by Joshua Guess
Beck bit the inside of her lip to keep from reaching over and slapping the cool composure right off Reeves’s face. “We still could have tried to figure out why they set an ambush for us or—”
Reeves put up his hands defensively. “Whoa. Look, I know you’re pissed. I would be too if those guys had taken shots at my people. You get home after, and even though everyone is okay you start to really think about it once the adrenaline wears off. Holy shit, you think. Any one of those bullets could have been armor piercing or hit your eye pieces and that’s it. Lights out. Could have been you, or worse, one of your people. I know you want answers, kid, but the truth is there isn’t a big mystery here. They probably spotted your team last time they were in the area and decided to have a little fun.”
Beck snapped her mouth shut so quickly she almost bit her tongue. He was right—eerily right. Those were almost the exact things she’d dealt with in the hours after the attack. It was impossible not to concede that in this as in most things that had to do with the job, Reeves knew what he was talking about.
“So why’d you let them go?” she asked, not bothering to inquire whether compassion was in play. Reeves was many things, a soft attitude toward enemies of the Protectorate not even remotely among them.
“Because the trackers we injected them with won’t do much good if we don’t let them go home,” Reeves said evenly.
Beck blinked. “Injected them with?”
Reeves nodded. “Yeah. Bunch of simple nanomachines group up together and send out a radio signal we can follow. It’s weak, but it lets us tag a couple recon drones onto them without having to keep line of sight.”
There was an edge to his words, slowly emerging as he spoke. She often thought of the deadly intent beneath the learned calm of Deathwatch agents as a blade hidden in silk—an old concept but one that never lost its relevance. Especially in these trying times, it was easy to forget how brutally lethal the Watch forced its agents to be. The job meant sometimes getting your hands bloody all the way to the elbows.
“How long until you go after them?” Beck asked.
Reeves glanced at the hand terminal sitting on his desk. “I’m tracking the drone signals in real time. When they stop moving, we’ll pilot it in to see if they’ve arrived at camp. If so…”
Beck grimaced. “Then we move in and eliminate the threat.”
“We?” Reeves asked with an arched brow. “You’re coming along? I’d have thought your time with other Remnants would have put you off.”
Beck shook her head and chose not to rise to the bait. “These guys targeted us. I somehow doubt they’re out here raising kids and trying to build a life. You’re right. Any one of those bullets could have hit one of my people in the sweet spot. We don’t stop them here and now, they might get a chance to try again. And then it would be on me.”
*
The drone footage showed no Pales in the vicinity of the Remnant camp. There were no fires, either. Cold camp was not as harsh as it had once been; the warming of the world following all the damage humanity had done to it during the Collapse filled in the valleys and filed down the mountains between seasons. But it was still a bitter thing this far north, and air a few handfuls of degrees above freezing could still kill without precautions.
It was clear the Remnants expected someone to come looking. Beck and her team had been on the trail for a full day, only moving when their prey did and staying back so far that no sound or any other hint of their presence could reach the fleeing enemy.
Reeves and his team were coming in at an angle, having taken a transport further south and to the west. That was the most likely direction the Remnants would flee if they realized how close Beck and her team were.
When the time finally came, she almost felt sorry for the haggard collection of thirty sinewy men and women. The footage from the drone that came just close enough to verify their location showed thin bodies of whipcord muscle, scraggly beards and heads of hair, eyes so angry the old Beck would have backed away terrified.
She was no longer that person.
“Everyone put your safeties at maximum,” Beck ordered. “We want to move in as fast as our bodies will handle.” Her own were set above the preset ceiling, but the others didn’t need to know that.
When the board showing team readiness went fully green on her HUD, Beck raised a hand and gave the signal.
Their boots churned up dirt in a cloud as they rushed forward as one. Beck outpaced the rest of them by several strides. She had to be the first into the fray. If there was a trap, it would be sprung on her. Not them. Never again.
At twenty feet from the circle of sleeping bodies she knew something was wrong. They weren’t wrapped tight in their sleep gear as one would expect from people trying to ward off the cold. The edges were loose, enough to fool a camera lurking at a distance but obvious up close.
“Trap,” she panted as she threw her legs wide and fell into a power slide. Time seemed to slow as the nearest of the Remnants erupted from his bedding with a curse. There was a small device in his hand—a familiar weapon. Her forward momentum was almost gone. She had fractions of a second to make a move.
With a muttered command, Beck ordered her suit to release her primary weapons. The blade and staff fell away to the ground, no longer held on magnetically.
“See how fucking tough you are without your suit,” the man growled as he hurled the disruption grenade at her.
It arced through the air with glacial slowness. It would freeze her solid and let the first person who pulled out a firearm have an easy target. From this distance missing was nearly impossible. She did the only thing she could in the fraction of a second she had left.
“Eject!” she shouted.
The panels on the back of her armor blew away at the joints just as the grenade struck home. Beck pushed herself back as hard as she could and tucked into a backward roll. Her shoulders slapped painfully against something hard, and when she righted herself a thrill of recognition lit her face.
She snatched the staff from the ground in front of her and surged forward without hesitation.
It was heavy, a weapon meant to be wielded by the enhanced strength of a suit, but she compensated by not letting the thing slow once it was in motion. Letting its momentum carry it through the familiar patterns, the staff spun in her hands as if it were alive.
The butt slammed into the face of the Remnant who attacked Beck’s suit. In that flash between moments, she saw his cheek crumple from the impact. Beck didn’t slow, instead pushing forward into the rising mass of bodies ready to do her harm.
Her staff whipped around in huge, sweeping arcs. The strain sent aching lances of pain from her fingers to her shoulders. She clenched her teeth with the effort of keeping the thing moving. No single blow was a heavy one—a shot to the torso would have done damage, certainly, but would have stopped her momentum cold—so she aimed for wrists and elbows most often. Faces when she could manage it.
A few people tried their guns, but none among them had pistols. Their intended targets were Deathwatch agents, after all. Short-range weapons with low velocity ammunition would have done them little good.
Beck should have died in seconds as soon as those guns were freed. She would have but for two factors. The first was the deliberate choice to move into the crowd. The Remnants might hate the Watch with a fiery passion, but they were less keen on shooting their friends by accident. The press of bodies was her shield no matter how much danger it put her in without her suit.
The other factor was the team following behind her. Screams of rage and pain filled the night as the others, warned by her frozen suit, fired stun darts well ahead of their approach to keep the enemies from replicating the attack on Beck.
Just as she spun away from breaking the forearm of a man raising a machete high overhead, another person slipped inside a hole in Beck’s defense and thrust a knife at her exposed belly. She twisted as far out of the way as possible, letting the weight of the staf
f pull her off balance in the opposite direction, but it was not enough. She hissed as the blade drove home, the point skidding off the edge of her left hip and skewing up and away as he momentum carried her free.
“Beck!” a flat electronic voice shouted, the volume painfully loud.
She stumbled, dropping the staff out of shock and protective instinct, her hands clamping down on the wound. The man with the knife reoriented and lunged forward. Beck leaped back as best she could and balanced on one foot as she kicked out with the other.
Her uniform boot was, thankfully, both steel-toed and with a tongue of metal running along the sole. The knife met the bottom of her foot and glanced off, but the delaying tactic cost her what balance she had left. Beck’s hands fell away from her wound as she unceremoniously flopped onto her back, dirt and debris from the stunted forest around her grinding into the bleeding cut when she hit.
He was coming for her, knife already aimed at her again. The point gleamed a dull red in the dim light, and she could see the moonlight reflecting off his teeth as he grimaced. Death was coming, bearing down on her with a certainty she had never felt in her life. Inevitable. Ponderous. Rolling over her in an unstoppable wave.
This was the end. That was what her brain screamed at her. In a desperate bid to spur her into action, her neurochemistry kicked on the afterburners. Beck became hyper-aware of every sound and smell, her vision sharpening to painfully clear definition. Worst was her sense of touch; every pebble and leaf glued to her bloody hands was a distinct object, alien and intrusive.
Death came within two feet of her supine form, then moved no further.
A set of armored gauntlets appeared as if by magic at the edge of her tunneled vision. One black steel hand grasped the knife hand’s wrist and simply closed as if the space between the fingers held nothing more than air. Bones broke like shattering concrete. Flesh tore wetly. Thick droplets pattered to the forest floor as a shriek filled the air in a fair imitation of an angry Pale.
The other fist followed through barely a second behind, repeating its mate’s squeezing trick with the knife-man’s neck.
Then Eshton was standing over her, his target tossed away like so much trash, every line of his suit furious and aggressive as he defended her from attack after attack.
20
Beck’s injury was relatively minor. Thought it bled fiercely until a medic could inject the wound with trauma gel, no major vessels were cut. Deep as it was—the blade had glanced off the bone—an hour of careful work by the medic restored her well enough that she could move around on her own, if gingerly.
The same could not be said for her armor.
“That’s a shame,” Lucia said quietly as Beck pored over the remains of her suit. Reeves’s small camp was only a temporary site meant to act as a sort of set for the captured Remnants to stage their escape. A real Deathwatch campsite would have been impossible escape from.
Even so, the camp had all the amenities one would expect from a traveling group of Watchmen. This included the tent Beck stood in and the platform her armor rested on.
“You put in so much work,” Lucia said, trying another conversational gambit.
This time Beck looked up. “Huh? Sorry, I was distracted.”
Lucia stepped aside to stay well out of Beck’s way as she slowly circled the armor. “I was saying I’m sorry about your suit. You spent a lot of time on it.”
Beck’s eyebrows furrowed. “You say that like it’s a lost cause.”
“Isn’t it?” Lucia asked, gesturing toward the gaping back of the armor. “You blew the hinges off.”
Beck grinned. “Well, yeah. I had to. But…here, look. I did a lot more alterations than you might think. The attachment points for the hinges can be removed both on the suit and the panels. The sub layer on the panels is fine. All I have to do is unscrew them, put in new hinges from my kit, and spray some sealant in there to make sure it’ll hold air. Two, three hours of work at the outside.”
Lucia blinked. “Really? We were always told an emergency eject ruined the armor.”
“Eh,” Beck said, seesawing her hand. “That was never completely true. It would have just created more work than the suit was worth. Easier to scrap it out and make new armor from its parts. This way is modular. I did it specifically because they told us that. I wanted to see if I could make the process less damaging.”
She opened a compartment on the left leg of the armor and pulled out polymer-wrapped bundle of flat metal. New hinges. Fingers poised to tear the polymer away, Lucia reached out and put a hand on Beck’s wrist.
“Sorry, you don’t have time for that,” she said apologetically. “That’s why I came to find you. Stein wants us at the Spire as soon as possible. We have to prep for a meeting. She said you had some idea you shared with her she wants to move ahead with.”
Beck straightened in a flash. “Oh. Uh, I guess I’ll have to drive us home. Or at least sit in the cab of the transport. Assuming there’s not a spare suit here?”
Lucia shook her head. “Sorry, we asked around for you, but no. Keene really fucked us there. I’ll load your armor onto the transport, though. We’ve got a body box we can store it in. Once we’re in Manhattan, I’m sure Lin and his people can do the repairs. You can write him a message and tell him how on the Loop ride there.”
Beck frowned theatrically. “I thought I was supposed to be the leader.”
Lucia grinned. “You are. It’s just that I finally worked out my role. Jeremy is your right hand, even when he has to set you straight. Jen is the one who makes us smile. Wojick is—and I say this with love—our big, dumb dog. Loyal and protective. Tala is our point man. Competent and not bothered by our dumb chatter. Eshton is our older brother. He’s the one who guides all of us even when we don’t realize he’s doing it.”
“Enough foreplay,” Beck said. “What does that make you?”
Lucia shrugged. “I’m the team mom. Wojcik keeps telling me I’m too nice for the work we do. I tell him I’m not going to quit, and I’m not, so I decided to just lean into it. The rest of you are better fighters than me. Better at tactics. I’m a line grunt at best, so I figure I can help by making sure the little things are taken care of.”
Beck nodded. “Not so little, I don’t think. There’s a lot to be said for that. Stressing over the small stuff can wear you down.”
Lucia snorted a laugh. “Yes, I have been watching you work…”
*
The meeting was not what Beck expected. Instead of another series of discussions, this was Stein at her peak: laying down what would happen and glaring at anyone who dared interrupt.
Beck sat among a handful of people, and it did not escape her notice that every person in the room knew about the fact that Pales could reproduce. And unless she was wrong, it was every person in the Protectorate who knew that fact.
“Here’s how it’s going to go,” Stein said as she brought up a schematic on the wall display. “What you’re seeing here is a design for a new kind of Rez. There’s a wall, but it’s not printed by a dragonfly. The panels are manufactured here at first, then shipped to the build site. Everything is centralized so a single admin building is all we need for survival-level vital functions. That will be prefabricated as well and assembled along with the wall. It’s going to be a lot more rough than what our people are used to, but it’s a step into a true diaspora since we can make this happen relatively fast.”
She swiped a new image onto the display. This Beck was far more interested in. A small machine filled the space, of a design she was unfamiliar with. Stein noticed the mystified expressions and smirked. “Yeah, this is new to everyone here, I think. This is an upgrade on the dispensers we’ve been using to hit Pales with the cure. This little guy is a drone. Basically a mobile delivery platform. Making them is about has difficult as putting together one of our recon drones, which is to say not hard at all. We’ve already dispatched twelve dozen of them to the site of our first new settlement.”
&
nbsp; “Whoa,” Scott said, raising his hands in front of his chest. “Moving a little fast here, aren’t you?”
Stein met his eyes with an expression of pure stone. “No. If anything we’re running behind. Beck had a good idea, one whose merit couldn’t be put aside easily.”
Beck flinched. “Hey, don’t bring me into this.”
Stein shook her head. “This first settlement is going to be far outside the range we originally planned for the diaspora when it eventually happened. It has to be, because we don’t want anyone wandering to it by accident. It’s going to be a science station. A very important science station.”
Eshton was the first to work it out. “Oh. You’re going to move Parker and his research out there. Which I guess means Rose, too.”
A round of surprised murmurs filled the conference room as Stein confirmed his theory with a nod. “Yeah. That was Beck’s idea. We avoid letting people know about the speciation taking place in the Pales by relocating the work far away. At the same time, because it’s a science station, we placate the Traditionalists who want more study before we commit to new settlements for regular citizens.”
Jeremy snorted. “Translation there is they don’t actually want us to ever move forward but are too cowardly to say that out loud.”
“Right,” Stein said. “But this lets us pretend to meet their demands and ties their hands. Maybe by the time the real diaspora is ready to go they’ll have another argument, but by then it won’t matter. We’ll just do it anyway.”
Jen leaned forward, elbows on the gleaming surface of the table. “This will make the Diasporans happy because they’re getting a new settlement out in the fertile parts of the badlands. Damn, that’s smart.” She flashed Beck a smile.
Stein grinned. “It checks off a bunch of boxes. Getting Parker away is vital. We know Keene is planning something. You don’t accumulate the kind of hardware he has in his little kingdom without meaning to use it. Movement HQ is safe, but I’d rather err on the side of caution and not have our most valuable scientific resource where Keene might be able to reach him.”