Song of the Badlands

by Joshua Guess

  Jeremy moved closer to the squads in front, Tala following him. The other side of the warehouse was inky black even using the different viewing modes of their cameras.

  “There’s something not right about that,” Jeremy said. “We should be able to see—”

  Tala lurched into him, knocking Jeremy to the side as she shouted, “Ambush!”

  What Beck had taken as dimness from the lack of light had begun to drop away in sheets. This was what Tala had seen before the rest of them. Her mind needed half a second to process the strangeness of the sight before understanding flashed through her. It was fabric. A deeply black fabric, the sort that absorbed light.

  When the vast sheet fell to the floor, half a dozen heavily armed Deathwatch traitors stood revealed. Each held a pair of heavy guns, already firing before the fabric had a chance to settle.

  Beck saw two Sentinels in front of her go down as the armor-piercing bullets connected with their helmets. Their dots blinked out on her HUD, a fact she noticed as she dove hard to her right.

  Gasping for breath on the floor from adrenaline-fueled panic, Beck had no orders to give. She froze in that moment, so taken off guard that thought would not come. Only feeling was in working order. A sense of immediate and powerful guilt pushed against everything else in her head. She led them to this. She was the one in charge. She should give a command, order them to react. Save their lives.

  But she had no idea what those commands should be. What did a leader tell a soldier to do when death was raining down on him? Run? Shoot back?

  She need not have worried. The other squads might have been surprised, but they were not amateurs. Nor were they unprepared.

  Of the eighteen people comprising those two squads, four were issued their own firearms. All of them reacted as the calm professionals they were. She didn’t need to see their targeting systems to know they didn’t bother with them. As Wojcik leaped in front of her, interposing his body as a shield, she saw the liquid movements of an expert marksman as the nearest of her shooters returned fire. His shots took the closest traitor right in the face.

  The traitor kept firing.

  The suits were empty. In sentry mode. The realization broke something loose inside Beck, and the next step seemed obvious. With a glance, she targeted the enemy suits on her screen. Unlike Keene, these now showed up just fine once activated. Once selected, she spoke a command over an ad hoc channel directed only at them.

  They froze, their fire immediately stopping.

  “Smart,” Jeremy said.

  The others, however, had turned toward Wojcik. The big man still knelt with one knee on the ground in front of Beck’s face. His armor was rock still. It was only when Jen and the rest of the team spun that Beck noticed the flashing red light on the small corner of her display dedicated to them.

  “Medic!” Beck shouted over the general channel. “We’ve got dead and wounded in here.”

  His vital signs weren’t good, but the telemetry from his suit didn’t indicate imminent death. Four rounds pierced his armor, one in the left side of his torso and the other three along his raised left arm. That defensive gesture probably saved his life; the arm was protecting his head.

  “Gonna be fine, boss,” Wojcik said in a pained, wet voice. “Suit’s keeping me from bleeding out.”

  Beck pulled herself to her feet. “Data says you probably have shrapnel in your lung. We need to get—”

  Wojcik grasped her forearm. “You need to catch that fucker. Medic’s on the way. You can’t do anything for me right now. Go get Keene.”

  Beck stared at him for a few moments before patting his metal hand with her free one. “Roger that. Tala, Lucia, stay with him. Jeremy and Jen, you’re with me. Everyone is with me.”

  She strode forward, furious with herself for hesitating and enraged that more had to die because of Keene. The remaining members of the other squads formed up around her. One of them reached the doors at the far end of the warehouse past the now-still sentries and gave it a furious kick.

  The gaping hole led down. A sudden draft of air blew up hard enough to be heard through the metal of her helmet. Beck stepped just behind the lead Guard and looked down the steps. “Give me a light. I’ve had enough surprises for one day.

  The Guard knelt and pulled a set of portable lamps from a compartment. These too were small, but when activated they flared bright as the noonday sun. He tossed them down the steps.

  He tilted his head curiously as the chamber at the bottom was revealed in stark white light. “What in the world? Is…is this a Loop station?”

  As the pair of lamps rolled to a stop, a high-pitched whine could be heard. Then everything was noise and dust, a sound loud enough to cause her suit to mute her speaker filling the world.

  Beck reeled inside her suit as the shock wave tried to upend it. “I told you assholes not to blow the walls until I gave the order!”

  “We didn’t,” came the reply. “That was from inside.”

  Beck let out a frustrated sigh. “I guess it was a Loop station. Whatever Keene shipped out of this place, he must have gone with it.”

  She wanted to be more angry, but Beck couldn’t help feeling relief that none of the team had been down in that hole when the trap went off.

  “Send in people to check it out,” she ordered. “Be careful, obviously. See if we can find anything that will tell us where this tunnel goes.”

  She had her doubts, but it was worth a shot. Beck turned to leave, drawing her team along in her wake.

  There was still so much more to do.

  33

  Beck was not only allowed to be in the room when the congress of Wardens chose a new High Commander, it was actually required. The transition took place well after the initial day during which Beck had unassailable control over all the systems under command of that office, which was to say all the systems there were. A quirk in the design meant that so long as no new High Commander was chosen, she retained that power. Her voice command was required to pass it on.

  She did so gladly.

  “High Commander Stein,” Beck said, “it’s all yours.”

  Stein looked less than pleased but said nothing about it. The woman was prickly at best, and that was when she just had a Rez to look after. As Bowers’s second-in-command of the Movement, she was the clear choice to follow after him.

  The older woman stood and dismissed the room. The Wardens filed out quickly—they’d listened to enough argument from Stein over the previous few hours to want some space. Beck stayed. She could read her superior well enough to know a private chat was coming.

  When they were alone, Stein half-sat on the edge of the conference table circling the round room. “Well, this is a fine heap of shit Bowers dropped in my lap, huh? Our laps, I guess.”

  Beck frowned. “Ma’am? I’m sorry, but you’re the one in charge.”

  Stein’s smile was not pleasant. “Oh, am I? Because when the command handoff happened, my tablet sent me a little message. Apparently that old bastard made some last minute changes. Publicly, I have sole control of all High Command functions. You still do, too.”

  Beck gaped. “You’re kidding. You have to be kidding.”

  “I’m not,” Stein assured her. “Bowers stacked the deck, kid. He wanted me in charge if he died and made sure it would happen. He wanted someone else ready to step in like you did when you went after Keene, so you get to be the invisible half of this duo. We’re in for rough times, and since the old man wanted you in Special Projects, looks like you’ll be the one out there in the streets trying to manage the chaos.”

  The part about coming trouble was only partly true—some of it had already arrived. Bowers had arranged to have the video of his own murder publicly released. A contingency that made sure Keene would be implicated in the death of the High Commander at the very least. Just as Bowers said, the people needed context for the video. A reason citizens could understand for the betrayal.

  The stolen and selectively edited
data from the Cabal server was perfect for the job. The picture that information painted exonerated Beck, Eshton, and every other Watchman exiled to the badlands. Efforts were underway to retrieve them. Most of them.

  The evidence damned Keene and his people at the same time. Many of the Cabal were identified in those documents and messages, and some of those who weren’t actually came forward seeking deals. Once Keene fled, his protection no longer a shield for those lesser conspirators, they turned on each other with stunning alacrity.

  No one outside the Movement knew the Cabal was behind the creation and use of Fade B as a weapon against citizens. Even Beck understood that knowledge was too powerfully disruptive. It could instigate full-scale revolution. That was not something the Protectorate—the people who composed it—could survive in its current state.

  But maybe down the road that could change. Beck thought it likely. She had seen how adaptable the people of Canaan were. The Protectorate was stagnant by design and through manipulation, and the Movement got its name because the people within it believed it was past time for that stagnation to end. Humanity had to take new steps forward.

  All humanity. Not just the ones living in a Rez.

  The public learning that Keene spearheaded a program meant to use Fade B against Remnants was bad enough. Riots had broken out. Citizens were beside themselves with rage that the most powerful man in their world would so casually break the Tenets. Beck understood their fury.

  More than any government or society in the history of the world, hers existed on trust. The mutual agreements forged in those early days after the Collapse were a compact that every citizen regardless of rank or class would unify under the Tenets. The Protectorate itself was an oath of loyalty to preserve humanity as a whole at all costs. Many of those same citizens had lost much to that promise, as Beck and Eshton had. Many of those instigating riots were just like her. People who had lost family to Fade B.

  She knew the darker side of the truth, and it made her want to burn every member of the Cabal alive. That unchecked fury was precisely why the people could not learn it. Change was crucial. It had to come.

  But change which came too quickly was indistinguishable from an explosion.

  “Ma’am,” Lin said as Beck sauntered into Science division later that day.

  She struggled not to roll her eyes. “You outrank me, Lin. You don’t have to call me that.”

  The older man—though only in a technical sense as he looked maybe twenty-five—shook his head. “Technically true, but the High Commander has assigned me to you. I’m aware of your…special circumstances. I’m your guy in Science. You’ll have your own team here. Apparently that comes with some nice perks. I’m getting higher clearance and a whole new facility just for our use. It’s gonna be…”

  He trailed off under Beck’s flat stare. It was a skill learned from the many grumpy men who had trained her. “You called me here for a reason, Lin. Maybe get to it?”

  “Oh! Right,” he said, as if the urgent and annoyingly cryptic message he left was the last thing on his mind. “We know where Keene ended up. And what was in that warehouse.”

  Beck felt a headache form in the middle of her forehead. That happened every time she heard Keene’s name. The medic she went to said it was a blood pressure thing. “Please tell me the Loop crashed somewhere.”

  “Afraid not,” Lin said. “He’s taken over the Block.”

  Beck flinched as if he’d swiped a hand at her face. “Come again? He took over a prison? He was the fucking Protector. Half the people in there must want to cut his head off.”

  Lin turned fully around in his chair to face her, expression more present and serious than she’d seen before. “We don’t think so. Once we knew he got away, we cleared the line and followed it with drones. It ends at Block. Which is now sealed off with a lot of armored blast doors that aren’t original construction. The place is a giant cube of stone with a wall around it, designed to be a fortress in the first place. Except now it actually is one.”

  Beck closed her eyes in a failed attempt to lessen her building headache. “Wonderful. Any other good news?”

  Lin grimaced. “Once we knew where he was and that he transported material of some kind, my team started digging hard. Looks like he was secretly moving traitor Watchmen there. Mostly from Security. Best theory is that it’s his own little kingdom now. Prisoners he could convince to join up probably got trained by his pet Watchmen. Don’t really want to think of what happened to the rest.”

  Beck considered what she knew about Keene and had a moment of insight. “I bet he turned most of them, actually. Keene is a politician. He knows how to work a crowd. I bet when you started looking into it, you discovered a lot of high quality foodstuffs went missing. Right?”

  Lin blinked in surprise. “How on earth could you possibly know that?”

  “Food is the easiest wedge,” Beck said. “You take a man who hasn’t had a good meal in years and promise him something better, then actually deliver on it? You’ve got a hook. I bet Keene has been building this up for months.”

  “No,” Lin said. “Years. We’ve gone back and looked at everything. And I mean everything. Food, supplies of all kinds, weapons. Even Deathwatch armor. Guess how many sets of decommissioned armor are in storage?”

  Beck raised her hands. “I don’t know, man. Fifty?”

  “None,” Lin said. “Though there used to be almost two hundred. Apparently over the last two-and-a-half years, they’ve all been mysteriously requisitioned by Security division. Not to mention about half as many new suits and whatever sets of armor were taken by the traitors who left when Keene did. Then there are the guns.”

  Beck stepped over to an empty chair in the cramped office and sat down. “So you’re telling me Keene has a private army holed up with enough food to keep them in good shape, inside a building meant to withstand anything we can throw at it.”

  Lin nodded. “Yep, that’s pretty close. I let Stein know already, but she didn’t give me any direction on what to do next.”

  Beck let out a slow, calming breath. “She’s the boss. I think this is above our pay grade. For now we have a job to do right here. If you’re my Science team, then I guess we’re a task force.”

  Lin’s eyebrows rose. “What’s the mission?”

  Beck tried to keep her voice light. “Keep the Protectorate from spinning apart without killing anyone if we can avoid it. Should be easy, right?”

  The hospital in Manhattan didn’t have a name. It was just the hospital. That was a thing Beck understood to be especially odd to Parker, who mentioned that every business and organization in the old world had some kind of personalized moniker. Maybe they would move that way as a people again once attitudes and outlooks began to shift. Culture was a strange thing. You could never know what direction it would go until it was far too late to change course. The Collapse was proof enough of that.

  “You didn’t have to come visit me,” Wojcik said. “I’m not one of those people who gets real hurt without constant attention.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Beck said, slapping him gently on the side of the head. “You got shot for me. Let me at least stop by and see how you’re doing.”

  Wojcik raised his wounded arm to show her the bandages wrapped around his chest. That entire side of his trunk was swathed in them, as was the arm. “Peachy, boss. I’ll be up and kicking ass in no time.”

  “No, he won’t,” Lucia said from behind Beck. She had enough self-control not to jump.

  The other woman was wearing civilian clothes and was made up. She looked like she was about to go to a fancy party, but instead walked in the room and curled up on one of the visitor’s chairs. “They’re having to regrow part of his lung. His ribs are held together with carbon fiber. He almost died.”

  “Did die for about thirty seconds,” Wojcik said proudly. “I got better.”

  Beck couldn’t help laughing. “More like whatever lives on the other side figured the longer it took
you to end up in his afterlife, the better.” She glanced from Wojcik to Lucia, who was trying hard to not be caught staring at the big man.

  “So how long has this been going on?” Beck asked casually. “You two, I mean?”

  The suspicion was instantly confirmed as the pair shared a quick and guilty look. Wojcik grimaced. “Uh, it’s not against regulations or anything.”

  Beck’s smile matched the warmth she felt radiating through her chest. “Hey. I’m happy for you. The world is a better place when there’s some love in it. Good for you.”

  Everyone needed something to hold onto, especially in the dark times ahead. She only hoped it would be enough.

  Epilogue

  Eshton ran with the rest of the crowd toward the path leading up the cliff. The alarms went off with urgent force. Whoever rang the bell was slapping the absolute shit out of the thing. The people waiting at the bottom of the path were a mixture of terrified and excited, and most of the second group were armed. Getting used to people having guns out here took time. It still caught him by surprise from time to time.

  He stopped short when he saw the source of everyone’s concern. Marching down the path in single file, loaded with gear of all types and even hauling rolling pallets of boxes, were at least a dozen Deathwatch agents.

  “Hey, everyone should calm down,” Eshton said loudly to the stunned crowd. And they were still a crowd, not yet a mob. That would end…unfortunately, should it came to pass. “No one do anything that will get everyone here killed, please.”

  To his surprise, they seemed to listen. It didn’t hurt that the armored forms moving toward them showed no signs of aggression. They didn’t cluster when they reached the bottom. Instead the Watchmen spread out and began setting down their burdens. Eshton knew something truly bizarre was happening when the smallest of them stepped into the small clearing between Remnant and Deathwatch and froze in place.