Song of the Badlands

by Joshua Guess

  The extended fingers, strong enough to pry the steel plates of her suit from their locks, rushed toward her face as the snarling creature took a flying leap from half a dozen steps below her.

  Beck’s gauntleted hand ignored both, grabbing instead for the Pale’s throat. Its eyes widened in surprise. Prey didn’t react that way, after all. Normally these things subsisted on what Remnant humans they could corner out in the badlands and the scant wildlife not wary enough to keep a distance. People were especially prone to batting away reaching hands or at least grabbing a wrist.

  She didn’t try to crush its throat. Her glove could to it, but it would be slow and inefficient against the toughened tissues of its body. Instead she lifted the Pale with her left hand and punched with her right, the custom programming sending the spike forward and back five times a second.

  Calcified skin couldn’t hold up to the narrow point of the spike driven by the electromagnetic rail. She was careful not to try breaking bone, however—Pales had skeletons like iron.

  Still, her upward thrust shredded its heart and one lung by slipping under the bottom of its rib cage. Death was not instantaneous as it would be for a normal, non-mutated human. The Pale’s blood carried around six times the oxygen as her own. Consciousness did not immediately cease.

  Instead of holding the now furiously thrashing beast until its time ran out, she drew back her arm and threw it as hard as she could down the narrow, enclosed staircase. The heavy body tumbled, arms and legs flailing madly as its dwindling control tried to reassert itself.

  Another Pale managed to work its way past the tangle, its eyes more cautious than those of its fallen brother. Beck let it get fairly close before triggering one of her limited number of stun darts. The shock didn’t do much more than give the Pale, a tall woman, a few seconds’ pause, though Jen took the opportunity to lean forward and put her spear neatly through its eye socket.

  “Good aim,” Beck grunted. “How much of that was your targeting system?”

  Jen made a dismissive pshhing noise. “None of it. You’re not the only one who trains constantly.”

  Inside her helmet, Beck felt a smile split her face.

  They were driven fully onto the roof within three minutes. The press of bodies coming up the stairwell was dense, but the real problem was the cleverness of the second wave ascending it. Those Pales carried shields of a sort, pieces of old equipment torn off and hauled around for just these sorts of situations, apparently.

  Beck’s best efforts couldn’t stop them. She could have locked her suit in place, but the ease with which grasping hands could reach between the shields would have upended her in seconds.

  Instead she, Jen, and Jeremy backed up slowly, attacking when openings presented themselves, and generally trying to prevent the encroaching Pales from getting past the tight last turn onto the roof where the others worked diligently to not die.

  Lucia and Tala worked the opposite end of the rectangular roof, each taking half of the long side and striking between the bars set along the perimeter with their blades. Beck caught a glimpse of their work through one of the camera feeds cycling through the lower right hand corner of her HUD and flashed back to their first field assignment, a bloom requiring their recruit cohort to kill recently infected human beings. Before even entering the Rez proper, they’d cut down people who had been innocent citizens only an hour earlier in exactly this way. The ease with which it could be done—a narrow weapon crushing a skull with an overhead chop through the bars—was why the design was used widely across the Protectorate.

  Which didn’t make Beck feel any less nauseous upon seeing Tala mechanically raise and lower her blade as Pale heads reached the tops of ladders.

  Wojcik moved like a madman to cover the rest. The other three sides of the roof were less busy with enemies, but his ceaseless dash from hot spot to hot spot pushed his body to its limits. Beck winced as the structure shuddered beneath his massive footfalls. Not because she was worried it wouldn’t hold, of course. The thing was meant to survive anything short of artillery strikes that Beck only knew about from vids on the horrors of war. Her concern came from knowing what Wojcik was enduring as his suit moved at the edges of human speed. He was being slammed around inside it like a man trapped in a steel barrel thrown down a hill.

  The brutish man had to be hurting, but he gave no sign. Wojcik danced from one place to another, slashing down with his blade one second, punching another. He stopped for a few moments near Beck, only a few feet from the top of the landing on the opposite side of the steps, and reached through the bars to grasp the top of a ladder and shove it away. The sound of thudding bodies could be heard, but only as a background noise to Wojcik’s half-mad laughter as they fell.

  “We should use incendiaries,” Tala said, not bothering to even use the comm. Her amplified voice rang across the rooftop, a dead giveaway of a potential action had their enemy not lost all capacity for understanding language.

  “Can’t.” Wojcik panted as he ran. “Too unpredictable. You want that shit getting on your suit? Into one of your joints?”

  “Drop some over the edge, then,” Tala said, her voice beginning to heat. “They’re clustering at the bottom of the ladders. Only a couple of them can climb at once.”

  Wojcik started to argue again, never slowing his pace, but Beck cut him off. “Do it. Whoever has them, just do it. In fact…”

  She and the others were holding off the advancing wall of Pales by thrusting weapons at every thin spot in their defenses as fast as possible. It was a battle of literal inches, one requiring calm thought and consideration.

  Well, screw that. Beck surged forward, cranking the Punch to maximum and lashing out at the nearest Pale. The white form flinched, raising its shield instinctively, and Beck slammed a shoulder into it. Pales were heavy, far more than a human of comparable size, but they weren’t made of metal. Beck knocked the thing backward with the force of three people, and in the ensuing chaos she popped a canister free and gave it an underhand throw.

  She heard it tink against the stone as naked legs and feet batted it around. She wasn’t quite sure where it was when the timer ran out, but the flare of heat and light fixed that problem.

  Pales shrieked as superheated metal dust ignited in a cloud that engulfed their lower bodies. Those in the middle suffered the worst of it, and those still near the bottom of the steps were quickly overwhelmed by the weight of bodies falling on them.

  The ones in the front were driven forward, however. They flowed into Beck and her fire team as a wall of flesh and metal. Weapons thrust as the three of them backed up as rapidly as possible, not able to hold the landing. Beck clenched her teeth when the edge of the narrow space containing the last Pales in front of her gave way to the open rooftop itself. Holding them on the landing was the only chance they had to keep the Pales bottled up.

  She threw herself forward. One tiny advantage was the shields themselves. The enemy had to maneuver them, and they had to be held in place. A Pale holding a shield was unable to attack effectively. Beck mercilessly used this to her advantage, stomping feet and shins, then snatching the shield away to gain access to the softer enemy behind.

  Jen moved close behind her, slipping between bodies with a ballerina’s grace. Her spear found its mark with every thrust.

  When a Pale dodged a strike and yanked Jen’s spear forward, the other woman was caught off guard. She hadn’t set her feet properly—she was dodging another Pale even as she defended Beck—and that choice cost her. Jen was yanked toward the dwindling swarm, still five or six strong. Enough to break her helmet or at least drag her away.

  “No fucking way!” Beck screamed, all semblance of control evaporating in a burst of white-hot rage. She was not consciously aware of raising the broken piece of machine casing in her hands, nor did she plan to leap forward and drive its metal edge into the neck of the Pale hauling on Jen’s spear. The shield buried itself deep within its windpipe and severed arteries but of course cou
ldn’t behead the thing.

  It was an attack both precise and savage, shocking enough to give the other Pales pause.

  Beck offered no quarter. She renewed her attack, shouting over her external speakers as all self-control abandoned her.

  And the Pales did something she had yet to personally witness.

  They ran.

  6

  Parker loved the new lab and the base it was housed in, and he set about asking Eshton endless questions about it as the younger man helped him settle in. When he was informed the place hadn’t existed six months earlier, Parker experienced something rare.

  He was dumbfounded.

  “This place is six stories high and two hundred feet below ground,” Parker said, exasperated. “How in the world could you have built it so quickly?”

  Eshton favored him with an amused look. “We didn’t. Drones did. Mining drones, construction drones, drones with universal fabrication printers build into them. We programmed in what we needed, they excavated the space and reinforced it.”

  Parker walked over to a lab table with a sink built in and turned on the tap. Clean, clear water flowed out. “You’re telling me a machine did the plumbing here?”

  “Made the pipes, sure,” Eshton said. “Printers can make just about anything out of polymer. Construction drones made all the furniture and equipment after the main bay was hollowed out. People did some of the finishing touches and obviously we’re moving in the more complicated equipment, but other than basic assembly of components, this whole place was crafted by machines.”

  “That’s nuts,” Parker said. “Do you not see how nuts this is? How does your economy even work if machines can manufacture everything?”

  Eshton frowned. “They don’t, though. They produce basics.”

  Parker pinched the bridge of his nose. “But what do people do to make a living? Or even just fill the time?”

  “Lots of things,” Eshton said, as if talking to a slow child. “You might have noticed we rely on a lot of technology. A bunch of it requires human assembly. In older Rezzes where the soil is better, some people farm. I kind of understand what you’re asking, I think. I studied the old world enough to know how it used to work, but people just don’t live that way now. Basic needs are provided for. Work isn’t for survival, most of the time.”

  Parker knew this, of course. Half a year of talking to his guards, especially Eshton and recently Remy, gave him a comprehensive picture of the Protectorate. But dry details left it just that—a picture. A flat image with no pop. No life. Seeing the new base where his lab and the Movement would be housed together ignited that curiosity again. Made him question the fundamentals he knew about his adopted society.

  “You people are so fucking weird,” Parker said. “Half the time you’re brutal absolutists willing to do anything or kill anyone to stick with your Tenets. The other half, you’re providing all the things people need to live. It’s bananas.”

  Eshton raised an eyebrow. “I’ve hung out with you a lot, but I don’t know that phrase. What does an extinct fruit have to do with it?”

  Parker waved this away. “Never mind. Not important. I just can’t reconcile it all. How can you oppress on one hand and provide on the other? Every dictatorship in history has failed miserably at doing both, no matter where it fell on the political spectrum.”

  Eshton shrugged. “I think you’re looking at it backward. Trying to judge everything you know about us against how things used to be for you. What’s the phrase you use? First principles?”

  Parker nodded. “Yeah. What about it?”

  “Pull up a copy of the Tenets,” Eshton said. “Pretend you’re back at the end of the Collapse, one of a few hundred thousand people left alive on the continent. Imagine you’ve just drafted these rules and have to build a society from scratch, but leave behind all the shit that people used to argue about. You have to do things that are going to be unpopular, because they violate that first central rule, which is to survive and ensure the survival of the tribe.”

  Parker ran a hand through his hair irritably. “I know that! It’s just…ugh, even my metaphors are lost on you, because you don’t have cultures, plural. Just the one. I don’t even know how to phrase it.”

  Eshton frowned. “Wow. You can be a real dick sometimes, you know that? Do you listen to yourself and hear how condescending you are? You were raised in a world where every rule and law came over the course of decades or centuries. It may have started with a plan, but time turned it into chaos. It was organized chaos for you because you grew up with it. The Protectorate isn’t there yet. We’re a planned society. An intentional one. You judge us, and yeah, a lot of things we do are really fucked up, but don’t forget for a second we chose this for ourselves. Every citizen understands that.”

  Across the lab, where she had been working to unpack crates and forgotten by the men, Remy spoke up. “If you two are done flirting, I could use some help. All that arguing over wondering what people do for work, and both of you forgot there’s plenty right here.”

  Later that evening, Parker was joined at dinner by the man himself.

  “Commander Bowers,” he said as the stout old warrior dropped unceremoniously onto the mess hall bench. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  Bowers nodded as he cut into his steak. “Don’t forget, you live in Movement headquarters now. You’ll be seeing a lot more of me. Of all of us.”

  Parker chewed the small puck of chicken protein he’d sliced off the small sausage of the stuff. With his mouth not quite empty, he voiced a thought that had been coming back to him since word of the move came in. “I hope you didn’t go to all this trouble for me. For my work, I mean.”

  “Oh?” Bowers said. “Do you really hope that? Isn’t your work one of the most vital endeavors in the world? I would think you’d like any consideration you can get to make finding a cure easier.”

  “Of course,” Parker stammered. “What I mean is I didn’t want to put you to any trouble, especially since what I know of the Cabal says they’d probably have killed me if they didn’t take me prisoner.”

  Bowers fanned his hand dismissively. “It’s no trouble, Novak. There aren’t many lengths I wouldn’t go to in order for you to do your work. Though this particular move was planned long before we found you. We always expected to need a new headquarters once the existence of a force within the Deathwatch aware of the…Cabal…became obvious.” His mouth twisted around the name Beck had given their enemy. Bowers’ dislike for the term was well-known, but once the young woman used it in an encrypted brief passed to all members of the Movement, the damage was done. “Though I do find it odd you don’t think of yourself as our prisoner.”

  Parker laughed bitterly. “Protective custody is more like it. Do you have that here?”

  Bowers nodded. “Most of my people wouldn’t understand the term the way you mean it, but Security agents have to take the people they protect into chapterhouses or other safe houses from time to time. Human nature doesn’t change, and every so often someone does plan a murder or two.”

  “Right, right,” Parker said, aware of how different his mannerisms and style of speech were from this man. “Well, it feels like that for me. I know I can’t just walk into a Rez and hope for anything other than ending up in the hands of your people regardless of what I do. I miss the outdoors, but considering what the world looks like now, you can’t do anything for that short of time travel. I’m happy to stay here and do my thing.”

  Bowers continued eating as Parker spoke, and he took down the plate of food with impressive speed and efficiency. He wiped his mouth with one deft motion and pushed the plate away. “Good, because when things get bad, this place will keep you safe. We’ve put security measures in place that make the ones at your previous lab look like practical jokes. If they can get you here, nowhere on the planet is secure.”

  “Do you really think it’s that bad?” Parker asked.

  Bowers pursed his lips as if about to
say something, paused to breathe deeply through his nose, then spoke in his usual gruff but placid tone. “My stars, son, I thought you were intelligent. We smacked a group of power-obsessed genocidal maniacs on the nose with a spiked fist and threatened their hold on the citizens I’m sworn to protect at all costs. Knowing me as they do, is there any question they’ll expend whatever resources needed to stop the Movement? Moving headquarters was not an act that came from an abundance of caution. It was necessary. They’re as clever as we are, so I have no doubt they’ll find the old base as well as your lab. The defenses here are an order of magnitude more powerful than the ones you had, and that isn’t overkill. It’s just what we could manage in the time we had.”

  “Oh,” Parker said, suddenly not very hungry. “That’s…worrying.”

  A hand slapped him on the shoulder as Eshton took a seat. “Worrying? Hell, it makes my balls shrivel up. It’s way past worrying. Nothing we can do about it we haven’t already done, though, so what’s the point in dwelling on it?”

  “Easy for you to say,” Parker griped. “You won’t be here. You’re free of me now.” He tried to keep any trace of bitterness out of his voice, but it wasn’t easy. Eshton had become a friend, if not one as close as some he’d made in his life. Far more than a guard or work acquaintance, though, and he would miss the younger man.

  “I’ll be in and out,” Eshton said. “I don’t have a command to go back to, so I’ll be free to travel for the Movement without drawing as much attention.”

  “He’s getting a promotion out of it, even,” Bowers said, which caused Eshton to look up in surprise.

  “I am?”

  Bowers grinned like a shark. “Oh, yes. You are being made my personal envoy. I keep two or three of them at any given time. You’ll take meetings I can’t attend personally, keep careful notes, carry vital messages, that sort of thing.”