by Joel Dane
Behind me, Basdaq takes a hit at an angle his armor can’t deflect, and I think he’s dead until Shakrabarti reports that he’s got a smashed sternum and a punctured lung and a crappy haircut.
Only Pico laughs.
We keep shooting, the patriots keep falling—but the advance doesn’t break. The sizzle of fire in the corridor isn’t as loud as the explosions from the street, which isn’t as loud as my heartbeat. The red blotch surges closer, a boom makes the walls tremble, and Elfano shakes off a glancing hit.
“Sweet biyo,” she snarls, a phrase the squad adopted from Ting.
Cali screams in rage or ecstasy, Pico sidesteps toward Elfano to check that she’s okay, and M’bari eats a weird shock round that lays him on his ass.
“Medic!” Shakrabarti calls. “M’bari’s hit!”
Voorhivey reacts instantly, staying low and racing for M’bari—and new red marks blink on my display.
Enemy weapons are springing to life nearby.
CHAPTER 47
For a heartbeat, the onslaught in the hallway distracts me. Then I register what I’m seeing: a few dozen hostiles are hiding inside two apartments just in front of our forward ramparts. The patriots must’ve switched out the residents for shooters while we were on the ledge, and they’ve been waiting for the right moment.
“Apartments!” I shout, a second after Ting highlights the reading on our lenses.
“We’re getting stomped,” Cali snarls, sounding genuinely impressed.
“They’re putting us in a killbox.” Sergeant Manager Li reaches to the side. “Calil-Du.”
Without breaking the rhythm of her Boaz shots, Cali unlinks her anti-armor launcher and passes it to Li.
“Hose ’em down for three seconds,” Li says, and lenses the entire squad a countdown.
At zero, I switch to streaming and the hallway blazes. A hellscape writhes in front of us.
Li stands from behind the rampart and aims the launcher.
Two seconds is a lifetime. Boaz streams tear the corridor to shreds before death blurs from behind me and an anti-armor grenade flashes past.
Li lenses, “Backblast, down!”
A shock wave funnels toward us. She laid the anti-armor can directly inside the pocket of the security film, through the dust and the enemy fire. The blast roars down the hallway and kicks me in the sinuses. There’s blood in my helmet but the patriot advance finally falters, and Li didn’t drop the tower on us. She used the film to localize the blast on the hostiles and protect the building from damage.
“You’re a ballerina, Sarge,” Cali says.
I’d enjoy the moment, except Ridehorse is dead, and Li lenses that I’m with Pico to clear apartment one, while Calil-Du and Jag are clearing number two. She’s sending us into the apartments after the patriots waiting to ambush us.
Clearing rooms is a bottleneck nightmare. Clearing rooms is the terror of every squaddie, but clearing rooms is what Vila Vela patriots and refugee gangers do.
My display shows fourteen people inside the apartment designated one, with twelve live weapons, and eleven hostiles and ten weapons in apartment two next door. A frontal assault is suicide, so I lens Pico a plan, quick and dirty.
I sprint from cover, leaving the protection of the rampart and running toward the stalled patriot advance, where the groans and weeping from Li’s grenade still sound through the smoke.
The blast didn’t finish them. The red marks are regrouping and from behind the haze, a beast of a primitive autogun whines to life. A heartbeat later, it starts spitting forty flex-rounds downrange every second. A single flex-round can’t pierce our skins, but four or five to the same spot will crack it like an egg.
One knocks my armored hip. I stagger a few steps and throw myself against the wall just past the closed door to apartment one. Now I’m in the corridor between the patriots and my squad, with the apartment door between me and the ramparts.
My Vespr is heavy in my hands.
My breath is loud in my ears.
The patriots inside the apartment are waiting for orders. They don’t know we scoped them until Pico opens up from behind our forward rampart. The reinforced door shudders and his slugs tear through. Pico drops two patriots sight unseen before the rest boil out of the apartment at him, furious and terrified and laser-focused.
Pico screams and blazes like Bearserker on MYRAGE, blitzing the patriots. He’s murder made flesh, and painting himself as the biggest target in the world.
The first two fire at him, and one of them hits. The round scorches Pico’s chest plate and I shoot both patriots from behind with my Vespr before the third half-turns. Pico catches him in the neck, which splatters blood across the wall and the masks of the other patriots.
The patriots are blind and panicked and slippery with gore. The fourth makes an inhuman noise and charges.
The barrel of my Vespr is six inches from the fifth patriot’s head when I squeeze the trigger.
Pico takes down the fourth, I think. I don’t know. Maybe I take him down. My mind is skipping around, letting my body take control. More patriots are arming weapons in this apartment than my lens showed earlier, like they’re multiplying in there, and I’m shoving a skinny middle-aged insurgent backward through the doorway, my trenchknife in his stomach and my Vespr poking from under his armpit and there’s six or ten—or a hundred or a thousand—more of them inside, and in a flash of lucidity I realize that there’s an unmarked door between the two apartments, and all the hostiles are boiling into this one.
A round tears through the skinny guy’s chest and gut-punches me. I stagger and spin and return fire. Target-trigger, target-trigger, target-trigger; the apartment turns into a slaughterhouse as patriots scream and fall.
A spindle-modified Ambo swivels toward my face.
Two feet away. The barrel looks like my grave.
I don’t see a shooter behind the Ambo. I’m not sure I believe there is one. All I believe is that the Ambo spindle will punch through my blood-sheeted helmet and into my brain.
Some half-forgotten lesson of basic training kicks me into motion and I hunch and spin, giving the Ambo my armored shoulder to hit. The unseen shooter fires. Ten inches of high-explosive spindle drills through a seam in my armor and digs into my flesh.
It misses the bone and doesn’t detonate.
My right arm goes numb. My trenchknife drops and my Vespr’s gone, but somehow I fire a fucking brane canister from my Boaz, and it hammers the figure behind the Ambo into a wall and coats her with yellowbeige slime.
Then I stand there trying to locate myself.
Where am I?
What next?
What now?
A chubby green-haired man throws himself at me. He’s not armed, he’s not marked high-risk, but he brings me to the ground and proceeds to pound the crap out of me with what appears to be a musical instrument.
He cracks my visor and smashes again. The crack spreads until Pico shoots him in the chin and Cali and Jagzenka sweep into sight and clear the rest of the apartments.
There’s a blank stretch of time. Maybe ten seconds, maybe thirty.
I find myself kneeling in the doorway with Pico, holding my Boaz high on my frame. The autogun is silent. My visor’s screwed but my right arm is working again despite the spindle impaling my shoulder. Doesn’t even hurt.
My Vespr and trenchknife are gone. I’m down to the dregs of my normal ammo: I’ve got two seconds of streaming, and enough slugs to hold off an army if I don’t fire any slugs.
The rest of the squad is in worse shape.
Basdaq’s suit is clamping a sucking chest wound. M’bari is still clumsy from the shock round and Ridehorse is still dead. The rest of us are banged up pretty good except for Jag and Ting, who are unscathed. Squad channel is urgent with low-ammunition alerts. Even Ting’s weapons are empty, though that just
means Sergeant Manager Li distributed her cans.
Ting doesn’t shoot at things. She just hunches inside the best protection we can afford her and saves our asses.
The corridor is a ruin. It’s not even a corridor anymore. The blasts chewed through both sides, so the hallway widens into living rooms and bathrooms and bedrooms with truncated walls and charred furniture. Cables spark and pipes spew and people sob and moan.
And this still isn’t over: the patriots are massing in the dust cloud beyond the wreckage.
“Is your commander there?” Sergeant Manager Li asks on the public address.
The only reply is a groan.
“Who did you serve with?” she asks. “Where did you train?”
There’s no answer. There’s no movement. My shoulder itches and the cracks in my visor divide the dust cloud into kaleidoscope segments.
A man’s amplified voice says, “Welcome 12.”
“I’d bet my left lens you were ranked higher than Sergeant Manager.”
“You can’t hold that against me,” the man says.
I hear an accent in his voice and I rub my shoulder as I try to place it. Kanarese Creole, maybe?
“How much higher?” Li asks.
There’s another pause. “Executive suite.”
“Bastard,” Li says. “How come you know how to fight?”
The patriot commander chuckles. “I didn’t start at the top.”
“Well, pardon me for saying, san, but I don’t see your objective here.”
“I don’t see yours.”
“Mine is getting my squad home. But you . . . even if you win—and you’re not winning—you know the corpos will come back at you multiplied.”
“There’s more to life than winning, Sergeant Manager. The Magnolia Doom taught us that.”
After the corpos signed accords against genocide-class weapons—with bankruptcy-level penalties for violations—they invested in the next best thing: exclusion domes, aka Dooms. If the corpos drop one on your neighborhood, nobody gets out. Nobody dies, but you are cut off from the rest of humanity until the dome’s deactivated. With a long-term dome, they’ll evacuate the populace first, after accepting the surrender of people with outstanding violations—though the most stubborn or desperate always remain behind.
With a short-term Doom, there’s usually no notice. You wake up one morning and your building or block is cut off from the world. No MYRAGE, no imported food, medicine, or power for weeks or months. That’s a memorable lesson in the value of belonging.
Vila Vela is the only full enclave that’s been permanently Doomed. In my dreams, the streets and balconies of my childhood home still thrum with life; then I wake feeling the loss of my amputated, abandoned city. Apparently the corpos dropped a Doom on Magnolia too, though that’s news to me. I’m not even sure if Magnolia is a neighborhood, a noncompliant religion, or an affinity group.
Li lenses the squad the obvious question, but not even M’bari knows anything about the Magnolia Doom, and we’re cut off from MYRAGE so we can’t search.
“The what?” she asks on her public address.
An amplified sigh sounds from the patriot commander. “You’ve never heard of it.”
“Can’t say that I have, san. Is it the reason we’re fighting?”
“It’s the beginning of the reason. One of the beginnings. And don’t be so sure, Sergeant Manager, that we’re not winning.”
“Listen,” Li says, “I’m not authorized to tell you this, but we’re here for a remort. There’s a new class of remort, and we tracked one heading this direction. Even if you pull off a miracle and cut all our throats, that thing will melt you into puddles.”
“A new class of remorts?” the commander scoffs. “I don’t mind lies, but at least keep them plausible.”
“If I were lying, I would.” Li takes a breath. “Well, how about this? How long before three more Orit Gals hit the skyline?”
“You’re the only surviving squad on this floor and your other platoons are bleeding out.”
Li gestures for Ting to check that. “Do you want to lose more people today, san? I surely don’t. But I promise you this. For every one of mine you take, I will take a hundred of yours. I’ll turn this tower into a war crime.”
There’s silence for what feels like a long time. I don’t think the guy is going to answer until his voice floats from the settling dust. “You’re trying to get your people home, Sergeant Manager?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re overlooking the fundamental fact of irregular warfare.”
“What’s that?”
“I can’t get my people home. This is home. We have nowhere to go. Confirm.”
From beyond the ruins, a hundred ragged voices say, “Confirm.”
“And here’s another fact,” the man continues. “You’re out of ammunition, but we just got resupplied.”
The autogun coughs to life and sends a hail of flex-rounds at us. The roar of another autogun joins the first, then two more. The firepower is awesome. The air is so thick with rounds that I can’t see the other side of the corridor; the sound is literally deafening if you’re not hearing-protected.
Pico and I stare in shock from the doorway. Streams of flex-rounds converge and punch the forward rampart.
Chunks of foam explode and tear through the walls.
Li orders Cali and Shakrabarti to retreat. They scramble backward and fling themselves over the rearward ramparts. In two seconds of exposure, both jerk like puppets, riven with impacts. A spiderwebbing of cracks appears on Shak’s side, and chips of Cali’s armor flake away.
Then they’re over, crouching beside Ting and Li. M’bari is conscious but dazed; Voorhivey’s kneeling beside Basdaq, desperately working the medkit. My helmet filters the boom of autogun fire, but a sudden crack jacks my ears like a knife.
The forward rampart shatters.
The explosion stuns the squad like a pressure grenade dropping the ceiling on us. Static sizzles across my lens and the floor is a carpet of foam shards and spent rounds.
The patriot fire switches to the next rampart and—slackens. One stream of flex-rounds swivels upward and rips into the ceiling, tracking back toward the patriots. Another stream veers wildly away.
A moment later, we’re no longer receiving fire.
Nothing’s incoming except the noise.
“They’re not firing at us,” Voorhivey announces.
“They’re disappearing,” Ting says, as red marks vanish from my lens. “Like they’re cloaking or—”
“They’re dying,” Jag tells her. “Maybe Gimmel Platoon stopped playing dominoes.”
Shakrabarti looks at the blood pooling around his boot. “I need to regrow at least three toes.”
“On the bright side,” Pico tells him, “your face is pretty as ever.”
“Get me in touch with Command,” Li tells Ting. “We—”
A lamprey strand cuts through the floor and slices Pico in half.
CHAPTER 48
My mind switches off. My discipline dies. I hear myself telling Pico that he’s okay, that everything’s okay. I see myself holding the halves of his head together with my gloved hands. I’m soaked with fluid and my lens flashes urgently, but I don’t move, I don’t react, I kneel there trying to comfort a corpse.
I’m still crying when Cali clubs my helmet with her Boaz.
The world spins and she drags me to my feet and shoves me into the corridor. Elfano is a mound of armor and tissue on the floor and Sergeant Manager Li is pushing the squad over a destroyed wall into a destroyed living room, shouting at us to load lamprey munitions.
Three steps into the living room, my world snaps into place.
I shake off Cali’s hand and downstrap my Boaz. My hands move automatically as I load my brane cans, then roll my stiff
ening shoulder and tune into the chatter.
“—lamprey has responded to bait,” Ting is telling Command on the now-live coms. “It’s approaching through Tower Seven. Repeat. The lamprey is approaching the bait through Tower Seven.”
“It’s inside the du ma walls?” a stranger’s voice asks, mis-channing a message.
“What—what happened?” Voorhivey stammers. “What happened?”
“The lamprey is in the floors beneath us,” Shakrabarti tells him, his voice tight. “It chopped the patriots into chunks, then got Pico and Elfan—”
Oily pink strands slice through the living room floor from beneath, like shark fins breaking the waves.
We scream and dodge. Jag fires at a tendril and misses, splashing goo across a cracked cook unit. Voorhivey scores a direct hit. L-tech gel coats a ropy pink cable, which shudders and retracts through the floor.
There’s a breathless panic. Shots splatter the walls; soldiers scramble for safety. The lamprey keeps moving beneath us, churning westward and finally slicing into the neighboring apartment.
A moment later we’re alone in the wreckage, surrounded by slashes in the floor that open into a dark emptiness. The air stinks of recycled chlorine and rotten jackfruit. There’s a hollow moan, the crackle of a broken light, the clatter of falling debris.
After a broken moment, I say, “Now it’s our turn.”
Sergeant Manager Li snaps into action. She assigns a sluggish M’bari to keep Basdaq alive and splits us into teams, telling Ting to plot a return route across the shattered floor to the western ledge.
Sporadic fire sounds from the surviving patriots—two dozen red marks still glimmer on my lens—but we ignore them as we weave through the wreckage.
We reach the ledge without losing anyone into a hole. The street looks rough through my cracked visor. A severed sky bridge dangles from above, swaying and sparking. Three gaping dark holes open in the tower opposite like the eyes and mouth of an immense skull.
A rumble sounds from the floors beneath us.
The lamprey is still churning through the building, still moving toward the bait.