The boy had looked up at her that exact same way. His first pit. Her first pit. Both nameless. Both unseen. She had found the spear before him and sliced open his leg. (Just as he would have done to her, she had told herself a thousand times, if only he had found it first.) The nameless boy crumpled, bleeding against the rough pit wall. Clutching his leg. Eyes wide and wet with terror. Sabira over him, sweating and jittery with brew, spear held high. Sabira driving the tip through his chest, skewering his heart. The boy dying at her feet, forever nameless.
“Sabira, what are you doing?” Daggeira came from behind. “We don’t have time to toy around with baby vermin. Let’s go.”
Sabira lowered her stick and looked at Daggs. Saw only the reflection of her own visor mirrored back at her, an infinity of faceless reflections staring blankly one into the other.
“I don’t know,” she said, confused, unsure if she was on an alien planet or deep in the fighting pits of Nahgohn-Za.
What the shit is wrong with me?
Daggeira shoved her to the side. “Will you come on, already? We have to go! Now!” Without even looking, she aimed her gauntlet at the youth’s face and sprayed a dose of toxins. It tried to scream but could only hiss and gargle as its respiratory tract dissolved. All four hands clawed at its face. Mandibles flapped and sizzled. And then it just stopped.
“Right arm, listen up,” came the familiar commands of Caller Arrow in her helm. “This mission is not over. No extraction until we confiscate our targets. So let’s move, skins. Let’s go, let’s go!”
“Come on, Stargazer,” urged Daggeira. “Don’t want to miss all the fun.”
I am a Servant of the Divine Masters, enforcer of Divine Will.
“My life is their weapon.”
“You’re godsdamned right it is,” answered Daggeira. Sabira hadn’t realized she had spoken the last part aloud. “Caller gave the order. We’re moving, Stargazer. Now.” Daggeira ran back toward the rest of the right arm. “Sabira! Now!”
Sabira was already moving by the time she shook off the unbidden memory. She flicked her palukai, reshaping it into an assault rifle with a double-edged blade extending from either side of the barrel. A perfect configuration for close and medium range combat.
Vermin. Infidels. Kiss your old crumbling world down the shaft. The Servants are coming. Righteous, angry certainty felt so much better than doubt.
A new wailing pierced through the city, loud and mechanical. She recognized the noise. Enemy alarms.
Following Spear’s directions, Arrow and Cannon took point and led the arm up the ramp and then forked south on a narrow road. Sabira and Daggeira brought up the rear guard. Caller reminded them to check their vertical sight lines. Behind his commands, Sabira could just make out Spear’s voice. He was trying to coordinate their extraction to coincide with the right arm’s arrival at the target area. They were close. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she could almost hear drums, timing their movements, driving them onward.
Sabira spotted a group of vleez rushing down the street away from them. Perhaps word was spreading with the alarm, bringing the locals running to witness the massacre they had left behind.
While Daggeira hustled to her next point, Sabira posted at a corner covering her and scanning their surrounding. They were extremely vulnerable. If any residents were armed, the crew could be sniped from at least nine different locations.
Sabira had an open view of the city below. About thirty searchlights beamed into the night sky, illuminating the gray undersides of thin, rippling clouds. One by one, the sources of the searchlights rose above the city, rotated over, and pivoted their beams of light down to the streets and buildings below, then scattered off in their different search vectors. Vleez automated sentries. Each carried a full short-range sensor array.
“Sentry drones are up and roving," Sabira informed the arm.
“Engage your hover-field scanners,” commanded Arrow.
Distant echoes of gunfire attracted a swarm of sentries. They converged in on the sounds of fighting to their east. The mission clock read six hours. Had it really only been minutes since the slaughter on the terrace?
“Must be the left arm,” Arrow transmitted. “Our mission is still to locate and confiscate the target. Keep moving and keep quiet.”
Attendant Spear led them through a tangle of twisting roads. Cone-tiled walls echoed with the wailing alarm. She no longer spied any curious vleez venturing out to see what was happening. All around them doors shut, and lights dimmed. No one came forth to challenge them. No sudden sniper fire barked from dark rooftops. Sabira thought they had a chance to actually clear the mission after all. Until the explosion.
The blast came from the north, distant and reverberating, but still loud enough to be heard over the alarms. A fiery glow illuminated the low clouds from the far side of the hive city’s northern rim.
“No,” whispered Grandfather Spear’s transmission. “Gods no.”
Sabira had never heard him like that, so worried, and realized the wrecker was gone. She felt too far away from everyone else, too exposed. Only Daggeira was on the far edges of her view. She needed to get tighter with the rest of them, needed to be closer to Grandfather.
“Now what are we supposed to do? Oh Gods, what a cave-in,” said Cannon, panic in his voice.
“Trickster’s asshole,” said Daggeira.
Sabira’s visor flashed a warning: hover-fields detected.
“Right arm, hold steady. Keep your eyes up,” commanded Arrow.
“Now what? Oh Gods, now what?” asked Cannon.
As if in answer, blinding white light poured down from the sky.
19.
SABIRA AND DAGGEIRA blasted the sentry into melted slag. It fell from the sky, streaking sparks and flames, and crashed into a building downslope from them. Orange and blue fires spilled along its roof.
More sentries appeared overhead. Blinding white light everywhere. Sabira and Daggeira darted to opposite sides of the street. Sabira took cover under nearby awnings, Daggeira under a low balcony, each firing at the incoming sentries.
“Take them down! Take them—” Arrow’s command cut off and transformed into piercing feedback. Sabira muted the comms before firing again. The powerful glare of the spotlights made aiming impossible. Sizzling, red bolts disappeared into a wall of light.
“They jammed our transmissions!” yelled Daggeira from across the narrow street, barely audible over the screeching alarms.
“They’re coming!” Sabira yelled back and fired again. The sound of plasma searing through metal crackled overhead, and another sentry fell. But others remained hovering in the sky above, engulfing them in light.
A string of percussive hits rattled the cobblestones at her feet. Stabbing pain swept her right leg from beneath her, and she fell on her back. Screaming, she fired blasts of plasma wildly into the air.
“Sabira’s down! Sabira’s down!” screamed Daggeira, firing into the light. No response other than the rattle of return fire and the sizzling blasts of palukai from farther away.
Focusing through the pain, Sabira spied an armor-shaped silhouette passing overhead, tracked its hover-field signature, aimed, and fired. The crackle of bolt hitting target. A heartbeat later an armored vleez dropped from the sky headfirst into a nearby wall, bounced off and flopped into the street only meters away.
“Good shooting. Next time try not to get shot first.” Cannon slid beside her, staying close to the wall and under the awning. “The vermin are firing encased acid rounds. I’ve got to get to your leg while you’ve still got one.”
Wisps of smoke curled up from the stones where the vleez bullets had struck. A quick glance at her leg revealed a thin line of vapor rising from her thigh armor. The acrid scent of flesh and armor plating dissolving into fumes. But she couldn’t see the hit itself. She had fallen on the wound.
“Godsdammit!” she grunted.
Another rattle of percussive hit
s along the pavement drove Cannon back against the wall. They hid in a three-meter-wide gap between two buildings. Sabira lay with her feet toward the narrow street and Daggeira. Her head pointed at the back end of the gap where the walls of two buildings extended toward each other and met to form an archway.
“We’re too exposed here,” Cannon said. “Next time take cover behind a grank before you call a medic.”
“Godsdamn that hurts. It’s burning through,” Sabira hissed, pain spiking into her right thigh.
“Aim high and cover me. I’ve got to clear the arch.”
Sabira shot up into the light as Cannon pivoted and ducked under, facing opposite, palukai trained on the archway.
“Clear.” He pivoted back under the awning’s cover. “Turns into a downward ramp after about two or three meters. Limited sight lines. This has to be fast.”
“Come on then, driller, let’s go!” Tracking the hover-fields her visor detected, Sabira fired into the blinding sky. A sentry exploded in the air above them, its fiery crash echoing down the street. A moment later Daggeira nailed another. The ceiling of light dimmed noticeably, making it easier to visually track the individual sentries and the darting silhouettes of the airborne guards.
Sabira continued blasting covering fire as Cannon ducked under the barrel of her palukai. She was wedged against the base of the wall, her injured right leg beneath her. Cannon grabbed hold of her hip and twisted her onto her back. On the outer side of her thigh plate, a small black impact hole smoked and sizzled. Just below it was searing agony. Before she knew it, Cannon popped off the plate’s quick release and was cutting away her jumpsuit with his knife. He tossed the acid-splattered plate and cloth into the street. Where the suit was cut away, she saw purple bruising with a sizzling little, red hole in the middle. The wound’s edges rippled with melting skin.
“There’s still acid in the wound. The field bandage will neutralize it.” He drew out the bandages from his pack as he spoke.
Across the way, Daggeira dropped another sentry, and the street grew darker still. Acid rounds popped all around her, pecking the balcony and the windows above her. She returned fire but didn’t hit.
“You’re clear and set,” Cannon said, reaching down to pick his stick back up. “It’ll hurt like a prod in the ass, but you’ll keep your leg. In two shifts, remind me to change the bandage.”
He pivoted up from her bandaged wound. “Time to find the ranks and get the hell ou—”
Cannon’s visor shattered inward mid-sentence. Countless rounds fired through the archway nailed his chest and face, threw him on his back. His legs spasmed and kicked. He died screaming, hands clawing at his melting face.
Sabira wanted to scream, but her throat clenched tight, throttling the sound into an airless rasp. Enemy rounds whispered past her head through the archway, pelting the wall across the narrow street. A volley slammed Daggeira in the chest, and she collapsed to the ground.
“Get clear! Get clear!” Sabira yelled, waving her hand, wishing she could get to her.
More rounds whisked through the arch and tore up the cone-tiled wall above Daggeira. Chalky debris drifted down from the bullet holes. She dragged herself from out of the archway’s line of fire but also exposed herself to the enemy above.
Sabira tracked shadows in the sky and fired at blurs, covering her. “Get across to the awning,” she yelled between volleys, “and pop your armor!” She wanted to run to her, pull her to safety. Tend her wounds. Save her. But all she could do was lay there, pinned like a mine rat in a trap, and fire blindly into the sky.
Cannon’s armor triggered its self-destruct. In moments it was obscured in greenish flames. Sabira struggled to see Daggeira through the thick, noxious smoke and had to crane her neck at an exposed angle. Volleys of acid rounds shot past dangerously close to Sabira’s helmet.
Daggeira was out of the archway’s line of fire but still had to crawl across the street to the awning. Once she made it, they could get to each other without being exposed to fire. Daggeira made it halfway across when the rattle of gunfire tore down the middle of the narrow road. Plumes of small debris jumped from the stones, drawing a line straight toward Daggeira. Rounds pelted into her back.
Sabira screamed and fired wildly into the sky, unable to track and target the airborne shooter. But the shooter tracked her. The vleez swooped around for another firing pass, this time at her. Back to the wall, Sabira couldn’t roll away as plumes of dust raced across the gap, drawing a line straight for her belly. Every impact clear, starkly detailed, as fear gave way to the clarity of coming death.
Plasma seared the sky. A loud crack and flash of light. A crash nearby, echoing down the street. The plumes of dust drawing a line straight at Sabira settled back to the street. In the distance, the persistent wail of alarms. Nearby, a human voice, shouting. Closer still, the whisper of bullets racing past.
Caller Arrow yelled at her from the street corner, opposite from where Daggeira lay. The voice had been him shouting her name. He couldn’t get to her without crossing the archway’s line of fire. He gave the hand signal to indicate he had her in his sights.
Using hand signals, Arrow commanded her to stay against the wall but crawl her way to Daggeira and pull her undercover. He would tend to the archway shooters.
Sabira faced the wrong way to crawl in Daggeira’s direction. She sat up, swung her legs out into the exposed walkway and back as fast as she could. Every movement spiked agony into her thigh. She kept her back pressed against the wall, her stick trained on the arch, and pushed herself forward with her uninjured left leg. The vleez continuously fired through the archway. Some rounds ripped past her less than a half meter away.
Caller Arrow stalked in on the other side. He kept tight to the wall and posted in the corner where the building and the wall of the archway met. He unhooked a grenade from his belt, armed it, and tossed it through.
Like a drum silenced mid-rhythm, the gunfire ended in a flash of boiling light. A newly formed crater dripped smoky vapor into the sky. Lives turned to steam. And all around, buildings and vines transformed into flames and ash.
Sabira’s head rang. Her eyes stung, went out of focus. An arm supported her. A male voice yelled over the never-ending sirens. Arrow. He held her up, guided her toward the street.
“Sabira! Cover us!” he yelled again and again.
Arrow posted Sabira at the corner of the narrow street and the pathway to the arch. She raised her stick and searched the sky. No enemy triggered her field detectors or rained down fire. Then Arrow and Daggeira were on the ground next to her, pressed against the wall. He struggled with the quick release on Daggeira’s back plates as she stifled her screams and clenched her fists.
Arrow popped off the armor plate at last. Acid splatter had dissolved crumbling holes in the dark plate, but her jumpsuit underneath remained intact. A small, transient relief. Arrow tossed Daggeira’s backup oxygen tank as well. It had taken multiple hits.
Sabira’s eyes darted back and forth between her crewmates on the ground and their lines of vulnerability. But after Arrow flipped Daggeira over to get a look at her chest wounds, Sabira could only focus on her.
Arrow handed her a pack of bandages. “Tend to her. Press them hard to absorb the acid. I’ll cover.”
Sabira met Daggeira’s pale eyes, tight with anguish. Seeing the fear and pain in her face sickened Sabira, but the ugly wounds eating away her chest and belly truly unnerved her. They hadn’t gotten to her in time after all. Three large holes punctured her armor. The acid rounds burned clear through, fusing armor to flesh as it devoured her.
For now, at least, there were no sentry floodlights, no incoming fire. Sabira gripped Daggeira’s trembling hand with her left, while her right pressed the bandage into the largest wound over her breast.
“Damn,” said Daggeira through clenched teeth. “Now they’re going to be calling me One Tit.”
“Attendant and I got separated from you thr
ee when the sentries found us,” said Arrow, scanning all around for the enemy. “Spear was still alive last I saw him. They managed to separate us. We need to get him next. We’ll just follow the trail of dead infidels. That’ll lead us right to him.
“He’s carrying more breathers. We find him, we find cover, and we wait it out until the invasion drops hell on these godsless vermin. That’s our mission now, Conqueror see us.”
Sabira packed more field bandages into Daggeira’s wounds. Microbial agents in the material neutralized and absorbed out the acid, while other microbes disinfected the area and clotted severed veins and arteries.
“Sabira, engage your yarist gem. Daggs’s too,” commanded Arrow. “We don’t stop until we find Spear.”
She followed his command, engaging Daggeira’s gem first, then her own. Daggeira’s back spasmed and arched up as she sucked in air with a quick, gargling wheeze.
Sabira’s armor triggered patches in her jumpsuit. The gem shards hidden within the suit’s fabric pressed tight over her chest. Waves of tingling heat rushed through her body. Her mind flared. The agony in her leg receded to a fading echo. She felt her body grow stronger, denser. Reaching down, she grasped a revitalized but still weakened Daggeira under her armpit and lifted her to her feet.
“Let’s move, skins,” urged Arrow. “Gods see us.”
Gods see us, thought Sabira, riding the furious bloodlust building within, let’s kill all the vermin we find on the way.
Arrow took point, guiding them up the narrow road. They stayed tight to the walls, taking cover under awnings and balconies. Sabira and Daggeira followed close behind, each with an arm supporting the other. Sabira scanned the dark skies while Daggeira watched their rear. The road led to the top of the slope and flattened out after a dozen meters. Peering through side roads and between structures, Sabira could see how the city dropped away along the hill’s far southern side.
Before the Shattered Gates of Heaven Part 2: Infiltration Crew (Shattered Gates Volume 1 Part 2) Page 8