We all know he’s telling the truth. Someone’s got to stop those ratters. And as we look around our platform, it’s obvious no one’s going to sit this out, not when the rest are about to go out and risk getting killed.
“All right,” Mersh says. “Everyone grab two mines and line up forward side.” He looks over at Spammers. “Spams, you set up the slide gun and cover us.”
The slide gun is one of those auxiliary weapons we keep around for special occasions. It isn’t as powerful as the 13mm autos, for example, but it’ll work pretty much anywhere and can fire either conventional or ingenic rounds. I’m expecting Spammers to make a joke or something, but all he does is salute, say, “Yes, sir,” and get right to it.
The rest of us follow Mersh around to the front of our platform and line up with our feet on the flat metal and our heads facing the enemy. The cloud of Valentines is still shooting at us as much as ever, only now instead of being in front of us, it’s like they’re above, and we’re looking up into some stormy sky full of lightning and crazy, swirling suns. The tails from the ratters are like fishing lines, or maybe ropes you could use to climb into the sky.
“Ten seconds,” Mersh says. “Launch on my command.”
We crouch, ready to jump off and fly and just hope we make it to that umbris before something shoots us down. I don’t even think about what we’ll do if we actually get there. What I do think about is the first time I met Naomi, when she caught me by surprise with that great big pistol of hers. I couldn’t tell you why. I just see those old woods with everything wrecked all around, and her big eyes watching me over the barrel of that gun.
“We’ll make it, Torro,” Hexi says. She’s right beside me, and, somehow, she’s still smiling.
I just smile right back as best I can.
“Three!” Mersh yells into our ears. “Two! One! Launch!”
FIFTY-SIX
TORRO
We push off together, directly toward the cloud of Valentines. Our assault platform falls away beneath us, and it’s like we’re in this endless, weightless jump. From all along our net of platforms, other squads rise with us, and suddenly there are people in D-87s all around, thousands of us, first in a flat line, then more like a flock of birds as we separate out a bit, some moving a little faster or slower. I get the feeling we must go on forever, like there’s no way old Romeo could kill us all. He sure gives it a try, though.
Here and there through our big flock or whatever, people start spinning out of control, just getting knocked down like they’ve been hit by an invisible brick or something. Romeo’s started aiming for us, and out here in space we’ve got no cover at all. Our only chance is to make it to that umbris, and from here, it looks like it’ll take years to get there.
Every second, more of us are getting hit. Nearby, I see two guys from my platform get stabbed out of the air and go falling away out of sight. I’m about sure I’m next when not so far ahead the empty space lights up with little glowing red speckles—ingenic shells from our slide guns going live. Spammers and everyone back on the platforms must have got them working. I can just make out a kind of deeper red farther on, where the shells must be hitting the Valentine lines. The umbris is coming up fast now, and in no time I’m sliding right past those red speckles. It’s like I’ve dived into some tingling bath. My D-87s come back to life, and, instantly, I feel a whole lot better.
I can finally get a good look at the enemy, too, now that my helmet’s working again. The ratters’ nests are by far the biggest things in sight, probably a hundred meters across at least. The tails coming off have a kind of wavy, rounded look, sort of like tentacles, but they’re also a bit furry, like they really might be the tails of gigantic rats or something. Flying nearby are a lot of smaller fighters, though they’re still bigger than your average miles. Type 4s, probably. They’re flattish, like saw blades, and they spin very rapidly, spraying huge shells or whatever that move so fast you can’t even see them—or anyway I couldn’t until my D-87s started up again.
Spammers and our kiddos with the slide guns are already doing a pretty good job keeping the blade-things busy, and I’m just thinking I should be getting after those nests when Mersh hollers, “Get moving!” right in my ear. I unsling my lazel and set my personal gravity to full fall in the direction of the nearest nest. That should get me there in the shortest time possible with the least chance of getting killed. Most of the other milites around me seem to have the same idea, and it turns out we’re all wrong.
Several of them are pretty well ahead, since they didn’t stop to look around and like take stock of the battlefield and so forth, and it doesn’t take those saw blades long to swing around and start laying into them. They can fire null in addition to their heavy shells, the saw blades can. A few of our guys break up their lazels and use the bucklers to block the incoming fire, and that works real well as long as there’s only one saw blade shooting at you. As soon as two come at you from different angles, though, you’re pretty much done. I watch at least ten people ahead of me get cut apart, slashes of white-blue just slicing through them. Scraps of D-87s fly past my head, probably with bits of people inside, and I think now’s a good time to start like contemplating a change in strategy.
I give up on falling straight to the nest and angle my PG so my body swings to the side and goes tumbling toward one of those huge ratter tails. It’s a drop of maybe fifty meters, and I hit hard and almost roll off, grabbing on with both arms until I can stand up. I’m pretty dizzy, but at least no one’s shooting at me. I call out to Mersh and the rest of my squad, “Find a tail and land on it! They won’t be able to shoot at you without risking cutting off their ratters by accident!”
No one answers, though. I look up the way I came, but I can’t see a single person from my squad anywhere. The whole place is a mess, just lousy with saw blades and ratter tails and flashes of null going back and forth and milites everywhere getting completely blued. I’m starting to think my whole squad must be gone when Hexi swings up from underneath the tail where I’m standing. She shifts her PG, does a little dip, and lands beside me. I don’t know what else to say except “Hexi!”
“You always were easy to pick out in a crowd,” she says. Mersh has found us, too, and a bunch of other milites, some from our squad, some not. I’m glad as anything to see them.
There’s pretty much only one way to go from here, and that’s right down along this tail we’re standing on. It’s basically a big hairy bridge leading right to one of those nests. The surface is covered in crawly-looking Type 3s, the kind with arms and legs all over the place ready to rip you apart, what we generally call Swarm Tactic Skirmishers, or just skirms. They started bunching up around this tail as soon as we landed, and now they’re galloping right toward us.
Hexi and me, we start right in with our lazels, but Mersh and the milites closer to the nest break out their blades and bucklers instead. That really does the trick. The bucklers fend off most of the fire coming from those skirms, and meanwhile everyone else has a clear shot with their lazels. We push our way down the tail, using our PG to stick to it on all sides. There are a lot more skirms down on the nest, rushing to climb up after us, but someone’s already shooting them to crap from somewhere up above.
That’s when I remember our slide guns. It must be Spammers and everyone back on the platforms helping us out. I turn, expecting to see him there, now that I can use my D-87s to look way out into space, but I can’t pick him out in all this big mess of fighting.
“Torro!” Hexi calls. “What are you doing? Let’s go!”
Mersh and the rest are already charging toward another herd of skirms. They’ve all got blades and bucklers out, just hacking away. I pull my blade, too, and follow Hexi, but only after I’ve checked behind us one more time. The trouble is, the reason I couldn’t find Spammers is because where he should have been, there was only a bunch of torn-up platforms and hunks of scrap, bits of armor
and empty space.
The skirms certainly aren’t pushovers, that’s for sure. They’ve got blades of their own, long, hooked ones that can come scratching out of any one of their eight arms or legs or whatever. Mersh is really getting into it with them, but he isn’t so distracted he can’t give orders. “Torro! Hexi! See if you can plant a mine in this thing!”
Some of the milites who came with us down the tail are already like attacking the problem, but they aren’t making a whole lot of progress. That weird metal fur we saw on the ratters’ tails is all over the nest, too, and it keeps getting in the way. I’d thought it was a trap or something, but it’s actually a kind of armor. Every time you take a swing at the nest, some strand of fur or whatever stabs out and knocks your blade away.
Trying to get past the fur gets real annoying real quick, and pretty soon, Hexi and me are both starting to panic. We’ve figured out we can cut through the fur if one of us gets it to extend and the other slices it from the side, but that only works one strand at a time, and clearing enough space to plant a mine would take about 850 years. And all the time, more skirms are coming, swarming out from the side of the nest. Mersh keeps screaming at us to hurry up. He’s starting to sound pretty tired, and I doubt it’s from yelling. Finally, Hexi goes a bit berserk. She takes her lazel and starts shooting the side of the nest like crazy, making a bunch of those hairs stand up all at once.
“Do that again!” I shout. She shoots again, and this time I cut through each piece of fur that springs up when she hits it with her lazel. The whole patch comes away with a pretty satisfying scratch.
After that, it’s no trouble to cut a hole into the side of the nest. I drop one of my mines through and tell Mersh we’ve done it. I think we’re just in time. There aren’t too many of our milites left. Mersh is breathing real hard when he orders us all to get clear so he can null this stupid nest. In this case, getting clear means just launching off into the battle. Not a very safe plan, but better than staying here, I guess.
Hexi and I flip our PG and fall up away from the nest, and about half a second later the place where we’d been standing like collapses in on itself. A pack of skirms comes leaping up after us, but before we can get out our blades, someone shoots them apart from below. Mersh and some other milites are still down there, fighting to get away from the nest. I watch three and then four more jump off into space while Mersh hacks through a couple more skirms, and he’s about to launch, too, when one of the skirms buries a blade in his leg. I’m thinking somebody’s got to get back there and help him, but at almost the same time, there’s a gush of white-blue from inside the nest and part of the thing just kind of crumbles and falls off. A lot of the skirms that’d been chasing us crumble away, too. I don’t see many other milites getting away, either. And no Mersh. I try to get him through my helmet, but he won’t answer.
“Torro,” Hexi says, sort of hesitantly.
I think she’s worried about Mersh, too, so I say, “We’ll find him, Hex.” I’m starting to feel pretty queasy, though, like I couldn’t really have seen what I just saw. A skirm blade is going to take off a lot more than your leg. “He’s out here somewhere.”
“No, Torro, look. The nest.”
The nest wasn’t hit quite as bad as I’d thought. There’s an ugly, kind of caved-in place where I dropped that mine, but nothing much has happened to the rest. There are still plenty of ratter tails squirming around all over the place. I bet the mine only got one or two of them, if it got any at all.
“It didn’t work,” Hexi says. “Torro, we can’t leave the nest like that. We have to go back.”
She’s right. I mean, like, I know she’s right. If we don’t do something about this stupid nest, all the ratters at the other ends of those tails are going to be loose on old IMEC-1, messing with our guns and killing everybody.
So we reverse our PG and go back, aiming for the collapsed spot in the side. At least there we won’t have to cut through the nest to get another mine in, or that’s what we think until we see that silvery fur or whatever is actually growing back. There are still plenty of skirms, too, and when they see us coming, they rush in to meet us, shooting away with those terrible old legs of theirs.
We use our bucklers like umbrellas against the needles of null flying up at us, and land right in the middle of a huge crowd of skirms. They pounce on us immediately, and I start really like regretting the decision to come back. We probably won’t make it ten steps, let alone over to the hole we blew in this nest. That’s what I’m thinking, anyway, when another squad of milites drops down, sending the skirms spinning.
Actually “squad” probably isn’t the best description. There’s only four of them. They really lay into those skirms, though. One of them calls to me, “Let us finish your work, pawn,” and I recognize the voice, and the weird accent. When he turns around, I see it’s that real scarred, scary-looking old bivvie, Thom. The milites with him must be the other bivvies from his tribe, little Naomi’s friends.
Together, the six of us, Hexi and me and the four bivvies, fight our way toward the hole in the nest. It isn’t easy, with the skirms hounding after us and the hole getting smaller every second as more of that silvery fur grows back. By the time we get there, all that’s left of the damage we did before is a pretty small gap.
Hexi runs over and jams her buckler into the hole to keep it from closing up completely. “Get a mine, Torro!”
I pull the second mine I brought from our platform and slam it down on Hexi’s buckler.
“Blast!” old Thom yells. “Set it to blast, boy!”
Hexi says, “He’s right! Null will only take out a little piece—we’ve got to blow it apart!”
The mines we brought can use different types of energy, same as our lazels. Null is usually the best when you want to destroy something, but that didn’t work out so good last time. I set the mine to blast instead of null and just hope old Thom knows what he’s talking about. Then I kick Hexi’s buckler down into the hole.
“Make your move, pawn!” Thom shouts. He’s the only one of the bivvies I can still see. Everywhere else is all skirms and blades. I grab Hexi and set my buckler underneath me and blow the mine.
Suddenly, we’re way up above the nest, like we’ve been instantly transported there or something. I think the nest must have ballooned out or maybe in and just thrown us here, because it kind of shudders a few more times, then breaks apart in this terrific explosion. The shock of it knocks me tumbling back, and I lose track of Hexi, like she must go off in some other direction. I can’t see her anywhere. I try to steady myself with PG so I can find her, but my D-87s aren’t working right. They’re slow and heavy, and there’s some like yellow cracks in front of my face that make it hard to see straight. When I try and wipe them away, the fingers on my D-87s won’t move. They’re stuck to some other pieces of armor, what looks like an arm, just hanging there off my suit. Which doesn’t make any sense at all. That was the hand that was holding on to Hexi.
I remember one of those skirms jumping at me just before the mine went off, and I guess it must have damaged my suit or something. The more I try to move, the more I feel like I’m swimming through something very thick and heavy. Eventually, it’s like all I can do is float. So that’s what I do. I float. And I wonder what the chances are that if I just keep floating, I’ll eventually end up back home.
FIFTY-SEVEN
JAX
I don’t see it when the signal rocket comes through Lunar Veil. I’ve been watching the sky for almost an entire day, waiting for some sign of the battle, and so of course as soon as I doze off for five seconds, that’s when the rocket appears. I’m not mad I missed it. It’s not like I’m superexcited for news from the Legion. I’m more nervous than anything, or to be totally honest, probably halfway between nervous and scared stiff. When you’re afraid of what the news will be, sometimes you’d rather have no news. What I especially don’t like is how
the rocket only came once I was almost asleep. Good news doesn’t sneak up on you that way.
It isn’t easy to communicate between one Realm and another. Radio signals and stuff like that mostly get blocked out by passages like Lunar Veil, meaning most ways of talking over long distances won’t work. Messages between Earth and the Front were almost always delivered in person. For this battle, though, the Legion needed to be able to communicate quickly with the reserves, so they decided to send basic messages using signal rockets. Each color of rocket means something different. Green says the battle’s over, and we’ve won. Yellow means the Legion wants the reserve to come help. Red is for enemies incoming.
Naomi’s afraid, too. I can hear it in her voice when she says my name, and when I open my eyes, I see it in her face, even though it’s dark out. Up in the sky, the rocket looks almost like just another star, except for the way it’s sliding through the air. Then it explodes into an incredibly bright yellow, enough to light up the entire sky. For a few seconds, the whole Forum looks like it’s late afternoon, with long shadows stretching everywhere.
“They’re calling in the reserves,” I say, though what I’m really thinking is At least it’s not red. In a way, though, yellow is worse. Red could just mean a few Valentines had slipped past our lines, like in an incursion. But with yellow, we know the Legion’s going to need us to join the battle. It could be that we’ve got Romeo on the run, and they just want us to help finish him off, but somehow I doubt it.
I don’t expect Naomi to say anything. For one thing, that gigantic yellow rocket makes it pretty obvious we’re getting called in. For another, Naomi has said practically nothing since the battle started. She thinks everyone is keeping some big secret from us, and that has her sort of mad. I don’t see how it matters that much. We’re busy fighting a war. There isn’t always time to explain every little thing.
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