by Joel Dane
A Bountiful Mehr CIC—combat insertion craft—lies smoldering three hundred yards away, half-buried in rubble. I don’t know where it came from, and it doesn’t occur to me to ask. Downed sailframes hang limply on the walkways and bridges, and the bodies of soldiers and patriots litter the rubble.
The lamprey bait glows yellowbeige on the recharge cistern housing. The surrounding platforms are strewn with the exploded guts of a caravan. The street is quiet. No fighting, just wreckage and aftermath.
When the rumble increases below us, Sergeant Manager Li lenses, “Wait on my green.”
Despite the signal interference, Ting piggybacks on corner cameras and resident visors, showing us what we look like from afar: eight small figures clinging to the edge of a crumbling monolith. Pico and Ridehorse and Elfano are down. M’bari leans against a bullet-pocked column, barely conscious. Basdaq is curled on his side on the ground, his Boaz aiming in the general direction of the bait.
Gimmel Platoon is gone and only half of Bay is standing. My display tells me that Alfa is unscathed on the rooftop, impossibly far away, waiting to drop a thousand tons of ugly on this thing.
My shoulder itches. I clean my visor. Ting focuses her video on a round section of tower wall crumbling below us, collapsing from the inside. Mottled, writhing strands emerge from a widening hole. They flail at the air, dribbling pinkish snot.
The lamprey oozes into view like something horrible being born.
Its outer shell is composed of overlapping cables and plates widely enough spaced to offer a view of the crisscrossing mucous strands of the interior. It’s beyond ugly, it’s wrong. Inhuman and disturbing. This is the first time we’ve seen one this clear, this close. My eyes widen, my throat dries, and the urge to flee claws at me.
I hear Ting whimper and M’bari groan, but the weeks of training pay off; nobody breaks.
“Do we have a green, Sarge?” Basdaq gasps.
“Wait for it,” she tells him, her voice wavering for once.
The lamprey crawl-slurps toward the bait, leaving a tunnel of destruction behind. Ting cuts the perspective video and I’m watching with my own eyes as the horror creeps across the street. Most of its strands unfurl fifty feet from the shifting plates—but one fires two hundred feet and slices into a scraper like a skewer into a kebab.
Alloy melts and glassine shatters. The strand snaps back to the lamprey, leaving wreckage behind. Another strand fires five hundred feet—which disturbs me on a whole new level, violating my visceral sense of the laws of physics. There isn’t enough stuff for the strand to stretch that far.
The lamprey creeps toward the bait, firing two pinkish cables to the base of the recharge cistern. A third unchains toward the ground. It branches into a dozen strands that strike at traincars, caravans, cargo trailers, mobile homes.
I don’t watch the inhabitants die. I don’t hear a thing. I just remember the disfigured lumps in that Los Anod street, mutilated and flayed and shrunken—
A CAV screams down from the sky.
It powers forward on ribbons like grappling hooks, swinging around elevated streets and ladder clusters. The CAV is a third the size of the lamprey, but Elfano was right: there’s a certain similarity. Both are roughly spherical, with protruding elements for moving and attacking. Although as foreign as CAVs feel, lampreys are a thousand times stranger.
The CAV dives, leaves slashing, trying to drive the lamprey toward the bait.
The lamprey emits a fat cable, slow and almost deliberate. The CAV stays on path, and the cable strikes hard, crushing the CAV like a boot heel on an empty tube.
The force flings the CAV into a cloverleaf overpass. It falls and shudders beside the disemboweled Bountiful Mehr, then rocks to a halt. At least the cry pilot died fast.
“The fuck is an insertion craft doing here?” Cali asks, focusing on the Mehr.
“Nothing,” I tell her.
“Let me fire one can before I pass out?” Basdaq pleads.
“Wait for the green,” Sergeant Manager Li tells him. “First we need the CAVs to ensure that the target makes contact with the bait.”
“The target’s trying to make contact!” Ting says. “The bait is working!”
“Channel,” Li murmurs, which means she agrees.
Two more CAVs launch into attacks with all the finesse of a drunk throwing haymakers. Both achieve direct impacts, carving chunks from the lamprey.
The lamprey heals itself as it shudders closer to the bait. Severed strands and plates knit together, and then cables erupt from the lamprey’s skin and crush both CAVs.
Four seconds have elapsed since first contact. One CAV is totaled, but the other drags away, a twisted wreck withdrawing from battle.
“I thought CAVs soaked more damage than a dreadnought,” Cali says.
“They do,” Li tells her.
“They’re popping like soap bubbles.”
“They’re using them wrong,” I say, my grip tight inside my Boaz.
Another CAV is crushed and tossed aside. I feel the tilt of the pilot’s frame and the machine craving to fight. I feel all that wasted potential, all that untapped power.
“C’mon!” I murmur. “Dodge, hit—fight!”
“The remote operators are lagging,” Ting tells me. “The lamprey’s signal interference slows the connection.”
“They’re serving up CAVs like snackbits,” I say.
The lamprey oozes toward the bait. Dripping pink fringes reach the glowing yellowbeige octopus-shape and keep moving, rolling and spewing closer.
Shakrabarti says, “Brace for the explosion . . .”
No explosion comes. It’s not a replay of Los Anod. Instead, the lamprey’s strands touch the bait and the green go-sign flashes on my lens.
“Engage!” Sergeant Manager Li shouts.
A hail of L-tech brane rounds lashes from our ledge and the floors above us. The rounds can’t self-correct because of the signal interference, so we’re firing by sense of smell—and in a moment forty yards of the street-level road is painted yellowbeige.
The lamprey is drenched and bubbling. Slowing, sluggish, but not frozen.
Not yet.
The last two CAVs circle, looking for an opening, trying to weaken the remort or give the L-tech time to work. Alloy ribbons slash but the lamprey slices through both CAVs with a blur of cables—and Alfa Platoon opens fire from the rooftop.
Sheets of yellowbeige paste lash downward, covering every trace of lamprey. After Alfa runs dry, two Orit Gal gunships keep hosing down the target area. A mound rises where the lamprey enveloped the bait. Nothing’s visible but L-tech.
“Hostile isolated,” a voice says in my earbug. “Recife Unit engaging.”
The barrage ends.
The street quiets.
“That’s good, right?” Voorhivey asks, kneeling at Shakrabarti’s bloody boot. “The lamprey’s stuck.”
“The mission washn’t to trap it,” M’bari slurs. “The mission was to exshtract a shample.”
“Recife Unit is engineering,” Li says.
“With handheld extractors,” Jag says, eyeing the bubbling mess. “Better them than us.”
“We dropped the anvil,” Cali says. “We braned that puke-hole.”
“Yeah,” Basdaq mutters, around the film in his throat.
“Javelin teams, assume retrograde posture,” a wide-channel announcement says. “Recife Unit incoming. Initial hostile-status report from Dee Platoon indicates that we braned that puke-hole.”
Our exhausted laughter sounds like sobbing.
“Medic?” Sergeant Manager Li says, speaking quietly again.
Voorhivey looks up from Shakrabarti. “Sarge?”
“Ting just deactivated the spindle in Kaytu’s shoulder,” Li tells him. “So would you do me the favor of removing it?”
My heart stops. “It’s live?”
“Not anymore,” Li says, as Voorhivey trots toward me.
“It’s harmless now,” Ting assures me. “Except for stabbing you and stuff.”
Voorhivey starts treating the wound. “It’s barely a scratch, you won’t even—”
“Sergeant!” Ting interrupts. “Priority message.”
“Shit.” Li frowns at her lens. “Bad news. Deconfirm that, Voorhivey. Patch Kaytu, don’t fix him.”
“What’s up?” he asks.
“Recife Unit is unable to respond and—”
“What? Why?”
She highlights the fallen Bountiful Mehr on the company channel. “The patriots killed them.”
“That was Recife?” Shakrabarti says, with a sound that is half moan and half laugh.
“They said we won!” Voorhivey coats my shoulder bandage. “They said we braned it!”
“That’sh PR,” M’bari moans.
“So wait,” Cali says. “What’s the bad news?”
“What do you think?” Shakrabarti asks, tears streaking his beautiful face. “Ridehorse is dead. Pico is dead. Elfano is dead. Basdaq is—”
“I’m fine,” Basdaq grunts. “I’m okay.”
“Are you done?” Sergeant Manager Li asks Voorhivey.
He pats the numbing film on my shoulder. “It’ll hold.”
“Calil-Du, Kaytu, Jagzenka, form on me.” Li heads northward along the ledge. “The bad news is, this lamprey will dissolve any minute. Worse news? There’s nobody to work the handheld genome extractors but us.”
CHAPTER 49
There’s a dozen squads in the sky,” Jag says, as we fall into place behind the Sergeant Manager. “Why are we catching this?”
“They’re too far given the time frame,” Li says. “We’re the closest functional squad.”
“We know shit about gene extraction,” Cali growls.
“We’re about to learn,” Li says.
We cross a teetering bridge toward a performance garden and I’m not crying for the dead; I’m not scared. I’m not even meditating: I’m just numb. I can’t think about everything we lost, not yet.
So I follow orders and pretend I’m okay.
A drop pod waits for us on a sheet filter. Li pops it and withdraws a handheld extractor that looks like a demented rocket launcher. The modified warhead is tipped with green-glowing tubes that remind me of bonespur.
“Looks like a prototype,” Ting says on squad channel. She’s monitoring us, of course, and for a moment I’m almost glad she’s a technopath.
“Looks like paraframes,” Cali says, reaching deeper into the pod for a stack of frames.
“Strap in,” Li says. “We’ve got one shot.”
The frames self-assemble at Cali’s command and we each grab one. The spindle in my shoulder catches on a strap. Jag winces but I don’t feel any pain.
Cali secures my frame.
Li adjusts the extractor.
Then there’s a moment. Time freezes and there’s a moment when I think: Stop this, protect the squad. Forget about swooping at a lamprey with a handheld extractor. Just fire a Boaz stream through the paraframes and save the fucking squad.
The moment passes and we jump off the bridge four stories above the trapped lamprey. The walls and walkways of Belo City flash past me.
“The extractor is more of a sequencer,” Ting says on squad channel. “It’ll map the lamprey’s genome, DNA, RNA, tDNA, and all the—”
I mute her as Cali speeds ahead. Jag and I flank the Sergeant Manager, swooping between cables and banners. Our job is to keep Li alive long enough to fire a single shot into this lamprey’s guts, a single probe. I’m not thinking about backblast, I’m not thinking about DNA scans. I’m just following Cali toward the yellowbeige mound that’s enveloping the lamprey.
This is just another nightmare, just another day. Just playing capture the crown again—
“It’s dissolving!” an unfamiliar voice shouts on squad channel. “Move, move!”
“Who the fuck is that?” Jag asks.
An ID pops onto my suddenly live lens. The voice belongs to a DivCom executive. He sounds panicked as he overrides safeguards to speak directly to us. “It’s dissolving! Dee Platoon, make contact now-now-now! We need data, we need that fucking data!”
“Interference abating,” Ting reports. “Fire Team L, you are in my signals envelope.”
In some deep corner of my mind, I hear Pico laughing at “Fire Team L.” Street schematics flash on my lens. I adjust the vector of my descent and Li matches me. Cali shortens her wingspan and drops faster, while Jag sweeps above us, wheeling toward an outcropping for overwatch. She’s the only one with enough remaining brane cans—and the sharpshooter rating—to smack away any lamprey cables that threaten us.
Cali lands first, ten yards from the roiling yellowbeige mass surrounding the lamprey. I’m beside her three seconds later. She shucks her paraframe and prowls into position but my frame sticks on my shoulder again, and I’m an unbalanced mess lurching across the ooze-dappled recharge cistern.
The yellowbeige mound gives off waves of heat and chill.
My breath stinks inside my mask.
Without even looking toward the lamprey, Li launches a flechette almost directly upward. A silvery filament stretches between the flechette and her extractor, vanishing toward the rooftops.
“It’s a data cord,” Ting says in my ear. “The extractor probe is hardwire connected so the other end is plugged into a research craft flying above the enclave, outside the interference, connected to every superprocessor in every corporation in every—”
I flick a blank message at her, not bothering to say Quiet, but she understands.
The numbness from my injured shoulder spreads into my arm. My fingers tingle and I brace myself against the charred remains of a post and take aim through tear-blurred eyes.
Sergeant Manager Li kneels twenty feet behind me and Cali, the extractor probe primed. The mound of yellowbeige goo is trembling. I’m trembling too. Li waits for the shot. My lens flickers with orders and blueprints and chatter until Li excludes everything except the four of us—and the lamprey.
And I realize that the post I’m leaning against isn’t a post. It’s the acid-burned husk of a segment of destroyed CAV.
My mouth tastes like death, but my hand is steady.
I’m ready for this.
A stream of standard liquammo fires from the Orit Gal, sketching an unbroken line across the L-tech mound. They’re clearing a path for Li’s extractor. Another stream burns down from above and a mottled pink surface bulges through the bubbling yellowbeige goo as the lamprey oozes for freedom.
Take the shot, take the shot.
A lamprey strand unfurls from the impact area. Two strands. Three, four, five. A shifting meaty plate starts to emerge and—
Li takes the shot.
The extractor probe flashes past me with the silvery filament flowing behind. It speeds between shifting plates and strikes a pink node inside the lamprey. The green bonespurlike tubes deploy, burrowing into the lamprey for samples.
My breath catches and my palm tightens on the trigger. The filament shimmers—
The mound explodes.
A gout of slime catches the paraframe I’m strapped into and knocks me sideways. I smack against the CAV segment and fall. My head rings; my vision doubles. I see two recharge cisterns, two tattered ad-banners . . .
Lamprey cables rise from the yellowbeige foam. Shit. Shit. I’m on the verge of fainting while that thing is breaking free. I roll to my stomach and brace my Boaz.
“Wait for it,” the DivCom exec says, his voice tight. “Almost there. Establishing connec—”
The power dies in the building in front of us.
The windows turn dark one floor at a time.
The lights of the sky bridges and walkways blink off.
The next building dies, and the next one, swallowed by an abyssal darkness. The glow of the uppermost floors fades. Everything is dark except for the yellowbeige bait and the brilliant light of the filament, a pure white crack in a pitch-black world.
Voices crackle in my audio pickup:
“—it’s in our systems, it’s in our fucking sys—”
“Airgap! Emergency airgap!”
“DROP LINK DROP LINK! Trigger autodestruct!”
Fractal patterns bloom on my lens. Broken shapes strobe and an almost inaudible whine drives needles into my temples. Tears spring to my eyes and I can’t tell if I’m really seeing translucent threads wriggling through the air—
“We’re not reading it,” a new voice says. “It’s reading us.”
In the dim glow of the bait, the lamprey emerges from the foam. Its plates swivel and shift on its framework of cords and cables. There’s a glint of transparency, like the lamprey is coated in glass—and a pink strand whips at the filament.
Jag fires three times and hits twice.
Foam coats the strand, which twitches and smashes into the cistern underfoot. The grate jerks and lamprey cables lash at Cali.
She bellows and we empty our cans. Pink ooze splatters the ground, and the lamprey feathers into fumes.
CHAPTER 50
A nursurgeon sprays me into thera-sleep on the transport from Belo City. I lose myself in anxious dreams, then wake on a mattress made of starlight and hope. The medical devices around me purr reassuringly, like angels humming a lullaby.
My lens tells me that the spindle damaged my shoulder and I’m concussed. Also, I’m in a hospital room. I lie there and let memory return. I try not to think about Pico and Ridehorse and Elfano, but when sleep finally takes me there are tears on my face.
The next time I wake, it’s morning. Turns out that the hospital on Ayko Base is as fancy as the pool. There’s a MYRAGE rig, custom fitted for patients, and the vend is packed with delicious gels.
Ting is curled into an extruded cot beside my bed. When I yawn, her gaze shifts to me, and I’m struck with the oddest thought. I want to see her real eyes again, unhidden by her black lenses: I want to see her golden, stemhead pupils.