CROSS FIRE

by Fonda Lee

  Donovan saw his own death—the Hunter would slice him to ribbons—and so strong was his terror in that one moment as he rolled away in a desperate last-ditch effort to escape, that the involuntary reflex to armor seemed to overcome every other. His exocel flickered; he felt it trying to shield him, to save him, as one of the Hunter’s legs plunged down, missing him by inches, and another struck him in the space between the ball of his shoulder joint and his clavicle, pinning him to the ground. Donovan screamed as pain exploded at the place of impact. He glanced down to see the point of the Hunter’s armored leg driven into his flesh, through the feeble layer of panotin that had sprung up at the last second. He’d never seen his own armor pierced, and he’d never seen his own blood in such dizzying quantity, pooling up around the wound, over the torn weave of his armor, mingling with the blood of fellow stripes already slicking the Hunter’s gleaming, razored limb.

  And then the Hunter was blasted back by a hurricane of shrill gunfire; Jet, Leon, Cass—all of them unloading their electripulse rifles, none of them armored, but all of them standing up and advancing, murderous. The Hunter jerked and Donovan felt the puncture wound tear even larger as it pulled its leg free from his body, releasing him as bullets rained down on its armored hull. The alien spun toward the cluster of attacking humans, but in the wall of flying ammunition, several shots finally found their mark—the Hunter gave a piercing whistle, covering a shattered eye, and then dual bullet holes burst in another of the orange-red lenses. Fluid gushed out and the Hunter staggered and tipped sideways, twitching.

  The remaining Hunters moved faster than anything Donovan had ever seen. The scene became a chaotic mess of movement, gunfire, and armored limbs, his erze mates running, shouting, diving out of the way. Donovan tried to get to his feet, tried to hoist the E201 with what felt like a nerveless meat arm attached to his torso with pure fire. He expected at any moment for something lethal to strike his soft body; it was a sickeningly incongruous feeling to be fighting for his life so naked.

  “Jet.” Frantically, Donovan tried to make sense of the mayhem; he glimpsed his partner rolling behind the cover of a skimmercar only to see the entire vehicle violently shoved out of the way by alien legs. All of Donovan’s pain vanished in a blaze of panic; he leveled the rifle and pumped bullets at the Hunter, only half-aware that he was screaming unintelligibly. Leon joined him, both of them firing, Leon’s face pale and bloodied but his expression made of steel, until the Hunter fell under the hailstorm of their combined lead.

  Donovan saw the indicator on the E201 turn red and heard the snap of electric coils on an empty chamber. He fumbled for the extra ammunition he usually kept in his uniform pocket before he realized with plummeting despair that he was in civilian clothes and had no spare magazine. Leon turned toward him, took a step, and from behind him two of the remaining Hunters appeared. Donovan tried to yell a warning, but it barely left his mouth before two sets of razored limbs slashed at Leon in a cross-cutting motion, cleaving the unarmored exo in half at the waist.

  From seemingly very far away, Donovan heard Cass scream. The world seemed to fall out from under him as one of the aliens scrambled over the two parts of Leon’s body and came at Donovan where he stood, the useless, empty E201 in his blood-slicked bare hands.

  Something flew out of the darkness and struck the Hunter less than ten feet in front of him; the alien was lifted off its feet and for a second, Donovan, astonished to still be alive, stared mutely at the spot where the monster had been. Then movement surrounded him and he realized that Soldiers had arrived. A dozen of them descended on the pack of Hunters, striped hulls and patterned fins flashing in the light of discharging weapons as they flowed around the stunned humans. Three Soldiers leapt onto one Hunter, and in mesmerized, revolted relief, Donovan saw a massive tangle of flailing limbs as they pulled the Hunter’s legs out from under it and flipped it onto its hull. A fourth Soldier fired directly into the Hunter’s underbelly and a horrible sizzling sound and acidic burning smell pervaded the Hunter’s dying whistling screams.

  The Soldiers raced on; Donovan heard snatches of musical shouting in Mur, not at all unlike the short, clipped battle communication of human soldiers: “Erzeless Rii filth.” “Get these humans out of here!” “Go, go, go!” The shadowed entry into the Towers lit up with weapons fire, blurred movement, and high-pitched screaming as Werth’s Soldiers were met by additional Hunters, some of them dropping from the sides of the building as they continued to pour forth nightmarishly from the globular vessel still stuck high above.

  And then over the tumult, other zhree voices began shouting, in that peculiar homeworld accent, “Fall back!” One of Gur’s Soldiers bounded past Donovan into the melee, ignoring him completely. “Erze orders! Fall back!”

  The call seemed to travel like magic from Soldier to Soldier, Werth’s and Gur’s alike. They began to retreat, still firing shots at the Hunters, pairs of them lifting injured erze mates, covering one another as they yielded to the invaders. Loud clicks and whistles ran through the packs of Hunters, who held their ground at the base of the Towers, chirruping and stabbing the air with their limbs in triumph. The gunfire fell silent.

  The Towers were lost.

  Donovan fell to his knees, the empty rifle clattering to the ground. His arms and shoulders began to shake uncontrollably as the battle mania drained out of him. Sensation started to return to his exocel in the form of tingling pain that stabbed from node to node up his spine, sharp pinpricks like the thawing of a frozen limb. His armor crawled weakly over his wounds, large and small; it packed around the tattered flesh where the Hunter’s leg had punctured him, staunching the blood.

  The bodies of his fellow exos were scattered on the ground around him. Tennyson, Lucius, and Leon, and others he had not seen until now: Nicodemus, shot in the head, Katerina’s leg torn off. Donovan’s mind faltered, unable to take in all the horror at once. Cass was rocking back and forth, cradling the top half of Leon’s body in her lap. Donovan heard a noise several feet away that he did not recognize and turned his head toward it: Jet, storming back and forth, shrieking with grief.

  Soldiers swept through efficiently. “This one’s still alive,” called one, lifting an unconscious Ariadne in two limbs and carrying her off. A couple of others examined the human bodies with curiosity and distaste. “So this is what they look like inside,” one of them said, bending to peer at Leon’s remains, oblivious to Cass, still bent double under the weight of wracking sobs. The world seemed to tilt dangerously. Donovan felt himself sag and someone caught him up under the arms.

  “Can you stand? You need medical attention.” The zhree voice was vaguely familiar. Donovan stared into two of the pale yellow eyes. It was Soldier Wylt, who’d recognized him in the barracks. Donovan had no wherewithal to reply, and Wylt ordered, a little impatiently, “Get up, Donovan.” The tone of command from a zhree of his own erze moved him where his own will seemed to have abandoned him. He got to his feet and swayed against one of the nearly destroyed skimmercars. Wylt took a firm hold of his arm with vise-like pincers and kept him upright. “Come along,” he said, a touch more gently, and supporting him, led Donovan away.

  They were taken to the hospital in the Round. It was not designed to treat exos—there was a medical wing in the Towers for that, but the Towers were currently occupied by the enemy. Donovan and Jet, whose injuries were not life-threatening, sat slumped against the wall in the starkly lit emergency room lobby. All the other patients had been moved elsewhere to accommodate dozens of injured stripes. The group Jet and Donovan had been in was not the only one to have responded to the alarms; from all over the Round, soldiers-in-erze had rushed to defend the Towers and the result had been the same everywhere: Exocels had failed. People had died.

  Donovan’s eyes drifted over faces strained with pain or blank with shock, but each one that he recognized brought a small flutter of relief—at least those of them in here were alive.

  Vic wasn’t in the hospital. Neither was
Thad. Jet checked his comm again, for the thousandth time—still no answer to any of his frantic messages. “Maybe they can’t get through.” The note of hope in his taut voice strained against the agony of worry. “Too many crises going on. The system must be overloaded.”

  “Have you heard?” The woman sitting on the other side of Jet was named Anastasia. She’d suffered three broken ribs, a broken leg, and lacerations all down the left side of her body when she’d been pinned and dragged under an overturned skimmercar during the fighting. Her exocel bulged extensively over the wounds, the strands of panotin glistening as they knit over raw abrasions. “There were attacks all over the planet,” she told them. “We weren’t the only Round invaded. Cities got hit too, some of the biggest ones: Los Angeles, Shanghai, Mumbai … They all got hit. I heard half of Mexico City is gone.”

  That had to be an exaggeration. There was always a lot of confusion and wildly overstated rumors during disasters. What Anastasia was saying seemed too huge to be real. But yesterday the idea of so many stripes dead and injured and the Towers being taken over by the Rii would’ve also seemed impossible. If she was right, there’d been, how many?—millions?—of civilian casualties all over the world. Donovan couldn’t process that. Distant tragedies couldn’t penetrate the numbness of others that were so close and fresh.

  The Hunters had apparently allowed Nurses and other nonmilitary Mur colonists to flee the Towers unharmed. Therrid had been brought over here by Soldiers to do what he could for the injured exos. Donovan caught the incongruous sight of the Nurse hurrying about the hospital lobby, his nurse-in-erze, Sanjay, trying his best to keep up. Two other nurses-in-erze and a couple of emergency room doctors were helping to triage the patients, bringing the worst cases to Therrid’s attention and making the less severely injured more comfortable where possible. Donovan overheard Therrid telling one of the doctors: “No, don’t worry about severed limbs! As long as the exocel is undamaged, it’ll seal off the stump and they’ll be fine. But anyone who’s unable to armor needs to be seen immediately, and broken or bleeding cerebrospinal nodes are an emergency.”

  By the time Therrid made it around to their corner of the room, his fins were fluttering in distress and he was mumbling to himself in a constant low susurrus. “Vercingetorix,” he exclaimed, bending toward Jet. “And Donovan … thank the Highest State of Erze. I’ve lost so many of the hatchlings already. If you two had been …” He didn’t finish but began examining Jet quickly, feeling the nodes along the back of his neck and head and peering into his eyes.

  “I’m fine, zun Therrid.” Jet had suffered some nasty cuts and bruises, including a deep laceration on the thigh, all of them now sealed under his exocel. “Have you seen or heard from Vic? Or Thad?” Donovan knew the answer was likely to be no; they’d been looking through the room themselves every few minutes, and Jet’s mounting desperation was plain in his voice.

  Therrid’s fins swept across in a negative. “I haven’t,” he said sadly, moving on to look at Donovan, whose exocel was bulged so thickly around the stab wound that it looked as if he’d developed a frighteningly large tumor where his arm met his body. The pain there had become a dull, throbbing ache and he could barely move his right arm. Therrid probed the lump and Donovan winced.

  “You ought to be in a therapy tank, but we don’t have any here,” Therrid said. “Without access to the medical facilities in the Towers, I don’t have much to work with. This human medical center has a limited supply of emergency packs of panotin replenishment gel but not much else.” Therrid’s voice and fins vibrated with frustration. He thrust clear containers of milky liquid at them. “Drink this. It’ll bring down the inflammation and alleviate the pain. Both of you need to stay hydrated and get enough hydrocarbons and minerals. Your wounds aren’t serious, but if your exocels are too depleted, you’ll end up with scarring and mobility issues.”

  After Therrid moved on, they slumped back against the wall, drinking what seemed to Donovan to be a gritty, oily smoothie that tasted like raw eggs and sand. Anastasia had been moved elsewhere by one of the nurses-in-erze, so they were somewhat alone. “I just got through to my mom,” Jet said a few minutes later, looking at his comm yet again. “At least we know the network’s up.”

  Donovan looked down at his own comm display. Dozens of message notifications were lighting up on his cadre channel. With an increasingly sick feeling in his stomach, he began skimming through them. Anastasia had been right; the Rii attack had hit Rounds and cities elsewhere in the world and the consequences had been just as devastating.

  Maddison Chu had sent: Are you all okay, C-mates?! We fought them off, but it’s really bad here in Round One. Lots of stripes dead. Don’t know how many yet.

  Dmitri replied: We’re fine in Seven. No attack here. Moscow bombed but missiles shot down, not too much damage.

  Kamo/R17: I’m alive but what in all erze happened? Did everyone else’s exocel crap out?

  Maddison/R1: Yeah. This is a scorching nightmare.

  Pauliina/R6: I heard Round Ten is occupied. Anyone hear from Amrita??

  Bartholomew/R4: How about the guys in Rounds Three and Twelve?

  Fernando/R12: Matias is dead.

  The last was a gut punch. Donovan closed his eyes and dropped his head against the wall. Matias had been a hell of a guy to have around during CRP; he always had funny stories to tell, and a smile or a joke to lighten the mood no matter what sort of grueling torment they were being put through. He and Fernando had been like Donovan and Jet, as close as brothers.

  Donovan composed a reply of his own: They took the Towers in Round Three. Jet and I are okay. His hands were unsteady for the last bit: We lost Leon. Donovan stared at the three words, but seeing them did not make them any more real.

  He’d barely sent out the message when a priority alert came through on all local SecPac frequencies, causing every conscious stripe in the room to sit up and take notice.

  “This is Command One.” The grave voice in Donovan’s earbud was barely recognizable as Commander Tate’s. “Those of you who are able, make your way to Central Command by oh six hundred.” There was a long pause on the line. “Go in erze. Command out.”

  About a third of the soldiers-in-erze in the room began to get up. Donovan struggled to his feet, stifling a groan. His aching body protested vehemently, but he wanted to hear what Commander Tate would say and find out what was going on. He turned to give Jet a hand up, but his partner was already on his feet, staring toward the lobby entrance.

  SecPac lights were pulsing in the early morning dark outside the hospital doors as stretchers were wheeled into the emergency room. This scene had already happened several times while Jet and Donovan had been here, but this time, the motionless figure on the stretcher was Thaddeus Lowell. Even with an oxygen mask over his face, there was no mistaking him; one of Thad’s large, striped hands dangled limply off the side of the moving stretcher. Half of his dark hair was singed off, his complexion waxen.

  Jet was running toward the second gurney that was being wheeled in. Donovan rushed after him, getting a glimpse over his partner’s shoulder as Jet pushed his way to the side of the stretcher. Vic’s pale hair was matted with blood. Her exocel crawled feebly over her scalp and face. She seemed to be half-conscious because at Jet’s wordless moan, her eyelids fluttered and her fingers twitched on top of the sheets.

  “Vic. Vic.” Jet’s whisper was choked.

  Nurse Therrid had to push Jet back so he could get through to examine her. “Get them into operating rooms and start them on surgical exocel suppressant,” Therrid ordered. The stretchers began moving again.

  Jet began to follow, then half-turned toward Donovan. He seemed unable to talk but Donovan understood; he put a hand on his erze mate’s arm. “I’ll go,” he said. “I’ll find out what’s going on and come back here. You stay with her.” Jet nodded gratefully, then ran after Therrid and the stretchers.

  Something clenched violently inside Donovan’s chest like a poke
d clam—a visceral reflex to the expectation of more grief. Please not Vic and Thad too. He cringed with the desire to fold his head under his arms and sink back down to the floor of the emergency room lobby.

  Instead, he followed the small crowd of stripes heeding Commander Tate’s call and left the hospital.

  He was surprised to see that the sun wasn’t even up yet. It seemed to him as if days must’ve passed when in truth it had been only ten hours since the Rii attack. He was even more surprised when he arrived at SecPac Central Command to discover that the campus had become a zhree military encampment. From a distance, in the faint haze of predawn light mingled with distant street illumination, the largest training field behind the Comm Hub building looked like a pool of identically striped torsos, moving around like a repeating floor-tile pattern come to life. Even as a soldier-in-erze, Donovan had rarely seen so many Soldiers in one place at the same time. The fact that they had taken over SecPac’s property was utterly disconcerting.

  As he got closer, Donovan saw Soldiers standing and talking in clusters, some of them injured and being tended to by Nurses, others walking around and checking in on the status of comrades, accounting for weapons and ammunition, setting rotating guards, and doing the sorts of tasks one did when holed up in a position after a battle. Here and there, different markings stood out—Gur’s Soldiers, standing alone or in pairs, but a circle of space always seeming to separate them from the others, who did not approach.