s right knee. It had taken a 25mm slug at some point and was threatening to seize up at any moment, but it had done its job.
She found Fuller standing beside Jenny Armstrong and Catalina Loughlin and two of her remaining four mechs, a group beat up badly enough she wondered if they ought to have a fife and a drum among them. They were in a clearing beside the road, surrounding a Hellfire even more banged up than any of theirs, one of its arms blown away at the elbow, taking the 20mm Vulcan with it, its left hip smashed and twisted and part of the canopy stripped away from the cockpit.
It moved side-to-side, as best it could dragging one leg, keeping them all in sight like a cornered animal. Through the cracked canopy, she saw Nathan Stout’s face looking back at her and a chill traveled up her spine. She’d known, but there was knowing and then there was knowing.
“Why didn’t you get one of Church’s people to take care of him?” she asked, her voice rasping and ragged, her tone disinterested.
“Ne
ar as we can figure,” Catalina told her, “there’s no one left. I mean, there may be some survivors out there, but they ain’t transmitting and there are likely to need our help as to be able to make any decisions.”
“We have a grand total of ten operational Hellfires,” Fuller reported. “And I’m being damned generous when I say ‘operational,’ by the way.”
“Has anyone found Ramirez?” She didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to hear the answer because she was afraid of what it would be.
“My people and the two left from Conrad’s unit are out checking the wrecks,” Catalina said. She sounded numb, Roach thought. But who wasn’t? “They’ve found a couple survivors, Russians, but not your man Ramirez. Not yet.” She pointed her mech’s 20mm Vulcan at the damaged Hellfire. “And none of them.” She spat the word out, as if it were a curse. “Not one of them lived, except this one.”
Roach hissed out a breath and flicked the control for her Hellfire’s external PA speakers.
“Surrender, asshole. Everyone else is dead. Get out of your mech and we’ll turn you over to the Army.”
The dupe of Nate said nothing but his eyes flashed hatred at her and his mech’s intact arm cocked back with a whine of overtaxed servos. Roach kicked the Hellfire’s bad leg out from beneath it, the impact of her mech’s footpad an echoing metallic gong, and the damaged mech went down on its back, crashing like a felled tree. She regarded the man in the pilot’s seat for just a moment, wondering if they should try to capture him, if there was any reason at all to keep him alive.
Jenny Armstrong saved her the trouble of making the decision. She stepped forward and stomped her Hellfire’s footpad down on the dupe’s cockpit, crushing the twisted and perverted version of the Nate they knew beneath tons of metal.
No one objected. No one said a word.
“I wonder if we should try to find someone in charge inside the Mountain and report all this to them,” James Fuller mused, finally.