by Alex Kirko
Four columns were placed along the perimeter of the room. Black cables went out of walls, floor, and ceiling, wound around the columns, merged, and then broke into a thousand strands that plugged into four clusters of ports on the central platform. Those were multiple power sources, Blake knew. Tiniest fluctuations in electrical supply could turn the regeneration process disastrous, and half of these wires were backups upon backups averaging the current into a perfectly flat stream of energy. The other half were not wires but nanite supply to be used during Ascension. Even if the chamber had never been used, the Council kept it ready.
He walked to the north column. A loud bang sounded from the door, and a bulge appeared on its surface. Another strike made the bulge bigger, and the seam ruptured an inch.
He said, “During the colonization era ships were outfitted with these chambers to preserve crucial personnel like engineers and scientists and farmers. There was a single power supply that came into the capsule from the drive through the floor. A spaceship engine doesn’t like power fluctuations too.” Blake reached down and started setting explosive charges around the column. He said, “These aren’t reinforcing anything. They are here just to cover up the holes that were in the original chambers. Ascension is a fucked-up procedure, something the creators of these capsules couldn’t even dream of. There is no longer any margin for error: the power supply must be steady, and the nanites must come here right after getting produced. It takes half a major city’s computing power and a shitload of electricity to make it work.”
He looked at his work, making sure there were enough explosives and additional chemicals. Blake took five steps back. Nat and Mel had picked the regeneration capsule up and now carried it on their right shoulders, like two giants transporting a coffin. Behind the capsule, near where Sheong stood, a spike of angry plasma appeared between the doors and started cutting where they had fused the door panels together. It took the blade three seconds to cut a tenth of its way down.
“Turn off your audio for three seconds,” Blake said.
He pressed a button.
The light hit before the concussive wave. The suit locked onto the anchoring system permeating the floor. He reeled a little, and the artificial muscles tensed in effort. Blake saw the capsule get jostled and fly out of Nat’s arms, but Mel somehow managed to hold it for a second while the other woman restored her grip. By this point, more than half the door had been cut through.
“Drummond, where is the hole?” Nat asked.
He gestured to the left of the column, where snapped cables were smoking. He said, “Step over here and jump.”
Nat said, “Sheong, we are leaving.”
The soldier shook his head from across the room and activated his short plasma blade. “Go,” he said. “I’ve got four friends who are probably dead under this damn city. I won’t let you—”
Blake jumped ten feet up and crashed into the floor with all his weight. The corrosives he had placed above the explosives had seeped into the cable canals and eroded the metal. The ground tore, and he, Nat, and Mel fell. They landed in a room with memory banks that could contain anything.
“Sheong, get out of there!” said Nat. “You can’t hold them.”
“Not long enough to matter, anyway,” said Blake as he led Nat and Mel out a door.
The only response from above was a reverberating crash and a scream of twisting metal. They entered a circular hall that surrounded most archive floors, and Blake heard a fight beginning above. “I give him twelve seconds,” said Aileen.
The tower exterior wasn’t armored on normal floors, so he ignited a plasma dagger and burned a hole between wall sections. He released the last of explosives he had from his left forearm, set the detonator to three seconds, plunged the explosive cylinder into the opening, and stepped to the side.
The blast kicked up a cloud of metal and plastic dust that exploded into gold as the high-temperature charge burned most of it. It was always better to burn through a wall than blow it up. Two squad mates of his once got buried under debris because they accidentally destroyed a support beam.
Nat looked back. “Think he could have made it?” There was no hope in her voice. He said, “We aren’t waiting. Give it here, I can evade better.” Blake grabbed the regeneration capsule from Nat and Mel.
He stepped to the opening and looked down. The ground was at least a thousand feet below. People were scurrying between tiny buildings, seeking shelter. Blake was on the north side of the Archives, and he could see the bridge across the Musicians District leading out of the caldera. He heard somebody crash to the floor behind them. The comms were still silent, and Blake grit his teeth. Sheong wasn’t coming. “Shit. Wish we could at least bring the body,” he said. He crouched, steadied the capsule with both arms, and jumped. There was a moment of acceleration and then he was flying in an arc, weightless. Repulsors whirred into life. Aileen overloaded them, changing their sound to a frantic whine.
“Drummond, slow down!” ordered Nat. “We won’t be able to protect you when you land.”
He angled the repulsors to the ground. The arc he was making across the sky angled upward, and he saw one, two, three bolts of angry red pierce where he would have been had he not changed course.
Aileen said, “We need to get to where we can anchor ourselves.”
“Yeah, if they blow us in a random direction there is no telling where we’ll land. Get us down and evade on the way,” he replied.
Tiny flickers of blue appeared around his stomach area, and cerulean cones blasted out of them, cancelling his forward momentum. He saw that the inertial dampeners were working at one hundred and twenty percent of recommended capacity. The acceleration was enough to liquefy an astronaut of old.
An artillery slug roared fifty feet ahead and exploded into a multicolored sphere of plasma. Blake hoped his companions would make it. He flipped in the air, turned upside down, and added the thrust from his feet repulsors to gravity. Wind whipped against his face as he focused on the ground rushing at him. Landing without breaking his legs or the capsule would be tricky.
A magnetically-contained ball of crimson headed for him, but he blasted sideways, and it flew into the sky. He was only a hundred feet above ground now.
Something dark streaked in the corner of his vision, and Aileen tried to twist them out of the way, but she couldn’t properly compensate for the capsule they carried. An explosion roared against his shields, and shrapnel streaked across the purplish membrane. It did, however, hit him from below and blast him into a glass dome sitting in the middle of a square. Another slug whooshed by, and he barely had time to feel relieved when it exploded twenty feet from him without hitting anything. Programmable payload.
The secondary explosion sent him flipping through the air, crashing through the glass, trying to orient himself in the spinning world, and then there was the terrible sound like a harpooned whale screaming at his moment of death. Blake grit his teeth and let Aileen guide him. His vision expanded to three hundred sixty degrees and what had seemed like wailing animals became the sound of woonkas—overfed reed instruments that only people with long fingers could play.
He reached forward with his left arm and blasted a short burst out of his left hand. It didn’t stop the spinning, but it did send him careening feet-first into a wall. The reinforced plastic creaked but held, and he righted himself and slid down. The music had stopped by that point.
He looked to the center of the dome and saw two dozen teenagers looking at him with eyes wide-open in fear, their fingers still resting on oversized brass cousins of the saxophone. He felt awkward. “Keep going, that should have been a b-flat,” he said.
Blake ran to the entrance. The doorway slid shut before he could reach it.
“Let’s see if they build things differently in Mortenton,” said Aileen.
He readjusted the regeneration capsule on his shoulder, lowered his center of gravity and kicked the door out. Metal whimpered for a second and then went silent as t
he panel flew toward a group of musicians who had stopped in the street to see what the commotion was about. They dove out of the way, but one girl wasn’t fast enough, and the door panel caught her in the shoulder with a thud and pinned her to a wall.
A siren was blaring. Everyone was running away and noticing him made them run faster. Nat and Mel were galloping down the road toward him, people getting out of their way and pressing against the walls. He took a second to get to the restrained girl and shoved the door off her. She blinked up at him with unseeing eyes.
“Drummond, the capsule?” asked Nat.
“It’s fine, but I can’t dodge worth jack while carrying it. Got hit in the air. Cover me.”
An explosion rang from the south. His wireless connection crackled, but Blake didn’t pay it much attention. He kept running north, toward the bridge leading out of the city. A stray mech appeared from an alley to the right, but Nat batted it away without stopping. When the three of them were two blocks from the bridge, Blake ducked into an alley to the left. He wasn’t used to the capsule, which was as heavy as him, and instead of skidding into a sharp turn, he lost his balance, stumbled, and was forced to throw the artifact into the air, right himself with a repulsor blast, and catch it. He could hear footsteps pattering to them from all directions. He pushed Aileen some more.
Just as Blake was approaching the door, there was a rush of air, and a giant shape landed in front of them with a resounding crack. Nat rushed past him with her spear but stopped.
“Ryan?” she asked. “You are alive.”
“Don’t sound so surprised, boss.”
Blake hadn’t expected to see anyone from the other team, but if anyone could make it, it would be Ryan. The man was brilliant at electronic warfare and stealth. Still, his suit bore multiple burns, and Blake saw purple arcs of energy flash in disjointed web patterns around him—his shields were shot. Across one shoulder he carried Irene in her tiny mech. She had gotten hit at some point, and there was a hole in her side that was coated over with her suit’s emergency layer.
Irene twitched, raised her hand, and the door to the depot opened. “We need to get out of here,” she said, her voice coming with a soft wheeze of damaged systems.
Blake bent down, squeezed through the door, pried it open some more, and started running up the emergency stairway. Everyone followed.
“The others?” asked Nat.
“Dead,” said Ryan. “I would have stayed, but I needed to get Irene out.”
“You said you didn’t want to explain why we died earlier than them to our parents in the afterlife,” said Irene. “Funny.”
“Shush, little swallow.”
It took them three minutes to reach the top of the building. He and Ryan spent this time hacking their way through the city grid, creating phantom traces of their group to distract the Mortenton guards long enough to execute the plan.
The door at the top didn’t present any difficulty. Even in her half-conscious state, Irene opened it with a flick of her wrist. “Stupid Mortenton,” she said. “Isolating the locks is smarter.”
Blake didn’t bother telling her that Mortenton probably couldn’t afford security without remote control. If supports snapped, entire blocks could plummet into the caldera, so people needed to be able to evacuate as quickly as possible.
Nat motioned everyone to stop. She opened the door, and Blake could see a technician who was gripping a plasma torch. Nat rushed him, struck the man with the butt of her spear and sent him crashing into a corner. Mel ran to the terminal at the back of the room.
“I hear footsteps at the bottom floor, Blake,” said Aileen.
“They’ve figured it out,” he said out loud. “Mel, hurry.”
The girl didn’t answer for ten seconds, and then the ceiling began to slide open. The floor started to rise, and he could hear the growing murmur of magnetic accelerators.
“Get to the capsule,” he said.
He set it vertically on the floor, and everyone stepped up to it, turned around, and backed up against its metal surface. With a series of clangs, super-magnets on their backs engaged.
“Drummond, if this idea of yours works, I’m buying you replacement repulsors,” said Ryan.
Irene could hardly stand, but everyone else was just battered.
“Launch in three seconds,” said Mel.
The platform they were on reached the opening in the ceiling, and the floor tilted at a precise angle. He expected a countdown of some sort.
Acceleration hit him like a raging bull, and Blake felt all the joints in his suit lock as the inertial dampeners screeched to keep him from turning into a tin can of goo. In seconds, they arced over the city, over the caldera, and over the volcano. They were falling toward the plain at the foot of Mortenton’s volcano now.
“Well, shit,” said Nat. “You’ve done this before, Drummond. Any advice on landing?”
He said, “Don’t fall unconscious and blast whatever you have left in your repulsors five seconds before impact. Let’s rotate so that Irene doesn’t hit the ground first.”
9
Enemy Beds
“Does the apartment building have a gaming room? Petey loves learning, and we can’t afford a virtual reality set.”
Tara blinked trying to dispel the illusion, but it didn’t help. She was still in her office, still in charge of relocating immigrants from Lankershire to their new homes, and there was still a family of two moms and a child in front of her. Petey, three years old, was examining the ceiling and picking his nose. He found a booger, put it on his nail, and was scrutinizing it with the seriousness of a scientist unravelling the secrets of the universe.
She didn’t go into the military to deal with this shit.
“Miss, are you listening?”
Tara focused on her Mary persona, the dutiful secretary excited about her job and not disgusted by children contemplating eating their mucus if it looked good enough.
She smiled politely. “Yes, of course. The building has a place for your tyke to play, but it might be a tad crowded until we clear the rubble around the tower and rebuild some of the playground complexes. Just for the questionnaire: why did you leave Lankershire?”
The two women looked at each other for a moment. The taller one, Maria, said, “Frankly, the place isn’t bad now, but there are so many terrible memories there. The previous Count, he prohibited same-sex parenting, unless you were willing to entertain him and his people. We hid our relationship there, and we got away from Lankershire as soon as we could.”
Mary gasped and made some notes. “Well, you don’t need to worry about any of that here. Welcome to Seind, ladies.”
The smile lasted until the pair took their devil-spawn and left. She felt the mask slip from her face and rubbed her cheeks to get the muscles to relax. She would get wrinkles from all this smiling. The clock on the wall said it was three in the afternoon. Mary had four more hours of office time.
The door opened, and a young man with thinning blonde hair peered in. He said, “I’m next, may I come in?”
She caressed the heavy seal of her office for a moment, thinking how easy it would be to knock him out with a good throw. “I’m sorry, but I need to organize the files of the previous clients,” she said. “Please wait five minutes.”
The man left.
By now she had spent nearly a month in Seind, and she felt like she blended in perfectly. Playing Mary was fun, but she needed to get promoted. Dealing with people and faking a smile for hours every day was enough to make her snap. She was beginning to consider staging a murder across the hall just to get a break.
There was a knock, and she gripped the seal again. The door opened, and Kate looked in wearing the earrings Mary had helped her pick out a week ago. “Hey, Mary, you got a minute?” she asked. “I want you to meet someone.”
“Are they outside the building?”
“What? Yes, they are outside. I think you are ready to work with our Ascended forces. Those in active service
go through other channels, but some haven’t healed after taking Seind.”
“Thank all that is holy. I could use a walk.”
Mary stood up, gathered her things, and walked out of the office. There were at least twenty people in the hall waiting for their turn. This time, her smile was sincere. She said, “I’m sorry but I need to admit a disabled soldier, so please go down that hall, second door on the right. My colleague Tyler will take care of you.” She nodded at them and hurried after Kate. Tyler was an asshole, so a double load would do him good.
She caught up to Lind. “Kate, I didn’t know you made house calls. Scientists do that?”
“I could send someone else, I suppose, but I know what these men and women have sacrificed for us. Besides, observing how injured people heal helps with my work on Ascension. Turn here.”
The alley had everything: blocks of plastic, metal, and artificial stone littered the ground. A rusted beam stuck from where it had embedded itself into a wall during the battle. They ducked under it and approached the back of an obsidian residential tower. Kate fiddled with her personal assistant for a moment before she cursed, switched it off, put her hand on a brown door in the side of the building, and closed her eyes. A short beep followed seconds later, the door opened, and they walked into an elevator. There was a loud thunk, and the platform began to climb, passing drab brown doors on every floor. The trip took a minute and ended on the thirty-second level.
Faint music was pouring from somewhere. A string of kids ran by. Under the Republic rule, children went into the education system at the age of four, and parents saw little of them except on holidays. Why anyone would want a tiny template of a human, she couldn’t guess. Republic maintained that raising children was the job of a professional. A throng of three eight-year-olds barreled into her and Kate, nearly knocking them off their feet.
“A lot of people moving in,” said Kate. “How are you holding up?”
“I don’t know. I mean, it’s great to have a job—I can’t thank you enough. But, you know, I processed maybe fifty people today? Everyone in Seind is still confused, and the people from Lankershire . . . Actually, I’ve been meaning to ask you something.” Mary breathed deep and sidestepped a clump of laughing young men who weren’t watching where they were going. “Screw it, are all the couples in Lankershire gay?”