Men of Stone (The Faded Earth Book 3)

by Joshua Guess

  Beck chewed the inside of her lip as she thought. It was possible the enemy was making their way toward crucial infrastructure, but everything truly vital was in or adjacent to the chapterhouse. One of them managed to get in, so if the goal was to kill the bioreactors or water reclaimers, they had the opportunity. All this running around the Rez seemed aimless. The only thing it accomplished was drawing Watchmen in every direction. They weren’t even making a real effort to kill.

  Just a distraction.

  Insight struck her out of the blue. “Did anyone pay attention to the gate when we came in? Other than the fact that it was open?”

  “No,” Eshton said, a note of worry in his voice. “From the way you sound I think maybe we should have.”

  She changed direction at once and flipped off the governors for her suit. Her body screamed for some measure of sanity as she raced toward the gate, muscle and sinew straining to keep up with the punishing speed.

  Beck slid to a stop in front of the main gate a minute later, her sensors already scanning at full spectrum. The HUD overlay minimized to show her what was in front of her—what she suspected in that flash of understanding.

  “Access Rez core functions,” Beck said. “Sound emergency evacuation.”

  Through the open gate she could see a dust cloud stretching wide and billowing into the sky. Tiny figures in the distance, white specks in the field of orange, plodded closer. Pales. Dozens, maybe hundreds of them. If they were the only concern, Beck wouldn’t have triggered the evac alarm. She might have been able to buy time by blocking the gate somehow, maybe even figure out a way to drop the emergency barrier.

  Instead she turned and fled. There was nothing she could do here thanks to the dozens of small explosive charges now set inside the gate and stretching along the wall for ten yards on either side of it. The sniffer in her sensor package caught whiffs of the stuff dense enough to make it clear that when they went off, whatever was inside the blast radius would be a smear of molecules. The enemy had to have driven the Pales this way, which meant the explosion would come before it could pose a danger to them.

  As much as her body protested, Beck nearly flew along the main thoroughfare.

  “Everyone get out,” she said over the general channel. “Everyone! Forget chasing down Keene’s soldiers. Get to the goddamn Loop station. About a hundred feet of wall is about to stop existing and there are Pales co—”

  A flash of light filled the world brighter than the sunniest day she’d ever seen. A fraction of a second later a fist of wind slammed into her back mid-stride, picking her up and hurling her body forward nearly forty feet. Her trajectory was low to the stone street and ruler-straight, dropping her back on it on the downward arc. She silently thanked every higher power she’d ever heard of just in case she was wrong and one of them was up there watching her back. Had she impacted a building, the armor might have survived but Beck would have been red paste inside it.

  “Get out,” she coughed into the comm. “I’ll be there soon.”

  *

  A hundred yards from the station, as she hurtled through a cloud of dust thrown up by the bombs, she ran into an enemy. Literally. Their armor clanged hard against each other as they slammed together at right angles. She heard the clatter of a weapon hitting the ground and caught her balance before she could join it.

  Beck was already holding another of her weapons, this one wholly designed by her using materials common to the Watch. It was functionally nothing more than a short rod about eighteen inches long with a tube running from its base to a tank attached to her wrist.

  She struck out with it, smashing the tip of the rod into the joints of the enemy’s armor as it lurched back to its feet. A flat laugh echoed from the sleek mask. “Is that supposed to be hurting me or something?”

  The voice was male, and his arm moved with shocking speed to knock the rod away. Beck was ready for the move and she still barely drew it back in time. She danced away and made sure her strikes had been enough. No way to tell for sure. It wasn’t like she’d ever had the chance to test this one out.

  Small splotches of white foam stood out starkly against the armor. If the helmet had sniffers, or the man inside it any experience with technology proprietary to the Deathwatch, she was sure he would have had more concern.

  “This stuff supposed to gum up my motors?” he asked, stalking toward Beck.

  She moved, trying to keep distance between them. “No. It’s explosive foam with micro detonators suspended inside.”

  The man froze at the words, which was exactly what she’d hoped for. Beck used that extra second to gain a hair more distance, then detonated the foam.

  Pieces of plate tore away from the base layer and artificial muscle fibers. The man shrieked with pain, though the explosions likely hadn’t done him much real injury. Those base layers were tough, the fibers almost impervious to mechanical force.

  The connection points and motors, however, were as vulnerable to bombs as anything else. Making a system that released the stuff on impact in measured amounts took part of an afternoon.

  She paid the soldier no mind, running once more toward the station as soon as she saw him tumble to the ground. She wasn’t so bloodthirsty that she needed him to die as recompense for what his people had done to her home. Neither would Beck lose any sleep if the incoming swarm of Pales ate him alive.

  She had to slow when she got in sight of the chapterhouse. Two Guards with firearms had their weapons trained on her as they stood protectively in front of the main entrance.

  “It’s me,” Beck said. “Park. Where is everyone else?”

  They didn’t so much lower the guns as point them slightly off center, ready to raise and fire in a heartbeat if needed. “Inside watching the undercity side of the station. We welded the other doors shut with thermite. This is the only topside way in.”

  “Good idea,” she said approvingly. Forcing the enemy to use avenues of attack of your choosing, ones you could defend, was a solid tactic. “Any citizens come in this way?”

  Both Guards shook their heads. The one on the left who had spoken before answered. “Only person who came in topside was your man Wojcik and a civilian he found, but that was before we got here. Nothing since then.”

  Beck chose her words carefully. “Okay. Take this as a suggestion if you like, but I’m going down there and once all the civilians are in the tunnel, I plan on shutting the door behind us. I’ll let you know when that’s about to happen. You might want to hustle that way before you get stuck here.”

  “Will do,” the Guard said. “Probably gonna take some time.”

  Beck muttered agreement as she moved into the building, but she had her doubts. Everyone in a Rez knew what the evac alarm meant. Once a year they drilled on how to exit the Rez if needed. The game never went past marching through the streets and past the chapterhouse, but she’d participated in enough of the things to know the citizens of Brighton took the lesson seriously. Since there were only Loop cars for maybe a few hundred people out of the ten thousand or so who lived here, the only option was to walk them as a group into the tunnel itself.

  This too was part of the plan. In the event of an exodus, everyone was to escape into the Loop network. Preparations for such an event had been put in place ages ago.

  Beck dashed through the building and into the station. As expected, humanity flowed from the undercity in an unbroken stream. Families trying to stay together held hands, many carrying small children as they bumped into their neighbors. No one pushed or lost their cool thanks to the presence of several armored figures at the edges of the space.

  Others would be dotted along the closest stretch of the undercity, but Beck wasn’t interested in that. If an attack came she would of course jump in and help, but in that moment she wanted nothing more than to find her team.

  “Guys, give me a direction here,” she said over the team channel. “I’ve got no bearing on where you are.”

  “We’re all just outs
ide the tunnel entrance,” Jeremy replied at once. “Except Wojcik. He’s probably halfway to the nearest Rez by now. A Guard sent him with the first few carriages out so he could get treatment for his hand.”

  Those carriages would be packed to the ceiling with people. Beck actually felt a bit sorry for him. It would be a hellish ride. “Okay, I’m coming to you. Any idea whether those assholes have tried to follow us down here yet?”

  “No,” Eshton said. “Weirdest thing. Once you gave the order to evacuate they stopped showing up at all. Couple Sentinels we ran into on the way said they saw a handful of Keene’s men running off together. Away from the Loop.”

  “Wonder why?” Tala mused, unusual for her.

  Beck sighed. “You know, I’ve spent a lot of the last year worrying and wondering about that kind of thing. Most of today, too. And I’ve decided I don’t give a fuck about their motivations. The goal is pretty clear. They want to do as much damage as possible. Don’t care at all why. Just that we stop them and Keene once and for all.”

  She was not surprised to hear every one of them agree with her.

  26

  Beck waited at the mouth of the Loop tunnel until the last two people came through. These were the Watchmen she met at the main entrance to the chapterhouse, and they informed her solemnly that by the time they’d come through there was almost no chance anyone else would. Pales had spread through Brighton nearly all the way here.

  She sent the lockdown command and stepped away as the enormous blast doors rumbled into place. Steel two feet thick would stop anything short of a nuclear weapon, and once they were down the motors shorted themselves into worthless slag by design.

  The pair of Watchmen waited for her a few yards down the tunnel.

  “Sending everyone into the undercity probably saved thousands of lives,” said the one she hadn’t spoken to before. Beck flipped her ID sensor back on, no longer needing to avoid triggering the programs Keene hid in the Mesh. His name was Walsh. The partner was Franks.

  “Not all of them,” Beck said. “No way to know how many we lost until we can get somewhere with a head count.” She gazed at the moving sea of bodies walking the tunnel ahead of her. They’d opened the storage caches secured inside the chambers built into the tunnel walls in case of an evacuation, so they had food and water. Nothing else, though. These people lost everything.

  “We were never gonna save all of them,” Franks said. “You can’t think that way. What you did was incredible. We could’ve lost the whole Rez. Less than three dozen of us got most of the population to safety. Take a second and be proud of that.”

  She wanted to, but it went against her basic nature. That unbreakable kernel of humanity, the part of her the Watch could not shape into something that fit its mold, refused to accept it. She could be—and was—happy that so many got away, but pride in minimal losses felt too much like an admission that next time there was some level of death she would justify to get the job done.

  Which was of course the premise the Watch, and to a degree the entire Protectorate, was founded on.

  She changed the subject rather than explain her reservations. “I just wish we could have done more to hurt those bastards.”

  “We might be able to help you there,” Walsh said slyly. “See, we noticed soldiers moving in the streets ahead of the Pales. Coming for the chapterhouse. Figure since it’s a hardened structure they were just planning to ride out the swarm in there. Why not? It has everything they need to survive for as long as they want. That or they thought the Loop would still be open and they could get away.”

  Franks chuckled darkly. “So we left a present for them. Every canister of foam explosive we could find, tucked in corners around the entrance hall. We rigged the doors in there to lock and networked the containers with the Mesh so we could set ‘em off remotely.”

  “You did all that in the five minutes I gave you to get down here?” Beck asked in mild shock.

  Walsh shook his head. “Nah, we were already inside for ten minutes by then. We decided to leave that little gift and headed inside.”

  “Don’t worry,” Franks interjected. “We watched the exterior cameras to make sure no stragglers came through. Using cans of foam as traps is something most Reclamation agents end up doing at some point. We been on enough runs to know the trick.”

  Beck switched on the feed from inside the chapterhouse. Soldiers were filing through the door in a rush, and ten seconds after she opened the video the last few staggered in and secured the entrance behind them.

  “There they are,” Walsh said, clearly watching the same feed. “Want to do the honors?”

  The segment of her mind cultivated to take satisfaction from destroying enemies, a necessary if gruesome attitude to have in her line of work, should have perked up at the offer. Instead Beck felt only tired, angry, and sad. More lives sacrificed on the altar of principles of men who thought they knew better than everyone else. Keene for the hubris which drove him to push the masses into conflicts because he believed it would make humanity stronger. The Founders of the Protectorate and the Deathwatch who believed so strongly in their foresight that cutting away the parts of themselves that inspired creative drive and embraced freedom seemed like a perfectly rational course of action.

  “No thanks,” Beck said. Tired and sad, but in that moment mostly angry, she did decide to watch.

  *

  She and the team took a side tunnel away from the endless line of humanity moving down the main one. Carriages were moving in and away in regular intervals, stopping only long enough to pack as many bodies in as possible before zipping away to the nearest Rez. Beck kept an eye on the system as they moved toward the branch tunnel and the hidden carriage left there by Special Projects division.

  It would take longer to get to a Rez using the secondary branches and workarounds, but there was no helping it. Too many people clogged the main thoroughfare. So many that the incoming carriages had to slow down miles away to make sure they didn’t accidentally hit anyone.

  Once they were safely tucked into their carriage and on their way, Beck stepped out of her armor. Being suddenly without its constant support nearly caused her to collapse. She hadn’t realized how much of the work it had been doing to give her aching muscles and bones some relief.

  It took real effort to plod across the metal deck and take a seat at the terminal desk built into one wall. Bless Special Projects for making sure their carriages had everything an agent might need for information gathering.

  The rest of the team followed her lead, taking much needed breaks from their armor and letting the suits charge as much as possible as they ate and took care of necessities. They spoke softly among themselves while Beck worked. They knew the look of focus on her face that said she was not at all interested in chatting.

  When she paused nearly twenty minutes later to stretch her neck, a hand touched her shoulder gently. She glanced up to see Eshton standing behind her. His fingers began to work her shoulders and neck, gentle but strong.

  It felt wonderful.

  “So, how bad is it?” he asked as he dug his thumbs into knots Beck hadn’t been aware of until he found them.

  “Reports are spotty,” she said evasively.

  He made a dismissive noise deep in his throat. “Please. You’ve been scanning maps and reports nonstop since you sat down. Too fast for me to make much out of it from across the room, but I know better than to think you were just skimming. Is it really bad enough that you don’t want to tell me of all people?”

  Beck let herself just enjoy the massage for a few seconds before answering. “The attacks aren’t as spread out as I thought they’d be. I mean, Brighton isn’t—wasn’t—a strategic location, but they hit it anyway. There’s no vital work going on there. No reason to attack the place if crippling the Protectorate is what Keene is after. So I just assumed they were attacking all over.”

  Eshton chewed on that for a few seconds. “Unless they were just making a point? I mean,
Brighton is the Rez furthest into the badlands. It’s the place where contact with the deeper network of Remnants began. As a message, attacking there is pretty clear. They want us to know expansion is dangerous.”

  Beck shook her head. “I think we all got the point, then. As for the other attacks, they’re way more concentrated. And those are strategic. Rezzes that produce tech and refined ores were targeted. Two agricultural sites. A couple others that house facilities that perform nonessential but highly specific tasks. They’re trying to make recovery from the attack as difficult and long as possible, if I had to guess.”

  The screen in front of them flickered and lit up with Stein’s face. She was sweating, and the view was the familiar black enclosure of a helmet. Very few people video called that way.

  “Where the fuck are you?” Stein demanded. “We’re getting our dicks handed to us here. Get to the Spire and don’t waste any time.”

  “Glad to see you’re alive, too,” Beck responded. “Manhattan has more people than any ten Rezzes put together. You really don’t think the six of us could be more useful elsewhere?”

  “Six?” Stein asked sharply. Muted sympathy flickered across her face. “Who did you lose?”

  “No one is dead,” Beck said. “Wojcik took an explosion to the hand and got on the first Loop out of Brighton. No idea where he is now.” She wondered if the people on that carriage thought to raid the vast storage caverns like the rest of the refugees had on their way out. If not, they would be and instantaneous strain on the resources of whatever Rez they ended up in. Which might have been part of Keene’s plan.

  Stein’s face softened into a relieved smile. “Glad he’s alive. I like that big, dumb son of a bitch. And yeah, I need you here. I’m recalling every Watchman from the Rezzes being evacuated to Manhattan. I’m ordering the ones you left behind in the tunnel to take the next carriage that comes in.”