Men of Stone (The Faded Earth Book 3)

by Joshua Guess

  Beck laughed. “You guys, come on. You really think I’m going to make you choose which parent you love more, here? Eshton has been at this a long time. He knows tons of stuff we don’t. He’s been in charge of newbies for longer than all of us have been in the Watch put together. I’d be worried if you hadn’t learned stuff from him, and I’d punch him in the face if he made you miserable the whole time.”

  It was easy to say because it was true. In the heat of a fight or even just while on a mission, she didn’t allow her doubts any space in her head. Before and after they plagued her, sometimes as nightmares, and the crushing fear that she would fail to teach them some vital lesson that would cost a life was pervasive. Beck didn’t value herself so little that she believed she had nothing to offer as their leader, but she had almost no ego. If Eshton could show them a good time and teach them something in the process? Good.

  Like an unspoken command, the others moved aside as Tala stepped forward. Beck forced herself to look hard at the other woman, refusing to shy away from the consequences of their last fight together.

  What she saw was better than she imagined but not quite the flawless healing the medic had implied.

  “What do you think?” Tala asked, tilting her head slightly to show the thin lines of her scars. They weren’t invisible; you couldn’t miss them if you were standing within twenty feet of the woman. But neither were they terrible. There was no misalignment, no tightness as the slightly raised lines pulled at her skin. It was as if someone had traced the damage and small surgical sites with a wide marker in a slightly lighter shade of her natural skin tone.

  “Not what I’d have wanted for you,” Beck said after a pause. “But not as bad as I expected. Kind of looks bad ass, but I’m sorry all the same.”

  Tala shook her head. “Not your fault. Told you that in messages. Did you hear me complain when we set up the ambush? Not a fucking bit. We had no way to know that guy’s armor would be so advanced. And even if we did, so what? Wasn’t gonna run away from an enemy. None of us were.”

  Beck nodded, hearing the words even if she couldn’t accept them. Tala reached out and grabbed her arm, squeezing it tight. “No. Don’t just bob your fucking head and act like you agree with me. You listen to me. You didn’t make me join up, you didn’t trick me into that trench, and you don’t get to take responsibility for my choices. I’m my own person, not your kid or your dog. This is not on you. Got it?”

  Beck took half a step back. “Yeah, okay. I got it.”

  Tala disengaged but kept her eyes locked on Beck for a few seconds. There was real anger in that look, and though Beck wouldn’t have believed it even a minute earlier, she was certain that rage was not aimed at her.

  *

  Beck didn’t show up at the Spire just to meet with the team; she was called in. All of them were. Stein met with them for twenty minutes—looking more tired and haggard than Beck had ever seen her—then sent them off on a mission.

  “I don’t give a shit about light duty,” Stein said to Beck after the others had left the room. “Let them carry the load in a fight. Start thinking like a leader.”

  Beck decided to err on the side of sanity and not point out that the last time Stein went into the field, she almost had her head taken off by Pales. Instead she nodded and left the room before her mouth dropped into unexpected high gear and got her in trouble.

  As it turned out, the mission was an extension of the one Eshton led the team on. It was only after the briefing that Beck learned what it was—an attempt to find more Pale children cured of the Fade.

  All during the process of suiting up and heading north to the site her team had just come back from, the very concept of the mission rubbed her raw. During the month and a half of recovery she had thought about this particular problem as little as possible. The idea of Pales as a viable species represented a clusterfuck of unimaginable proportion.

  She wasn’t quiet about it, either.

  “You realize what will happen if people find out about this, right?” she mused aloud as the transport trundled along its path through the northern badlands. “How much trouble it’ll be?”

  “Fuck yes,” Eshton said. “It’s a nightmare.”

  There were murmurs from the others across the team channel, but it was Lucia who spoke up. “I don’t understand why. If some Pales can be cured, we try to help them like we would anyone else. I don’t see the problem.”

  Though Beck couldn’t see her face, she knew Lucia wasn’t playing devil’s advocate or acting the fool. She was perhaps the most innocent person on the team, the only one of them to join up because she really believed the Watch was a force for good that helped people. Even through the often violent things they had to do, she held onto that. Beck envied her a little.

  “It’s the Tenets,” Beck said. “If it was just that Pales could be cured or that they could have kids, there wouldn’t be a problem. Tiny Pales are still Pales, gross as it makes me feel to say it. But being able to revert to human means they’re just sick people, not permanently mutated monsters. And that’s going to raise a shitload of questions.”

  Lucia spread her hands. “Like what?”

  Beck grunted out a humorless laugh. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? We have no way to know how it’d all shake out. Some people would argue against killing them, others would get pissed about that, and we’d probably find ourselves with a bunch more factions and factions within factions, all dead set on being right and unwilling to think about the situation practically.”

  “Ah,” Lucia said, realization dawning. “Basically what we have now with the Trads and Dians but worse.”

  Jeremy turned in place slightly to look at her. “Worse is an understatement. Look at the factions we already have. It’s taken two months of constant work and the help of Scott and his people putting in a ton of effort just to get them to listen, and even then we’re only starting to see traction. Can you imagine trying to do that with people who’ve spent their whole lives hating Pales suddenly seeing other citizens willing to give them a chance?”

  “Then I gotta ask why the hell we’re even doing this,” Wojcik said. “Wouldn’t it be better to pretend we never found any of the cured and just…sort of carry on like we were?”

  “Say it if you’re going to say it,” Tala said. “Don’t beat around the bush.”

  Wojcik’s large frame, wrapped in armor and towering above the rest of them, seemed to shrink in on itself in shame. “Fine. You know as well as I do we’ve been planning genocide against all the Pales out there. That’s what the fucking cure is. And no one batted an eye. Aren’t the lives of our people more important than a handful of Pales out there who survived long enough to be cured?”

  A lot of cross talk followed this question, and Beck let it go on for a little while before squelching the channel.

  “This is exactly my point,” she said quietly. “Look at us. We’ve been out here in the shit together. We’ve fought these things side by side. We know how dangerous they are, especially in groups. But now we’re among the handful of people who also know they’re potentially human beings. Our laws say that the tribe has to be preserved over all else. The species comes first. But you can’t agree on whether or not that includes Pales.”

  Jen sat forward, the metal bracers covering her forearms scraping against her thigh plates. “Does it? What’s the right answer here?”

  Beck closed her eyes and bit back a sigh. “There isn’t one, or if there is I’m not the right person to decide what it is. This is way past something one person can or should be able to unilaterally decide.”

  Jeremy snorted a laugh. “That’s exactly what’s going to happen, though. Right? Stein will make her decision and that’ll be it.”

  “Yeah,” Eshton said. “She will. It won’t sit well with some of us, whatever it is. I’ll obey either way.”

  “Company man through and through,” Jeremy said, uncharacteristically snide.

  Eshton didn’t rise to the bai
t. “No. If Beck hadn’t come to get me, I’d still be living in Canaan, well away from this mess. I get more tired of this life every day I’m walking around in this tin can. I’ll obey Stein for the same reason soldiers have been obeying since the dawn of warfare.”

  “Because that’s what soldiers are supposed to do,” Lucia said. “Maintain the chain of command.”

  Eshton barked out a laugh of his own. “Nope. Because it passes the buck to someone else. Pure and simple. I can spend the rest of my life blaming her for whatever terrible thing we end up having to do.”

  The others thought this was hilarious. Beck didn’t join them in their laughter.

  Eshton was only half joking. She knew that. She’d basically begged Stein to take some of that very pressure off her own shoulders. The weight had grown tiresome on her best days.

  The real reason they were out here was because Parker wanted samples, needed data. Stein humored those requests because the more information and context he could provide, the more informed a command decision she could make. For example, if Parker could use what they brought him to refine the cure and turn even five percent of Pales back into human beings, that would represent a huge increase in the population. That itself could fall on the far end of the good/bad spectrum at either end—or both ends at once.

  Life was rarely simple black and white.

  Beck didn’t voice her own preference, which was to continue on as they always had. Kill Pales whenever possible and if they came across more cured, treat them as people. Help them. Hope there was some way to keep the citizenry at large from realizing the truth.

  There had to be some way to do that. Some avenue…

  She had the first moments of an idea on the subject just as they arrived at their destination, one of the areas where mass infestations of Pales were regularly spotted by sensors and long-range drones. One of the very first test sites for the cure, and a likely target for finding reverted humans.

  Beck was just starting to work out that flash of insight when the first bullet splattered off her armor.

  17

  “Everyone down!” Eshton called across the channel unnecessarily. Everyone was already dropping, and not simply to the deck of the transport. Experience had taught them all the value of cover. Beck was joined by everyone but Eshton in leaping off the flatbed and hunkering down on one side.

  The shot had come from the north, inside the copse of stunted trees and vegetation growing up through a stand of reinforced buildings a hundred yards away. Her suit threw no alarms, and she felt no pain. That was probably a good sign. Either the bullet failed to penetrate the steel plate or it had hit so hard it temporarily blew out the nerves wherever it impacted. In the sudden rush of adrenaline from the assault, her brain needed a few seconds to reconcile the fact that the lack of warnings from the suit meant she was fine.

  “That wasn’t an armor-piercing round,” she said. “I’m okay.”

  Jeremy crouched next to her, scanning the exterior of her suit. “Yeah, I’m just seeing a discoloration here. That’s it. No pitting. That was a vanilla round. Which means those aren’t Keene’s men out there.”

  Above them, Eshton returned fire. His shots weren’t the carefully metered staccato of a computer-assisted salvo. There was a messy cadence to them, and somehow she knew that meant he was firing unaided. Cover fire, then. Just enough to draw attention while the team got to safety. He was also using himself as a target. Fierce pride filled her—he’d put their safety first without hesitation or thought. Not just hers, but all of them. Almost all the people in the world Beck cared about.

  “Hop down here,” she said to him over the comm.

  “I should draw their fire,” he said, despite the fact that their hidden enemy had stopped shooting.

  Beck smiled to herself. “If you had a bead on them you’d be using your targeting computer. Get down here. I’d rather not risk one of them getting in a lucky shot through your visor.”

  “Already closed it,” Eshton replied with a snort, but he followed orders and jumped down. His visor was indeed closed. It wasn’t an option they used often—relying solely on external cameras to see was a dangerous gamble in many situations. The thinner armor plates which slid out from the sides of the helmet wouldn’t even slow down armor-piercing rounds, which made it pointless in a fight with almost anyone they might come across. Guns were rare, but when they were used it was virtually always against a Watchman.

  “I got a look at one of them,” Eshton said. “Just a glance.”

  “Already on it,” Jeremy said before Beck had a chance to have him run the video. His training and use of drones meant he carried a fairly complex suite of programs in his armor to let him scrub video and sensor data.

  “Hurry it up, man,” Wojcik said after thirty seconds. “They could be flanking us right now and pulling something that can get through our armor.”

  “Calm your shit,” Jeremy said distractedly. “It’s almost done rendering—there. Looks like…”

  Beck pulled up the image he shared across their personal network. “Remnant. No way around it.”

  The figure in the image was distant and blurry, but there was enough detail to be sure of his origin. Shaggy hair and beard. Ragged homespun clothing in worse shape than any she’d seen in Canaan. Antique rifle gripped in one hand as he began to turn away from Eshton’s field of view.

  “No others caught on video that I can see,” Jeremy said.

  Lucia let out a harsh breath, a literal venting of her pent-up stress. “Doesn’t mean they aren’t there. We need eyes in the sky.”

  Jeremy looked over at Beck. “Boss?”

  “Do it,” Beck said.

  He wasted no time activating the full complement of drones at his disposal. This didn’t even require Jeremy to change positions; he sent a signal to the hard case strapped to the bed of the transport. Two small aerial units and half a dozen rolling drones emerged from the case as its top cycled open and sped away under his practiced control.

  The low yellow grass nearly swallowed the ground units, but their cameras remained pointed up at an angle and the feed was clear enough. Each fed imagery in a rotating view from standard to infrared and back again as they approached the woods and began searching.

  One of the fliers buzzed higher than the other, swooping in a wide circle to make sure no Remnants were trying to work their way around to attack from the side.

  “There,” Tala said. “Lower left feed.”

  Jeremy cursed. “I see them. Shit. That’s a lot of Remnants.”

  “No,” Jen interjected. “It’s Remnants and Pales. Look at the clothes.”

  More accurately, the lack of clothes. The distant bodies shown on the feed from the northernmost aerial drone were a mix of shapes made indistinct by the presence of clothing and the smooth features of nude Pales. The group was separated enough to make the distinction obvious, but close enough that the infected should have been attacking the Remnants standing near them.

  Yet they weren’t.

  “That’s just unnerving, is what that is,” Wojcik said, succinctly putting into words what Beck felt in the pit of her stomach.

  One of the shapes was frantically gesturing at the others as it spoke, the rifle wobbling in its grip. Clearly the shooter making clear to the others that a fire team of furious Watchmen was nearby.

  Well. Now there were expectations.

  Beck didn’t want to disappoint.

  *

  The Pales moved first.

  Just as Beck gave the order to advance, the drone feeds began showing a bustle of activity. Bodies moving into the open toward the team. How the Remnants were able to command the infected, she had no idea. Pales were smart, certainly intelligent enough to work out cooperative effort with people who would point them in the direction of food—namely, other people. But communication? It could be something as simple as a body language.

  It didn’t matter in their current circumstances. The fight was the only issue at hand.<
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  Bullets began to careen off armor as Beck led the charge. She drew her blade and set her suit’s governors to the upper limit of what her body could handle. Everyone practiced with the higher settings regularly, even if they were rarely used in the field.

  Her first stroke of the blade was fast enough to make her bones creak as the armor pushed them to their limit, the force cutting the Pale leaping toward her in half at the waist. The blade caught in the spine of the enemy momentarily, but the computer sensed the hitch and recognized it as a potential problem before forcing the weapon forward with even more force to free it. The calculation and execution took place in a fraction of a second and with flawless grace.

  Grunts and shouts filled the channel. For once, Beck felt none of the overwhelming pressure to watch everyone’s back. The worry for her team was still there, nestled deep in the back of her head where it always waited to jump forward. This time it remained lodged firmly in place.

  It was her first combat since the injury. Her head throbbed as her blood pressure climbed, but the pain was not blinding as it had been so often lately. It clarified. Woke her up. Reminded Beck that she was alive and that the risks in front of her were very real not only for the team, but for her.

  A powerful, desperate thrill rose up through her chest and escaped her mouth in a battle cry that could be heard through her helmet without need of a radio channel. Beck stepped fully through the spinning sweep of her blade and rotated on one heel, reorienting for a moment before launching herself forward at fifty miles an hour in the direction of the shooters.

  The human enemies.

  Whatever they expected, it wasn’t for one of the team to break off and leave the others to deal with the infected. She didn’t expect it herself.