Men of Stone (The Faded Earth Book 3)

by Joshua Guess

  Tala bristled. “Why would I rather have a gun pointed at me right now?” she muttered.

  “Because you’re smart,” Stein said.

  They reached the stairs and walked down to find a group of armored figures waiting halfway down the main hall. Tala nearly went for her weapon before realizing the squad all had Deathwatch ID tags floating over their heads.

  “Commander,” said the squad leader, whose ID read Ansari, Camilla. “We cleared out the shooters on the roofs between here and the western emergency supply depot. No enemies left in that location.”

  Stein shambled forward. Tala thought the suit looked on its last minute of life, but Stein hadn’t tied into the shared telemetry. There was no handy running alert on her HUD to show whether the Commander was about to keel over.

  “What about the other depots? The utility substations?” Stein asked.

  Ansari shook her head. “As far as we know they’re still occupied. Those bastards came in straight through the wall when their weird aircraft landed and knew right where they were going. Stole civilian transports and drove right to them. My squad just happened to be near the depot when they showed up and it still took us all this time to clear them out. The backup we called for were wiped out to a man.”

  Stein showed no reaction to this, easy enough to do when fully armored. It was a matter of self-control. Tala knew enough about that to fill a couple books. She had to if she wanted to keep from slapping Jen stupid every other minute.

  “Orders, ma’am?” Ansari asked, tilting her head up the stairs.

  Stein’s helmet turned in Tala’s direction fractionally. “Stand down. We stay right here until further notice. No one gets past us in either direction. We’re the choke point.”

  Ansari nodded and directed her two fire teams with the wave of a hand. Tala admired the kind of teamwork and practiced understanding that took. She didn’t have to tell them how to set up a defense or assign people individually. They knew what to do and they just fucking did it. Someday, assuming they all lived that long, she hoped her team could do the same.

  “What are we waiting for, ma’am?” Ansari asked.

  Tala was powerfully curious about the herself. She turned her external mics up to full sensitivity.

  “We’re waiting for a signal,” Stein said. “Cryptic, I know, but that’s all I can say. Trust me. You’ll know it when it gets here. When it does, obey the orders you get.”

  Well, that was disappointing.

  Tala opened a channel to Eshton, who didn’t even let her get a word in. “No, I don’t have any idea what she’s talking about.”

  “Well, shit,” Tala grumbled. “Fine, I’ll just wait. What do we do here? The other team is covering both ends of the hall. What’s our job?”

  “Stein,” Eshton said. “Our job is watching her back. You and Jeremy stay in the hall and give backup if you’re needed. The rest of us will stay with her just in case she gets any ideas about running off.”

  Tala shook her head. “I don’t think she will. Whatever’s about to happen, it looks like she’s going to let it play out.”

  “Then we’ll be nice and safe unless someone shows up and tries to kill us,” Eshton said. “Just keep your eyes open.”

  Tala gave him a little salute. “Never had plans to do otherwise.”

  She took a spot against one wall and let her suit do the looking. Not in a lazy way—the thing was watching for any movement, change in heat signatures, or new sounds—but just to give herself a slight break from the strain of constant vigilance.

  In the limited space inside the helmet, Tala leaned her head back and let her eyes relax. This was always the hardest part for her. She could fight without fear, take wounds without them damaging her self-image, and keep pace with the best the Watch had to offer. Standing still and waiting? That was the real test.

  Illogical as it was, it felt too close to giving up for her taste.

  32

  Beck rose in the lift, painfully aware that she was doing so blind. There were no cameras in Stein’s office. None left on the whole floor, at least not that she could access. When the platform stopped, she tapped the comm on it and spoke to the room beyond.

  “This is Park. You might remember exiling me.”

  There was a long pause before a reply came in the form of bullets. She had crouched down behind her shield by then—not being a complete idiot—but the heavy armor cladding the doors stopped the rounds from even denting the interior.

  “If you’re done,” Beck said, forcing calm into her voice, “I’d like to offer terms.”

  Another pause. “This is Keene. We won’t surrender. If you open that door, I’m going to assume hostile intent.”

  “I’m not asking you to surrender,” she said. “I’m here to stop your people from killing mine. Too many citizens have died. This needs to end. If that means giving you control of our systems, so be it.”

  A laugh echoed over the comm. “You have to be joking. You think I’m going to believe that?”

  “I just got word that the dragonfly platforms have reached three critical Rezzes,” Beck said. That was all too depressingly true. It was a twist she hadn’t seen coming. The dragonflies were already tearing down the walls of the three largest remaining agriculture settlements. Bioreactors could produce nutritious if bland food, but they were only one fault away from failure. If Keene had control of them in the Rezzes his soldiers had attacked as she suspected they did, then they could starve the population. The ag Rezzes were no longer there as a backup, or soon wouldn’t be.

  “Ah,” Keene said. “Yes, I was wondering if you’d anticipate that. We’re still at an impasse. I don’t trust you, and you know I’ll kill you as soon as you come out of that box.”

  Beck had considered this. “Okay. Have your man on the terminal access my suit’s onboard network. I’ll give him the passkey to my cameras. You’ll be able to see I’m weaponless.”

  “Do it,” Keene said after a muffled discussion. Beck rattled off the key and made a show of scanning her suit with the camera. She detached every cargo pod on its exterior and held her hands up high. “Satisfied?”

  “Rarely,” Keene said. “But I’ll agree not to kill you on sight so long as you don’t make any sudden moves.”

  “Fine,” she replied.

  With a leaden stomach, she ordered the door to open. A certainty fell over her like a curtain. She was walking into a maw that would clamp down on her and never let go.

  She was going to die. She knew it as a fact no less concrete than the names of her lost family. And if that death, however terrifying it might be in that moment, could buy the lives of innocents, it was a price she would pay a thousand times.

  Beck stepped into Stein’s office and found herself staring down the cavernous barrels of a dozen guns. Every one of them was pointed at her head.

  “Do nothing,” Keene said to his soldiers. His voice modulator was off, making him easy enough to spot. “And you, Miss Park, have one minute to surrender and explain your terms to me before my men gun you down.”

  “I surrender,” Beck said. “I’m going to exit my suit, because if I’m not a threat, you have no reason to kill me. Okay?”

  Keene nodded. “Then send your armor into the lift and shut the door behind it.”

  Beck frowned. “That wasn’t part of the deal.”

  “It is now,” Keene said.

  She nodded and triggered the opening mechanism. Stepping out after it unfolded was strangely freeing even if her tired body nearly went into shock at having to manage its own weight and balance again. At least now there was no lingering hope. No barrier to give her false ideas of living through this. Beck thought it fitting to face death as she was—as just her. She sent the armor into the lift with a silent salute.

  When the doors closed, Keene turned to her and removed his helmet. “Speak.”

  “Are you sure?” Beck asked. “Don’t want to threaten me some more?”

  Keene fixed her with
a withering stare.

  “Fine,” she said, relenting. “Look, you hit us harder than we could have imagined. No one knew you were cooking up all this new gear out there. You’ve destroyed whole Rezzes. Killed I don’t know how many citizens, and now you’re trying to get control of the system. Other Watchmen might see their duty as stopping you no matter what the cost. I don’t. I took the oath to be the shield. I’ll do whatever it takes to protect those people out there.”

  Keene was clearly suspicious. “You’ll give up? Just like that?”

  “I’ll unlock the entire system and hand you control so long as I have your word the killing will stop,” Beck said. “Here and now. It’s my only offer. You get what you want, and people live.”

  “Or I could just wait for my coders to beat your security and do it anyway,” Keene said. “I’m not inclined to dealing with ultimatums.”

  Beck shook her head sadly. “You’re telling me you’re not willing to have the entire Protectorate handed back to you if it means making a promise not to kill its people? Seriously?”

  “Seriously,” Keene said. “Sometimes sacrifices have to be made. You have to cull the herd to keep it strong, to push it where you need to go.”

  “That’s about what I expected you to say,” Beck noted sadly. “I wish I could do an emergency eject on that suit of yours. But I bet you don’t have the alpha protocol built into them like we do.”

  Keene’s expression grew puzzled. “I’ve never been one of you. I’m afraid I don’t know that one.”

  Beck saw a pair of armored figures at the back of the room struggling to move forward. “Sir!” one of them said. “Sir, you have to—”

  Well, that hadn’t been much time. To the room and the highly complex computer listening to their every word, Beck spoke four words.

  “Activate Sunder, target all.”

  The lights went out.

  *

  The darkness lasted for fifteen seconds. When the system reset, Beck sighed in relief. It had worked.

  “What did you do?” Keene asked, clearly struggling to move inside his armor.

  Beck casually stepped past him, ignoring the now-useless guns, and went over to Stein’s console. She pushed the man sitting in front of it over. He toppled to the ground in his sitting position, frozen in place.

  She keyed the citywide comm. “This is Sentinel Park. The threat has been neutralized, but remain in place until the all-clear is given. All Deathwatch agents are to proceed against targets with full authorization to kill.”

  From elsewhere in the building, Stein chimed in. “This is the High Commander. Order is confirmed. Good hunting, everyone.”

  That chore finished, Beck went back to the lift and hit the call button. Her armor waited inside. Instead of climbing in it, she grabbed one of the discarded pods from the floor and removed a tool kit from it. She selected a screwdriver and tossed the kit away.

  “Answer me!” Keene screamed.

  “Your problem is you don’t understand the Watch,” Beck said as she approached him. “You thought Bowers was abnormal. That the Deathwatch was full of people just like you. You were wrong. As a rule we don’t care about power or respect. Not all of us are good people, but most recognize that one day we might become a threat. So the Founders planned for it.”

  She stood right in front of his frozen armor and waved the screwdriver at a corner of the ceiling. “Every Rez has Sunder nodes built into it. Every building has them. Every room. They’re part of the infrastructure. We put them in cameras. If a High Commander—or someone who has their level of access—decides the Watch is becoming too oppressive, Sunder acts as a kill switch.”

  She pointed to the pair of frozen soldiers who had tried to give warning. “I guess these guys are former Watchmen. They heard me give the coded phrase. The one that tells every Deathwatch agent to eject from their suit as fast as possible. Ruins them, of course, but Sunder would have done that anyway. You and your men were just hit with a narrow electromagnetic pulse designed to cause artificial muscle fiber to seize and the motors that reinforce them to burn out. Your private army is now a collection of statues.”

  Keene’s eyes grew round as reality began to set in. “You can’t do this. You can’t.”

  Beck smiled. It was not a pleasant expression.

  “I can. Hell, I expected to die before I had the chance to do any of this. If you’d killed me, Stein would have taken over and given the order, of course. But I wanted you to admit your crimes in front of an audience.” Beck tapped a button on her uniform. “Right here. Everything I’ve done since coming into this building has been fed to the undercities in every Rez. Including that conversation we just had. I wanted to make sure anyone who has the same ideas you do knows what’s coming to them.”

  Of course, the camera was no longer transmitting. She hadn’t reset it after the system came back online. That was fine. There would be ample time to capture the aftermath.

  “Wait,” Keene said. “We can make a—”

  Beck slapped him across the face with her empty hand. “Shut the fuck up. Jason Keene, for conspiracy against the Protectorate and more murders of citizens than I can count, I sentence you to death. You were found guilty of a list of crimes in absentia, in case you’re worried I’m just making this up. The method of execution is left up to the discretion of the officer overseeing the proceedings.” Beck tossed the screwdriver up and down on her palm a few times. “This will do.”

  Before Keene could muster more than a half-hearted denial, Beck flipped the tool into a reverse grip and jammed it through his eye. His scream was painfully loud but mercifully brief. With several hard sweeps, the tip of the screwdriver shredded his gray matter.

  “Open comm to local units,” Beck said.

  The line crackled to life. “Boss?” Tala answered. “We got your message. Sure hope that worked.”

  “It did,” Beck replied. “They’re all stiff as boards up here.”

  Tala laughed hard. “That’s how I like my men, and it’s turning out to be a weirdly comprehensive preference. We’ll be up to lend you a hand as soon as possible.”

  “No rush,” Beck said. “They’re not going anywhere.”

  She wandered over to one of the soldiers and jammed the screwdriver into the emergency releases on the neck of his helmet one after another. The lid popped off after a hard thirty seconds of work. The man inside spit in her face. She wiped it on her sleeve and stared at him with grim determination.

  “You were Deathwatch once,” she said flatly. “Keene I can at least understand. He was born to be an asshole who had to get his own way. You knew better. You were trained better. You betrayed your oath.”

  She pulled the knife from the front of his armor and cut his throat. It was impossible to take pleasure or even satisfaction from the act. It was simple necessity. Men as dangerous as this, so willing to kill to get what they wanted, could not be allowed to exist. A rabid dog would bite. She was so very tired.

  But the work had to be done, so she did it.

  33

  Jeremy felt naked without the armor, but also free for the first time in years.

  There was no rest to be found. Watchmen in their uniforms filled the streets of Manhattan, every one of them armed with faces bare to the world. It was impossible not to think of it as a new world at that, a place where anonymity was no longer guaranteed for the Watch.

  Perhaps a place where the Watch might no longer be necessary. At least in its original form.

  In the long hours following the activation of Sunder, he had killed more people than most Watchmen managed in their entire career. These were not battlefield kills in more than a technical sense, or recent victims of Fade B with their minds wiped clean. They were men and women trapped in the prison of their frozen suits, and every time he popped a helmet free and delivered the death blow, he had to remind himself they were enemy combatants. That these were executions demanded by every law and norm imposed by the Tenets.

  In t
he quiet place inside himself he shared with no one, Jeremy hoped his people could move past those Tenets and on to something better.

  Beck’s decision to broadcast the events in the Spire to the entire Protectorate was a brilliant move as far as he was concerned. It somehow managed to be an act of brutal honesty and a slick political maneuver at the same time. She showed the world a version of the Deathwatch it had never seen—the relentless protectors of humanity willing to give up everything for that goal—while using that very act as a tool to manipulate every citizen who witnessed it.

  Of course, they weren’t broadcasting any longer. The people would stay safely in their various undercities while people like him scoured the world above for frozen enemies. Grisly executions of hundreds of enemies weren’t something they could or would want to hide, but there was no need to advertise them.

  “This sector is clear,” one of the other Watchmen said. The suit and its HUD had ruined Jeremy’s ability to recall names. They were a crutch, and without the popup the information drained from his head like sand through his fingers. Nor was he the only one with this problem. There was a lot of ‘hey, you’ going on in his small, cobbled-together unit.

  “Okay, we’re off duty,” Jeremy said to the other Watchmen. It was bizarre to be in charge of them. Beck had insisted it was necessary since so many squads were missing members. The enemy hadn’t targeted leaders as they had no way to know who was in charge of a given unit, but those kind of people were generally on the front line of any attack. The number of experienced squad leaders in the city was low enough to justify someone like him stepping in and taking the reins.

  He led the team toward one of the above-ground transit lines and made sure everyone was present. It made him feel oddly like a school teacher, counting heads. Had Beck experienced the same sense of being an impostor as she led people older than her?

  Probably.

  By the time they returned to the Spire in search of food and any space large enough to let them curl up and sleep, Jeremy had been awake for more than a full day. It was morning again. Though he didn’t feel particularly tired thanks to the strange wiring of the human brain and its efforts to overcome severe exhaustion, once his head rested on his rolled-up uniform coat he was out in seconds.