Men of Stone (The Faded Earth Book 3)

by Joshua Guess

  Beck had only so much compassion and concern for human life to be divided up, and she no longer had the resources to waste on assholes.

  She turned just as the electrostatic shield built into her visor and cameras managed to clear away the dust and saw Jen’s small suit duck below a swinging fist only to launch itself straight upward into the chin of her opponent’s helmet. The heavy plate on the top of hers was strong enough to shatter the more delicate lower jaw of his. When he staggered back, Jeremy deftly wove himself into the fray and shot a tiny volume of foam explosive at the cracked man’s face.

  “Holy shit!” Beck shouted over the channel as the helmet burst into bloody shrapnel. “That’s going to be in my nightmares for the next year, you dick.”

  Just then, Wojcik’s enormous suit flew across her field of vision to tackle high while Lucia dove at the knees of the same enemy. Their weight and momentum easily overwhelmed, sending all three down in a tangle of bodies.

  “Help,” Tala said calmly as another enemy—this one sporting a pair of bullet holes in his cracked chest plate—bore down on her. Her suit jerked in uncontrolled spasms. Someone had hit her with stunners.

  The man who took her down wore what looked like a standard set of armor on first glance, but Beck spent a lot of time working on the stuff. The plates of metal layered over the attachment points on the sub-layer and frame beneath were thicker than they should have been. They also had a matte coating of some kind. Beck would have to look into what that was later.

  His fists rained down blows on Tala’s face faster than Beck’s eyes could track. That suit was modified somehow. Stronger even than Wojcik’s extra-large model.

  Beck rushed forward, blade raised high, and took a leaping swing.

  This was a mistake. As soon as her body left the ground, she lost any ability to control her momentum or direction. She was at Newton’s mercy, an object in motion destined to remain that way until acted upon by an external force.

  The false Watchman attacking Tala, whose helmet was badly cracked and breaking apart, didn’t even look as he whipped an arm around and swatted Beck out of the air with casual indifference. His other hand continued the assault on Tala. Beck saw her helmet fully split apart just before she tumbled out of view.

  Then another burst of gunfire sounded. Beck scrambled to her feet just in time to see the man slump away from Tala. The world spun as she stood, and continued on that way. Nausea welled up in her gut with a rapidity that was almost supernatural. Pain filled her head.

  Oh. There was the ground. Huh.

  Darkness.

  *

  Darkness. Pain.

  She muttered something, or tried to. It came out as a low moan. An indistinct voice made a noise and a sharp coldness seeped into the crook of her arm.

  Relief flooded into her brain.

  With it came sudden clarity sharp as broken glass. Beck gasped with the rush of realigned senses, as if a heavy cloth wrapped tightly around her was yanked away without warning. She sat up and was immediately pushed back down. It was only then she opened her eyes.

  “Hospital,” she said, the words both rushed and slurring.

  The medic in front of her was a stranger. He wore the white Deathwatch uniform of the dedicated medical corps. “Lay down, Sentinel. That’s an order.”

  “You should probably listen to him,” Eshton said, stepping from behind the medic. “You were hurt pretty bad.”

  For once in her life, Beck did as she was told. The pillow was more comfortable than the swimming in her vision that began as soon as she moved. She closed her eyes again, waiting for the reignited nausea and vertigo to subside. “What the hell happened?”

  “Cracked skull and concussion,” the medic said. “Your brain swelled up, and there was a minor bleed. The fracture actually helped it drain.”

  Her breath caught in her chest, which felt trapped in a vise. “But I’m okay? I’ll be okay?”

  “I think so, but we’re keeping you here for observation. You’ve been out for two days,” the medic told her.

  Beck slowly opened her eyes again, letting them acclimate to the world around her. Which at that moment consisted of the two men and one small room. “I have a question I need you to be totally honest about. Okay?”

  The medic didn’t exactly frown—it was more like his resting features were simply bent toward dour unhappiness. “That’s your right. Go ahead.”

  “Is there brain damage?” Beck asked, her tone deadly serious. She gestured toward Eshton with a subtle movement of her hand. “More specifically, if there is, am I still smarter than him?”

  The medic twitched in surprise, then burst into laughter. “I think you’re going to be fine. Any other questions? Real ones, I mean?”

  Beck started to shake her head before thinking better of it. “No. Thank you.”

  The grumpy physician walked toward the door but glanced back just before he stepped out. “He stayed with you the whole time, you know. Maybe don’t give him quite as much grief as you might have been planning on.”

  When they were alone, Eshton pulled a chair next to her bed and lounged back in it. “Since I know you’re going to ask, that guy punched you in the side of the head so hard it dented your helmet. Broke all the impact protection inside it. The metal cracked your skull. Didn’t help that you landed on your head, even though it’s easily the hardest part of you.”

  Beck groaned. “Terrible. Whole world of comedy you could’ve tried and that’s the best you can do?”

  Eshton shrugged. “That I can joke at all is kind of a miracle. What happened to you was scary, Beck. We brought you in and I had to help them get your helmet off. We thought you were going to die.”

  She tried to imagine what it was like for him, watching her bleed and not knowing whether she would make it. Her eyes misted over and she blinked away the tears before they could form. It wasn’t hard to put herself in his position. Both of them had lost their families in exactly the same way. They each knew that agony like an old friend. “Where are the others? Did they try to stay.”

  “Of course they did,” he said with a low laugh. “I had to order them back to quarters. They’re here in the chapterhouse, obviously, but I’ve only given them an hour a day in here with you. Didn’t want them bothering you if you woke up.”

  Beck smirked. “No, that’s your job.”

  “Damn right it is,” Eshton said. He put his hand on the bed just in front of hers. After that first kiss when she’d responded by punching him in the face, he had learned restraint. She believed he cared for her, probably even loved her, and she even understood why that could be true.

  She was smart, a trait he would have found attractive in any woman. But their commonalities, from their lost families to their careers, made her ideal. He didn’t think in those granular, analytical terms. Not the way she did.

  She reached out and laid her fingers on his. She spoke without looking at him. “I’m sick of having nothing of my own. This job is…I have to do it. I want to. But I need something else. I have to find a balance somehow.” At first the wounds from her family were too raw. The idea of opening herself to caring about anyone enough to relive that was almost physically painful. Then the exile, her return, the upheaval…

  Almost dying had a way of putting it all in perspective. She gave his hand a squeeze. “So, uh. Any news on the guy we took captive? He give us anything?”

  If Eshton was bothered by the clearly deliberate change of subject, he didn’t show it. In fact, he was smiling. Why did he have such a shit-eating grin on his face.

  “Not yet,” he said. “At a guess I’d say Keene sent out his toughest or most loyal people.”

  Beck frowned. “Then what are you so happy about?”

  “Well, you’re going to be on light duty for the next few weeks,” he explained. “Stein says you’re going to sit your ass in a lab and do your work there. Your first and only priority is helping a team of our Research people figure out what that modified
suit had going on. Important stuff, from what the Commander tells me. You’ll have your nose buried in machine parts for a while.”

  Not only would she not have to go back out and try to straighten out the shit show the Protectorate had become, but she wasn’t even allowed to. She would get to plumb the secrets of new technology instead.

  “I guess,” she said with a little shrug. “I mean, if she really needs me to.”

  Eshton’s laugh told her he was buying none of her shit, and she found that strangely endearing.

  11

  It was only hours after the initial rush of waking up and not finding herself dead or badly crippled that Beck remembered why she was in the hospital wing in the first place. When the realization washed over her she called for a caregiver and demanded to be put in a chair and wheeled away. It took some berating, but Beck was determined.

  “Don’t stand up,” the caregiver, a Watchman now too old to continue fighting. Not that she was elderly by any definition. The woman was perhaps fifty. But the configuration of scars creeping from beneath the hems and cuffs of her white uniform spoke of an unusually violent career.

  Damage, as Beck knew well, accumulates. There was no avoiding it.

  She did as she was told and remained in the chair. It took an effort of will not to rise to her feet and check Tala over. A pointless instinct. Beck knew little enough about how human beings worked. She wouldn’t be able to offer any insight trained professionals had somehow missed.

  The larger woman should have looked smaller in that setting. Sickbeds had the effect on people. Not Tala. She filled the bed just as Beck’s expectations told her she should, all broad shoulders and long limbs. The damage seemed confined to her face and upper torso—there were no telltale lumps of casts or braces beneath the crisp white sheet. The gown clinging to her form was just open enough to show the midnight bruises covering nearly every inch of exposed skin. They climbed in splotchy constellations from the neck of her thin gown and down biceps honed to steel by months of rigorous exercise.

  Her face. Oh, Founders. Her face was…

  “What happened?” Beck asked in a reedy voice almost devoid of air. “What happened to her face?”

  Tala’s features were swollen and distorted to a degree that seemed almost artistic. Her jaw had clearly been broken at least once, judging by the shape of it. Her nose hadn’t gotten off any easier, and lacerations crisscrossed her visage in random locations but mostly in straight lines.

  The strangest thing was that every break and cut was held together with a shiny black material.

  “Her injuries weren’t actually as bad as yours,” the caregiver said. “Her jaw and nose were broken, there’s some fracturing in her cheek and in one orbital bone, but those are relatively minor. No chips. From what I understand from the field reports, your attack saved her life. Most of these injuries were sustained before her helmet finally gave way. The fractured orbital came from when your man Eshton shot the attacker. He fell on her and the weight of his armor caused a stress break there.”

  Beck tried to find her breath. Tala looked barely human—barely alive. “Why is…why is her face so out of shape? Is that how she’s going to look now?”

  The caregiver chuckled, and looked only slightly ashamed when Beck shot her a glare. “Oh, I’m not laughing at you. Just your age. I forget how little kids like you have seen. Medical is one of the things they don’t teach you in your cohort.”

  She stepped around Beck and gestured at Tala’s unconscious form. She leaned over as she spoke, pointing out the places as she mentioned them. “There were two options for some of this. Surgery, which is invasive and dangerous, or a more modern approach. The black material you see here is carbon lace. It’s holding the pieces together, even the cuts. As the swelling goes down it will draw the broken piece of bone back into place and seal around them. Like a cast on the inside. The cuts will do the same, then it will slowly dissolve in the skin. If I were to guess, I’d say her injuries will be noticeable for much less time than your own.”

  Beck’s head snapped toward the caregiver. “Why do you say that?”

  The woman gave her a curious look before carefully reaching out and tousling Beck’s hair.

  Or rather, where her hair should have been.

  “Our tech is very good, but we still had to shave that side of your head to work on you,” the woman said. “It’ll take a while to grow back. With the newest stem cell treatments, Tala might not even carry any scars.”

  Beck wasn’t so sure of that. As she was wheeled back to her own bed—her own room, as the hospital wing was virtually empty of other patients—a piece of fuzzy memory rose up to the surface of her mind. The entire fight and the conversation leading up to it existed only in fragments now, erased by the blow to her head.

  But she remembered the plaintive, terrified undertones in Tala’s voice as she’d asked for help. So much came through beneath that single word, the use of language itself only the tip of a buried mountain far beneath.

  The caregiver helped Beck back to bed, where she lay thinking about that for a long while.

  Tala might remember the fight or not. What she would remember, and surely with stunning clarity, was the face she’d wake up to. The injuries and knowledge that she’d come close to death to get them would prey on her. The stoic woman would probably tell everyone she was fine and do whatever it was she did to cope with the stress and strain of the life they’d chosen—likely a string of casual sex partners, if history was any indication. Tala had a healthy appetite in that regard.

  Yet beneath it all, Beck worried that the resilience she had seen from the woman would crack. Because the face you saw was also just the visible facet of a much deeper and more complex structure.

  It took four hours for Beck’s mind to realize the importance of that realization, and she was dead asleep when it worked it out. She woke up instantly and called for her terminal to connect with Stein.

  *

  It was only three days later, when the physicians decided she was well enough to leave full-time care, that Beck was able to see her idea in practice for the first time.

  Though she still had to check in at the hospital wing of the Brighton chapterhouse once a day, the rest of her hours were spent in her own private lab bay. The facilities for Science division here were as robust as any standard chapterhouse, but the small size of the garrison left the space wholly in Beck’s hands.

  She was watching the huge vid off and on as she slowly cataloged the heavily modified suit that had taken her and Tala down. She took notes by hand rather than voice dictation, a habit instilled in her during those years in the mine. You wanted to be able to check something at a glance rather than call for playback and have to do any searching.

  Beck was halfway through disassembling the suit’s right arm—normally she’d have started with the helmet but Eshton’s shots pretty much destroyed the thing—when the vid caught her attention.

  “Volume up,” she ordered.

  There was no narration, no voice carrying an explanation of the news. Parker had commented on how odd he found this given his childhood in the 21st century. If he was to be believed, there were entire channels dedicated to round the clock news and endlessly repeated explanations of it. That sounded like a nightmare to her.

  The video was a recording of a local meeting between the concerned parties in Rez Butler. The Warden of the Butler chapterhouse was in attendance with three of her senior Guards. They sat across from an equal number of delegates from the Traditionalists, the Diasporans, and the Butler civilian government. The last of those would historically have been a vestigial organ on the body of state at best, but times were changing.

  Proof of that could be found in the Deathwatch delegation, who wore no amor at all. Only crisp black uniforms. The bare faces were clearly making others in the group uncomfortable as they made introductions and began the traditional airing of grievances.

  Yet as the meeting wore on, something interest
ing happened: the Watchmen were actually listened to. No one was throwing their position away. None of the other factions gave more than a few inches in their given stances. The Trads still wanted everything to go back to the way it was in the fabled Good Old Days, regardless of how much horror those days entailed. Beck had no patience for that sort of casual disregard for reality. Neither did the Dians give ground on their ceaseless demand to move away and settle the badlands right now, with no more damned delays. The civilian delegation remained detached if slightly amused, presumably because they understood how the sausage of governance was made and recognized how absurd the Dians were being.

  No, there wasn’t much ground given, but the attitudes were softer. Beck saw it in every glance and word. Seeing the Deathwatch as human beings made it hard to hurl the kind of invective and disdain her people normally endured during these things. Even before Keene’s revelation, the citizenry hadn’t always shied away from pretending the armor protected its wearer mentally as well as physically.

  She listened and occasionally watched as she slowly broke down the suit’s arm into pieces and parts. She labeled everything carefully and double checked the position of each component before removing it.

  In the familiar routine, Beck found something she’d lost since joining the Watch: a measure of peace. Her idea to have their people negotiate and listen as themselves was, she thought, an important one. It reminded those speaking with them that Watchmen were human beings, not faceless monsters without compassion or pity. It reminded the Watch agents themselves of the same—being exposed meant acting on good faith instead of relying on strength of arms. Beck’s reminder of just how fragile they were had been a sort of inspiration.

  But she let the surge of satisfaction at seeing her idea in action fall away. Along with it went her worry over the factions, the increasing frustration among local governments, even Keene and his army holed up in the Block.