Men of Stone (The Faded Earth Book 3)

by Joshua Guess

  “Can’t believe you got your armor back in working condition,” Jeremy said over the team channel. “Lucia said you installed some mods, but I had my doubts.”

  “Your words are hurtful and our friendship is officially over,” Beck replied. “My skills are legendary, I’ll have you know.”

  Jen snorted a laugh. “In your own head, maybe.”

  “Well, I’m kinda impressed,” Wojcik said. “The fact she’s walking around in it makes the point, if you see what I’m saying.”

  Lucia cleared her throat daintily. “That’s true, but if you listen hard enough you can hear her ass squeak when she bends over.”

  Beck put her hands on her hips, about to retort with something devastatingly funny, but Tala spoke first.

  “Hell, that’s not her suit,” the scarred woman said. “Beck’s just wound up so tight her cheeks could fuse coal into diamonds.”

  Eshton, standing sentinel on top of the massive armored container bearing Parker and the others, laughed so hard he knelt in place. Beck tried to put indignant outrage into her body language, but the suit made it difficult. “Traitor,” she said, barely holding back a laugh.

  “Show me the lie,” Eshton replied.

  Beck sighed. “Okay, so maybe I’ve been a little high strung lately. It’s not—”

  A peal of thunder filled the air, a harsh crack like a mountain being broken in half echoing with it. Her external mic went dead silent as it tried to save her hearing, but the safety measure was nowhere near enough. The sound reverberated into her, through her, the force of it rattling every plate of her armor hard enough to make the attachment points groan slightly in protest.

  “What the fuck was that?!” someone shouted over the general channel. The convoy came to a halt and chatter filled the network between suits until Reeves, who was in charge, squelched the comms.

  “Everyone calm down,” he said.

  Everyone did not calm down. As the last word echoed through her helmet, Beck caught sight of something high above. A trail of white smoke with a black speck at its head, tearing through the sky in a wide circle. Even as she watched, the thing straightened out and began descending, its belly catching the air to slow its fall.

  “It’s going toward Brighton,” she whispered. Then, realizing the comm was still off and no one heard her, she pinged Reeves. He accepted at once, and she repeated the words.

  “Yeah, I have eyes,” he said. “I know you and Stein have some kind of…arrangement, so I’m not gonna pretend I can tell you what to do here.”

  Beck weighed the options. One hand held her orders, a duty to protect Parker and the others on their way to the new Rez site. No matter how well they cleaned the area out, and it had been cleansed as thoroughly as the Watch could manage, there was no way to know what might have sneaked back in. Enemy Remnants, especially crafty Pales not yet taken by the cure, even more of Keene’s soldiers in their experimental armor. Beyond that, she cared about them. Parker and Remy were friends, as much as it was possible she could have them as a member of the Watch. Rose was an innocent, and Beck had rescued her with her own hands. There was a power in that. A connection she could not ignore. Abandoning them wasn’t right.

  But the hard, analytical part of her knew that Brighton was understaffed. The chapterhouse there was relatively small under normal circumstances, and losing a dozen of their fifty available Watchmen to this convoy hurt their readiness. Stein had done everything within her power to make this convoy happen with utmost speed to get ahead of the rumor mill, and that meant sacrificing defense to avoid drawing attention by bringing in other agents to cover the gap.

  No one expected this. How could they?

  The choice was clear. Her heart told her to stay here and finish the job. That her duty was to the oath she’d sworn, an oath she kept even when her people exiled her.

  Beck’s head disagreed. It said that the Protectorate was the target. That no one would notice or care about the convoy. Whatever else Keene knew, Parker Novak didn’t appear on the list. A few less agents here would make little difference against a swarm of Pales or a few Remnants. They were heavily armed, the deck stacked with those Guards certified for firearms. A few more in Brighton might be enough to change the tide of whatever wave was about to roll over them. Especially if that backup knew the Rez intimately.

  Logic told her that holding to the Tenets meant saving the many. Rather than give in to self-doubt—almost a hobby as of late—Beck ignored the math inherent in wondering whether safeguarding Parker actually would save more people in the long run and made her choice.

  “We’re going,” she said. “Tell them I’m sorry. Brighton is going to need us.”

  “Understood,” Reeves said. His usually placid, empty tone carried more warmth than she expected. Not merely an acknowledgment, but a statement of fact. He understood the choice. Might not agree with it, probably would not have made the same one, but he saw why Beck did. “Take the fast transport. Your guy Jeremy will be able to drive it. Just send it back to us on auto when you get home, yeah? We might need that thing.”

  Beck said that she would and opened a channel to the team. “We’re going back. Load up.”

  *

  The ride back on the fast transport made Beck thankful for the medications they took when on duty in armor. Without the injections from her suit locking up her guts, the incredible speed over the uneven landscape might have had unintended consequences.

  The fast transport wasn’t actually rated to carry seven of them, but they made it work. It was nothing more than a low-slung platform made mostly out of battery, with a small electronics hub at the front and four wheels with motors housed inside them. It was as basic a design as could be thought up, an emergency measure that could be lashed on to the back of larger transports and hauled around as needed.

  Jeremy slewed them to a stop a hundred yards from the Brighton wall. Smoke billowed up from a vessel resting just outside it, a long furrow carved in the dust where it landed. The first thing Beck noticed after hopping off the transport was the main gate set into the wall. Or rather where the main gate should have been.

  “Son of a bitch,” Wojcik said. “They breached it.”

  Jen’s voice came across the comm furious, no hint of her light humor left in it. “They must have disabled the emergency barrier. I can see right into the Rez.”

  “That’ll make getting in a lot faster,” Beck said. “Jeremy, send this thing back. Let’s move.”

  Eshton drew his gun as they ran. The others unlimbered weapons as well, but Beck spent her spare attention on the uplink with the local Mesh networks. She was tapped into the Deathwatch and civilian systems at the same time, looking for any information she could find on the attack.

  There were, oddly enough, no automated alerts. As far as the system knew, there was no breach in the wall and no emergency. No warnings were being broadcast to citizens, and in the confusion she doubted very many of them would be able to spot the difference between friendly Watchman and what she knew in her bones had to be Keene’s men. There was no other logical explanation.

  “They’re going to show no ID,” Beck said. It was a guess, but an informed one. Keene would have been smart enough to make sure she had no way into enemy computer systems. She’d seen how closed their network was during her examination of the captured suits after the ambush. “They’ll show up as blanks. We won’t hear their chatter. If you see one of them, kill on sight. Understood?”

  The team chorused that they did, and she led them to one side of the open gate and stood close against the wall. There were a few annoyed grumbles, but Beck raised a hand to cut them off.

  “No, you need to hear this,” she said. “Remember that any one of their suits or every one of them might be just like the upgraded version that beat the hell out of me and Tala. The artificial muscle fibers are stronger and tougher. Their plate is thicker and can shrug off a lot more damage. They’re going to expect you to go for head shots with your melee weapo
ns. Give them a surprise.”

  She heard Jen and Lucia both chuckle darkly, a far more creepy sound coming from them than someone like Wojcik. Beck had tried to convince Stein to task some of the manufacturing hubs with creating upgraded weapons to deal with this exact situation. Stein turned her down each time. Not from overconfidence, just simple lack of resources. The stolen armor needed to be replaced. Their fabricators had been at maximum capacity. And any reasonable assessment said that a few hundred soldiers, no matter how advanced or well-armed, couldn’t win a war against the whole of the Protectorate.

  That was fine. Beck still had a fab of her own in Canaan, and it only took a few days of work to produce weapons for her team.

  “You’re really not going to like this part,” she said, bracing for the explosion to come. “Try to stay together. Split into teams of three if you have to. Eshton leads one, Lucia the other.”

  “Beck?” Jeremy said. “You can’t go alone here.”

  “No choice,” she said. “If you haven’t noticed, the Mesh isn’t showing any problems. There’s also no Deathwatch chatter. Our people can’t talk to each other. I can work on the problem from inside my armor, but in the meantime everyone is going to be working blind. I need to run overwatch while I try to figure out what they’ve done to our system.”

  “Fuck that,” Eshton said. “You’ll have to sit still. You’ll be a target. Let us guard you.”

  Beck smiled to herself. Always the loyal protector. She briefly wondered if she’d ever get her head in a place where a relationship actually made sense to her. A social life and the skills that came with it were alien concepts. Work in the mine transitioned to her time in the Watch. It wasn’t like they could go on dates. In those few seconds she resolved herself to rectifying that if they survived.

  “No, you have your orders,” she said. “The people here need you. That’s your job.”

  She accessed the Deathwatch network and found several commands functional and ready for use. Her smile turned into a grin. “Besides, I think I just found a way to ruin these fuckers’ day.”

  23

  “All residents of Rez Brighton,” Beck said into her suit’s mic. “This is Sentinel Rebecca Park. There is an emergency.”

  That much would be obvious to the people who’d already seen the strike teams running around causing chaos. Whatever Keene’s men had done to the local network to quash automatic alarms, it didn’t interfere with manual functions. That was probably because of all the failsafe features—you could trick a sensor into not knowing something was wrong fairly easily. Messing with core functions within a system was a lot trickier.

  “The people wreaking havoc are not members of the Watch,” she said, hearing her voice boom over every speaker in the Rez. “They’re enemy soldiers from the Block. Fortunately, their armor is built on the same scale as ours. They can’t fit through the emergency escapes.”

  Beck’s fingers danced insider her steel gauntlets, tapping away in tiny strokes against the sensors marking her virtual keyboard. “Every isolation chamber in the Rez is now open. You’ll find hidden escape hatches in the floor are now open as well. Take the ladders down into the undercity and make your way east. There is signage. You’ll know where to go.”

  She almost cut the connection then, but hesitated. It felt wrong to be so casually cold. “The Rez doesn’t matter. Only you do. Help each other get to safety. The Deathwatch will protect you.”

  Yeah. That worked.

  Beck pulled herself from the narrow alley she hid in. She knew the spot well; one side of it served as the back wall of Fisher’s bar. It was only place she could think of to stay out of sight long enough to put roots into the local network.

  “Switch to voice input,” Beck said as she hustled down the street.

  “Voice input active,” her suit confirmed.

  She huffed lightly as she ran down the street. “Give me long-range visuals from chapterhouse exterior surveillance. Disable the facial recognition and ID chip readers on those cameras. Visual systems only.”

  “Profile enabled,” the system told her. “Would you like to save this surveillance profile for future use?”

  Beck would have stumbled if her armor hadn’t automatically stabilized her. “I’m such an idiot. Yes, save the profile. Executive override.”

  There was a short pause as the system recognized her super user account. “Override active.”

  “Disperse saved surveillance profile to all networked devices,” she said. “Visual systems only, live feed.”

  The system, however, was being a fussy bitch. “Please specify area of coverage for new profile.”

  Beck blinked. She had meant to negate some of the invaders’ advantage by hamstringing the surveillance network. It was widely known that Keene had some kind of back door program like her own that made him invisible to the network. It forced video to loop any time his BIM was recorded or facial rec positively identified him. The simple solution was to just turn off those systems and make the cameras just cameras. It would prevent the video looping and let her see where the enemy was attacking, though the system wouldn’t be able to determine friends from foes.

  But she hadn’t considered how far to take it. The level of power Bowers had given her only hit home in that moment. “Disperse profile through the command Mesh, full coverage over all devices in the Protectorate. Send voice message to all Deathwatch personnel. Record.”

  “Recording.”

  “This is Sentinel Park,” she said, once again letting her voice fall into the confident tone of command that was slowly becoming less of an act. “The enemy has software in our system which makes them impossible to see or track if our ID systems catch sight of them. All cameras are now dumb, purely visual. It’s the only workaround I can come up with. If you think of a better one, contact me on my priority channel. Good hunting. End message.”

  Beck kept a watch on the street as she moved, but this area of the Rez seemed devoid of human life of any kind. She hoped that meant the citizens took her advice and dropped into the undercity and not that some weapon of mass destruction was employed against them. The lack of enemies made sense once she thought about it. The weird craft outside—somewhere between an airplane and a rocket—couldn’t have held more than twenty of them. Even spread out across the Rez individually, the chance of stumbling across one of them would be low.

  “Set camera view to thermal,” Beck ordered. “Lock on to any sudden spikes.”

  The computer did as it was told and she was rewarded at once by a distant lance of yellow-white streaking through the air. She heard the shot at the same time. It took a few seconds of studying the feed to work out where the shot came from in relation to where she stood.

  “Did anyone see that?” she asked over the general channel. No response came. “Oh, yeah. Forgot about that. Let’s see…”

  Rather than keep screwing around out in the open, Beck ran straight for the chapterhouse. From there she could do a hard reboot of the comm system and see if that fixed things. Far better than the half-ass job she’d manage between ducking for cover and nervously watching out for enemies. If she was going to provide overwatch—and she hoped whoever was in the chair hadn’t given up because of the comm failure—then she’d at least do it right.

  *

  The problem with the comm became clear when Beck stepped into the control center inside the chapterhouse and found an enemy in gleaming black armor hunched over the board. The figure spun on the reinforced seat, surprised that someone had been able to sneak up on them through the empty building. The shock was enough to momentarily make them forget the massive pistol on the table.

  Beck, however, did not forget her weapon.

  The sticky grenade splattered against the enemy’s helmet half a breath after the door opened. Beck ignited it at once and took immense satisfaction seeing the frantic pawing as four thousand degrees met steel.

  Instead of counting on the grenade to finish the job on its own, she steppe
d forward and thrust out her right hand, jamming the tip of the yard-long baton against it. It discharged an electrical current into the enemy suit. Not one powerful enough to short out the systems—her study of the captured one made clear that Keene’s people had planned for that.

  No, this was calibrated to overstimulate the electrically-sensitive fibers that made up the artificial muscles beneath the plates. This trick was also thanks to her studies. The delicate control mechanisms might be too heavily shielded for anything short of a bolt of lightning to fry, but the next-generation fibers were far more sensitive to current. It was this quality that made them so much more powerful than the ones in Beck’s suit. They were highly reactive.

  So much that the mild discharge from her baton sent every fiber in the torso and arms to maximum contraction, essentially turning the upper body of the person in the suit into an enormous clenched fist. Hands whipped away from the melting helmet with an audible snap. The suit recovered in four or five seconds, but by then it was too late. The front of the helmet was a ragged mass of molten steel with singed yet intact pieces of ceramic clinging to it. The enemy soldier screamed himself—judging by the sound—ragged as he pulled away the ruins of the helmet.

  The entire front sloughed off like a mask from some children’s costume party. When it did, Beck saw the terrible consequence of her attack. The man’s face was not completely gone, but the skin on it was. Burned black at the edges and pulled away with the remains of the helmet’s front, sinew and muscle lay exposed. Bone peeked through. Beck saw she was safe—the enemy no longer had eyes. Only a boiled mess that almost made her vomit when she saw them.