Five by Five

by Aaron Allston

  From the shockwave, or the energy pulse of the antimatter detonation, the network built between his platoon of ICAS troopers was at least partially disabled. He still had STANDARD VOICE comms, and the platoon’s standing column of status icons, but no tactical feed. He gazed upwards, into the strategic interface. Tried pulling an UPDATE from Command. Enemy positions … Revisions to his standing orders …

  Nothing.

  “Books! Fall out of line and get our network rebuilt.” Without a local system, the platoon could not share firing data, or UPDATE each other on the position of enemy units. With no tie back to Command, they could expect no support form nearby Alliance positions. They were more likely to be designated as Forces Unknown—one designation removed from a confirmed enemy target.

  Standard doctrine, in a secure position, was to bunker down and rebuild the network. Marcos didn’t have that option. Not after the dropcraft arrival and Bravo’s screeching weapon’s fire.

  “Bravo, close ranks and double-down on the Cans. Full assault. Make it clear that AID holds this scrap of nowhere. Able, work in behind those Walkers. Hold fire until I give you a target.”

  His orders were barely given when, directly north, the air wavered with intense energy disruption as every able-bodied soldier in Bravo overrode safeties and tore up more of Rho VII’s landscape. Even at this distance, the discharge wash of a dozen assault rifles rattled his back teeth.

  Then there was a violet flash, and erupting tendrils of plasma energies twisted above the killing field into giant, powerful columns. Cowboy, his status icon still burning a steady amber, was active enough to throw his PAD into the firestorm. Plasma area-dispersion weapons were among the hardest-hitting ordnance available to ICAS troopers; ionizing large swaths of a battlefield, frying circuitry and scorching flesh.

  Another anti-personnel canister detonated at half a klick.

  The Walkers moving in from the east would be coming hard now. Bravo had certainly drawn interest through strong tactical deployment. Officer-speak, for hanging their ass into the wind by giving away their position. Scrabbling over piles of blackened, broken rubble, Marcos pulled his fireteam along the edge of the crater. Without tactical feed scrolling through his DATA STREAM, he had only a fair idea where his own men were and barely a guess as to where the Walkers might be. But if they had altered course above Able … spreading out to flank Bravo while the squad concentrated its fire on the Canisters rolling in from the north … Marcos would expect to make contact somewhere about—

  Gravel saw them first.

  A high-pitched wail screeched in Marcos’ ears as fifty meters downrange a rocky outcropping shattered into dust and razor-sharp shards. A Walker stumbled back from its ruined cover. Scout-designation; bipedal with reverse-canted legs, able to spring over the ground in rapid deployment. No head to speak of. Sensors and antennae sprouted in a small tangle from what might have been called its shoulders. Raw muscle and sinew, corded in a grisly, bloody rope, tied a very human arm into the Walker’s chest. The hand at the end of that arm was open, waving back and forth. And had an eye grafted into its palm.

  Rabbit and Two-Joe were a heartbeat ahead of Marcos, adding their weapons fire to Gravel’s. Trying to bracket it. Smash it down before it could react. Scouts carried light armor and rarely anything heavier than anti-personnel weapons. But they were fast, and this one was far too close.

  Instinct more than anything had Marcos pull his aim into the air above the scout. Maybe the way it had coiled back on itself tipped him off. That’s what he’d tell himself later, counting heads on the way back to the starjumper to confirm the platoon’s losses, considering what to put in any combat report.

  Now, it was the simple twitch of a nerve cluster. Contraction of the biceps. A three-degree rotation of his left wrist. The barrel of his CAR-7 swung up, just enough, and his finger caught the firing stud as the Cyborg scout gathered itself. And leaped.

  His weapon’s assemblers stripped perfectly formed rods of solid tungsten out of the rifle’s stock. Barely more than a sliver in length, once fed through the acceleration chamber they left at an impressive fraction of Big-C as the arrestor assembly bent Newton’s laws to turn the recoil into a backwash of distortion. Rusty knives carved at Marcos’ ears as energies swirled around him. The landscape wavered, and danced.

  As the scout was plucked from the air and smashed back to the ground in a bloody, ruined tangle of flesh and steel.

  “Scrap it,” Rabbit offered over STANDARD VOICE. He and Gravel put another long burst into the wreckage, leaving little for a Harvester to reclaim for the Cybs.

  Marcos might have joined them in reducing the scout beyond salvage. The sergeant also might have warned his men that there were two Walkers still unaccounted for. Whatever he might have done, Two-Joe was one heartbeat ahead of him.

  The G.I. threw a shoulder into Marcos’ side, taking the sergeant off his feet. Marcos was barely aware of the crimson jewels splashed off his faceplate by a Cyborg spotting laser. Then he was falling.

  Twisting around to absorb the fall against his left side.

  Watching—as hypervelocity pellets cracked the air above him, and tore through Two-Joe’s armored suit.

  Converging streams of weapons fire converged on the synthetic, tearing Two-Joe’s left arm to shreds as he fell back, away, and down. He hit the ground hard, twitching violently. His status icon flashed dark, deadly red. Before Marcos had the chance to order Rabbit and Gravel “Down!” the two men were into the dirt, adjusting their own fire to hammer back at the Cyborg assault Walkers which had broken cover several hundred meters beyond the wrecked scout.

  Marcos pushed Two-Joe’s status to the back of his mind. If the synthetic soldier was still alive—still aware—ICAS technology would save him. He glanced into his DATA STREAM by reflex, wanting to UPDATE his platoon’s MAP files with enemy positions and a call for coordinated fire.

  “Not happening,” he reminded himself, as a fifth thunderclap shook the ground north of his position.

  He grabbed for a grenade, pulling one of the fist-sized canisters from his belt. Showed it to Rabbit who reached for his own while Gravel continued his sporadic return fire. Marcos’ system pulled a drop-down menu across his retinas, and he dialed YIELD to half-strength in order to boost his programmed throw for an extra hundred meters. He chucked the grenade high overhead. Rabbit did the same. At the top of their arc, each grenade stabilized on an electronic gyro and a burst of propellant launched them toward their distant targets.

  “Bravo, walk your fire east and concentrate. Able, hold position and override safeties. Bring the pain. We are three-zero-zero meters southwest of the detonations.”

  Big Mike had just enough time to ask “What detonations,” when bright columns of fire rose up through swirling gasses. Two new craters in Rho VII, Marcos knew. Both ringed with the telltale molten crust of a small antimatter flash.

  Big Mike managed an, “Oh,” before Bravo and Able overlapped fire into the area. Anything else was lost in the high-pitched backwash of assault rifles and the deep, weighty thrum of PAD cannon unleashing their own slice of hell.

  Someone, either Big Mike or Cowboy, was off target as a plasma storm erupted only fifty meters from Marcos’ position and a lone tendril of supercharged energy tore up the edge of the crater above his head.

  “North, push that north!” Marcos ordered. Not that he was certain STANDARD VOICE could penetrate the distortion fields erupting all around him. Where was their network?

  But his call was heard, and the PAD discharge ranged north and then east. Huge twisting ropes of plasma energies whipped across the battlefield, ionizing the air and chewing up ground, metal, and flesh. Assault rifle fire pocked the surface, throwing out lethal shards. Another ICAS grenade flashed in the storm. Then another.

  Marcos, Gravel and Rabbit kept their heads down. Gravel lifted his rifle up and fired blindly, his personal ICAS system retaining target data from his earlier visual. The rifle wailed and its distortion
fan wavered around them. In the swirl of energies, Two-Joe lifted his rifle with his remaining arm. His body appeared to fold over and then jerk straight once more, roll up onto his wounded side. The rifle barrel climbed. Pointing over, and up.

  Toward Marcos!

  Another time, another battle, Marcos would never have thought to worry. It was only the distortion field. Two-Joe was dead. Almost certainly. Even if not, as twitchy as the synthetic soldier might be, he would never point a live weapon at one of his own. And even then, there were safeties in place to eliminate the chance of a friendly fire accident.

  “Except our network is down!” Marcos shouted, realizing that this was not a backwash-induced illusion.

  Rabbit heard him. Rolling to one side, the ICAS trooper swung his weapon around. Hesitated. Disbelief or loyalty prevented him from mashing down on the firing stud.

  Two-Joe fired.

  By reflex, Marcos flinched from the assault rifle fire. Simple human nature, wanting to present as small a target as possible. Even as the rifle fire passed harmless above him, he rolled to his back and looked away—

  —up toward the rim of the crater, where a Cyborg Canister hung, ready to drop into the middle of his fireteam.

  Two-Joe’s rifle fire smashed into the suicide-device head-on. Stopped its charge at the last moment. Drove it back. For one incredibly-long heartbeat it clung to the rim of the crater, working to fulfill its mission. Marcos sensed the strain put on the brain casing as it calculated the damage being taken against its effectiveness of detonating from the crater’s rim. Then Two-Joe cut down, directly into the axle which snapped in half as the entire device tumbled back over the edge.

  And detonated.

  –5–

  Tevin smelled the Cyborg harvest site a good thirty meters away. A foul odor of spoiled meat and blood. Feces. And that cold, ozone smell the Cybbies left behind them almost anywhere they touched.

  An odor of terror, and fear.

  With a raised hand he held up his straggling line. Looked back. Billy and Cog had everyone hunkered down in the shadow of a fire-gutted delivery van. Everyone but the man with the head wound, who stood on the walk, gazing around. As if trying to decide if he wanted to hail a cab or hoof it back to work.

  “Get that zero down,” Tevin whispered harshly. “Keep him there.”

  Tevin had replaced the boomer into his canvas messenger bag, and after a second of hesitation left it there as he crept down the shattered sidewalk. Pieces of broken concrete shifted underfoot, grinding against each other, but the sound wasn’t so bad he would risk moving down the street in the open. He passed the jimmied security doors of a street-side bodega. A cracked fire hydrant laying next to exposed, bone-dry pipes. A dropped briefcase with papers spilling out of it, the dingy pages stirring in the uneven wind.

  The ground shook light and long, like a large vehicle rolling by, but it felt distant. Different from the AID Juggernaut Tevin had seen a few days back. Different from the giant Cyborg meat wagons that drove through the city on their diamond-pattern steel treads, responding to the call of Harvesters.

  More weapon’s fire. Out on the plains. Tevin hadn’t heard much in the way of nearby gunfire in the last ten minutes, but that didn’t mean that the enemy wasn’t close.

  It only meant that they were not being challenged.

  The small hairs on the back of Tevin’s neck stood up with gooseflesh. He swallowed hard, grimaced at the taste of ozone and blood which sat on the back of his tongue like a sickness. The next door was the front to a bank. Strong building. Thick glass. Straining, he thought he heard a metal tap-tapping sound, like the cycling of a weapon, and he slowed his approach.

  There were blood smears on the sidewalk out front. More on the edge of the doorway, where Tevin imagined hands of wounded civvies or soldiers reaching out, grabbing hold in an attempt to prevent their being dragged inside. It was easy to imagine the screams, the calls for help. He’d heard them, over and over, echoing through the streets. Sometimes in the distance. Sometimes just down the block.

  He heard it again. A tap, followed by a scrape or maybe it was a mechanical whirr? Yeah. Tap-and-whirr. Tap-and-whirr.

  Something was still inside the bank.

  He had to look. Had to be certain that were still Cybbies inside. What kind. Something small he could deal with. Maybe. No way could he sneak his line of evacuees by without drawing attention, and circling back with sniffers on their trail wasn’t a great option either. Not unless they had to.

  One quick look. That was all he’d take. Edging up to the bank’s entrance, Tevin breathed shallow and quick through his mouth, cutting down on the smell. His heart pounded in his chest, and he readied himself for a quick retreat (and flat-out run) if whatever was inside happened to notice him. He would have to bolt across the street. Or, better, continue to the left and get around the corner, pulling whatever it was away from Billy and Cog and the others. If it didn’t look to the right. If it focused on him. If nothing waited around the near corner and if he could get into a building fast enough …

  Way to much “if” in his possible future. He hated that. But the only way to remove the “if” was to look, or run back the way they’d come. A Gladiator didn’t just run away, though. A Gladiator faced what was coming at him. Tevin still believed that. Didn’t he?

  Wondering if he did, in fact, still believe it, Tevin ducked his head forward and glanced into the bank.

  Something moved and Tevin pulled back at once, twisting around to flee back toward the others. Seeing him, Billy and Cog jumped out from behind the delivery van’s blackened shell. Also ready.

  But Tevin stopped himself with a heartbeat to spare, catching the side of the building with his shoulder as he checked himself. What he’d seen in that quick glance—blood, steel, broken glass, and movement—registered now. He eased himself back, and this time took a longer look.

  An automatic door, wedged open on the right but the left-hand slider trying to close. Its safety glass was spiderwebbed with cracks, and missing a large piece near the end of the frame. A frame twisted and bent too far outward to allow it to move properly. The door’s machinery clicked against its limit, whirred as it struggled for an extra second. Then reset, and tried again.

  Deeper into the bank nothing else moved. No sign of the Cybbies.

  But they had been here. Yeah.

  His heartbeat slowing back toward something which approached normal, Tevin brought the others forward with a curt, short wave. He studied the interior while he waited for them.

  Enough light filtered through the bank’s front, tinted windows to let him witness the horror that had happened here. Two metal desks shoved together at the center of the room as a hasty operating table, so crusted with dried blood they appeared to be painted black. Torn, blood-soaked clothing piled to one side. Pocketbooks, purses, and personal electronics to another side. Very orderly. Very not-human. Flies buzzed throughout the room, swarming around the desks and crawling in a black mass over a large pile of cast-off flesh and gore. Meat, not up to standard, or maybe already damaged by the Cyborgs in taking their victims.

  Tevin had seen that before too. Whatever the Cybbies wanted from people, whatever drew them to attack and harvest, it wasn’t random and it wasn’t indiscriminate. They tested. They perfected. They chose.

  For this they had killed—were killing—his entire world.

  Whatever they had chosen here, they had already taken it away and moved on in search of more. It was enough for him to know that his group was safe. For the moment.

  Footsteps behind him. Tevin turned and caught Billy by the collar of his heavy jacket, pausing the line for only a second. “No one looks,” he said. “Around the corner.” With that, he propelled the smaller boy forward. Nearly threw him. Billy stumbled to get his feet back underneath him, managed, but not until the far side of the bank’s entrance.

  “Go,” Tevin encouraged them. Waved them on. “Around the corner. We’re almost there.” Each of the ev
acuees got a word, a touch. Whatever it took to distract them, catching no more than a glimpse of the nightmare behind him. Keep them moving.

  Cog obviously recognized the odor and didn’t even attempt to look. The Gladiator turned his back to the bank’s entrance, keeping his eyes on the street as he gestured back the way they’d come with his shock-stick.

  “Still have two Sniffers tracking us. They follow our scent to the doc’s door, he won’t open.”

  Or they’d call Walkers to smash it in. Doc wasn’t clear on much, but he’d been pretty open on how bad it would be allowing Cyborgs to find the underground facility.

  “Wait here,” Tevin ordered, and, taking a deep breath, he ducked into the bank.

  It was easier to move through the horror with purpose than to study it from outside. Moving quickly, Tevin snagged a woman’s purse from the sorted collection of personal items. He found what else he needed from the fly-swarmed pile of viscera and gore. Trying not to think about what he rooted out of the horrific collection, he paused just inside the bank’s entrance so that Cog wouldn’t have to see him load the grisly package into the handbag. Breathing through clenched teeth, he cleaned his hand against the wall and dodged back through the still-shuddering door.

  Gagging for breath, sweat burning at the corners of his eyes, Tevin removed a boomer from his messenger bag. He pushed the plunger all the way down, mixing impact gel into the street-formula explosive. He balanced the steel pipe on one end against the side of the building, looped the handbag’s strap around the base of the device, then left the bag itself sitting as far out onto the walk as he could. Bait. Sniffers would never be able to ignore that stench.

  “It’s going to take a harder impact than knocking that boomer over to set it off,” Cog complained as Tevin grabbed his arm and hurried them both toward the corner.

  Normally, yes, that would be true. You press the plunger, and hurled it away just as fast and as hard as you could. But the reason to do it fast (and what rank didn’t tell you the first few times you handled a boomer) was that impact gel mixed with flash turned unstable. Seconds. A few minutes. The longer it sat, and heated up, the more likely it would simply detonate in your hand.