Beware of Light (Dark Stars Book 1)

by Alex Kirko

  “Here,” he said and threw her an emergency nutrient bag. Since she had become his partner, he always kept one on his person. He then sat down and began to cut his meal into uniform strips.

  “Won’t your steak get cold faster this way?” Tara looked at the dirty-red bag she was now holding by a corner. “Ugh. I hate ENB. It tastes like dead cat. I’ll just eat during the fight.”

  “Tara,” he said. “You’ll pounce on the first enemy you see, and I’m not cleaning up this rebel mess by myself. Eat. You need to be able to heal in combat.”

  Tara grimaced and poked the bag as one would touch a dead viper. She cut a corner, and put her right finger into the brownish-red substance. It started to drain.

  He said, “What a pain it must be to have such a refined palette.”

  “Shut up. It’s bad enough you forced me to consume this crap. I’m not putting any into my mouth. That’s just . . . disgusting.”

  “Didn’t you mean to say ‘ugh’?” Blake strained to contain a smile and failed.

  “Look who grew a sense of humor,” she said glancing at his steak. “What do you think of you repurposed plastic, by the way?”

  “Eight out of ten, thank you.”

  It was their private dance: the jabs, the insults, the arguing. Blake got the upper hand most of the time, and he always knew what Tara thought of him, so he didn’t mind. Backstabbing was common in the Terra Nox army. He was sure, at least, that Tara would look him in the eye if she ever decided to kill him.

  The steak wasn’t half-bad, but he hadn’t eaten real meat in a while, and nostalgia could be clouding his judgement. It looked like meat, smelled like meat, but there was something off about the flavor—a hint of kimchi.

  “Hey, Blake? You really think this can blow up in our faces?”

  “Yes,” he said between gulps of water.

  “Why? Except for the old crowd being mummified bats?”

  He shrugged and said, “I don’t believe Count Heatsworth is stupid enough to attack Seind without a plan, but the higher-ups based our strategy on him being dumber than moss. I tell you, the man is smart. It took him what, half a decade to Ascend after landing here?”

  “Yeah, a record. News companies gushed about him for weeks.”

  Blake nodded. “Yes, our ‘golden boy’. Came from nowhere, and in five years his company is the global leader in bioengineering. And in another five he maneuvered the late holder of his current title into a duel and replaced the man.”

  In a rare moment of seriousness, Tara rubbed her chin in contemplation. Unfortunately, she used the finger that had been dipped into the nutrition bag and smeared red-brown all over the lower half of her face.

  She said, “And five years later he decides to rebel. Yeah, I see your point.” She frowned and stared into the distance. “What’s with him and five-year intervals? Anyway, all rebels get squashed—doesn’t matter if it takes a week or a month. I don’t know why the idiots even bother. The Council will just get someone awesome like me to knock them down.”

  “Tara—”

  “Oh, don’t get all prickly, you aren’t half bad. For a human, of course.”

  He said, “I’m flattered.” He pointed. “You have a little smudge right over there.”

  Tara picked up a napkin and started cleaning her chin. “Stupid Seind. Can’t take a walk near the industrial district without getting covered in grime.”

  “Actually, it’s processed flesh.”

  Seeing Tara jump with a yelp and hearing her chair topple backwards made him feel warm, like stepping into a pre-heated room after walking in a snowstorm. The remaining steaming steak flopped over the edge of the table and landed where all falling food goes. He snatched it from his lap and threw it away before it did any permanent damage to something valuable.

  He said, “I thought it was an improvement. Like make-up.”

  “You underfed ass! No wonder you have no friends.”

  As Tara ran to the restroom to clean up, Blake picked up the nutrient bag from the floor, threw it into a trash can, and left the payment for his meal on the counter. He looked at the damage they had done: the door, the upturned tables, the bloodstains from when Tara’s meal went flying. He added a thousand credits and left a card for an insurance company. With Ascended tempers, property damage was inevitable, so the military absolved Ascended soldiers of liabilities and contracted specialized companies to cover that sort of thing. It was still more economical than keeping the armed forces human-only, not that it was an option. It would be ridiculous to have a planet ruled by one race and policed by the other.

  A sharp beep in his ear announced that they had only an hour left.

  Tara got back, and Blake saw that there would be no more skipping gait and easy laughs.

  He remembered seeing her like this for the first time. They had gone up against a half-baked demolitions group. The assholes decided the key to changing society was to stop the government propaganda in schools by blowing the buildings up. The allegedly brainwashed kids weren’t considered even collateral damage, and the fact that children weren’t old enough for protective augments was just icing on the cake. When Tara walked out of the room where the terrorists had held the hostages, she was covered in boiling burns which were in turn obscured by blood and chunks of her enemies’ flesh. Her skin was clear only where it had re-knit over the holes that had been punched through her. He respected this battle-born woman enough to tolerate her normal bubbly self.

  “Let’s go, Blake,” she said. “Lieutenant Nicastro might have some new intel. Then we give Heatsworth hell.”

  He grinned. “I’ve been dying to try out the movement upgrades I installed on Aileen last weekend. And take care of yourself. Try to remember this time that I’m the one in an armored suit.”

  Tara rolled her eyes but didn’t say anything. They left the restaurant, and Blake did his best to focus on the tactics of the upcoming fight. The world was full of idiots, drug-addicts, and lunatics, and until evidence said otherwise, he would hope the Count was one of those.

  There were two hundred of them, five hundred if he counted the support drones—less than he would have preferred. Most soldiers couldn’t control more than two or three robots in addition to their own power armor, and Blake’s ability to run a unit of nine was one of the reasons he got his rank.

  Aileen waited where he had left her. The frame was a modified mobility-focused model. She stood a little over seven feet tall, all flowing surfaces of grey energy-resistant alloy and black nano-mesh. Cerulean coolant pipes framed her face and curved down the neck, splitting into separate streams cascading to the fingers and toes. They were pale-blue now but would light up as soon as Aileen powered on. The sleek outline was disrupted by bulky repulsors attached to calves and lower arms for an extra burst of speed when dodging. The suit looked like an androgynous giant who wanted to attract other androgynous giants and hit the gym a bit too often. She looked human, except at the neck which was as broad as the armored helmet above it. It took some time for new operators to get used to the changes in balance a suit brought, but protecting the skull was well worth it.

  Unlike him, Tara didn’t need to prepare, so she was the one to give the report. The lieutenant was an Ascended like her, which helped too.

  Blake felt the tingling caress of the scan when Aileen queried his implants. It was easy to forget just how many he had. While well-off civilians installed implants for convenience or looks, an operator’s cybernetics didn’t do jack to help them in ordinary life. Blake still needed seven hours of sleep, ate normal food, and bled red when cut. The technology came into play only inside a suit.

  Satisfied with the check, Aileen opened. The process took a minute as myriads of nanomachines cut through the material allowing artificial muscles to peel the layers of protection away so that he could step in. He entered.

  “Welcome, Master Drummond. Please stand by for the start-up procedure.”

  It wasn’t Aileen’s voice, not yet. Hers was fe
male, low and throaty. This one was the dirge of the initialization system. Supposedly, the scientists who programmed the damn thing couldn’t agree on the actor to voice it, so now everyone was stuck with this sorry excuse of a recording.

  The suit snapped shut, and Blake was plunged into darkness and silence. Somewhere outside, the nanites got to repairing the damage to the suit, but here he could feel and hear nothing except for the hum of air being pumped in. A minute passed in the void before connection spikes stabbed into the neural ports at the back of his skull and the base of his spine. The familiar all-encompassing wave of pain washed over him in less than half a second before agony was displaced by numbness. The suit had injected a cocktail of anesthetics and primers directly into his central nervous system.

  The world exploded back into color, and Blake disappeared.

  “Hello, Master. You took your time waking me up—overconfident much?”

  Now that was his Aileen, far too playful for an AI that spent most of its existence in hibernation. Her voice rang out inside his head. Or rather he was inside Aileen’s head as his own body was for all intents and purposes unconscious.

  He was over seven feet tall, and he could see, hear, and smell everything. The warmth of his fellow soldiers’ bodies shone red to his eyes; the hum of the generator of the most distant turret on their side was like a distant storm; the Ascended forces reeked of ozone. Hell, he could even smell Tara’s dinner on her fingertips from fifty feet away, and it did have something in common with a wet cat.

  “Thank you, Aileen. How are the systems?”

  “Global positioning is off by about five inches. Shield stress-testing indicates a one-point-two percent chance of overload in case of a concentrated burst hits us. Right arm’s response time to commands is five milliseconds behind the left one—”

  “Got it. Let’s begin.”

  These were minute adjustments that most chose to ignore, but Blake wasn’t most people. If a glitch had a zero-point-one percent chance to kill him, then it warranted half an hour of tweaking before battle. He got to work.

  Long gone were the days when humans fixed machines by hand. Now, kids learned about neural interfaces and micro-repairs in high school. Knowing what to do took study, but what stopped everyone from becoming a mech suit operator was the concentration that was needed.

  Blake stood in ankle-high green grass, watching the setting sun tinge the sky with blood. At the same time, he was inside a maze of interwoven branches of his suit’s logic routines. Aileen was a luminescent tree supported by the bough of hardware, and the branches were chiming like a thousand raindrops striking silver bells. He pruned the unnecessary offshoots and let the system grow where it needed to. Vision-encompassing walls of streaming program code popped up when needed. Without Aileen’s help, even he would be lost.

  It didn’t take long to get the old girl in order, but the eight drones were much worse. He hadn’t run a full diagnostic on them in weeks, and their saplings in the darkness of his mindscape were a tangled mess birthed by an automatic calibration routine gone wrong. He shouldn’t have had that steak after all—now he would have to cut corners.

  Blake was so focused on recalibrating the targeting algorithms that he didn’t notice Tara’s return.

  “We are fine,” she said. “Lieutenant Nicastro isn’t happy that there are still civilians near the artillery positions, but he won’t blame us in the report.”

  Blake motioned for her to go on.

  She said, “We are going with the wedge formation. Me and Sergeant Reis will spearhead the force, the heavy division will back us up, you guys will flank the enemy from both sides. We should be able to break Heatsworth’s offensive and intercept anything trying to get into the city. When they turn to run, we pursue.” She grinned and tensed her fingers as if they had claws. “Delmor sent us five super-heavies to make an example out of the bastards. See the red square mechs in the distance? With guns like these, we only need to get rid of the shields for a second.”

  Blake nodded. Between the calibrations and three other specialists messaging him with questions about problems of their own, he had little attention to spare. Tara didn’t seem very understanding though, judging by the minute spike in her body temperature.

  She said, “Hey, at least say something when people are—”

  That was when the radar started wailing in his ear and everything went to hell.

  Johnson, who stood twenty feet away, got hit in the chest by a red-hot tungsten shell the size of Blake’s fist. The corporal’s shield flared, and he was sent flying along with his three-ton heavy mech like a plastic can kicked by an angry Ascended teen. The sonic booms of artillery fire followed a moment later.

  Blake ejected from his mindscape and slammed the anchoring controls without bothering to shut down the calibrations. Unfortunately, it was the rooting routines he had begun working on, and the emergency earth-bonding spike dropped down only from the left boot. A slug impacted his shields moments later, and Blake felt the system seize in a series of electric flares.

  The frame struggled to stay operational: it wasn’t designed to withstand a direct artillery hit without proper anchoring. Nano-fiber muscles strained to their limit, and he felt something resembling pain in his left leg before he tumbled to the ground as his boot tore several tons of earth and rock out of the ground. He felt something slam into him from the back and stop his fall.

  “Drummond, get your shit together,” Tara ordered. “Now!”

  She bought Blake a few precious seconds. With a thought, he pulled up the backup for the rooting system and rebooted it. The right emergency anchor spike disengaged, making Tara swear as his weight changed, but Blake didn’t care. He needed to tether himself to the ground until the root network would be complete. Meanwhile, one thought had lodged itself into the back of his mind: how the hell did the enemy manage to sneak up on them?

  As soon as the system finished restarting, Blake jumped and stomped hard. Two tiny cylinders burrowed down from the heels of his boots, exploding into a mishmash of strings, clusters, and spikes twenty feet deep, which would hold him in place while everyone did their part to build the network. Nearly a third of their forces had been blasted away in that initial attack, but everyone else joined him, and soon his discharges of magnetic root payloads were followed by others.

  Ground moaned and tore. Myriads of silver glowing blades sprouted out of it like radioactive grass in a science fiction video. The suit locked down onto the ground and stopped spending valuable cartridges. Another shell hit his barriers only to be deflected off its concave surface in the direction of the city.

  “Regroup!” the lieutenant commanded over the intercom. A hastily made battle plan appeared in the lower right corner of Blake’s vision.

  The enemy came in pairs. Greenish spider-shaped humans in ragged clothes and covered in oozing lesions. More than a half of them had a hump, and all had disfigured limbs, as if somebody had invented a steroid that made some muscles bulge, but turned others into withered straps of dried meat. Watery, pain-filled eyes stared at him from featureless lumps of scar tissue in the middle of which he could barely make out a nose and a mouth.

  For one terrible moment, he thought that it was the city and not the rebels. That some medical enthusiast from the street was having fun with chemicals and malfunctioning nanites. Blake fired a shrapnel grenade from a bulky apparatus attached to his left arm. Two pounds of concentrated death landed in the middle of the advancing horde and exploded. Instead of getting a shower of gore, Blake saw the tell-tale shimmer of shields. One protective bubble cracked, and the abomination exploded into a fountain of red in what Blake recognized as barrier overload. Others kept coming.

  Blake snatched up his four-foot blade. Magnets clicked, the sword attached to his right hand, and plasma jets poured out with a roar: an endless parade of blue, green, and red, burning along the edge at different temperatures, draining several fuel cells.

  He sent the drones forward with a t
hought, and everybody else did the same. Blake could see Tara dancing nearby with her dual daggers. His vision blurred when the enemy came in range—the sign of a shield jammer. Blake compensated for it and charged at a hunchback that froze and started to lurch randomly, as if struggling against its uncooperative body. Well, too bad for him.

  Just when he was about to deliver the killing blow—no way their crappy shields could survive a direct slash—an instinct born of decades of experience made him backpedal instead. He barely saw the shadow that darted by where he had just been. They have stealth tech, he thought. The blur smashed against a heavy Republic mech battling nearby. Electricity cracked, something failed, and the monster compressed into a pile of bones and flesh.

  It started to rearrange itself back into a proper shape just as Blake refocused on his own fight.

  One moment the enemy in front of him was having a seizure on all fours and then it was in flight, but this time Blake was ready. Repulsors in his right forearm fired, and the blade made it in time to intercept the attack with a screeching swoosh, only momentarily impeded by barriers before it cleaved the beast in two. Both halves kept twitching after hitting the ground despite black ooze flying everywhere and slimy organs falling onto the ground.

  “I don’t know how they did it, but all of them regenerate,” said Tara. “Super-heavies, we need artillery support. Burn downed enemies to cinder.”

  He could hear the rolling baritone of the turbines and realized they were about to take her orders literally.

  A five-foot-wide tendril of hellfire arced lazily through the air, licked the remains of his enemies, and vaporized them along with one of his drones. This was the second one as he had already lost the first to the crooked blades their strange enemies wielded. He cursed, but there was nothing to be done. They needed to atomize anyone downed.

  Once everyone started getting used to the monsters’ tactics, things got easier. The creatures seemed to have trouble with maintaining control of their movements and covered for this by pairing up. While one of the things crouched on the ground unable to do anything, another pounced on anyone who attacked the seemingly unprotected target. They fought with repurposed plasma torches or, rarely, military blades of some long-outdated make, like falchions. The abominations didn’t have any sort of propulsion to change their direction mid-leap and moved too fast for their own good.