Emeth’s final sounds were screams of various volumes.
“His fate was a mercy,” said Andrei Kazmer as the fire raged and burned. “The next person who calls me that name will die a death so inexpressibly confusing and odd that it would take days to describe, let alone experience. From now on, I am Wake.”
The fire-blackened corpse fell to the ground. It looked almost like a person mummified by Black Shift. Its hands were clutching its face, like charcoal sticks. As Emeth’s body fell, his hip split opened, revealing boiling and bubbling fat within.
Wake extended his fingers, and the corpse began to rise, levitating higher and higher. As if the burning had rendered away so much of his essence that he wasn’t even heavy enough to be affected by gravity.
Wake snapped his fingers, and the charcoal human flew into the sky, straight upwards, growing smaller and smaller until it was gone.
“I hate,” Wake said. “And that extends to you as it does to everyone else who ever did me a wrong. For the moment, I will let you live. Truthfully, I’m curious to see what happens next. You’re alone on a planet with little food or water, and enemies coming to get you. Speaking of which, start making battle plans. The Solar Arm’s forces are moving into position, even now.”
He started walking away, a seven-foot golem that perhaps had once been a man.
“I’m leaving now. I’ll give you some advice. You will live as long as I find you entertaining. So if you have a choice between doing something interesting and doing something boring…go for the interesting.”
Then he simply fell right through the ground, vanishing as if the solid rock below was as ephemeral as a holograph.
Seconds later, Zelity and Ubra ran into the camp, supplies in hand.
“What happened?” asked Zelity. “We heard someone scream.”
“Sit down,” Noritai said. “There are many things to discuss.”
Emeth’s sudden death took the pitch black pall of the Defiant’s morale and made it a thousand shades blacker.
“He can kill us at any time,” Noritai said. “He just appeared and disappeared. I don’t know if he’s a spiritual extension of the planet, like he said, but he’s not mortal any more.”
“Emeth was with me underground,” Zelity said. “Hell, what a way to go. Not even a goodbye or a warning.”
“Never mind,” Noritai said. “We have enemies that are mortal. Let’s talk about how to manage them.”
Ubra was surprised by the man’s callousness.
“We’ve got hardware,” Noritai poked the depressing fire with a stick. “When they ran, they left all kinds of good stuff behind.”
“Cause for exuberant optimism?” Zelity asked.
He gestured at the pile of helmets, portable shields, and handguns. “No. It’s more a case that we now need like nine or ten miracles to survive instead of twenty. We don’t have any long-range tactical weapons or drones, but we’ve got enough small arms. Most of the electronics are destroyed, but the Solar Arm still builds guns with lots of mechanical moving parts. I guess the EMP attacks on Mars taught them a thing or two about relying on microchips.”
“Did we capture any of those Spidermecha things?” asked a lanky man with an aguiline who’d introduced himself to Ubra as Jagomir. “They were devastating in the first battle.”
“We’ve retrieved one, just down on the hill. It had an oil leak that I’m pretty sure I’ve patched. Otherwise, it’s near mint. Some grit got into the articulating joints, but otherwise they’re in great shape. Their operator must have bailed without taking damage.”
“Any craft capable of flight? We’ll need to get to the Skyfortress.”
“The Sky-what?” Ubra asked.
“A floating platform that we keep hidden in the clouds. If it wasn’t for that thing, none of us would be here. It’s how we condense water to drink. We also run bioluminescent gardens up there that grows food. By the way, has anyone found some MREs? I wouldn’t mind eating meat again.”
“Ask Ubra, she’s spent the night eating everything in sight,” Zelity said. “Anyway, what about the Spheres? Any of those still good?”
Jagomir shook his head. “Probably not. I can find about two or three – the rest have either rolled far away, or swallowed by the earth, or disincorporated by an explosion. Exactly none of them still work. Either they’ve been destroyed, or they’re out of power. I tried digging down to a thermal vent and recharging one, but it didn’t work.”
“What about the two Emeth and I took down the Doorway?” Zelity asked.
“I assume they’re still down there. All our digging equipment is melted to slag, and I wouldn’t fucking go down there even if I could.”
Zelity shuddered. He’d spent a long time in the presence of the universe’s last Vanitar, before Andrei Kazmer had killed it, and his mind still felt covered in a thin film of corrosive acid.
“So basically, our aerial capabilities consist of…Ubra’s Vyres.”
“That’s a big problem, isn’t it?” Ubra said.
“Yep. They could theoretically pin us down and starve us into submission.”
“What’s their strategic goal? For that matter, what’s ours?”
None of them spoke, but all of them were thinking the same thing.
It was like trying to draw a map on a layer of oil floating on water. The situation was too unstable for anyone to have goals except live another day.
“We know nothing about them except that they plan to attack,” Jagomir said. “And there’s probably no kind of long game they can play. Whoever’s commanding them probably just needs to keep his forces intact and working as one. One way to do that is to provide them with an enemy. And thanks for rescuing us, but you’ve kind of played into that.”
“What was the alternative?” Ubra said. “I needed you, and you sure as fuck needed me.”
“We could have surrendered. All of us. We would have been questioned, but ultimately he probably would have just pressed us into his army. And then we’d be full of the joys of spring, wouldn’t we? Protection. Nobody trying to kill us.”
“What if he’s one of the Sons of the Vanitar?” Asked Zelity.
“This is a hunch, but I don’t think he is,” a lieutenant called Haledor said. “Sarkoth Amnon’s one, and he abandoned their general here to die – he wouldn’t have done that if he had to account for the loss of one of their members to Emil Gokla. The fact that he went to the trouble of retrieving Mykor is another piece of evidence in that direction.”
“So now our plan is to hold out under the Vanitar Shield, and hope something happens,” Zelity said.
Jagomir gave that idea a thumbs down. “Sorry, that’s the big bit of bad news I was trying to soften you boys up for. The Vanitar Shield is fucked.”
Noritai’s face scrunched up in disgust. “You’re kidding? No way.”
Jagomir stood up, and approached the hulking pillar-like device at the digging site. The savage earthquakes hadn’t dislodged it, even as they were swallowing main battle tanks.
He pressed controls on the front. There was a slight crackling of blue energy, a whiplash of what looked like liquid metal tendrils, and then silence. No encompassing dome of safety. Nothing.
“Either a missile took it out, or the double apposition of the moons permanently destroyed it, or it doesn’t work for a thousand other reasons.” Jagomir kicked it, irritably. “We’re sitting ducks, basically.”
“Soon to be cooked ducks.”
“That’s kind of why I wanted to propose running. Get a few vehicles up and running, and just head for no particular horizon. While we’re driving, we’re surviving.”
Noritai shook his head. “Forget it. We’re surrounded, and the net’s drawn tight. Try to escape and the harpoons flash in.”
“Shit,” Zelity smacked a hand to the ground. “Just, shit. What’s the point, anyway? Don’t they realise they’re going to take us out and be in exactly the same position?”
“We’ll be in exactly the
same position if we beat them, so I kind of get where they’re coming from.”
The twelve of them sat in silence, all of their thoughts running along similar lines.
“We need a polyfleshing device,” Noritai said. “To heal wounds. That’s the one edge that they don’t have. One of our casualties is not equal to one of their casualties.”
“We don’t have one,” Jagomir said. “In the original cache, years ago, we found three. The first one was with Zandra. We don’t know where she is now.”
I do, Ubra thought, but kept silent.
“The second was with Mykor. He’s captured, so I guess it’s now with Sarkoth Amnon. The third, we left up on the Skyfortress.”
“Want me to fly and get it?” Ubra said.
Jagomir gestured at the blue light illuminating the landscape, spreading neon hues across the rocks. “At night, maybe you can do it. By day, it means becoming a big fucking target for every sniper they’ve got. Do holes left by Teflon-coated bullets improve your aerodynamic stability? I shouldn’t think so, but maybe you know things I don’t.”
Sigrid was a taciturn woman posted as a perimeter guard. She froze and stared at a cluster of Solar Arm forces a few kilometers away. “Hey, what the hell is that?”
“What the hell is what?”
Before anyone could answer, there was a deafening sonic shriek that flooded the camp. Everyone screamed, clapping their hands over their ears and dropping to the ground.
The ululating sound was a digital tone, projected at ear-shredding volumes. It ascended, it descended, but everything it did was overwhelmingly loud.
The Defiant scrambled for helmets, and fitted them on. Ubra crammed one down over her head, not even caring about the scratch left on the back of her neck from what might have been a piece of fried flesh or blood. She just had to get away from that noise.
Even with the sound filtering system on, the noise was utter torture to listen to. The Defiant writhed on the ground, like insects before a focused beam of light. Even the ground was vibrating, each oscillatory wave causing the hard rock to tremble.
Ubra caught Zelity’s eye.
“LRAD,” he mouthed. She had to lip read him, even though he might have been shouting his lungs out. “They’re using an LRAD.”
She snatched up her Orizen R-9 and crawled to the edge of the digging site. Beyond was the plain, teeming with soldiers.
The Long Range Acoustic Device was a sonic weapon that beamed high-amplitude noise across a narrow arc. Dozens of expensive titanium drivers focused the sound in one direction. Stand behind it, and you hardly heard a thing. Stand in front of it, and you were deafened. Even at a range of several kilometers, the decibels recorded by the helmet’s HUD were well in the 120dB range.
They’re trying to flush us out, said the tiny part of Ubra’s brain that wasn’t roaring in agony at the sound. And unless we shut that thing off, it will work.
She scraped together the remnants of her concentration, and put the rifle’s stock her shoulder. She pulled the safety lever and exposed herself to the enfilade, scoping out targets.
If the sonic weapon is able to reach us, there must be a path of directivity from it to us. A straight line. So it should be visible, and I can snipe it.
She sweeped with the scope across nearly a hundred degrees, and saw nothing. No radio dish, no speakers. No truck. Not even a disguise that could suitably hide it.
Shit, shit, shit. The piercing noise made it impossible to think. For all she knew, she’d looked straight past it dozens of times.
Her eardrums started to throb, a raw dull ache, as if the sound was gradually scorching through them like slow acid, one follicle at a time.
If they didn’t shut it off, they’d all suffer permanent hearing loss.
I’m going crazy, she thought. It’s almost like the landscape’s blurring…
She felt a tap on her shoulder. With his shock of black hair concealed by a helmet, it took her a few seconds to figure out it was Noritai.
He touched his nanomesh suit’s collar, and a couple dozen green laser beams shot out on the ground below him, each one a letter of the alphabet. By using his fingers to interrupt the beams of the laser-based keyboard, he typed, and text scrolled in on her HUD from him.
They’re using heat blurring shields to hide the LRAD. It could be anywhere out there.
She brought up her own laser keyboard and typed back four words. What can I do?
Spray and pray. You might score a lucky shot.
Fuck that. She crawled back to the edge of the digging site, a plan suddenly blazing in her mind.
The sound was so overwhelmingly powerful that it was literally moving the earth. Particles of dust bounced and skittered across the ground.
Ubra took a sharp piece of rock, found an exposed patch of skin, and cut herself. A little rivulet of blood flowed out, glowing ghastly purple against the rising blue sun.
Then she took a small pebble, and daubed it in blood. Then she put it down, as if consummating some ancient Aztec blood ritual.
The remaining Defiant were furiously firing at various points on the perimeter, hoping to disable the unseen device with a lucky Hail Mary shot. But when they saw what Ubra was doing, they stopped.
And came to her side.
The pounding noise pushed the blood-soaked rock along, tracing a straight line in the hot sand.
That is brilliant, someone messaged into her helmet. She didn’t know who it was.
She put another pebble to the flowing wound, then a third, then a forth, coating them in a hot and slippery layer of her blood.
When she put them on the ground, they gradually moved away from the pulsing force of the sonic weapon, leaving trails. Straight lines. Perfect brushstrokes from an invisible artist.
We’ll make him visible soon enough, she thought.
Now there was a radial pattern, the lines slightly angling away from each other. At the imaginary point where the lines met, they would find the sonic weapon.
Hopefully. Maybe the heat cloaking would also mask the location of the LRAD.
Doesn’t matter. When it comes down to the wire, all doubting thoughts must die.
She put the Orizen sniper rifle back to her shoulder, triangulated the diffusing lines as best she could, and fired at the vertex.
The rifle made a soft thupp that was totally swallowed by the blaring noise. It registered only as a thud in her shoulder. Nothing happened.
She fired a few more times. The bullets vanished into the heat shield, and there was no reaction.
It’s a small target, text scrolled into her helmet HUD. You need a big blanket of fire.
Then Jagomir pulled the sniper rifle from her hands, and replaced it with a Meshuggahtech KA-52. An explosive clip was fitted.
Desperate for it to work, her eardrums feeling like they were almost bleeding, she set it to 3-round bursts and started firing.
The dull mechanical action of the assault rifle became a repetitive pistoning against her shoulder. She fired again and again, until her clip was empty. Jagomir was ready with a new one. She fired that one empty too.
When she loaded the third clip, she lost patience and put the gun on full automatic.
A tongue of flame leaped from the barrel of the KA-52 as she let rip with a massive wave of fire. The kicking recoil of the rifle took her off aim, straking the ground to the right of her target, and she overcorrected. The HUD interfaced with her magazine, and she watched her remaining rounds spiral down to zero.
The chamber clicked empty just as an explosion tore the morning air, and a chiaroscuro of fire fifty feet high plumed above the Solar Arm’s heat shield. Instantly, the blurring effect began to dissipate, and within a few seconds she was looking at a few dozen soldiers, fleeing the smouldering remains of a large cargo truck.
She activated the telescopic sights on her helmet.
Circuitry sparked and smoked. There was the half-melted remains of a massive speaker assembly.
She�
�d ass-fucked it. The LRAD would serenade them no more.
She now had a massive headache smoldering between her temples, and she was nauseous. The absence of the sound was almost as shocking as its presence – like stepping on a stair that wasn’t there.
she staggered to the center of the digging site. By the time she made it her hearing had started to come back...and she realized she was being applauded.
“You’re a genius,” Zelity said, looking amazed. “Seriously, how did you think of that?”
She pointed at the bloody lines on the ground. “That’s one kind of parallel thinking, I guess.”
“Might have been a lucky shot,” said Noritai, removing his helmet. He rotated a finger in each of his ears, wincing. “More likely, you hit a fuel depot.”
The burning flame was now capped with a long pillar of smoke, like an exclamation mark. They all watched, spellbound by destruction, not realizing that destruction was already upon them.
Something whizzed past Ubra’s ear like a hornet. Funny, she thought, that sounds almost like a…
“Company!” shouted Sigrid. “They’re at our six!”
Gunfire chattered at their backs like a horde of cicadas, and the Defiant found themselves in the midst of a bullet storm. A glancing shot caromed off Ubra’s shoulder plate, hurling her to the ground with kinetic energy. She landed face first and didn’t get back up, her hands speedloading another clip into the Meshuggahtech.
The plain was alive with armored bodies.
Sixty or so men were charging up the slope, mobile Repulsors deployed in front of them. Their armor and weapons glittering in the blue sun, overlaid by white-hot muzzle flashes.
The Defiant were caught badly out of position, and paid for it dearly.
The two perimeter guards sustained the bulk of the fire. They went down, their entire upper bodies shredded to confetti. Blood and brains flew in streamers.
The next one in line was Sigrid. She tried to drop to the ground, but she took a bullet to the leg, then two more to the chest, and her tactical drop to the ground became a completely involuntary one. More bullets pounded into her shoulder, one ripping through her clavicle, and she screamed with pain.
Extinction Level Event (The Consilience War Book 2) Page 6