by Fonda Lee
The pain receded under the realization that every second he spent on the ground was one in which he wasn’t returning fire and helping his erze mates. Donovan grabbed his rifle, got to his feet, and kept firing.
Following some unseen command, the Hunters retreated into the curving corridors of the Towers. Two fresh SecPac teams hurried past, weapons up and eyes forward as they pursued the enemy down the passageway. There was sudden silence save for the rapid clacking of reloading ammunition and the muted but urgent calls of people checking up on erze mates. “Who’s hit?” Thad’s voice demanded, sounding strangely normal after all the madness.
A hand grabbed Donovan by the shoulder. To his inexpressible relief, Jet was beside him. He pointed at Donovan’s stomach. Donovan looked down at himself for the first time. With bladed fingers, he tore away the bottom of his vest and winced at the sight of his own damaged and chemically burned armor, knitting frantically, trying to protect the site of injury and eject the crushed projectile fragments.
Donovan laughed weakly. When his partner looked at him oddly, he said, “TGINS.” Jet broke into a pained, slightly mad grin. Thank Goodness I’m Not Squishy. “I’ll say,” he agreed. As incomprehensible as this firefight was, there was a bizarre sense of rightness to it as well.
Thad came over to them. “Get some of that burn stuff on it, stat.” Donovan reached for the small container in his vest pocket. Jet took the canister from him; it dispensed a white medical foam that felt tacky but cooling as Jet sprayed it over the wound. Donovan had no idea how it worked, other than it counteracted whatever corrosive residue was eating at his panotin. He ejected his nearly spent magazine and slammed a full one into the breech.
“Tucker, your armor’s scorched, you’re staying put. You too, Martinez,” Thad ordered. “The rest of you form up; let’s go.”
They pressed forward toward the sounds of battle.
The center of the main Tower, a tall open space that stretched past the upper levels, had become a vaulted echo chamber of gunfire and chaos. It was immediately apparent that the Rii had retreated deeper inside to gain the advantage of ground where they could fire down on the humans from above. Following close behind Cass and Mac, Donovan hugged the curving wall, rifle aimed upward, firing at the mottled figures on the level above them. A dozen stripes already lay on the ground, some of them unmoving, others trying to crawl away from the barrage, or still determinedly returning fire even as they were dragged to safety by teammates. The battle had begun as an orderly and disciplined assault, but it was fast becoming a melee. The open layout of the Towers provided little cover and the fast, animalistic attacks of the Hunters quickly broke apart human formations; it was getting hard for both sides to shoot without hitting their own erze mates.
Scores of Hunters were dropping fifteen, twenty, or thirty feet from the causeways above, landing on six legs as lightly as spiders and attacking the exos armor on armor. Donovan saw one Hunter grab a man by the leg; another grabbed him by an arm, and like dogs with a rag, they yanked their victim violently side to side until his spine snapped.
Three stripes rushed one of the Hunters and as Donovan had once seen Soldiers do, two of them bore it down with their superior weight, forcing it sideways onto its hull while the third fired several rounds into the underside of its torso, slamming the Hunter’s body into the ground.
In the deafening noise, Thad was shouting, but only after Donovan focused on the lieutenant’s face did he hear the words. “Up! Up! Go up!” Cass took point, leading the way up one of the winding ramps to the chambers above. Mac, Donovan, Jet, and Zach fell in behind her. They advanced together, Thad covering the rear.
Cass slowed before the next landing and threw a flash grenade. A bang was followed by a shrill, whistling exclamation as a concealed Hunter leapt from the vantage point where it had been sniping the humans below. Cass and Mac rushed forward and opened fire.
Bullets tore into the Hunter’s exocel and shattered an eye, but the Hunter leapt forward and seized Mac around the neck and torso with its long limbs. Before anyone could come to his aid, the Hunter had thrown itself from the third floor, its legs wrapped around the human as they both plummeted to the ground below.
The other exos rushed to the spot where their teammate had gone over, but there was nothing they could do. Far below, the Hunter lay motionless, but any hope that Mac had survived the fall vanished when two other Hunters rushed to the spot and fired down on his body.
Jet roared in denial and trained his aim below, but it was too difficult to place a shot with the number of mingled humans on the first floor and the Hunters already on the move again.
Thad banged a fist against the wall, his face grim. “We keep going.”
They continued upward. Sweat wicked up through Donovan’s armor and trickled under his vest. The battle continued to rage, but the sound of it changed. Donovan understood why: Werth’s Soldiers had arrived. They’d fought their way through the other side of the Towers, and now both humans and zhree of the same erze were converging in the main chamber. They poured in from the ground floor and from walkways connected to the secondary spires.
“Thank erze. About time,” Zach said. Donovan agreed; he’d never been happier to see Soldiers. He could sense the tide of the battle turning. Striped hulls clashed with mottled ones. Soldiers boosted one another, leaping off the domed bodies of their erze mates and pulling themselves onto higher floors, their musical shouting mixing with human voices and the rapid clicking and chirruping of the Hunters.
The five exos fired and climbed, paused to reload, and continued. It was like fighting their way up a well. Close-quarters combat inside the Towers was not something Donovan could’ve ever imagined a few months ago. There were no corners around which to take cover. Bullets didn’t pass through the unearthly walls but instead lodged in the metallic weave or ricocheted dangerously off support frames. Soldiers, Hunters, and humans fought up and down the height of the spires. “Should have … taken … the elevators,” Cass joked, catching her breath. She held out a hand. “Flash grenade. I’m out.”
Donovan handed her one of his. They’d learned a hard lesson after what happened to Mac and now always moved forward along the interior wall. Cass threw the grenade into the open archway ahead on their right. A Hunter burst through a cloud of smoke and charged them. They mowed it down with electripulse rifle fire, but not before it hurtled through them, plowing into Jet and Thad with razored limbs extended, sending all three careening several feet down the passage.
Donovan ran up. Thad had been knocked clear and was pushing himself to his feet. The Hunter lay dying, two sets of pincers wrapped around Jet’s throat. Jet’s bladed hand was sunk into one of the reddish eyes, the opaque lens shattered and leaking pale fluid. Donovan and Zach blew out two more eyes and the alien let out a final sigh like gas escaping a tire.
Donovan dropped to his knees and pried the sharp pincers away from his partner’s throat. “I’m okay,” Jet said hoarsely. He grimaced as he disentangled himself from the zhree corpse and got to his feet, a hand on his neck where the weave of his armor showed dark laceration marks.
Donovan felt weak in the legs for a second as he stood. He forced a steadying breath as he picked up his E81, but when he opened his mouth to speak, Zach hollered, “Look out!”
Two of Werth’s Soldiers barreled into their midst, one of them limping badly on three limbs, both of them firing behind at pursuers. A Hunter ran and leapt from a causeway above, clearing at least thirty-five feet of open air and landing on four legs. With its other two limbs it shifted its grip on its heavy weapon with the nimbleness of a baton twirler and fired a blast that took one of the limping Soldier’s fins clean off his torso. The Soldier staggered back, stunned; his companion let out a shrill whistle.
Donovan and his teammates opened fire, triangulating a hailstorm of lead on the Hunter’s mottled hull. It fell back with a warbling cry. Two other Hunters appeared in its place. Almost faster than Donovan’s eye could tr
ack, one of them tore Cass’s rifle from her grip and sent it spinning off the edge of the ramp. A whipping limb connected with Cass’s midsection, hurling her against the wall. Cass tumbled to the ground.
The two Soldiers threw themselves onto one of the Hunters and together they pulled the much larger zhree off balance. All three of them fell, stabbing and slashing at one another in a frenzy of limbs. Jet and Donovan ran up and emptied their magazines into the Hunter’s body at close range. “For Vic,” Jet snarled as he held down the trigger. “For Leon.” The mottled armor rippled and spasmed and tore in several dozen places at once, spurting whitish liquid.
Gunfire choked the air. Donovan hit the ground in time to see Zach go down, his leg obviously broken. Before anyone could get to him, the second Hunter fired again and shot him in the back of the head. Donovan’s stomach dropped out of his body. Zach was dead; even an eighth-generation exocel couldn’t withstand skull impact at that range.
Thad let loose a guttural howl and got off two shots before a sniper on an upper ramp nailed him in the chest. The lieutenant staggered and collapsed. Time turned to sludge. Donovan saw everything; Jet returning fire across the tower, blasting at the enemy across the way, Cass trying to get to Thad, the remaining Hunter bringing its weapon around toward them.
Donovan launched himself at the alien’s legs. It was stronger than him, but he was heavier. His momentum knocked it aside and its next shots went up into the ceiling. That was enough time for the two Soldiers to act. Like a pair of wolves, they took the Hunter down, rolling it to the ground, stabbing it again and again in the eyes and underside. Zhree blood spurted, mixed with the expanding pool from Zach’s body.
Donovan stumbled away. “Cass!” he yelled. “Thad!”
“Still here.” Cass was yanking open their squad leader’s tactical vest and fumbling for the burn spray. Thad reeked of charred panotin, but he pushed himself to a sitting position, clutching a hand to his chest. His breath came out shallow and labored; the lieutenant’s punctured lung had barely healed enough for him to even fight today. “The three of you keep going.” His voice was wheezy but utterly calm. “You’re almost there. We’ve almost got this squared away.”
Cass spread medical foam across Thad’s frayed armor. “Don’t go anywhere, Lieutenant, and I’ll give you a better chest massage later.” She stood. “Where’s my rifle? Someone see where my rifle went?”
“Take this one, human.” One of the Soldiers extricated himself from the tangle of the dead Hunter’s limbs. He picked up his weapon and limped toward them on three good legs. There was a ragged scrap of tissue and panotin where one of his fins had been. The other Soldier lay unmoving, an alarming amount of whitish zhree blood pooling around him, one of the dead Hunter’s limbs embedded in his underside.
“It’s not designed for humans, but you can still fire it,” slurred the Soldier. “Set the tips of your armored digits into these holes and pinch the two contact plates together. It’s simple.” He handed the weapon to Cass. “Get to the uppermost communications center and shut it down.”
They went on: Donovan, Jet, and Cass. It seemed incomprehensible to Donovan that just a few months ago, he’d passed this very spot with Anya’s hand in his own, eager to show her the alien magnificence of the Towers and the impressive view of the Round, hoping to convince just one person that the world he knew was worth saving.
Just a few more yards. They paused to reload their rifles. Donovan was drenched in sweat and down to his last magazine. The communications center lay ahead—a chamber full of consoles and screens and complex machinery for controlling orbital equipment and weapons as well as encrypting and transmitting messages through space-time.
They approached the room cautiously, weapons at the ready. Standing at the chamber’s central wraparound console was the Hunter that Donovan had seen speaking to Soldier Gur—the huge one with striking light and dark mottling. The Hunter was clicking and whistling in rapid speech as it manipulated various controls. It seemed to be having difficulty dealing with the unfamiliar Mur technology because its broad fins snapped with frustration, and as Donovan watched, it banged a limb on the top of the console.
The massive, agitated Hunter was not, however, the most shocking sight in the room. Standing behind the Hunter, flanking it like bodyguards, were two men. At least, Donovan thought they must be men. They were each easily seven feet tall, broad shouldered and slightly hunched. Their faces were not quite human: longer jaws and hairless sloping heads, eyes that were large and round and solid black. Ridged, exocellular armor covered their bare, muscled bodies.
“What in all erze are those?” Cass exclaimed.
The Chief Hunter caught sight of them and for a moment, paused. Then it flicked a fin and gave some sort of sharp, chirping command. Without a moment’s hesitation, the two armored man-creatures charged at the exos like linebackers from hell.
Donovan was so shocked that he lost half a second of reaction time. He pulled the trigger on his E81 and got off two rounds that struck one of the men in the chest at near point-blank range at the same time as Jet shot him in the head. The man—if it was a man—staggered, armor shuddering as he collapsed, but the second attacker grabbed the hot barrel of Donovan’s carbine, ripping it from his hands and swinging it like a crude cudgel into the side of Jet’s face.
Jet fell sideways onto his hands and knees. Donovan began to move, but the man on the floor, the one they’d shot, was still alive and lurched upward like a monster, tackling him around the waist, dragging Donovan to the ground. Cass had been trying to open fire but lack of familiarity with the zhree weapon in her hands had cost her precious seconds. She got off only one round that struck the shoulder of Jet’s attacker before the armored man knocked her weapon aside and swung both armored fists down on Cass as if to smash her like a piece of fruit.
Cass raised her arms in defense. One of the brute’s blows sheared across her heavily armored left forearm, but the other smashed into her right elbow. It broke with an audible snap.
Cass let out a cry of pain. “Oh, you ape-faced bastard!” Cass dove for Donovan’s weapon on the floor and tried to bring it into position with her left arm.
Donovan could not help her; he struggled against the unbreakable grip of the attacker who was pinning him. The man was so much larger and heavier; he’d immobilized Donovan’s legs and was crawling up his body like a boa constrictor. Jet’s shot had deformed part of the vaguely human face. The cheek was grotesquely caved in and one black marble of an eye was destroyed and bleeding—bright red blood, like any human—but he was still, horribly, very much alive and staring at Donovan fixedly with his one good eye. Donovan shoved at the massive armored shoulders. He slashed at the awful face and neck with the serrated ridges of his armored forearms. The impact of panotin on panotin vibrated across both of their heaving bodies. The man had no nodes, Donovan realized. Whatever he was, he wasn’t an exo. He hadn’t been Hardened by any method Donovan knew of, and while his armor seemed astonishingly strong, it remained fixed in place, like an animal’s.
“What are you?” Donovan screamed.
One huge palm closed over Donovan’s face. The man-creature lifted up slightly and made an incongruously soft clicking sound, and in that instant Donovan surged his exocel for all he was worth and thrust the point of his bladed fingers into the open mouth. He shoved as hard as he could, feeling, with a shudder that ran through his body, the wet thunk of his hand sinking in up to the wrist, slicing through tissue and hitting bone. Blood gushed down Donovan’s trembling arm. The light in the remaining black eye died and the grip around Donovan’s throat fell slack.
With a moan of horror, Donovan pulled his arm free of gore and struggled out from underneath the dead weight in time to see the remaining armored man lift Cass and throw her bodily out of the room, where she rolled several times and came to a limp stop. Jet drove himself up and forward, ramming his shoulder hard into the man’s abdomen and sending them both crashing into a bank of screens.
For a moment, Jet held the advantage as he rained down slashing body blows that opened gashes in the enemy’s exocel. They knit up again.
Donovan struggled to his feet. The large mottled Hunter was still manipulating console controls in the center of the room with barely a glance spared at the battling humans. Donovan knew his priority ought to be stopping the Rii leader. Whatever he was doing, it couldn’t be good. But the horrible armored man-creature was pinning his best friend to the wall by the throat and pounding him relentlessly, armor on armor. Jet’s mouth bled freely. His battle armor collapsed as he weakened.
Donovan spotted his assault rifle on the ground, the barrel hopelessly bent. Jet’s was nowhere in sight. Lying a few feet away was the zhree weapon that the Soldier had given to Cass. Donovan picked it up, walked over, set the business end of the Soldier’s weapon against the base of the elongated head, and muttered a fervent prayer. He pinched the trigger points hard with armored forefinger and thumb. The weapon discharged, tearing through armor, blasting apart the sloping skull.
Jet fell to the ground, dazed and gasping.
And the Chief Hunter shot Donovan in the back.
Donovan blacked out for two or three seconds when he hit the floor. When he came to, he couldn’t move; his shoulder blades felt as if they’d been smashed into powder. He could only lift his head enough to see the Rii leader tap the console two more times with satisfied finality. Only then did the huge Hunter step out from behind the communications station, chirping and clicking something unpleasantly triumphant as he almost lazily leveled his Grade 7 Er combat pulse weapon.
Jet lurched over Donovan, simultaneously shielding him and trying to reach the zhree firearm that had fallen from his hands.
Half a dozen Soldiers burst into the room. “Highest State,” one of them exclaimed, taking in the bewildering sight of the armored humans on the ground and the splatters of carnage. The Chief Hunter shifted the barrel of his weapon toward the newcomers, whistling hateful defiance.