Back to the current conundrum. “We must be missing something.”
“Well, we’re definitely missing something.”
“We could at least send this theory on to the solar station.”
Chaelee opened up a channel and shot the message. In six hours, by the slow bounce of their communications equipment from the surveying satellites ranged between this planet in the ass-end of space and the solar station slightly nearer an intergalactic Hub, they would get an answer.
She sat back. “Doesn’t help your Gun, though.”
“Where have we got for identifying his accomplices?”
“Nada. A fog storm rolled in that night, too.” Chaelee tapped the screen to show the limits of the electromagnetic interference. “That’s why the satellite couldn’t record when the force shield went down, and we can’t establish even a time of death.”
On another screen, they tracked the incoming fog storm currently threatening their Upstairs communications with the biologists’ main science ship. For the moment, a low volume chatter between Navina and the Bad Company navigator hissed in the background.
“I think better when I’m eating. Protein bar?” Chaelee offered.
Talia liked Chaelee more and more.
She chewed the malformed bar, product of another open-palm argument with the mess hall reprocessor. It tasted like cheese and blueberries. “Any news on Logen?”
“His brother fixed his tooth.”
So, now he’d go back to prison in one piece.
Talia polished off the bar. “What haven’t I seen?”
“His classified file.” Chaelee cycled through more holos.
As the only functioning spotter, Chaelee had seen them in order to advise her CO on anything he had missed. Talia debated requesting access. It seemed like a hell of an invasion of privacy. She wouldn’t want anyone digging in hers. No more than the higher ups already did.
More than anything, she wanted out of the mercenaries. She wanted to be a free civilian again. She wanted to live in a world where no one owned her, no one pawed through her past whenever they liked, no one told her what to do or how to live.
“Oh, and also his interview with you.” Chaelee queued up the holo.
Talia stopped her. “I was there.”
“You sure you don’t want to see? I didn’t have time to watch.”
“He confessed.”
“Yeah... I do have an alternate theory, if you would like to hear it.”
They were coming up against the two-hour mark. Talia removed her oculars, set them on the comm panel, and said, “Sure.”
“Say that he actually is innocent. There are three damning pieces of evidence against him: The stents, the blood on his hands, and the fact that he killed a member of his team already.”
What the fuck?
“What?” Talia said.
“It’s in his classified files,” she said, also glancing at the time. “It’s the reason he went to prison and has the cybernetic stents to begin with. He killed his last spotter.”
Fucking hell.
Their team was closer than blood, closer than air, closer than close.
The blackness swelled up in her heart and cascaded over her. A tsunami of realization. She couldn’t catch her breath. The dry protein bar lodged in her throat.
She had been wrong. She had been so wrong.
“Take the blood,” Chaelee said, not realizing that Talia was done with the thought exercise. “Its smudge on his palms is consistent with having gripped a log that had your residues smeared across it. We found him in the woods, doing concentric circles outward from Base Two. Maybe he crossed the trail of an animal dragging your body without realizing it.”
“Or he did realize it,” she snapped, “because he fed me to a damned snakezoid.”
“Second, the stents. He’s never tried to kill anyone after the first time.”
“That’s what the stents prevent.”
“Well, think about it. If the stents are shut off, the Robotics Faction isn’t controlling him. He has no accomplices and he’s acting alone.”
“He killed his last spotter,” she said.
“It’s too much a coincidence, don’t you think? If he wanted to murder you, he could do it any time. Not happen to do it the same week they issue a general warning about people with stents.”
“Maybe he’s taking advantage of the confusion.”
“But we never told him about it. We didn’t even know about it until after your death. Are you saying he received the Robotics Faction kill order, then shut off his stents, and then killed you?”
Fine. It was a coincidence. She returned to the important point. “He killed his last spotter.”
Chaelee shook her head. “I don’t know enough about his situation. But, I’ve been killed by my own team before.”
“Accidents don’t land you in prison.”
“Logen wasn’t court martialed. It could have been much worse.”
“No offense, but you may not be the best judge when it comes to survival.”
Logen didn’t belong in Hazard Zero. A man with his talents belonged in Hazard Five, and his demotion was either because of the stents or because his brother had screwed up. Their contract was written so they were a matched set. If Daz ended up in Hazard Zero, Logen did as well.
But Logen had done something unforgivable. Not only had he committed a crime, it was the worst crime. He had killed not just someone in the corps, but the closest member of his team.
On purpose.
Gun and Spot. Spotter and gunner. They worked together, one picking the targets and the other executing them.
Funny how, in the beginning, she had thought it such a mark of trust when he had stopped double-checking her work and shifted to automatic fire on the targets she selected.
Now, it seemed, that was only a front. All that time, he had been evaluating whether she should live.
“Yeah, I know,” Chaelee agreed with her earlier statement. “I feel guilty every time I let my team down. I’d rather die a hundred times than let another person die once.”
“You might do more good if you lived to fight another day.”
“Well, so, we’re back at Logen being the murderer.” The two-hour timer went off. Chaelee stopped it with a sigh. “At least we got him, and the witch hunt is over.”
Talia’s investigation was over. She only hoped the Robotics Faction was to blame. Either way, she was wrong to have trusted him. He was dead to her.
All that virile masculinity. All of that quiet solidness. All of the man who stroked her dreams, sliding into her desires and teasing longingly of the sweet future denied to her.
Dead.
Her muscles felt as heavy as granite pressing into the chair, despite the exoskeleton support.
A hundred centuries of merciless, lonely warfare stretched in front of her.
She would never escape the mercenaries. She would never see her family again. She would never find love. She would never, ever pay out and become a free civilian.
Her past was a dream. Not a dream, a lie. A lie teasing her about something that had never existed. Could never exist. Happiness had never happened to her, and would never happen to her, and could never happen to her.
And Logen was only the most recent illusion of her stupid, idiotic, weak-willed disappointment.
The shuttle engine roared.
Talia put aside her personal headache. “Weren’t you supposed to be on that shuttle escorting the biologists up to the main ship?”
“Shit.” Chaelee walked to the door and shouted down the hall to one of the other Bad Company guys.
Because she had nothing better to do, Talia found the queued holo of Logen’s interview with her and started it.
His strikingly hard, blank face stared at a recorder mounted above the door. At her entry, he tilted his head and squinted, and said his creepy line about moving forward so he could kill her.
And still, despite everything, she reacted. Her
e was a rugged, tough, gorgeous man who had killed two team members without remorse. Watching his lips move sent little shivers through her, and her desires ached. Why torture herself this way?
She reached over to turn off the holo.
Then, something crazy happened.
The back of her head appeared on the holo as she floated forward, into the recording area.
His eyes widened. Emotion swept across his face like an incoming tide, unstoppable. Relief, anxiety, concern. He softened, became more human.
She didn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe it.
Talia grabbed for the spotter oculars and double-checked herself. Hurt, surprise, resentment, longing. There, the emotions printed across the oculars, each one pointed out with undisputable accuracy.
“Hey,” Chaelee stepped into the room, “can I borrow your badge com?”
“Mine’s still back in medical,” she replied absently. “I haven’t ‘earned my suit’ back yet.”
Hour after hour of emotionless footage showed a cold killer. She walked into his cell and set off passion-sparked fireworks.
And, at the end, when he was warning her, fear.
This fearless man warned her to watch out for a storm and felt fear.
The recording stopped.
She took off the glasses again and rubbed her temples. “Chaelee?”
The woman didn’t answer.
Why hadn’t they made Chaelee review this? Talia had been barely able to stand; she spoke to Logen, and her vision had blurred so badly she could barely keep the tears out of her eyes.
But she knew his stents had stopped working.
Which meant the Robotics Faction wasn’t controlling him.
...so he must have killed her for the same reason he killed his last spotter. Murder was inside his soul. He was evil, and she had missed his evil. She always attracted evil men. Right?
Thinking this way made her tired. She wanted a second opinion.
She raised her voice. “Hey, Chaelee?”
The other spotter leaned in the doorway. “Yeah?”
“I want you to see something—”
“Emergency.” The comm crackled suddenly. “Hello, Base One, this is Navina on the Good Explorer. We are investigating the resupply ship. Something is very wrong. We have suffered a casualty. Spotter Talia’s restore point has been destroyed.”
“Oh, no,” Chaelee gasped.
Talia’s stomach dropped.
Without a restore point, she could die permanently and never wake up again.
“We have to get you into protective custody!” Chaelee rushed back to the door. “Five guards! You need five guards at all time until you get another restore point made.”
“Please place Talia under the highest protection until we can return,” Navina continued, echoing Chaelee.
Chaelee shouted down the hall, “Hey! Who’s here? Somebody answer me!”
“Also, we see several unidentified ships hovering around you on the planet. We are hailing Base One directly because the main ship has stopped answering our hails.”
Indeed, the chatter of Bad Company’s navigator on the main ship, previously talking to Navina and to the pilot of the shuttle Chaelee had missed, had gone silent. Only a suspicious hiss of an open line remained.
Chaelee touched her badge comm. Maybe it was not as broken as they both had thought.
“Some of the unidentified ships are within striking distance of the base,” Navina continued. “Are you reading these ships? Answer, Base One.”
They checked the map screens.
The skies overhead looked clear, aside from the electromagnetic fog storm rolling in. Once it blanketed the region, the satellite wouldn’t be able to communicate with the base, and their location would be completely cut off from the biologists’ main ship—as well as the small explorer shuttle piloted by Navina, Vi, and Iren.
But there were no ships on any screen.
“Why would they say that?” Chaelee asked. “And where’s the other ship, and the shuttle that just left? And where is everybody? You have to be protected!”
Talia scooted over to the comm and depressed the button. “Navina, this is Talia. Hello?”
She counted the seconds for the signal to bounce up to the satellite, then streak through ordinary space to the distant explorer, and then to return.
“Base One, please respond.”
“Navina, we are here. Hello?”
“Base One, please respond. Are you all right? Base One, I have just downloaded the last visual snapshot of your location from the satellite, and your force shield appears to be down. Is anyone there?”
“Well, that’s weird.” Chaelee depolarized a window. “They should have turned it on again after the shuttle took off.”
Navina was right. The usual bluish glow that kept out the animals and the elements was missing; the jungle seemed darker, more shadowed.
A six-legged gecko crawled across the window. Its poisoned tongue sizzled against the glass, seeking prey.
Chaelee peered around the gecko. “How do you suppose it shorted?”
A disabled force shield. Non-operational communicators. Missing shuttles. Mystery ships hovering overhead.
An attack on the distant shuttle that drew away her team and left Talia without a restore point.
An awful picture appeared in her head.
Talia curled her empty hands into fists. Danger zipped through her veins. She lowered herself below the ledge of the comm. “Chaelee, get away from the window.”
“Hmm?” She tilted her head at Talia. “Oh, no way. I think we’d know if we were under attack.”
“Base One—” Navina started to say.
Iren’s voice in the background screamed. “Shit, shit, shit! Breach! Incoming!”
“We are being boarded. Base One, our hull integrity has been—”
The transmission hissed.
Fuck. “Chaelee, get down!”
“I know, but I don’t see anything!” She pressed her comm badge, then shook her head and started for the door. “We can’t sit here alone waiting for whatever might happen. You have no restore point. Try the base-wide announcement system.”
Talia swore, rose out of her shelter, and pressed the announcement button. “This is an all-base warning.”
Her voice echoed reassuringly through the mostly empty halls.
“The force shield is down and we have lost communications with Upstairs. Secure your area and report to the officer’s ready room immediately.”
She released the button.
The room exploded.
* * *
A cliff-breaker missile had a distinctive, escalating, oh-shit-the-world-is-ending whine. Minutes after the shuttle blasted off, the whine jolted Logen in his chair.
Seconds later, it boomed against the gigantic comm tower.
Shit.
The tower listed, weakened metal screaming under its own weight, and then the shrieking rose to eardrum-piercing agony. A shadow crossed over the window ledge above, widening and darkening. A deadly wind compressed the air as the tower obviously failed in his direction.
Shit. Shit!
He lunged against the chains, striving to break the weld to the floor.
The sound accelerated and the shadow blackened.
No. Fucking. Way!
He strained with all his might. Beneath his feet, the concrete cracked.
The tower smashed through the shed, crumbling it inward in a spray of shards that rained down on him. Huge metal pylons ruptured the ground and shattered the concrete. A massive central pillar flew at him.
He dove forward, into the gap between buckling struts, yanking the chair free.
The struts sliced through the lower back of the chair and severed his chains like a pair of scissors.
He continued rolling, scrambling for openings, as the tower disintegrated around him. Soil geysered up and dust obscured his vision. He raced for the outer edge of the dirty mushroom cloud, fighting for freedom. Fo
r air.
A strut emerged from the dust, whistling past his forehead with decapitating force.
Logen ducked.
It grazed him, shoving him sideways, out of the path of another unseen hazard. He got back on his feet and burst through, running fast and hard across the debris-strewn ground. The mushroom cloud poofed and dissipated. He cleared it and ran free.
The base was in shambles. Not only had the cliff-breaker destroyed the comm tower, it had also annihilated the officers’ quarters and caved in half of the main base. If he hadn’t heard the biologists and most of the mercenaries loaded onto the off-planet shuttle, casualties would have skyrocketed.
As it was, he only saw a couple of Bad Company mercs emerging from the mess hall wreckage, bleeding from head wounds and helping each other out the low windows.
He himself was covered in dirt and almost unrecognizable.
His chains hung from him, battered and ripped open; one was missing from his right ankle, and the left chain was severed after the first link. He shook his wrists and the two manacles fell off.
A gash on his shin he didn’t remember glugged blood, and another poured from his forehead down his cheek. He wiped it away from his eye.
Another sound penetrated his consciousness: the pop-pop-zap of shatter rifles.
Shit.
He limped toward the armory. He needed a gun.
Around the corner, a sight stopped him dead.
Robots. Shiny silver androids, marching out of storage on their own.
What the fuck?
One turned on him and lowered its gun. The others all turned and oriented on him too. Red targets wiggled across his pectorals.
He turned and ran.
The robots fired.
He dodged into the base. All those huge, open windows in the rooms leading to the empty north-south main hall offered no protection. Androids swarmed after him, slowed by their budget construction, but inexorable in their pursuit. Shots burned the corridor.
He ducked down a western corridor and landed in Medical.
No Talia.
Shit.
Had he heard her voice just before the cliff-breaker? Maybe she was in the officers’ quarters. Except they were half-collapsed by the missile. His jaw tightened.
Resurrection Heart: Robotics Faction - Cyborg Mercenaries Page 6