Men of Stone (The Faded Earth Book 3)

by Joshua Guess

  Each of those things was being addressed in some way. The ship of state, of society, made only wide turns. Their weight was on the tiller, no doubt about it. Only time would tell if the change in direction took.

  After a few hours there was a knock on her door. She’d disabled the chime—her head injury made sharp noises painful from time to time. “Unlock door,” she ordered the room.

  She might have expected Eshton or Jeremy, but not Lucia. The gorgeous young woman wore her field uniform, unadorned and ready to step in a suit. Beck felt a vague pang that the team was obviously about to go on a mission without her or Tala.

  “Hey,” Beck said, bending back over the suit arrayed on her massive work table. “Guess you guys have a job, huh?”

  Lucia stopped a few yards from the work space. She had enough practical experience with Beck to know she liked her projects left untouched by other hands. She settled into a stiff parade rest.

  “Oh, for the love of—Lucia, it’s just us. You can relax,” Beck said. “I’m not your boss right now, okay?”

  Lucia relaxed by a fraction, which Beck supposed would have to do. “I wanted you to know before we left that Tala woke up a few minutes ago. Eshton has already been in to see her. The others wanted to, but…”

  Beck put down the wrench she’d been about to insert between the plates and the sub layer of the chest piece. “Tala’s up? Is she, you know, okay?”

  Lucia cocked her head curiously, then smiled. “Oh. You mean has she seen what she looks like right now. Yes, she has. She can’t talk yet, but she wrote to us using a terminal. She says she’s still prettier than Wojcik.”

  Beck laughed. “It’s funny because it’s true.”

  If Lucia was bothered by the jokes at her partner’s expense, she didn’t show it. Instead her face grew more serious. Concerned. “We don’t feel right going without you, but the orders were immediate. I was wondering if you had any insights.”

  Beck leaned against the table and crossed her arms. “Give me details and we’ll see.”

  Lucia nodded and did just that. Beck listened for a solid ten minutes as the other woman went over the rough strategy, goals, and finer tactics. That brief span of detachment evaporated as if it had never been.

  “Well, I’m glad we’re finally doing something about those fuckers in the Block,” Beck said. “I guess I’ll be there with you in spirit. Here’s what you might want to do…”

  12

  In a lifetime of morally gray areas, Eshton was profoundly relieved to finally have some black and white. Pales were one thing—you went outside the wall or stood atop it to defend against them, and that was that. People were different. They were mutable, ever shifting. Push too hard here, commit to one judgment there, and without warning entire populations could turn on you. Attitudes could alter course in the blink of an eye.

  But this? This was war. The kind of clash not seen since the middle days of the Collapse. Eshton could not revel in it, as war was one of the central crimes outlined in the Tenets, but he could take some comfort in the stark nature of the conflict.

  “Wedge formation,” he said as the team moved out of the Loop car stopped a mile and a half from the Block Loop station. “I’m point. Lin, I want you in place and scanning in thirty seconds. You have priority on the team channel. If you see something we should know about, override any of us and sing out.”

  “Yessir,” Lin said, the words running into each other. How someone so skittish about field work had ever made it through training, he would never know. Maybe there was a different standard for lab specialists.

  They would have moved closer in with the Loop carriage, but the residents had been busy. The secret Loop tunnel Keene and his lieutenants had constructed as an escape route to the Block had been sealed off, but the main artery was still in place. This last mile and a half was vastly different from the smooth-walled tube it should have been. All the track was removed, clearly ripped free by armored hands. The finger marks in the underlying stone were easy to spot.

  Pieces of track were jammed into the tunnel to create blinds and fortifications, along with huge chunks of the tunnel itself. Broken away from the curving surface, jagged boulders dotted the long stretch and gave cover for defenders.

  Eshton raised a fist and halted the team fifteen yards past their carriage. With a quick command, he sent it back the way they’d come. Not far. Just distant enough that it ended up around a bend. He didn’t want any stray rounds or shrapnel damaging their ride.

  “Team one in place,” Eshton said over the command channel as he took a knee behind the easternmost slab of rock. There would be defenders out there, that much he knew without a shred of doubt. The quiet was deceptive. A trap meant to draw in attackers who grew overconfident. Such had been the fate of every previous assault team.

  Those had taken place with an entirely different intent. Then, the belief was that while the Block and Keene’s army represented a threat, it was a distant one. A demon trapped in a bottle that could erupt and spew forth at any time but in a predictable way. Now that they knew different, the goal was not to take and hold ground in advance of an attempt to enter and retake the Block itself.

  Now it was all about containment.

  Eshton made sure the compartment on his right thigh holding his pistol was open and the gun extended on its rack. He wanted it ready at a moment’s notice when things got rough. And they would get rough, no doubt about it.

  From his shoulder where a blade or pike would normally rest, he retrieved a heavy steel rectangle. With a murmured command to his computer, the thing shifted and reconfigured, unfolding itself into a massive rifle. Nearly five feet long and with an attachment three quarters the way down that would allow it to grab on to nearly anything for stability, it was a weapon unlike anything the old world had ever seen. Few people even knew Deathwatch Science still developed new firearms instead of settling on refining ancient designs.

  His HUD linked to the rifle’s cameras and other systems. For all its size, the rounds weren’t all that large. In the old world they would have been a moderate caliber. Combined with the many advances in tracking, materials science, and other technological leaps, they didn’t have to overwhelm with sheer brute force. These bullets were smarter than some Sentinels Eshton knew.

  “Shields ready,” he said calmly over the channel. “Stay in the wedge. They’re going to fire at us as soon as I give them a reason. Don’t let them get you, and I promise to keep them from melee range.”

  The others acknowledged over the team channel, but Eshton knew they were worried. Their last fight with Keene’s soldiers cost them two team members, one of them their leader. Even the reinforced shields each member of the team carried wouldn’t make them feel an iota safer.

  From his position fifty yards back the way they’d come, Lin cut in. “Drones are now deployed. First three have been taken out, but I have partial scans. I’m just going to start feeding your targeting system the data, if that’s okay.”

  “Yeah, go ahead,” Eshton said. “Give me a false color readout so I don’t have to guess what I’m looking for.”

  Lin complied, and his HUD began drawing outlines of enemies and other objects wherever drones found them. The telemetry was less than encouraging.

  “Holy shit,” Wojcik muttered in a near whisper. “How many fuckin’ turrets did these guys install? And they’ve got, what, thirty guys scattered in just the next hundred yards? All in armor.”

  Inside his own suit, Eshton smiled. The advance teams had taken out as many cameras and sensors as could be found. The Cabal soldiers knew hell was coming for them, but were blind to the specifics. They couldn’t know about the sapper teams using ground radar to check for more surprise tunnels, or the other teams waiting just out of sight for the fun to begin. The whole idea was to give the enemy only so much obvious visual data to go on. They would know a deception of some kind was in play, that was unavoidable.

  But Eshton’s goal was to keep them too busy
to realize just what was about to happen to them.

  “However many turrets or agents they have doesn’t matter,” Eshton said, falling into the blank space in his mind that turned his words into an arctic breeze. “It’s about to be a lot less.”

  *

  Though Eshton couldn’t see them directly, he tracked through his HUD what happened next. The representation there was small, rendered in simple lines to give an approximation of the movements and distance of all objects and people involved.

  Drone after drone rolled or climbed down the long tunnel. Each was given priority commands to evade any attack but to position themselves as near enemies as possible in the process of staying safe. Nowhere near all of the defenders or even their defenses were identified—that wasn’t the point. The assault teams only needed an idea of what lay ahead in the nearest portion of the tunnel.

  “In position,” Lin said over the comm, a tentative note in his voice. “Green across the board.”

  Eshton slightly repositioned his rifle, focused his attention on his targeting system, and let out a slow and calming breath. “Go.”

  A tenth of a second after the order was given, the drones moved in a carefully orchestrated pattern. Those nearest Eshton were heavily modified, their extraneous systems removed to create space for a tiny canister. Those drones hurled themselves toward targets whether they be defender or gun turret and latched on with the speed and accuracy of a pouncing insect.

  Sprays of explosive foam with the usual embedded microscopic detonators hissed from a dozen places in front of Eshton. A grim smile spread across his face as turrets turned into shrapnel bombs seconds later and armored defenders found the stolen protection of their suits suddenly worthless.

  In any battle strategy, it was best to nestle objectives together to create efficient chains of cause and effect. Though the overall mission was not to kill enemies, it was a nice side benefit. The attack against the individual soldiers lining the tunnel was not to kill them; that was a consequence of their need to clear a certain amount of space between Eshton’s position and the target area. The explosions did kill enemies, however, and as a result other enemies reacted instinctively and moved away.

  Into the open. Right into Eshton’s sights.

  In an earlier age, a whole line of riflemen would have been needed. Eshton had a backup waiting with the other teams. In the fractions of seconds when enemy soldiers began to pop out from the safety of their cover, his system acquired them, checked to make sure they weren’t friendly, then aimed and fired. Eshton was long used to the automated system taking control of his suit to manage the impossibly fast firing solutions.

  As this dance played out, other waves of drones moved in. Eshton’s suit finished picking off the visible targets in short order, and he switched over the manual firing.

  “Frag rounds,” he ordered the suit. The gun shuddered as the ammunition change took place. He aimed down the tunnel at a low angle, making sure to set the right dispersal pattern. Frag rounds could be timed to explode at an exact distance, and he peppered the air with them. The shrapnel wouldn’t do much to armored bodies. The sound the ceramic and metal pieces made as they contacted suits would be recorded by his system and used to figure out which barriers still had bodies behind them.

  During his second wave of frag shots, the enemy began to fight back.

  On the eastern end of the tunnel, Eshton was the only one using a firearm. When the western side unleashed their own, what followed was a rain of projectiles that would have shredded him had Eshton given them the chance.

  “Wow,” Wojcik said from beneath his shield, which was taking heavy fire. All of them were. “Kind of went to full tilt without warning there.”

  “That’s the idea,” Jen said.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know,” Wojcik grumbled. “It’s different actually being here for it.”

  The drum of bullets slapping against stone and steel barely lessened over the next ten seconds. Presumably the enemy would have to reload or would just run out of ammunition at some point, though Eshton could not discount the possibility that some kind of supply network running beneath the tunnel existed and could keep them stocked almost endlessly. He doubted it, however. The ground radar showed no such structures.

  “Got to say I’m not a fan of being bait,” Jeremy mused. “Sitting here while they move up the tunnel toward us feels kinda suicidal.”

  Lucia cleared her throat. “Are you not watching the drone feeds? They’re keeping back. Probably because they’re afraid of more drones coming in and shooting them in the face with explosives.”

  Eshton smiled. “Which feels like a reasonable concern to have right now. Lin? How are we looking?”

  There was a brief delay before the Science agent answered. “Fifteen more seconds before breakthrough. Nice of them to cover our sappers by making so much noise.”

  Eshton counted down the time, which ended up being closer to thirty seconds. When Lin came back on the line, it was with the news Eshton had been hoping to hear. “We’re good. Ready for breakthrough when you are.”

  By now the firing had finally slowed down. Not enough that Eshton would have wanted to stand up and wave at anyone, but they could at least finish the job.

  “This is it, kids,” Eshton said. “On three. We pull back and give them one last bit of covering fire.”

  The team acknowledged, and Eshton gave the order. They formed the shield wall without a mistake, their suits shoulder to shoulder except for the small gap right in the middle that allowed Eshton clear shooting through. He ordered the gun to cycle through every kind of ammunition it had as rapidly as it could as he tried to time the second it would run dry with the countdown on his HUD.

  “Now,” Lin said when the timer hit zero. It was all the order any of them needed.

  The floor of the tunnel erupted in plumes of dust, sand, and broken stone. Mining drones sent this way weeks before had run a parallel tunnel beneath the Loop far enough down not to be detected. It was only the vertical connecting the two that would be easily spotted—and so a distraction was needed.

  From the hole in the floor came dozens, then hundreds of small drones. Turrets would have picked them off long before they could get in place. Humans close enough could have stomped them with armored boots and swatted them with gauntlets.

  The entire enterprise was designed around creating just enough of a coverage gap and wasting just enough of their ammunition to allow the drones to get in place.

  “Run,” Eshton said, throwing the rifle on the back of his suit and turning to sprint away. Every shield dropped as the team—in a display of practical wisdom beyond their years—figured living was far more important than being yelled at for leaving equipment behind.

  They ran like hell to get around the curve of the tunnel. They had just reached the minimum safe point when a sound like the earth itself breaking in half filled the space and a pressure wave hit him in the back hard enough to lift his suited body off the ground completely and throw him forward six or seven yards.

  “M-mission accomplished,” Lin said over the comm. “All tunnels out of the Block are sealed. Watchers and sensors are fully dispersed and active around the perimeter both above and below ground.”

  Eshton felt blood running down his cheek from where his temple had smashed into some worn out and unnoticed spur of metal inside his helmet. It hurt like a son of a bitch along with the rest of his body which had slammed around inside his tin can mercilessly when thrown.

  He still smiled. “Got ’em penned in now.”

  Without the ability to move around freely, Keene and his fanatics were less of a threat. It would give the Protectorate some breathing room.

  In fairness to Eshton, that was what everyone thought. It was even true. But the assault had consequences few could have seen coming and fewer expected given how long they took to manifest.

  Part Two: Speciation

  13

  In the six weeks of Beck’s recovery—much longer
than anyone expected and three times as long as she would have liked—a new status quo began to emerge across the Protectorate. The foundation of work done by Scott and other Remnants recruited by him began to bear weight. These ambassadors spent a great deal of time and effort singling out those most likely to listen to reason among the many leaders of groups within each faction. Incrementally, both the Traditionalists and Diasporans became less inclined toward fiery speeches and shows of force.

  These were subtle shifts, but positive. No small part of the change sprang from the video footage provided by the Remnants showing the harsh realities of life outside a Rez—including the persistent waves of Pales lapping at their borders. This was a harsh reminder to the Dians that the threats outside were all too real and dangerously immediate. The Watch produced archive footage from one of the more recent blooms and the slaughter which followed. The worst of these videos were the sort of thing the Deathwatch actively suppressed. Showing the general consequences of a bloom had always been common practice; the burned out buildings and distant images of piled bodies was vague enough to prevent citizens from revolting against the Watch when seen.

  What had never been shared before were the grim realities of cleansing a Rez. Seeing Watchmen stomping through once-peaceful streets now ankle deep with blood and gore would have fomented resistance to the Watch, a group the citizenry already feared and resented to a large degree. This was not speculation; the first cleansings were not so rigorously whitewashed. Riots had ensued.

  Reminding the Trads what cost the stability they so dearly craved came at sobered them to a surprising degree. It helped that Stein herself put out regular recorded messages to the population, something Bowers would never have agreed to.