by Joshua James
There was just a pool of blood.
He turned around. The kid was hopping on his one good foot toward the open blast doors.
“Nico, get your ass back over here!”
The kid stopped and looked back at Lucky, bewildered, his bio-sacked stump dangling pathetically in the air.
“Sir?”
Lucky gritted his teeth. “Get over here.”
“Yes, sir!” screamed the kid as he swiveled and started hopping back. His foot was several minutes away from any meaningful regeneration.
“It’s not like Sir Hop-a-Long is going to help us,” said Rocky.
“You stay out of this.”
The scientist appeared at the blast door again, yelling something.
But Lucky wasn’t interested in what anyone had to say anymore.
He heard more pulse fire over the all-comm. There was a firefight out there, and he had to get to it fast.
In his mind’s eye, Rocky had illuminated a path through the maze of dead rovers.
The drones around him buzzed forward to cut down what they could.
The kid was still hopping his way back.
Rocky was right. He was more than useless.
“You’d better have one hell of a detailed sitrep waiting for me when I get back,” Lucky said calmly over his shoulder.
“Sir?”
Lucky rolled out from behind the rover, pulling his pulse rifle to his shoulder and setting off at a full sprint between rovers.
The movement brought out two eyeless Unioners, but Rocky had expected that and had drones waiting for them.
A lazy stream of blue energy flowed wildly into the sky as one of them squeezed the trigger as it was cut down.
Lucky kept his head down. A spider plucked in his mind, jerking him left, then another pluck, and he juked right. He was a puppet on a string again, at the mercy of his pattern-recognition bots to keep him alive.
Two more arcs of blue light tore into a rover on his right, sending one of its huge tractor wheels spinning away.
Lucky pulled the trigger on his pulse rifle again and again, firing wildly and letting the drones find him targets. But more and more shots didn’t curve away in any direction, and Lucky knew it was because there too few drones left to help triangulate his shots. He was on his own.
“It’s time, Lucky.”
“No, dammit, we can do this on our own.”
Distracted, Lucky took a moment too long to react to the pluck of his spiders, and a searing burn ripped through his hip. He felt an instant of pain before his biobots overrode the nerve message to his brain.
Lucky stumbled and fell.
But he was not going to die here in this godforsaken hellhole of a backwater on the edge of Union space.
He crawled on all fours under a rover.
Warm signatures closed in. Another arc seared just above his head, smashing into the rover he was under, throwing it up on two wheels for a moment before crashing back down over him. The shocks gave, and Lucky felt a crunch from his armor as it absorbed as much of the blow as it could. He felt a crack in his chest.
Something’s leaking under here, he thought.
“That’s you,” said Rocky, grimly.
Blood gushed from his hip while his biobots tried desperately to staunch the flow.
The cab door opened. A middle-aged man with gaping, blood-caked eye sockets and a bald head stepped out.
Lucky pulled up his rifle, then closed his fist on nothing but air. His rifle had slipped out of his feeble grasp.
He flopped forward like a dying fish, grabbed the man by the ankle, and yanked.
An arc hit the bottom lip of the rover just above his head as the man instinctively fired his weapon before his back hit the ground.
But this only made it worse, Lucky realized. Now the freak was at his level. The sprawling man swung his weapon around and pointed it in Lucky’s face.
Lucky stared into the gaping muzzle and felt the warm crackle of energy wash over him.
16
Puppets
He missed.
Dirt exploded where the pulse left a hole next to his head.
The bastard missed him from point-blank range.
Something buzzed overhead like a blur.
A pulse hit the man as he squeezed the trigger a second time. The pulse caused him to flop up in the air, and his weapon discharged wildly into the side of the rover. It bounced up and back down again, and Lucky was again driven downward by the pressure of the rover. The blaster dropped from the man’s grip and came to rest across the palm of his outstretched hand.
As Lucky stared, the man’s finger reflexively closed one last time, brushing past the trigger as the gun finally slipped out of his grasp.
Lucky watched as another drone buzzed over. Then another.
“Nice work, Rocky.”
“Not my drones.”
“Then—”
Suddenly, the sky was full of locusts.
Lucky dragged himself upright, wheezing as his chest ached.
A sharp static burst hit the all-comm.
“Get down!”
It was Jiang’s voice.
Lucky dove back to the ground, his ribs on fire, waiting for something to happen.
Then he realized she wasn’t talking to him.
At the base of the stackshack, Nico rolled on his side as a Marine in hammerhead gear shot by in a blur.
Jiang bounced once as she skated across the dirt, twisting so that her hammerhead took the brunt of the blow. However, the move left her spinning out of control on the rebound.
She slammed shoulder-first into the side of the stackshack with a sickening thud.
Dawson bounced off the edge of the rover Lucky was leaning against, coming to rest on his side, legs splayed back across the rover’s huge back wheel assembly.
Matted blond hair and a big goofy smile filled the faceplate. “Incoming,” he said, and swung his legs down as an arc of energy fired into the air, followed by another a second later.
Cheeky limped around the side of the rover opposite where Nico was now hiding.
“Ay dios mío!” screamed Cheeky, red cheeks quivering. “What the hell are those things?”
“They don’t have eyes,” said Nico helpfully.
“What the hell are those blasters? Never seen anything that powerful.”
Lucky was still trying to come to grips with their sudden arrival.
“How—”
“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuu—” came Malby’s screaming voice across all-comm.
A moment later he landed, far less gracefully than Jiang had, and stupidly tried to put his hands and feet out to absorb the landing.
Lucky heard his leg snap.
Malby tumbled to a stop next to the stackshack, where Jiang had just gotten to her feet.
“Malby, you ass.”
He grunted as his pain cocktail kicked in, then struggled up on his one good leg. Lucky counted several fingers pointing in a variety of directions, too, but as he watched biobots snapped them back into place.
Lucky scrambled up, holding his chest, and ran for the rover closest to the base of the building, coughing up blood as he went. He fired his rifle in wild arcs behind him, trusting that the renewed swarm of locust drones would keep the eyeless things busy for the moment.
“Hey, great idea about landing, genius!” Malby yelled. “Where the hell were you?”
Lucky looked over at Peters’ headless body.
“Busy.”
“Aw, damn,” said Malby.
Jiang frowned and quickly shed the rest of her destroyed hammerhead.
Lucky realized they had pulled the same trick he had, using the last of their landing burn juice.
It got them airborne, if only a few dozen feet, so they could glide here.
But they had no way to stop.
Considering Jiang had been the first to arrive, and that she was the only one with half a brain, he figured it was her idea.
“And this?
” Jiang asked, motioning to the pile of rubble that had been the scaffolding and Union gun mount.
“Just another successful landing,” he shrugged. “No crazier than your idea.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Don’t thank me.” She nodded at Cheeky.
“Cheeky?” he said. “You crazy bastard.”
It was his turn to shrug. “Me and my buddies used to take turns jumping off cliffs. We’d see how far we could go before we fired the jets to get back up. So I got a pretty good idea of how much juice they have.” He smiled. “It’s more than you think.”
Lucky stared at him. “That’s crazy.”
“Nah,” said Cheeky. “I mostly made it back out.”
Lucky hadn’t realized quite how much of a daredevil Cheeky was. He was impressed.
He turned back to Jiang and saw she was standing next to the inset blast doors.
They were closed again.
Lucky banged hard against them. “Hey! You in there? Open up.”
The other Marines exchanged looks.
“One of the scientists is in there,” he said. “Two of them, actually. They offered to let us in earlier.” Lucky banged again.
Malby leapt to the doors in two bounds. “Hey! Hey! Hey!” he yelled, pounding with urgency.
Jiang joined in.
There was no response from the other side.
“Looks like they rolled the red carpet back up,” said Rocky.
“Malby, think you can get us in there?”
The tech took one look at the airlock pad and shook his head. “It would take me more equipment than I have with me,” he said. “These are battle hardened. They aren’t made to be popped from the outside.”
“Incoming!” yelled Dawson, no mirth in his voice this time.
Rocky and the other Marine AIs had pooled their drones, and the cloud of them had fanned out, looking to draw fire.
“Show me, Rocky.”
The view in his mind’s eye rapidly expanded as Rocky overlaid a grid of what their drones were seeing. Hundreds of warm targets began to converge on their coordinates.
“Not good. It looks like they are starting a coordinated move.”
“What are those eyeless freaks?” asked Malby as he and Jiang joined Lucky and Dawson with their backs to the rover.
“Just puppets with guns,” said a voice behind them.
They all looked back toward the blast doors, now tantalizingly open. A woman in a lab coat was silhouetted against the soft light emerging from within.
“Not that different to you.”
17
Xenotechnologic
As soon as the blast doors closed, Malby screamed and threw down his combat helmet. It bounced across an inner chamber that led into a small operations room. “What is happening?!” he yelled, waving his pulse rifle and hopping around as his broken leg healed. He looked at Jiang, then Lucky. “Where did the Union get blasters like that?”
Nico closed his eyes and slid down a mesh wall next to a bank of computers, waiting for his foot to finish regenerating.
Lucky looked closer at the computers and recognized them from the vid. One was the six-dimensional data cube that Mr. Beet Red had been using.
That seemed odd. In the vid, they were under the tarp outside the stackshack.
Lucky holstered his plasma rifle and slid down next to Nico.
Nico opened his eyes and glanced over at Lucky, then sat up straighter.
Lucky smiled. “You’re all good, man.”
Nico hesitated, then relaxed his shoulders.
“Sorry about being a dick out there,” Lucky said.
Nico’s eyes widened. “Nothing to apologize for, sir. I should never have gone for the blast doors.”
Lucky silently agreed, but tried to put the kid at ease. “And you can stop with that sir crap. I’m no officer. I’m just old.”
Nico nodded. He still had his hammerhead top on. It was warped and dented, but Lucky could still make out the “this side fucked” scratched on the side.
In the middle of the small operations room, perma-peacock Malby was still holding court.
They sat and watched for a while before Nico broke the silence.
“So, is it true?”
“Is what true?”
“You know,” he said, “What they say about you?”
Nico squirmed, clearly not wanting to repeat what it was they were saying about him. “That… that you can dodge anything. That you never get shot.”
“Maybe you missed the big hole I had in my thigh earlier?”
“Oh yeah,” he said.
“Kid, I learned a long time ago that nothing good comes from paying attention to what people say about you,” he said.
“He doesn’t remember anything about anyone anyway,” said Jiang, who had walked up while they were talking. She was sneaky.
The kid looked at her quizzically. “Why?”
“His short-term memory is toast after every cycle,” she said.
“What the hell, Rocky?” he said. “You gave me no data on her. It’s pretty clear we’ve worked together before.”
And she knows me too well, he thought. This wasn’t common knowledge.
Nico looked surprised. “Really?”
“I’m not exactly state-of-the-art, kid,” he said.
“Oh. Because of the… because you were in stasis so long?”
“Fifty years in cryo will do that,” he echoed to Rocky.
“Fifty years stuck in your head. I got the raw deal.”
“Yeah, something like that.”
“Don’t you get tuned?” asked Nico.
“They can tune up the tech, but they can’t do much with the meat,” he said, smacking himself on the head.
“Ain’t that the truth,” Jiang mumbled.
But it wasn’t the truth.
The truth was that he remembered more and more every day.
He was the opposite of an old man and his fading memories. His grew more vivid with time. The short-term burn of each cycle gave way to the long-term memories he couldn’t forget.
When he was younger, he wanted the memories. He craved them.
He bragged and boasted. He didn’t get his reputation by accident.
He’d list the actions he’d been in. The enemies he’d killed.
But somewhere along the way, the wars grew meaningless. The victories hollow. The ground bloodier.
Now he wanted to forget.
He wanted to forget the wars he’d fought in the blackness of space, in the bowels of space stations, on the ashes of dying planets.
He had fought all his life.
He’d seen men killed for nothing more than a look. Killed men himself for the same.
He’d killed men, women and children. Burned them alive, drowned them, tore them limb from limb and laughed over their carcasses.
He’d been a coward, a liar, a thief, a cheat. He’d cried and begged for mercy. He’d cursed those who asked for it in return.
He’d killed enemies in their sleep, as they ran away, as they took a piss. He’d killed friends who got in his way.
The universe would be better if he wasn’t in it.
But he was.
“Look, I don’t need to know what I did or what someone says I did,” he said. “I just need to live to the next cycle.”
Jiang shook her head. “It’s no way to live,” she said, then hesitated a moment. “And I know what you are capable of. Both good and … bad.”
“Rocky, you gotta give me something. How does she know me so well?”
“Like you are that hard to figure out.”
“Seriously? What is she, like, blackmailing you?” he said.
Rocky was silent.
Great. Just great.
“My brother met Lucky here when he was a rookie, too,” she said to Nico. “He pretty much worships the ground Lucky walks on.”
Nico smiled at that.
“Or used to. He’s dead now.”
Nico’s sm
ile evaporated.
She absently rubbed the chain around her neck again. A long, curved fang hung from it, the fossilized tooth a reddish brown. Jiang saw Lucky watching and stopped rubbing it and slid it back inside her combat plate.
It belonged to her brother. That much was obvious. But there was something else about it.
“He’s got a soft spot; he just doesn’t want anyone to know about it,” she said. The words seemed forgiving, but her voice was sharp as a plasma edge.
“Don’t believe everything you hear,” Lucky said to Nico. “And don’t try to be a hero. You’ll be fine.”
Jiang shot daggers at Lucky with her eyes. She stood up and swung a cheap elbow at him as she walked past.
Malby was still shouting, spittle flying from his mouth. “And what the hell was that in orbit? They cut our destroyers to pieces!”
“You tell us, Malby,” said Jiang. “You’re the tech specialist.”
“You saw what my AI saw,” shot back Malby. “No way the Union can do that. No way!”
Malby paced faster now, his leg having healed to a slight limp.
Cheeky and Dawson stood near the blast doors, eyeing the two scientists. The wound on Cheeky’s thigh was almost gone.
Jiang was looking at Lucky like he should do something.
Like what? he thought. Sarge is dead. Our support is gone. You want me running this shit show?
“Well?” Malby said expectantly to everyone and no one.
“Is he just going to stand there shouting?” said the tall lead scientist curtly as she surveyed the Marines.
She was older. In her late fifties, Lucky guessed, although biological age and Empire standard age could differ wildly depending on how much time you spent in cryo.
Lucky knew all about that.
She had dark brown hair with gray streaks and looked fit as a drill sergeant and twice as stern.
“Looks like we have a new alpha in the group,” said Rocky.
“Who are you, lady?” Malby exploded, taking two big steps toward the scientist.
She didn’t flinch.
Dawson took two lanky steps of his own and smoothly stepped in front of Malby.
“Easy, baby,” he said. “We’re all rattled.”
Malby stared for a second longer at the scientist, then gave Dawson a shove and turned around.