The diminutive alien began spouting a string of nonsensical babble, eyes wide in terror—then let out a blood-curdling scream.
Harper whirled, TSG rising with the motion. Five Ch’mshak had emerged from behind one of the few standing walls and now barreled straight toward them.
Five.
A splinter grenade from Redale knocked one of them out of play, but the other four just brushed off the mortal wounds and kept coming. The rest of the squad opened fire, but the monsters were close—
—a pinpoint laser stream streaked down from above to burn into the advancing enemies and the ground beneath them. When it had passed, only bone shards and viscera scattered around a smoking depression remained.
She exhaled through the adrenaline. She didn’t know their fighter-type craft could hone their fire so precisely, or to so small an area.
Got your back, because I adore you.
She jerked in surprise and peered upward, but the craft that had fired was long gone.
Not going to lie—right now, I’d adore you even if you weren’t sharing my bed. Thanks.
She wanted to say other things, and say them better, but instead she forced her attention back to their still obscenely hazardous situation. “Pello and Benoit, get our rescue to Forward Base 1. The rest of us are heading to see what else is behind this wall.”
Nothing but more wrecked structures and more anarch bodies. Past the wall they had a good view of the remainder of the post, all the way until it abutted an almost sheer mountain face.
She’d only thought the infrastructure had been destroyed up to this point. What remained of the main administration building looked as if it had been hit with an antimatter bomb. Either the Machim had tired of waiting on the Ch’mshak to make it to the rear section of the post, or they’d elected to take out the most strategically crucial buildings at the start.
Movement on her left heralded the arrival of Alpha squad. Malcolm jogged over to her. “Sit rep?”
“We’ve rescued five. That’s all. Five goddamn survivors. Killed…I don’t know, maybe a dozen Ch’mshak.”
“We haven’t fared much better. Think anyone’s left alive up there?”
She considered the ruins ahead, stretching beneath daunting snowdrifts into the mountainous reaches. “No, sir.”
“All the same.” Charlie squad came into sight, clambering across debris to make their way toward the gathering.
Malcolm motioned the Charlie lead over, then glanced down at her leg. She did the same and discovered it was bleeding through the medwrap and the tactical pants. She gave him a shrug.
His voice rose. “Bravo squad, set up defenses and hold this location as an additional forward base. Alpha and Charlie, let’s move ahead. I know it looks bad up there, but we have to check.”
Harper started to protest, knowing damn well her injury was the reason Bravo was being left behind…but the truth was she was gimped, and if heroic actions were required, she would fail.
She sighed. “We have our orders, Bravo. Start gathering together debris for fortifications.”
12
CHIONIS
ANARCH POST ALPHA
* * *
COLD.
Biting, painful cold so frigid Chione herself must have crashed the party to dole out an extra helping of cold….
Something was wrong.
Eren struggled to open his eyes, an act made yet harder due to his eyelashes being in the process of freezing together. He brought a hand up and rubbed on them until they grudgingly parted and his eyes opened.
Wind and snow whipped through the air above him. Because the roof was missing. Most of the walls, too.
Huh—
He sat bolt upright. The attack! Alpha had come under attack—Machim warships in the skies—he’d grabbed a stash of weapons from the armory and rushed to find Cosime—
“Cosime!”
He got a couple of moans in response to his call, but their low, growling tenor meant they weren’t from her. Had he reached her before the building had come crashing down on him? The last seconds of memory were for now a blur, but…maybe?
He started to stand—and collapsed back to the floor with a howl of pain.
All air had left his lungs with the cry, and for a time he forgot how to breathe. When his body finally remembered how to inhale, he gulped air in, froze his throat and twisted around to inspect the damage.
His right leg was broken, and spectacularly so. The tibia had ripped through the skin to jut out at an angle into the open air. It had fucking frost on it.
Pain. Right. There was that, too….
…and it was slowing him down. How many minutes had he been writhing about, panting and hurting in a foggy, doped loop? There was something else he needed to be doing—
He scrambled to get into a position where he was able to look around. Again? “Cosime? Where are you?”
Nothing, not even the moans from before. Dread joined pain in his chest. Think!
He had cut through the admin cafeteria and spotted her on the opposite end of the room, running in the same direction as him. He’d shouted for her to wait, and she’d halted and turned toward him. Then crashing and screaming faded into blackness.
Okay. Where had she been? Next to a table at the far end of the cafeteria…left from where he’d come in, which had been…behind him? He could have fallen in any direction and writhed in any other. But the missing far wall revealed a downward slope instead of a sheer mountain face, so this was the correct direction. His goal was a little to the left and a long way away.
He planted his hands on the floor and began dragging himself through the snow.
Whenever he suicided out in a blaze of glory, he always tried to die quickly, the better to avoid the unpleasant side effects of the process. A couple of times, however, things hadn’t worked out as planned. Twice he had suffered for many agonizing minutes before mercifully losing consciousness, once to asphyxiation in space, once to a gut wound.
Dragging himself across the floor with a maimed leg in tow felt about like those. Both, at once, in fact.
He bumped up against two of the weapons he’d been carrying. He bumped up against a body, then another. He kept moving.
A bright dash of emerald cut into the white palette a few meters ahead. Her eyes? No, ridiculous—but she had been wearing an emerald top! He veered to the left and dragged faster.
Too many agonizing seconds later he reached her. His first thought was relief that no large pieces of debris pinned her, because he was in no condition to be lifting heavy objects. His next thought was considerably darker.
Blood coated her left arm and shoulder to the point he couldn’t tell the extent of the injuries. Lighter flecks of blood decorated hair that otherwise shown pearl upon the snow beneath it. But the blood wasn’t the problem.
Her chest jerked in shallow, fitful motions. Her lips were parted as she stared up at the sky and tried desperately to draw in air. The lines of her spiraire lay crushed into tiny shards beside her.
“Arae, Cosime!” He balanced on one elbow and brought a hand to her face. Her eyes didn’t shift to acknowledge him. Her chest jerked again, after too long a pause, the feeble gasping in of air barely audible.
She was going to suffocate and die if he didn’t do something fast. What the Hades could he do? He couldn’t walk, which meant he couldn’t carry her. And where would he carry her to? There was no safety here, no refuge. He couldn’t create nitrogen out of thin air—
—but he knew someone who maybe, just maybe, could.
Eren: “Caleb, I need you right now.”
Caleb: “Are you at Alpha? Are you hurt?”
Eren: “Yes and yes, but I’m not begging for me. I’m in what’s left of the admin cafeteria.” He peered around for a landmark and belatedly noticed there was an entire war going on outside, down the hill. Smoke and flames curled through the falling snow, punctuated by erratic rumbles and booms. Now that he noticed the activity, it was all very lo
ud and chaotic. Damn, he was in a sorry state. “Way up the mountain from most of the fighting. There’s a large tree split at the base and burnt to a crisp lying about fifteen meters south of me.”
Caleb: “I’ll find you.”
Eren: “Arae, hurry.”
He dropped his forehead to Cosime’s arm, taking care not to put any added weight on her straining chest. He was probably getting her blood in his hair…turnabout was fair play, though. “Don’t you die on me. You can’t. I won’t allow it.”
He listened to her shallow, halting breaths slow and grow more uneven. Panic washed away pain, and he forced himself back up to lean over her. “No, no, no, no, no. Help is coming, so you keep breathing. Godsdammit, you keep breathing!”
Still her eyes didn’t deviate from their fixation on the sky, and he wondered if she was truly seeing anything at all.
“Eren!”
His head whipped around to spot Caleb running toward him from below. “Over here!”
Caleb’s darting gaze took in the scene as he neared them, and he dropped to a crouch the instant he arrived. “What happened?”
“She can’t breathe—she’s suffocating. She needs an…eighty-eight percent nitrogen, eleven percent oxygen and…one percent helium air mixture. Can you create that?”
Caleb’s brow furrowed. He looked as if he’d strode right through the heart of the battle to get here, all covered in snow and blood. Perhaps he had.
“I can try.” He lifted a hand, palm down, to hover half a meter above Cosime’s face. The air beneath his hand gained a faint crimson hue. He frowned, and the crimson grew more pronounced.
Cosime’s chest rose, faltered, and rose again more fully. It fell, and her body stilled for an endless second…then she inhaled, long and deep. Her chest rose, then fell, rose, then fell.
Eren started laughing, or crying, or making generalized hysterical sounds. “Thank you, gods. Thank you, Caleb. I, um, okay. Got to focus. How are we going to get her to safety? I can’t carry her—or walk.”
Caleb glanced down at his leg, and his face screwed up. “Jesus, Eren.”
“It doesn’t matter. Can you take her to wherever someone is treating the wounded? Please tell me someone is treating the wounded, somewhere.”
“I can do so much better than that. One second.” Caleb’s voice dropped to a murmur under his breath. “Mia, are you on Satus?…Great. Can I have your precise location…I don’t give a fuck about Nisi’s security protocols, I need Satus’ location…thank you. Alert the medical staff they’ve got incoming.”
“Get ready.” He lifted Cosime into his arms, placed a hand on Eren’s shoulder—
—and they were kneeling on the floor in a room. A warm room, with walls and a ceiling. Also medical beds and Curative Units and lots of people scrambling around.
“We need help here!”
An Erevna woman spun and looked at him in shock. “Where did you come from?”
“Does it matter? I’ve brought wounded from Post Alpha.”
She hurried over to them, Curative Unit trailing behind. “Get two mobile cots readied.” She directed her doctorly scrutiny at Eren first, for some unknown reason. “Sir, what are your injuries?”
“Other than the obvious, I’ve no idea, and I don’t care. Focus on her.”
The Curative Unit tried to take Cosime from Caleb’s arms, but he turned his shoulder in a protective stance. “I’m maintaining a bubble of the proper air mixture around her face. I have to stay with her until you can get her hooked up to a suitable air supply.”
The doctor blinked in confusion. “You’re Praesidis?”
Caleb exhaled ponderously. “Something like that.”
“We’re going to move her to the cot on this side here. Ready?”
Caleb stood to follow. When he reached the cot, he gently laid Cosime down on it. The doctor wound two tubes out from the wall, fitted them into a mask and placed it over Cosime’s mouth and nose. “Naraida air supply established. Unit C-3, I want diagnostics on her chest cavity in case there are internal injuries, then of her left shoulder and upper arm.”
She pivoted to Eren, who had used various furniture to pull himself up to a standing position and clung feebly to a cabinet. “Now, you—off the leg before you fall and shatter what’s left of your tibia. A Curative Unit will see to cleansing and disinfecting the area…eventually.” She reached in her lab coat pocket and removed a vial filled with liquid. “For now, painkillers will have to do.”
Eren sighed, briefly interrupting the grimace he wore. “I should decline them, but…frankly, right now I’m not that strong. Load me up.”
“First, let’s get you on a cot.”
Caleb helped him over to the next empty cot. He gritted his teeth to keep from screaming as Caleb carefully lifted his busted leg up and positioned it alongside the non-busted one. Nope, not anywhere close to that strong. There was nothing else he could do to help Cosime, to help anyone including himself.
But what of the others? He had been consumed with pain and cold and Cosime to the exclusion of all else, and only now did the reality of his home, his friends, his colleagues all being under attack penetrate his addled mind. He frantically started pinging comms.
The doctor motioned in grudging approval, and Caleb gave him a once-over. “Well, you look like shit, but they’ll take care of you. I need to get back out there.”
Eren’s hand shot out to grab Caleb’s arm. “Wait. Felzeor—he was supposed to be evacuating to Charlie, albeit under protest, but I don’t think he made it to the teleportation gate. I just checked, and he’s not answering any comms.”
“The teleportation gate’s been destroyed. The whole building’s been destroyed. If he’s not already at Post Charlie….”
“He saw the attack coming and warned us. He saved dozens if not hundreds of lives.”
“I’ll find him.”
SIYANE
CHIONIS STELLAR SYSTEM
MILKY WAY SECTOR 59
How the hell was he going to find Felzeor inside a smashed complex of buildings three hundred meters wide and twice as long?
Caleb had gotten the comm address and started pinging Felzeor immediately, but the Volucri hadn’t responded to him, either. Maybe his translator was damaged—or maybe Felzeor was damaged.
He teleported from Satus back to the Siyane and found Alex mid-destruction of a Machim fighter. On the ground, among the snow, fighting and very visceral death, he’d almost forgotten about the battle underway above the planet. But up here, it continued to rage unabated. Out the viewport, tens of thousands of ships large and small soared and fired, spun and exploded—
—including the Machim fighter.
Alex peered over her shoulder at him as she casually veered to avoid the debris. “Do I even need to say it?”
He glanced down and realized blood had soaked into his shirt and much of his pants. “Okay, but it’s not mine.”
“Eren? Is he all right?”
“He’s not in great shape, but he’ll…well, obviously he’ll live, but this time probably without the help of regenesis. Cosime, I’m not so confident about.” He dropped a hand on the cockpit dash and leaned in beside Alex. “Can you leave the battle for a few minutes to go to the surface and circle what’s left of the upper main complex? I want you to scan for life signs.”
“I can, but is there any chance you could be a bit more specific as to what we’re hunting for? I expect, or hope, that we’ll pick up a number of life signs, so what do we do then? The Marines are already on the ground wading through the Ch’mshak to reach survivors.”
“We need to find Felzeor. Eren said he was on site and headed for the teleportation gate, but now he’s not answering comms.”
Her face fell. “Shit. There are a lot of bodies down there—fighting, injured, dead—and he doesn’t cut that large of a profile. I don’t see how we’ll be able to identify him through all the noise. Not from the air.” She politely left out the ‘even if he’s alive’ p
art, but she must be thinking it. He was thinking it.
‘I can find him.’
He and Alex shared an uneasy look. “What do you mean, Valkyrie? By modifying the scan parameters? Or are you saying your consciousness projection can locate him?”
‘Yes. The latter, that is. In my testing I have confirmed that I can detect and distinguish individual life signs at eighty meters distance with a high degree of fidelity. From a position on or just above the surface, I will be able to conduct a far more precise search than the Siyane can perform at the minimum safe altitude.’
“It’s ugly down there. We’re talking about an active combat zone, with widespread gunfire and bombing runs.”
‘Weapons cannot harm me.’
Caleb chuckled kindly. “An excellent point. Alex, will you and the ship be safe?” He gazed out the viewport in concern. It looked as if they might be winning, but too many Machim vessels remained for him to be certain. “I know you’ve tested the effects of her absence, but this isn’t exactly idling on a landing platform.”
She nodded firmly. “I will. I can fly without her. Did it for years.”
“And quite skillfully, as I recall. If you’re sure.” He drew in closer and kissed her softly. “Don’t push your limits, please? Let the rest of the fleet take the risks for once.”
She smiled a little as he stepped back. “I’ll try, but…no promises.”
He sighed in acceptance. He’d recognized its futility as soon as he’d voiced the request. “Stubborn as ever. Okay, Valkyrie. Meet me at the coordinates I’m sending you.”
CHIONIS
ANARCH POST ALPHA
The snow cover makes the blood stand out in stark relief, as if someone painted scarlet graffiti indiscriminately across the landscape.
Valkyrie de-prioritized her emotional processes. Her presence here was not an experiment in fostering personal growth; her presence here was an attempt to facilitate the saving of lives.
Caleb materialized off to her left. A crimson shimmer—brighter than the blood—encased him to form a reinforced protective layer of diati. He briefly gazed to his right down a slope littered with half-fallen buildings and smoldering debris, to where the core of the fighting raged. Then he turned from it and strode toward her. “What do you see?”
Requiem: Aurora Resonant Book Three (Aurora Rhapsody 9) Page 11