Borderlander

by Joshua Guess

  The Seraphim began moving forward using its conventional drive, the plume reaching out behind it in a dazzling display. The ship rolled away from the Smith to avoid its debris cloud. Something tickled the back of Crash’s mind. What was it? That little bump of unease was a familiar friend. It always told her when something wasn’t quite right.

  Her eyes flickered over the display, dancing from the Ravager’s sensor data to the remote feed. What was it? Why—ah.

  She focused on the passive communications array. The damned radio was silent.

  It shouldn’t be. Any ship with the level of damage inflicted on the Smith would have half a dozen automated signals blaring out into space. It was built into the architecture; multiple channels for multiple warnings. Radio signals should have bombarded the array telling Crash that assistance was needed, that there was a debris field, that critical systems may be on the verge of failure. A bunch of the boxes for any broad distress beacon should have been ticked.

  None of them were. The only thing she got from the Smith was a lot of silence.

  “Iona,” she said, keying the link back to the ship. “It’s a trick. Don’t move away from the Smith.”

  The response, as one might expect from a machine that could think ten thousand times faster than a human being, was nearly instantaneous. “What? How do you know?”

  Crash tried not to raise her voice, but her sense that something was about to go terribly wrong grew by the second. “No distress beacon. They’re playing dead. Do not move away from that fucking ship.”

  Seraphim ceased accelerating at once, emergency braking thrusters kicking on to bring her to something approaching a stop. It was probably the last thing anyone expected. Certainly the approaching ships wouldn’t have thought it wise to sit still for their assault.

  She caught a hint of motion out of the corner of her eye and looked at the feed. Nearly filling the screen was the Smith, no longer motionless. The ship wasn’t accelerating—it was coming apart. Seams running along the corners of its cargo spaces widened, splitting the rear two thirds of the damaged vessel neatly in half.

  A smaller ship—no, a section of the larger ship made to detach—pulled free of the damaged portion and moved with the same casual swiftness of the Ravager. So. This was the real Smith, the drive section provided by the Children now free of its bulky camouflage.

  There was no way her people would be able to catch up with it once the thing was able to take off at full speed.

  “Iona, you guys take down those other ships. I’m going after the Smith.”

  She flipped the comm channel closed as Grant and Iona yelled over each other in a futile effort to explain how idiotic the decision was. She didn’t need to hear it. It wasn’t as if she didn’t know that.

  Still, someone had to fucking do it.

  Crash went into the weird mode of thought reserved for the suicidal and Ravager pilots. The ship thrummed as she pushed the new systems to their limit, lancing through space so quickly she couldn’t help laughing nervously the whole way. The new engine did its work well, grabbing hold of the fabric of space and hauling itself along.

  Just before reaching the Smith, gauges began to red line. The cockpit grew uncomfortably warm. The even, predictable hum morphed into a shimmy, then a stutter. Crash dropped the barely-tested engine down to idle just as she passed over the fleeing ship. The lack of weapons fire hinted that she was still unnoticed, but that was definitely about to change.

  She let out a harsh breath and eyeballed the blinking status light that told her someone on the Seraphim was trying to contact her. Fairly urgently, judging by the frequency of the missed pings. Crash ignored the indicator as best she could.

  Among the many gifts given to them by Blue was a version of the slicing program Drummer used to get his information. A sufficiently complex AI could block the attempt, but somehow Crash doubted the Smith had one aboard. She flipped on the comm array and hailed her prey. It was a long shot; the comms would almost certainly be sandboxed away from any critical systems.

  When the green light popped up to show a successful attack, Crash was surprised. A glance showed the point of ingress: the sensor array. That had to have been Iona. No one else was clever enough to code a transmission in a way that would allow malicious code to sneak in through passive sensors.

  It was a tiny crack, but enough to send a brief set of commands into the Smith. Her timing would have to be perfect since the commands and the actions they created would only last a few seconds.

  The ship slowed as the engine briefly lost its grip on space. Crash didn’t hesitate to unload every piece of ordinance, admittedly not a large number, into a specific area of the enemy vessel. Blue’s instructions had been clear, pinpointing the most likely places for weak spots. Of course, no one could have planned for a third of the damn ship to peel away and fly off, but work with what you have.

  Twenty hi-ex mines flew off and attached themselves to a section of hull she painted with a targeting laser. They detonated just as the pair of missiles and her single torpedo struck the same spot. The missiles delivered their own explosives—aside from being smaller and more basic, the defining line between them and torpedoes was that their payload was always the same—while the torpedo did something a bit more specialized. Its impact was staggered to take advantage of the hole Crash had just punched through the thick armor shielding the drive section. Its nose was blunt, hardened steel. The power of the hit fractured it and spewed its payload into the weakened section.

  Some technologies never go out of style. Thermite, for example, was ageless. It was more advanced and the delivery mechanism was contemporary, but the practical effect was the same as it always was.

  A burning metal with its own oxygen supply, blazing white hot. Combined with the severe structural damage, the heat would soften the hull in that section to the consistency of...well, not taffy, but by no definition could the spot be called solid.

  When the thermal reading hit what the computer told Crash was its peak, she fired her small rail gun at its center. The slugs landed on top of each other, pushing with titanic force against the weakened hull. And then; success.

  A breach right into the engine room.

  The brief power failure she’d been able to induce was gone. The Smith now had full access to its fusion plant. The breach would have forced the engines to shut down, though. They weren’t going anywhere. That was the good news. The bad news was that all the other systems would still be operational during the twenty or so minutes it would take them to restart the drives.

  Including, she noted, the defenses.

  When she cycled up her own enhanced engines to ten percent capacity, the shudder and warning lights immediately returned. Something was profoundly broken here, but not yet inoperable.

  “Just hold together for me a little longer, baby,” Crash said to the ship. “You can do it.”

  She said it, and she believed it. But if not, well, there were worse ways to go.

  28

  They fell like rain. For six days, the ships dropped to the surface of the planet. The process was slower and more halting than it might appear at first blush. The overseers of the hellish experiment that was now Dex’s life apparently thought the job would be much easier than the reality. Two ships landed on the first day. He watched them descend through the atmosphere from a safe distance, popping his head up from the hollows between the dunes just long enough to take a mental picture.

  Those ships contained twelve mercenaries each, all wearing heavy combat armor and carrying modern weaponry. They resupplied their brothers already on the ground, bringing their total number to somewhere in the vicinity of forty. From their point of view, the mistake was understandable. They were heavily armed and armored, practiced killers all. Any tactician in history would have given the mercs great odds against less than two hundred people wielding primitive weapons.

  And it was true: they did manage to kill some. But in those six days Dex saw a thing that gave
him hope for the human race for the first time in his life.

  His general pessimism regarding the human condition was an understandable if biased product of his life on Threnody. The callous disregard for life—its quality, its existence, any measure of personal choice within it—was enough to permanently scar channels into his psyche that caused his feelings to flow a certain way. Even a man as self-aware and intelligent as Dex couldn’t help being a product of his environment to some degree.

  Yet the way the people from the infected camp rose up to defend the clean group brought those deeply held beliefs into doubt. Those who weren’t secreted in the recessed caves pocking the cliff faces in every direction stayed close to their infected brothers and sisters, both relying on their greater strength as well as providing support where possible. Dex ran across them often in the mad scramble to survive during the six days in question. Some he stopped and helped, others he observed from a distance.

  The key for his survival and theirs was constant motion. The weakest among the prisoners were hidden in the caves, with everyone else providing a distraction. That any of the uninfected prisoners were willing to stay in the open and fight when necessary surprised him, but it shouldn’t have. Human beings have always had a remarkable capacity for bravery, enhanced muscles or not.

  By moving, they appeared to be a larger force than they were. Dex fervently hoped the mercs thought the majority of the prisoners were out and about. It would keep them from looking elsewhere. The tactic was working, helped in no small part by the teeming life in the forest which prevented sensors from isolating individual people. As happy as their improbable survival made him, Dex knew it was a delaying tactic at the very best.

  While the teams of defenders kept the hidden prisoners alive by staying on the go, Dex kept the defenders alive in the same way. In those first six days his sleep came in random fits and bursts, twenty minutes here or an hour there. When he was awake, he was hunting.

  Anyone who had witnessed his work might have described Dex as falling into savagery, and who could blame them? When he caught an enemy, there was no warning. No quarter. No mercy. He killed without hesitation or any visible sign of remorse.

  More subtly, and easily missed, was that he also did it without even a hint of anger. The mercenaries were a threat, and threats had to be eliminated. In truth, falling into a more primitive mindset in which the survival response was the only driving impulse would have been a blessing for Dex. Instead he remained perfectly composed and utterly rational. In the face of overwhelming odds, nothing less would keep him alive.

  After six days, the odds were much better. Four ships fell the second day. Another four the third. By this morning, a total of thirty had landed and disgorged their deadly contents. There were two hundred mercenaries assembled on the dunes. Dex counted them before sprinting back to the forest. The mercenaries had learned the folly of hunting in small squads and fire teams. Even one enhanced prisoner was strong and fast enough to down two or three mercenaries in seconds. In the time it took them to rise again, the rest of the defenders would swarm to attack.

  More than a hundred dead enemies provided all the armor and weapons Dex’s side could ask for. Rather than eliminate the prisoners in a series of controlled sweeps, the enemy only made his people stronger and far more dangerous.

  Now they would come in groups of fifty, separated only as far as needed to flow around trees like a flood. Overwhelming force in the form of professional soldiers, laying down a hail of weapons fire that would cut the prisoners down like so much wheat in a field.

  Or so they expected.

  Dex smiled to himself as he ran, his scarred combat armor thunking against itself in a rhythm not unlike music.

  *

  “How long are we going to wait?” Fatima whispered fiercely. “They’re getting close. I can see them through the trees. They’re going to notice us.”

  Dex shook his head. “They’re not coming right at us. We need to redirect them.”

  “How are we—oh, for fuck’s sake,” she said, her voice trailing off as Dex slipped away from the group. He moved low and as silently as possible, though the copious wildlife in the forest made so much noise that the footfalls of a single man hardly stood out.

  He reached the spot that seemed the best bet for what he wanted to do. Less than twenty meters from a wall of mercs fifty strong, Dex took a knee and calmly slid the rifle around on its attachment points and raised it. He set the gun to burst mode, enabled the tracking feature, and used its computer to paint the nearest three soldiers. He did this quickly—the enemy systems would know they’d been hit with a targeting laser. All told it took him four seconds from kneeling to firing.

  Three men went down, their faceplates neatly pierced with a trio of rounds each. Dex was already moving when the bodies fell, running at full speed back toward Fatima and the others. He ducked and dodged between and around trees, throwing his body low at random to prevent a decent target lock. The foliage helped a lot; the large leaves played hell with recognition software.

  Fully aware that the leading edge of the enemy forces was less than a dozen meters behind him, Dex found an empty space in the wall of hidden defenders and leaped with all the considerable force his muscles were capable of, hurling himself forward to land in a messy roll.

  “Now!” Fatima shouted, all the signal her troops—for lack of a better word—needed.

  The line of prisoners fired in near perfect unison, their stationary positions giving them all the time in the world to pick and choose their shots. This fusillade had two effects. The first and most obvious was to kill the enemy, which it did. Another handful of mercs dropped, unlucky sacrifices allowing the warriors behind them enough time to dive for cover. Still hugely outnumbering the prisoners, they no doubt had plans to reform and become the sharp tip of the spear. If allowed, Dex knew they would cut right through the heart of the defenders, who were, after all, hungry and exhausted from days of intense combat.

  The mercenaries were not given a luxury as helpful as time, however.

  As soon as Fatima shouted her command, prisoners hidden further away and to the sides of the main line of defenders started their own attack. Not with their bodies or confiscated guns; with lizards.

  Keeping the beasts restrained was impossible with the meager resources allowed before the onslaught, but enough belts and weapon straps were salvaged from dead enemies to make a little lizard wrangling possible if not at all easy.

  On each side, four of the giant beasts suddenly galloped forward. They were angry and aimed right at the mercenary troop. Erin was the one to discover that the things would flee in whatever direction they were pointed once the restraints were let loose. Apparently the giant lizards found captivity of any kind a wholly new experience—once snared, they cowered in anxiety. Nothing in their evolutionary history had prepared them for it.

  Letting them go created living guided missiles with a deep desire to stomp on and tear through any bipedal life form in their path. Erin had explained her reasoning simply: the lizards would be angry and violent, eager to get away, and the soldiers would react as soldiers did. They would attack the lizards.

  Which anyone who had spent time on this shithole of a planet knew would only make them more angry and violent.

  The point was not to force the lizard beasts to do the work for the prisoners. As the massive creatures barreled forward, mercs in their path popped up from their hiding places and stepped into the open from behind trees. Bless them, they just couldn’t defy human nature and its millennia of evolutionary imperatives screaming at them not to stand still in the face of a gargantuan reptile about to run them down.

  When the mercenaries showed themselves, they were shot. Dex’s people were not professionals by even the most generous stretch of the imagination, but with the stolen gear they didn’t have to be. Nor did they stay still. All around him, prisoners with armor swathed in camouflage picked from the surrounding forest moved to close in. At the corners
of his vision, the flanks did the same now that lizard herding was no longer a concern.

  “I can’t believe this worked,” Dex panted as he moved with Fatima, covering her. “I knew the chaos would help, but this is...wow.”

  Fatima didn’t smile, but he thought the corners of her mouth might have twitched a little. “Makes me glad people never coexisted along dinosaurs, you know? We’d have died out in like twenty minutes. Shit ourselves right before being trampled is my guess.”

  Dex chuckled, then shoved her aside mid-laugh. His weapon rose and fired without target acquisition, but one of his shots still managed to slap into the shoulder of the man who’d popped up two meters in front of them. It was enough to throw the merc off balance, an opening Dex used to lunge forward. He let the rifle fall, momentum carrying it back along its track in his armor, and slapped away the enemy’s gun as the mercenary tried to swing it back around.

  There was naked shock on the enemy’s face, easily visible through his scratched and pitted faceplate, at the raw power of the hit. His gun broke free of its attachment entirely and spun away into the green.

  The merc tried to fight, but it was pointless. Dex moved too quickly, too decisively. He let the other man pull the knife at his waist. It wouldn’t matter, and he used the precious fractions of a second it took the man to arm himself to draw his own blade.

  Dex dodged a vicious jab expertly aimed and executed. Had he lacked his Blessings, his throat would have been laid open. As it was, Dex almost lazily ducked to the outside of the strike and snaked his own blade up and inside.

  Killing blows were what professionals did. Dex went for the more immediate and practical, slashing through the weakest part of the armor and deep into the man’s elbow joint. His scream was only slightly attenuated by the helmet.

  The knife dropped from his hand. Maybe he thought that would be the end of it. If so, he was wrong. Dex took no joy in what followed.