by Alex Kirko
A massive stainless-steel table dominated the room, and five people in white coats orbited around it. The ceiling projectors all focused on it, and computer consoles and measuring equipment bleeped excitedly along the walls. Two transparent chambers stood at the wall across from him, and one had a white mech in it. Blake hacked the decontamination shower and stepped through the glass doors. A short man with a mop of dark-blonde hair turned his head in Blake’s direction. The lead scientist yelled at the guy for getting distracted, so he jerked back to work without giving the doors a second glance.
The leader waved his hands at his helpers. “No-no-no, what are you doing, people, we need ten milligrams of pheromtazine, not five! Up the stasis field by three percent. Allan, is the suit disconnected yet?”
The short guy who had noticed Blake’s entrance said, “No, Doctor Reeves. The backlash would kill him.”
“Shit, whoever the hell came up with the idea to hook up the human brain to the mech like a secondary processor needs a good kick to the face. The injections are done? Good. Stimulate electric activity in the cortex and isolate the mech’s influence. I’m going in.”
Doctor Reeves grabbed an ultrasonic saw off the side of the table, bent over the table and began opening the patient’s skull. Blake moved closer.
One of these new white mechs was lying on the table. The front of it had been torn open like a tin can, and parts were littering the lab floor. Inside the suit there was a man. He was six feet tall and didn't weigh a hundred pounds fully dressed. Parchment skin was drawn taut against the bird bones and vestiges of muscles. The face was sunken, and the body was yellowish where it wasn’t black. Blake could see the beginning of necrosis on the fingers and toes, and he realized that him rotting alive was what was making the room smell like an abandoned meat market. The man’s eyes were open and red, and they were darting across the room, independent from each other, sometimes rolling into the back of his skull. He twitched from time to time, but the atrophied muscles and whatever the scientists had pumped into him didn’t allow for much movement.
Reeves said, “Militaristic dumbasses. Don’t they know that the pilot can’t stay unconscious? I specialize in regeneration, and even I know that.”
“Doctor Reeves, sir?” asked the blond-haired technician. “I think I saw somebody come in.”
“Shut it, Patterson, there are forty mechs guarding this building. General Ryuu will take our hides if we don’t find out what happened to this poor bloke. Hand me the beta-wave analyzer.”
Blake still stood frozen behind the scientist, staring at the grey-pink mass of what made up the pilot’s personality and flinching as Doctor Reeves dived into the brain with scalpel, electric stimulator, and scanner.
“Blake, they are our enemies,” said Aileen.
“He is dying. Just lying there, his body turned against him. They have a chance to save him.”
“He isn’t you, Blake,” she said. “And they aren’t going to save him. The best they can do is buy some time to learn what went wrong. And if they do, the Republic will think they got it, that they have outsmarted the Kamarkvat Directive.” She paused. “And that tangle that almost tore you apart? It’s that sleeping mech. It will wake up in a few minutes.”
Blake shifted uneasily, allowing himself a final moment of hesitation before he stuffed his emotions deep enough to ignore having them in the first place. The five scientists were all crowded around the patient’s head. The easiest thing to do would be to decapitate the lot and be done with it, but they weren’t combatants.
Aileen said, “We can’t afford to have them raise the alarm before we are out of here.”
Blake didn’t answer. He stepped behind the group and redirected some of the power supply to the surface of his suit. He spread his arms and hugged them all at the waist level.
As the surgeon spasmed, the scalpel in his hand jerked and split open his patient’s brain like an overripe watermelon. The seizing eyes froze, the left one staring at Blake. Spittle flew everywhere, and one of the scientists elbowed another, breaking a rib with a snap that could hardly be heard among the commotion. For three seconds, it was like holding a bundle of writhing eels.
Blake stopped the current and dropped them. He bent down, grabbed Reeves, slung him over his shoulder, and ran out engaging the stealth systems on the way.
“Did they get an emergency broadcast out?” he asked Aileen.
“No, but there were life monitors on them that I disabled. The network will sound the alarm and reboot the security measures any second. We’ll be locked out.”
The stealth field wrapped around the doctor, bending light and muffling sound, but it wasn’t nearly as good as when used with the suit’s specialized armor surfaces. Blake bolted out of the building before the doors were fully open, scrambled the sensors around him with no subtlety at all, and began running for the tree line. There was a patrol of four mechs twenty feet to his right. The one in front stopped and turned in his direction. Blake could feel the growing buzz of radio chatter around him, but he was already picking up speed. Ten miles per hour, twenty, thirty.
The alarm began blaring throughout the camp.
“We are locked out,” said Aileen.
The mech patrol began moving, and their speed wasn’t constrained by a human that didn’t have inertial dampeners to keep him from crumpling like a used blood bag if Blake pulled some evasive maneuvers.
There was a soft click of comms.
“Blake, over here!” Nat called, and a soft blue beacon appeared at the coordinates she sent. He legged it there fast enough to bruise Reeves but hopefully not fast enough to kill him.
A plasma grenade whizzed over. He swung Reeves off his shoulder like a bag of grain, clutched him to his suit’s chest, and wrapped his shields around them both. The world exploded in white and orange, but he kept running. Aileen recalibrated the sensors, and he saw his captive was still alive.
Nat descended from the trees like a fallen angel. Her spear blazed in the dim light of the jungle as she impaled the rear-most white mech in the group through the neck.
The ground behind Blake exploded in a burst of cerulean—a mine blew up—and he saw two arrows fly from the darkness, spinning and spreading four colors of plasma from the exhausts along the shafts. He saw them slam into the shields of one of the mechs, the first one overloading the energy field and the second one burning through the chest. The man stumbled, fell to one knee, and began rising again.
Before the shields could recover, Blake stabbed him in the forehead, burning through armor, bone, and brain in less than a second.
“The pilots are on life support,” he said. “You need to decapitate them, or they’ll keep fighting.”
One of the remaining pair lurched toward the kidnapped doctor while firing streams of plasma from armored white hands. The attack slammed into Blake’s already drained shielding and brought it to twenty percent. He risked a weak repulsor blast while holding the doctor’s head to protect him from whiplash. The enemy mech dashed after him, and the second one jumped over Blake, trying to cut him off.
He raised his left arm and used the momentary respite to switch to another shield capacitor. The white shadow overhead whipped a charge out, and blew it up between the two of them. Blake tensed as the explosion washed over, blinding him and dropping both his shields and the shields of his opponents to zero. His vision came back and he cursed, dodging out of the way of a plasma tanto and straight into the path of the other mech’s slash.
There was a light rustle, and three shadows came out from behind trees.
Kia and Steph went for the mech about to stab Blake. Steph hacked his hand off in one strike, and Kia flipped over the man, grasped his head with both her hands and twisted it along with the helmet off his neck. Blood spattered and sizzled over Blake’s shielding.
Roy materialized with his blade already through the other enemy’s skull.
“There is an energy build-up at the far edge of the camp,” said Aileen.<
br />
“Shit, we need to get out of here,” he said to the others.
Nat turned to the mechs they had cut down. “We could use the bodies to examine the technology—” She turned her head. “What’s that sound?”
Blake said, “The artillery heating the molten metal.”
“Right,” said Nat. “Let’s move. Keep the captive alive. Break up into three groups and spread out decoys.”
They scattered into the jungle, activated their shields, and threw thermal charges in a fan. Branches cracked under his feet as they ran, and one time a group of sentries dashed out of a tree and began chasing him, Nat, and Ryan, but the pursuers weren’t fast enough. Not when he didn’t need to change direction, and certainly not after they had trained in the jungle for weeks.
He heard the shuffle of Crawlers before he saw them.
A wall of greenish bodies lurched out of the jungle at them, but it parted before Blake and closed right after.
“Go,” said a malformed Butcher staring at him and Nat with a sky-blue eye from under a scarred eyebrow. Pink burns were sprouting on his skin in the now-overcast sunlight. “We’ll hold them off.”
13
Moira’s Interlude
“You are being paranoid, Moira. Mary isn’t a Council spy: it’s been a month and I haven’t seen her do anything suspicious. She’s just a girl from a second-rate Ascended family, who came to Seind in search of a better life.” Kate clicked her tongue. “Don’t you have better things to do anyway? I’ve seen Kyle around—he’s been asking for you.”
Moira made a note on her personal assistant. They were sitting in Kate’s apartment after work hours, and she was using this time both to question her friends and get some nourishment. She thrust her finger deeper into the nutrient bag and absorbed some more ground flesh and blood. She had been neglecting her diet lately. Her list of potential Council operatives was long, and Mary Dorheftung was near the top.
“Arthur?” she asked.
“Honestly, Moira. The girl even volunteered to help some of our boys who didn’t handle the transition well.”
“Lyndon was looking into her. I’m just following up.”
Kate said, “Lyndon says it’s not paranoia if it keeps you alive, but I think this is taking it too far. If he had more than a suspicion, then Mary would be the one getting questioned. Moira, what’s going on?”
Moira kept staring at Arthur. He shivered under her gaze and retreated deeper into the shadows in the corner. His malformed face twitched, attempted a frown, and creased all over instead. “Mary is a good girl even if she is prickly as a cactus,” said Arthur. “Reasonable at helping vets with chores, but I’ve never seen anyone as good at steering soldiers away from despair.”
Moira turned to Kate. “This was not what I meant when I said you could give your recruits whatever work you chose.”
The biologist shrugged. “I don’t see a problem. We are understaffed, and Mary is compassionate and candid. Besides, the soldiers don’t have any classified information—not like they could see anything in the pitch-black chambers during Ascension. Well, Patrick is more knowledgeable about Lankershire than even Kyle, but he knows when to keep his mouth shut.”
She felt something warp inside her chest. They were her friends, and here she sat keeping secrets from them and grilling them as if they were the enemy. Moira sighed. “You can’t tell her.”
Kate rolled her eyes. “Dear, I wasn’t born yesterday. You are my friend and a superior, no matter how unreasonable you get when you go a week without sleep.”
“I’m searching for my biological sister, Tara Linheld, so I’m looking into every female Ascended with access to anything sensitive.”
Kate cocked her head to the side. “And what evidence do you have except for both the names having two syllables?” Moira began to bristle, but Kate continued. “No, I’m serious. Our apartment has a DNA scanner, and the City Hall has one too. Mary checks in daily, and she visits us at least twice a week. The machine would know. Those scramblers Council spies get caught with aren’t good enough.”
Moira stepped to the kitchen counter and poured herself a glass of water. Even Ascended needed to drink normal water from time to time, and she was parched. “I don’t know. Maybe she can transform like me? She couldn’t have gotten out of the city.”
Kate walked up to her, hugged her, and laid her head on Moira’s shoulder. “Honey, when your sister escaped, how much time did it take for you and yours to encode her DNA into the city defenses?”
Moira felt herself relax a little into her friend’s embrace. She was so tired. “An hour. But she isn’t in the logs, I checked. And she was badly wounded.”
“Logs can be tampered with. It’s much easier than fooling the city sensors. Moira, let go. I’ve lived next to Mary for a month. She works, she watches video series with me, she goes out to clubs.” She stepped back. “Let’s say she were your sister and could hide from the sensors through some magical non-existent powers. What would you do?”
Moira didn’t answer, but she felt her features tighten as she thought of almost a century of humiliation and depravity that she had suffered because of her family. “She didn’t come to find me,” she said. “She didn’t, and my parents didn’t. They just left me there, with him.”
Kate watched her for a few moments and shook her head. “I can’t help you. My advice? Have some rest, visit a shrink. It’s a war, so if you two survive, you’ll meet again on the battlefield. But think about it: what did she do to you that you now want to kill her?”
Moira wondered what kind of expression she had for Kate to come to that conclusion. I don’t want to kill Tara, she thought. She wanted . . . something. She’d know when she saw her again. All that rage was burning her up, and if only she could find her sister, she knew it would get better. She said, “Maybe you are right. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t say anything to Mary. No need to distress her. Sorry for bothering you this late, Kate.”
Moira stepped out of Kate’s apartment, started walking down the hall, and then stopped. There was Mary’s door, as nondescript as any other in the building.
Surely it wouldn’t hurt if she looked? Maybe then she would be able to sleep.
Mary fished out the key to the city out of a back pocket, inserted it into a slot on her personal assistant and punched in the override code. The door opened with a soft hiss, and the lights turned on.
14
Sisters
Tara entered the code for a large nutrition bag and paid. The unoiled machine screeched and spit out the plastic packet of something brown and disgusting into her hand.
She felt like at any moment her frustration with Blake might break apart the prison she had built for it, and she would start screaming. Why did men always take the idiotic choice when it counted? First what her father did to her sister and then—this. She knew that in Seind it looked like the Federation could win the war, but even Tara could do math, and Blake was supposed to be smarter than her—with a diploma and everything. The Republic had too many mechs and Ascended for two cities and a village of ancient nomads to overcome. Not unless a hundred thousand Freefolk were hiding in the jungle.
She checked the supplies. Three bags of food for the road and four batteries to recharge her shields if they failed. Now all she needed to do was to go to her apartment, destroy all the evidence, get the data she had gathered on the Federation, and head to Mark’s place for the electro-magnetic bomb and the blueprints for the city’s security system. Tara decided to see Mark first.
He had moved shop since their meeting a week ago and set up in the maintenance tunnels of the city rapid transit network below the manufacturing district. It took Tara five minutes to find the manhole. She eventually saw the blinking red strip of the DNA detector hidden between the worn-down wall of an abandoned factory and the ground. Tara bent down and lowered her wrist to the light. The sensor cycled two times and flashed green. The stone near her shifted down with a heavy thump and slid to the si
de, revealing a ladder. Tara climbed down.
As much as Council cities were forests of golden towers above, they were labyrinths of intertwined communications below. Water, nutrients, information, electricity—everything flowed somewhere down here. She could see Mark’s tracks in the dust. It didn’t look like anyone had been in this hallway for years before him.
She walked up to a solid black door reinforced with pale-green shielding and pressed the doorbell. The camera on the ceiling clicked and turned to her. Tara waited.
The shields blinked off, and she heard a heavy wheel turning on the other side, drawing the metal studs back into the door. Belying its obvious weight, the plate of reinforced alloy swung on thumb-thick hinges without a sound, and Mark’s head peeked out. His artificial eyes scanned the hallway independently from each other, then he nodded and motioned her inside.
“Hurry,” he said.
The room behind the door was no more than fifty square feet, and the walls were lined with boxes, most of them labelled Incinerate. The lone console across the opposite wall had the markings of official Seind property. It had a bulky drive plugged into it, and a blue process bar crawled on the holographic screen displaying Deleting files, eighty-five percent complete.
Mark himself was rubbing his hands, glancing at the door she had closed behind her, at the boxes stashed around the room, and at the console. He gulped and focused on her with obvious effort.
“Hi, Mark, you moving out of Seind?” she asked.
The lenses on his eyes clicked and extended an inch. He said, “You don’t know? Right, what am I saying, I’m your contact, nobody could tell you. Look, the Council is planning to take back the city. I’m not supposed to tell you this, but I have other ears in town, and it doesn’t look good. Seems like the Republic is bringing big guns this time, but the Federation has some secret plan for protecting the place.”