by Joshua James
“Rocky, keep the demon in the bottle,” he said.
He aimed for the base of the scaffolding.
It dawned on him these were the exact coordinates he was supposed to be landing at.
How happy his superiors would be to see him following orders to the letter.
Four seconds.
“Wait until the last moment to fire those reverse thrusters.”
“You’re going to be sliced in half by one of those supports.”
“Good talk.”
Three seconds.
The crosshatch side of the scaffolding loomed up. It suddenly didn’t seem so funny.
Just as he began to line up on one of the supports, out the corner of his eye he saw the cannon belch an energy beam.
It was a blur just fractions from him.
Two seconds.
Too close!
He knew he wouldn’t be able to dodge from this distance. He gave himself over to the spiders, allowing them to yank him like a marionette. He felt his body swing violently as a burning tore through his thigh.
One second.
He opened his eyes and felt a wave of nausea as his body was thrown viciously forward, flames coursing around the edges of his vision from the shoulder exhaust vents of the hammerhead.
A metallic shriek rang in his ears, jerking his head to the side as a sickening thud brought him to a sudden stop, pain searing through his left shoulder.
Something above him was driving his head downward, bending him impossibly forward. A snap, and he felt his body swing fiercely back. Something hollow and metallic arced past his head, and he caught a momentary glance of scaffolding collapsing downward, pancaking one section at a time.
Closer. Closer. Closer.
His prone body started bouncing as the platform around him shuttered. He felt the spiders tugging at his mind, willing him to move.
“Again, Rocky. Hit them again!” he yelled aloud, hoping she’d understand.
A moment later, his hammerhead landing rockets fired again, spending the last precious drops of energy in the landing capsules.
He felt his weight shift, but it wasn’t enough. His legs were still pinned.
He stared up and saw the second-level platform give way.
He pushed with all his might on the flat scaffolding pinning him down, felt it shift one last time as the last level collapsed.
He rolled over as the last of the onrushing pancaking sections reached the ground with a tremendous roar of air and pressure.
Dirt and rock kicked up wildly around him as the force of the collapse ejected him outward and over a lip next to what remained of the foundation the scaffolding was built upon.
An explosion erupted as the Union energy weapon finally succumbed to the same planetary gravity that had toppled the rest. Part of the cannon flipped over, spewing out the middle-aged man who’d been operating it. His face was melted raw, and his eyes were gone.
Lucky almost missed the weapon until it was too late, but his spiders caught the danger and he leapt off his feet, swinging his own pulse rifle up as he did so. A blue energy beam belched from the man’s gun, but his aim was poor.
Lucky’s aim was not. The man’s head snapped back and he toppled over.
Lucky knelt and scanned around the base of the stackshack as Rocky ran through his bio damage. A fresh chemical cocktail hit his bloodstream as he sensed the bots quietly knitting his thigh back in place like hidden hands stitching a loose quilt back into shape. The sensation tickled.
Two boots appeared next to him.
He swung around, pulling his rifle to his shoulder for a snapshot.
The boots were Marine boots.
He relaxed and looked up into the serene face of Sergeant Peters, head hanging forward, seemingly asleep. His AI had carefully glided him into position directly onto the landing coordinates at the base of the building.
His hammerhead jets maneuvered to shift the Sergeant into a sitting position.
Lucky saw his leg joints were already repaired, bending slightly as he sat.
He slumped over.
Lucky bastard, he thought.
Peters opened his eyes, unfocused and bewildered for a moment.
Then he locked on Lucky and squinted.
“I should’ve known,” he said.
Lucky shook his head and lowered his pulse rifle.
“You’re welcome.”
And then Peters’ head exploded.
13
Blind
Lucky instinctively ducked and felt heat searing just beyond his head. He smelled singed hair and for a split second thought it was his own until he realized it emanated from the wafting crater of steam that had been the location of Peters’ brain. His skull, right down to the blood-spurting stump of a neck, was now pulverized.
There were many, many places you could shoot a Frontier Marine and it would grow back.
This was not one of them.
The stream of blue energy stopped, and Lucky threw Peters’ body to his right as he rolled to his left, calling on his drones to once again give him a fix on the location of the energy blast.
It was not what he expected.
He saw a long-haired child in miner’s overalls emerging from the back cab of a nearby rover. A girl, no more than eight or nine-years-old, he guessed.
She held a long curved blaster that encased her arm almost to the elbow. It had a thick rounded middle that tapered out to a larger opening at the end, about the size of her fist. It was smooth and reflective and didn’t appear to have any obvious sighting mechanism.
She held it at arm’s length like an extension of her body and fired without any noticeable effort to aim it.
If this was a Union blaster, it had none of the ineffectiveness that label would imply.
The blue energy it emitted poured out in a constant stream so that the beam whipped around as the muzzle shifted, slicing into anything it came into contact with.
Perhaps owing to the success of the blue energy he’d seen earlier, he shouldn’t have been surprised by its effectiveness. But Lucky was still stunned.
Of all the armor a Frontier Marine employed, his skull was still the most important. His AI copilot was biotech in his head. It was the central command center for both his drone army and his biological support functions. A blow to the brain killed the Marine, killed any chance of recovery, and killed all operational effectiveness in theater.
By contrast, even a mortal blow elsewhere on the body that could not be healed by nanobots would still leave the AI copilot alive and functioning for several hours, depending on how long it took for all electro-biological function to stop in the human.
That was why AI copilots were instructed to deliver their operators to their targets, even if their wounds were too severe for regeneration. Battles had been won by Frontier Marines long after they died.
For those reasons, the helmet was the most carefully crafted article of defensive gear, designed to disperse all known forms of energy, channeling it outward along its edge and away from the vital brain pan.
This blaster had simply sliced through Peters’ head and kept slicing onward, almost taking out Lucky in the process. Dumb luck had saved him for the millionth time.
Again, he was looking at an enemy with an incredibly effective weapon with no apparent defensive interest. She wore no armor and made no attempt to protect herself.
The girl shuffled forward in a blood-soaked dress and filthy socks.
Lucky felt a stirring in his stomach that told him the girl’s blaster would fire again.
He squeezed off two rounds from his pulse rifle and dove wildly, willing his drones to triangulate on the central point in his target and bend the pulse in midair to find it.
The girl was cut down where she stood, the pulse shredding her small body.
She’d still managed to send the firing impulse to her finger, but her nearly severed arm fired wildly upward, glancing harmlessly off the side of the stackshack several floors u
p.
She didn’t move, but Lucky wasn’t convinced she was dead. He held his rifle at his shoulder and gripped tight. He took a halting breath. Then another.
Then he stepped slowly toward the girl.
He had hit her center mass, nowhere near her face, and yet there was caked blood there.
Her eyes had been gouged out of her head. Violently.
“What the hell’s going on, Rocky?”
“Her aim was remarkably good, all things considered,” said Rocky.
“Is that supposed to be funny?”
“No, quite the opposite. Clearly she was blind before she shot at you.”
Before he could answer, a shadow flitted across his vision.
He again spun, rifle raised to his shoulder.
Nico executed a textbook high-G approach, retro boosters firing him to a midair stop before dropping him hard on wobbly legs from nearly a meter up. To the kid’s credit, he nailed the landing.
He was starting to grow on Lucky.
Then he slipped in the pool of Peters’ blood at his feet and fell forward over the sergeant’s slumped body.
And then something even more unexpected happened.
He heard a voice from heaven.
14
Hidden
“Hello! Marines?”
It wasn’t over all-comm. It was wafting in and out of the thin atmosphere.
Lucky looked up at the sky, dumbfounded.
“I’m right here,” the voice said, exasperated. “On the roof.”
Lucky slowly turned his head to follow the sound.
Standing on a ledge of the stackshack where the top of the ladderwell had been was a man in a white lab coat.
It was the scientist from the vid earlier, the cyborg who’d been playing with the six-dimensional data cube. He looked as beet red and angry as the last time Lucky had seen him.
“We don’t have all day. Can you please come in here?”
Lucky blinked.
“Is this really happening?” he thought at Rocky.
“It is,” she confirmed.
It figured that the goddamned brainiacs would somehow pull through when everyone else was dead.
Lucky glanced back at Nico, who had crawled to his feet and was staring at Peters’ body.
Lucky was about to distract the rookie so he didn’t puke when he got an alert from his drones. Two more figures were climbing out of nearby rovers.
He ducked down, yanking the kid off his feet as he did so.
“AIM clearing maneuver,” he said. “Step over and cross-check.”
It was a classic tandem between two Marines with AI support that Nico should be well versed in. He nodded, probably glad to have something to do that he remembered from combat training.
Lucky crawled forward to the rover a woman had stepped out of and sent a drone in ahead of him. It reported no movement, then swung out to a covering position for Nico to slide open the rear cab door as Lucky stepped in with another trailing drone.
Nico followed and slid open the door on the side nearer the new targets, keeping his drone at his six and a firing space clear ahead of him.
A woman who had appeared dead in the passenger seat suddenly leapt forward with another smooth Union blaster. Lucky cut her down. He felt a heat signature to his right, then his spiders danced in his head and he jerked to his left and rolled back out of the cab as an energy arc sliced through the air where his head had been.
An old man was at the opposite end of the rover, leaning in through a hatch. A drone punched a hole in his arm, and the weapon toppled over, taking most of his arm with it.
Lucky glanced over at Nico, who had his rifle up with a clear shot. Inexplicably, the kid was watching Lucky roll back out of the rover instead of tearing the old man a fresh hole.
“Enjoying the show?” Lucky screamed.
Nico finally pulled the trigger on his pulse cannon, and the drones triangulated the shot into the center of the man’s forehead.
The old man silently crumpled.
The kid stared forward, eyes unfocused and his eyelids fluttering. Lucky couldn’t decide if he was in shock or just interacting with his AI. Either way, he didn’t have time for this shit and took back his earlier assessment. The kid was an incompetent idiot.
The silence was broken by the scientist’s his high-pitched voice wafting down from above again.
“Hey, did you hear me?”
The asshole wouldn’t quit whining. “Can you tell him to shut up?”
“I have no networks to send a message to,” Rocky replied. “He either doesn’t have neural networks or isn’t using them. Either way, I can’t help you. Unless you want me to have a drone shoot him.”
“Tempting.”
He and Nico held their position, backs to the rover. Lucky wondered what surprises waited in the other rovers.
“This is why we couldn’t see them,” said Rocky.
Lucky was lost. The scientists? “Who?”
“Our targets. We got heat signatures late because they were sitting in those rovers, effectively shielded from our high-level scans.”
She was right.
Every single rover littering the open field was a perfect hiding place for these things.
And with that came a realization.
He pictured the clearing he’d painted for the rest of the Marine dive team. It was right in the middle of a vast graveyard of these haphazardly parked rovers.
This is why I should never be left in charge, Lucky thought.
“Jiang, sitrep!” he screamed over all-comm.
No reply.
“Malby? Dawson?”
Nothing but cold static answered his call.
“Hang tight, we’re inbound!” he shouted, hoping someone was receiving.
“Oh really?” said Rocky.
“Really. We aren’t leaving them out there.”
Rocky sighed.
“Drones out and hot.”
Lucky heard a crackle and then something like pulse cannon fire roar over the all-comm. He heard a grunt that could pass for a response. It was all Lucky needed.
Lucky smacked Nico on the top of his helmet and pointed to the rover on his left. Lucky quickly slid behind the giant tire of the rover on his right. He pulled his rifle up and nodded at Nico.
“Do we have a plan?” asked Rocky.
“Sure we do,” he answered, and at Nico, he yelled; “Light up anything that moves!”
15
Suicide
Lucky rolled from behind the giant tire and ran forward at a low crouch for the next randomly parked rover a half-klick ahead of them. He felt a quick jolt from a stimulant cocktail. Five locust drones appeared in tight formation around Lucky as he tore forward.
Nico fell in behind him.
Lucky saw the drones begin to fire. It seemed like they all fired at once. And then came the reply, as streams of blue energy arced up from the rovers, cutting down drones in wide swaths across the sky. The drones were just as defenseless as the Unioners, and both sides quickly dwindled in number.
Just as quickly, the plan—if you could call it that—went to hell.
The kid took two steps, and a beam of blue light streamed out from below the rover Lucky had just been leaning against. His left foot severed, Nico screamed and fell awkwardly into the cab of the next rover along.
Lucky leapt into the air to avoid the same fate and fired blindly as he jumped into the cab of a nearby rover, ready to fire on anything inside. But it was empty.
He slid across to the other side and glanced at the kid. He took a deep breath, jumped out of the cab, took two giant steps, then dove into the back of the rover Nico had fallen into. The kid’s eyes were fluttering again, though this time Lucky was sure he was receiving a serious stimulant kick while his biobots went to work on his severed foot.
Lucky ripped a recovery bag from the kit he wore on his combat belt. In one practiced motion, he yanked the kid’s bloody stump of a leg up and dropped it b
ack in the bag and pulled tight the cinch. The organic material inside immediately activated, and the bag turned a radioactive green.
He would be mobile in twenty minutes and fully regen’d in a half hour.
The rest of the Marines out there would be dead, of course.
“This is suicide, Lucky,” echoed Rocky. “Even with a partner at your six. We’ve lost over half our drone cover. I can confirm 130 disabled targets, but it’s not enough.”
In his mind’s eye, he could see the terrain was still crawling with heat signatures. Arcs of light slashed through the sky as the drones returned fire with surgical strikes that were deadly to the defenseless miners. But for each that fell away, two more appeared.
“Dammit, there’s no way we’re leaving them out there,” he screamed aloud.
He leapt out of the rover and ran a dozen feet over to the next empty cab.
A beam of blue energy lit up the ground where he’d just been, whipping along behind him as he ran.
“They’re already dead,” said a booming female voice from behind him.
He looked back to the base of the stackshack some twenty meters away.
A blast door that had been recessed into the wall and partially hidden by the scaffolding debris was suddenly open. Peering just over the lip was the scientist from the video.
She didn’t look nearly as cool and calm now, but her voice was steady.
“If they aren’t dead yet, they soon will be,” she said.
“Sure are a lot of scientists around,” observed Rocky.
“No shit. Were they all just in there singing songs together while the Marines were out here getting their asses kicked?”
Light illuminated the blast doors, but so far none of the eyeless fighters were shooting at it. That would change soon.
Perhaps sensing that, she ducked low and turned back into the blast doors.
“Hurry, we have to close this.”
Lucky looked back the half-klick toward his Marines. “Screw you, lady,” he murmured under his breath. “Rocky, paint me a path.”
Lucky turned to Nico’s rover a dozen feet away.