Men of Stone (The Faded Earth Book 3)

by Joshua Guess

  On their free arms, everyone wore shields. The building was a warren of relatively narrow hallways designed to withstand a siege. Every inch of the place was meant to make the sort of hand-to-hand combat employed by the Watch as effective as possible. Confined spaces where single suited Watchmen could block a hallway alone while still using pure mass and momentum to devastate unarmored enemies were the rule.

  But these soldiers were not that. The terrain was against Beck and the team. Against every defender. Now the halls would become shooting galleries. The shields might slow them down, but having mobile cover too thick to be penetrated by even armor-piercing rounds was an advantage too good to pass up.

  As they ascended the stairs toward the first blast door, Beck explained the other little bits of help she’d put in place.

  *

  No one was waiting for them as the heavy steel door set in the ceiling opened. Beck knew this because she could see everything. In a society built on a pervasive surveillance apparatus, nowhere was more heavily seeded with cameras than the inside of the Spire. They were hidden everywhere. She could see the clear hallway the steps led to as well as the full squad of enemies waiting in the room at its end, carefully flanking either side of the opening there.

  “Eshton,” she said.

  The response was deadly calm. “I see them. Everyone go to standard view.”

  Beck’s display, including every camera thumbnail on it, switched to normal vision. No thermal, infrared, or low-light. She had passed temporary control of the lights for the second floor off to Eshton. Other than the lobby, the Spire had few windows. None of them in the immediate vicinity. Darkness fell at once as he stepped upward, the only light coming from the failing day below.

  Beck closed her eyes as the grenade launcher spit its first charge forward and trusted the rest of the team to do the same. The flash of light it emitted upon landing was so bright she could see her veins inside her eyelids. The enemy had their external speakers turned off for stealth, otherwise she would have heard their screams of pain as their retinas overloaded.

  The second, third, and fourth rounds from the launcher were special. Each was a smart round with the sole purpose of taking down rogue Watchmen. Beck had never seen them used before—they were rarely needed and tightly controlled—but knew their function. Each cylinder would be timed to land at a set distance and break apart on impact. The small spheres inside would spread across the floor before their even smaller computers took over. They would roll toward the nearest suits of armor, their networking making sure that all targets were covered, then climb along the steel plates magnetically.

  Beck knew the moment this job was done. No amount of soundproofing could prevent screams that loud. She shivered at the thought of the tiny weapons crawling up her suit completely unseen, slipping beneath the gaps in her plate, and igniting between the steel and the sub layer.

  Each shot held twenty of the miniature drones. Sixty minuscule spheres of pain and death burning at more than four thousand degrees.

  Between being blinded as their night vision was forced on by the dark before being overwhelmed by the flashbang and their suit systems encountering a weapon most members of even the Watch never knew existed, the squad never had a chance.

  “They’re down,” Eshton said.

  Beck followed him up the stairs, shield held in front of her and pistol jutting out from one side of it. “Make sure. There are nine of them. We leave no one behind to hit us from the back. This is only going to get harder.”

  It was an understatement. The Watchkiller rounds were limited. Eshton had six more, nine being the total number in stock within the armory. There being approximately a zero percent chance Keene’s men weren’t networked together, every one of them likely saw what happened here and in the lobby. The next time her team wouldn’t get the chance to foil an ambush. They would be greeted with a hail of bullets and much worse. Beck was not so arrogant as to believe the engineers fabricating those advanced suits had somehow failed to create weapons other than guns.

  Leaving the nine men in the squad behind after finishing them off with two rounds to the faceplate each, Beck led the others toward the northern stairs. She had to go slow by necessity, checking each the feeds for each room they passed visually. The system was smart enough to give them to her automatically as she approached, but as all the ID systems other than in their suits were down, only human eyes could determine if any hulking black shapes were friend or foe.

  Her nerves should have been on edge. One disabled camera in a room could leave a blind spot big enough to hide a fire team. Four or five enemies could step out at any time from any of the doors lining the halls and spray them with rounds, any one of which could get lucky. The persistent feeling of weight on her mind, dread so heavy it nearly had physical mass, was gone. It was replaced by—or perhaps cleansed by—a clarity of purpose. There were no shades of gray here. No moral or ethical shadows to jump at and worry over.

  For the first time in her career, Beck understood the pure calm men like Reeves had attained before she entered primary school. The only discordant note marring her outlook was a minor pang of worry that it felt so right.

  Beck ignored it.

  “I’m going to have to slave your suits to mine,” she warned the team. “I may not have time to give verbal instructions. Jeremy, I want you in the rear. Keep your weapon out but get whatever drones you have left ready to move in case we need them.”

  “Armory had some,” Jeremy said. “No fliers, but I’m full on recon drones.”

  Beck nodded as she moved past the last few doors before reaching the stairs. “Good. Jen and Tala, you’ll be in front with me. We’re going to interlock our shields and form a wall. Not a hard lock. We might need to move apart.”

  “Keeping our guns out, I suppose,” Tala said.

  “Of course,” Beck said. “I’m loaded up with grenades, but I’d rather not take one of our guns out of play to use them.”

  “What about Eshton?” Jen asked.

  He answered for himself, not needing orders to know his part. “I’m in the middle. I won’t be tucked down behind my shield like you are. I’ll carry it high to give Jeremy extra cover and I’ll be free to take shots to either side while the three of you guard our front. With these hallways, it’s going to be a tight fit. Which actually benefits us.”

  “Weird that we haven’t heard from Lucia yet,” Jen said a shade too lightly, clearly forcing herself not to let worry into the words.

  “Oh, I’m sure she’ll show up,” Beck said. “She’s a lot tougher than she looks. Anyone who’s seen her put elbows into Wojcik’s ribs knows that.”

  What Beck did not and could not say for fear of some highly sensitive microphone put in place by their enemies picking up was that she knew perfectly well that Lucia was alive. She had sent specific orders via text burst to her back in the lobby. If Lucia was successful, she might just save them all.

  29

  What began as a random, headlong flight turned into a purposeful mission.

  Losing the drones wasn’t hard. Lucia was faster, and the fact that the recycling drones could tear apart her armor given the chance was a compelling reason not to run less than her fastest. Her biggest worry wasn’t losing them once they were drawn away from her team, but going so quickly she missed seeing other drones ahead and running right into them.

  Her path took her in a wide arc away from the square, through the upscale market district—a strange and alien thing to see for someone from an agricultural Rez, no matter how many times she came here—and into dense residential blocks. These were stone cubes five stories high. They looked strong enough to endure just about anything.

  She didn’t go in them. Instead Lucia checked her cameras and made sure her external mics had sound profiles of drone noises to work from. If the suit heard them coming, it would alert her ahead of time. Hopefully far enough ahead that she wasn’t chewed up by an inescapable swarm.

  Why had she run o
ff in the first place? It wasn’t like her. Oh, part of it was Wojcik. The worry of not knowing his condition mixed with the anger at this attack, so stupid and pointless, to create a volatile compound inside her head. The drones were the spark. A cause for the reaction that ended with her impulsively dashing off when she should have stayed to see if Beck had a better solution.

  Now here she was wandering a city she barely knew. Most of her trips here had been directly to the Spire. Not much time for sightseeing or exploration. Even with that limited experience, Lucia found the empty streets unsettling and weird. No trip here, regardless of length, went by without seeing the dense press of humanity. Instead only discarded items littered the wide streets, as residents returning home from shopping in the market or receiving allotments from the admin dispensary dropped their burdens during frantic escapes.

  Walking slowly among the abandoned upper city gave her a bizarre sense of déjà vu. This must have been what the original survivors felt at the tail end of the Collapse. Human beings left alive and nearly alone after passing through a bottleneck that left the world picked clean, skeletal compared to the vibrant life which had once animated it.

  Though she knew the citizens of Manhattan were hiding in the tunnels beneath her feet, the feeling that she walked through the corpse of a civilization persisted.

  Lucia paused in the middle of an empty street and got her bearings. The Spire wasn’t hard to find; it stood high enough in the skyline that it could be seen from almost anywhere in the central part of the Rez. She had to remind herself that wasn’t true across the entire island. It was too easy to forget its scale—eight miles long. The largest Rez by a hell of a lot.

  She opened her comm link to let the team know she was okay, but a message popped up on her screen as soon as she tried.

  External comm network may be compromised, it read. It was tagged as a priority command message sent by text burst. It was from Beck’s ID code. Interesting.

  Instead she sent a simple text burst of her own letting their leader know she was alive and well. That wasn’t really the purpose of the message, of course. The Rez was transmitting her suit telemetry to at least Beck, who could check her biomonitor readings at a glance. What she was really saying with the text burst was that she was safe, secure, and able to move at will.

  Ready for orders, in other words.

  Lucia expected to be told to move toward the Spire and join the team. If it was true that returning to Brighton to add their strength would bolster the local Watch—and it was—then Lucia joining the fight they faced in the Spire would help just as much. With Wojcik down they were already undermanned.

  She had already begun to walk that way, picking a path between housing blocks that would hopefully avoid any of the likely routes used by drones or watched by enemies, when the text burst containing her orders came in. Lucia ducked into a recessed doorway to read the burst and went through the lines of instructions several times to make sure she was reading it right. There was no question this was what Beck wanted; the double slash mark she used at the end was a personal touch that meant the message was genuine.

  “What are these coordinates?” Lucia asked the computer. The rest of the instructions were unclear. Maybe getting some insight about the location would help.

  “This location is marked on the public record as a secondary power substation,” the AI said.

  That was weird. The AI never made those kind of distinctions. Usually when it gave her an answer it was straightforward. ‘This is a secondary power substation’ would have been more in line with Lucia’s expectations.

  “Is there another record it’s listed in?” Lucia asked.

  The AI pondered for a moment. “Burst transmission contains temporary super-user access to Deathwatch high command functions,” it said. “Accessing classified blueprints and listings.”

  A screen popped up with a file name Lucia had never heard of. “What’s this project name mean? ‘Sunder’ is kind of vague.”

  “I am unable to read the file,” the AI said apologetically. “The material is tagged for human eyes only.”

  Lucia scanned the file. As she did, her eyes grew wide.

  *

  Getting to the coordinates was easier than she expected. The spot was nearly a quarter mile from where she’d stopped to read the message, but away from the Spire. This was good since the enemy was clustered there. It left only drones for her to deal with, and they were spread thin.

  Exiting the street was not a matter of entering the building. The directions took her to an access hatch to the undercity a block away. Lucia had to enter a code listed in her instructions before it would open, and the thing shut behind her before locking with a hydraulic whine.

  The tunnel was a single-use space. It existed solely to allow someone to move to the basement of the building in question. The file said this supposed substation was sealed off at street level and above, functionally a bunker with no outside access. When she reached its below-ground door, Lucia could not help stopping and taking a few seconds to just stare at the thing. It looked like it belonged to a vault.

  She entered another code and waited for the massive door to unlock and swing open. The instructions were clear about the length of time it would stay that way, so she dashed inside.

  Instead of a basement as she expected, Lucia found herself at the bottom of a tall space that only looked like a building from the outside. There were no floors between her and the roof four stories above, which was not to say the space was empty.

  A maze of complex electrical systems filled most of the room. Lucia was not a technically minded person, and though she knew the end result of what this thing could do, she had no idea how it went about it. She licked her lips as she searched for the control panel. The file made it clear that being here was not the only way to arm the system. It could be done from the Spire, but the assault made the likelihood of Beck reaching the isolated control room unlikely. The mountain of electronics in front of her was so dangerous it got its own dedicated, secure space just for its on switch.

  The activation procedure was surprisingly easy. The system integrated with her suit, recognized the temporary command access she’d been given, and requested a pair of codes. These Lucia did not have—Beck only sent the first. The instructions were very clear on that.

  She entered the first code and waited five seconds. Right on time, the console lit up in a series of green lights.

  System armed, it read.

  She sent a burst to Beck to let her know the status.

  Got the notification, Beck wrote back. We’re being shot at right now. Using voice to text behind cover. Get here soonest. Will look for safest path to guide you to us.

  Lucia sent her acknowledgment and made her way back to the street. She envied the way Beck could detach herself from the violence. Or, no. Not detach. That was neither accurate or fair. It was more like their team leader could split her mind into sections, a partition that let each individual piece take a different part of the emotional and mental load. Being able to dictate text while hunkered down behind cover in the middle of a battle seemed strange to her. Lucia was never that cool and collected under fire.

  Whatever she did, she did with her heart. It wasn’t the Deathwatch way, but that never bothered her. Reeves could talk about detachment all he wanted. Lucia chose to care. It gave her the motivation she needed to act against her basic nature. Peacefulness was her base setting. The constant fighting took a toll. She could only manage because she knew it was worth it to protect those who could not protect themselves. Sometimes that meant citizens, other times her team. The latter could need anything from a kind word to a strong arm holding a blade.

  Lucia watched the road in front of her as much as the feed overlays as she made her way to the Spire. The cameras saw no obvious threats, but she didn’t take chances. Sticking to the narrow alleys between buildings as much as possible gave her nearly endless cover if an enemy appeared.

  She somehow d
oubted it. The Spire was the target here in Manhattan. Keene’s forces were not visiting the same kind of destruction on the place as they had on other Rezzes. Of course they weren’t. She might not have Beck’s capacity with machines, but one thing Lucia understood better than the others was people. It was painfully obvious to her that if Keene won control of the Spire and the systems inside it, if he managed to defeat the Watch on its home ground, he would be seen by a large chunk of the population as someone not to be fought against.

  Not a heroic figure by any means. The people of the Protectorate had a shrewd understanding of power and the dynamics of its use. The Watch was widely viewed as an unstoppable, inevitable force. Any man who could topple it even temporarily would win the war of public perception. There would be no populist uprising against a victorious Jason Keene, and the man had to know it.

  Winning a symbolic victory would be functionally the same as winning an actual one in this case.

  Between the strange bunker and the Spire, she encountered no enemy soldiers. It seemed those who might have come to replace the slain guards here were busy elsewhere. Not surprising. Manhattan was enormous, with key infrastructure nodes that were critical points to hold for any successful invader who wished to maintain control for longer than five minutes.

  Rather than decrease her worry, this understanding made it worse. Her path to the Spire was clear and she tried not to look at the bodies inside the lobby, but Lucia grasped the furious struggle she was about to step into better than any of her teammates could have.

  These were men who had left the safety of their cage to take one suicidal swing at glory. Power. Control. There was no avenue of retreat for Keene and his followers. No laying down of arms. No understanding to come to. They were far from home, limited to what power their suits held, and armed to the teeth with victory their only chance to live.