by M. D. Cooper
Fugia made an irritated sound.
Andy switched to his private channel with Lyssa.
Lyssa’s voice faltered.
Fugia’s map to the necessary data stores flashed across his Link and Andy added them to his display. There were ten locations. Then he shared the info with Harl and they quickly split the targets between them.
Stepping carefully among the bodies, Andy found the first two rack locations and set his rifle down to study the hardware. Each node was a cube made of dull metal, roughly half a meter across, with a simple diagnostic display on its face showing scrolling numeric codes that were meaningless to Andy. Mounting points secured each cube in the racks.
After checking the locking mechanism on the first cube, Andy grabbed the designated removal points and pulled on the node until it slid free from whatever held it to the rack. The cube was heavier than he expected, and it took some strain to navigate the path back to the transport cart even in Larissa’s low gravity.
By the third cube, he was sweating inside his suit and tired of trying to navigate the stacked bodies and splayed legs of the upright corpses. He shoved them out of the way with his boot to create a path between the racks.
On his search for the fourth data cube on his list, Andy stepped over a corpse whose arm fell free as he moved it, dropping a personal data terminal on the floor when its wrist broke free. Andy squatted to pick up the black rectangle and pulled the dried hand away from the device. During their various walks through the staff living areas, he didn’t recall having seen any personal devices like this one, which again made him wonder at the plan of whatever had tried to hide all these bodies.
Andy wished there was a way to get their names at least, but that would have required a hard connection with each of their dead Links, something he and his team didn’t have time for. From the look of the head wounds, it was entirely possible their Link hardware had been removed.
As he lugged the fifth cube to the mule, Andy checked in with Lyssa.
Andy dropped the last cube on the transport cart. He straightened, alert.
Andy relaxed slightly.
Harl carried his last cube around Andy and placed it on the stack. He tapped the mule’s control panel and nodded at what he read.
On the shared channel, Andy said,
Lyssa said with irritation.
Fugia said.
Raising his rifle, Andy immediately scanned the upper corners of the space where he had expected a turret to appear at any time.
The sound of metal scraping on metal filled Andy’s helmet. The long scrape was followed by a quick staccato of hammers hitting pipes.
Between them and the lift, a spider-shaped mech climbed the engineering works to the right side of the access bridge and hung on the wall. It had a low-profile body made of dull metal, rotating from a central point where the legs joined. There were more legs than Andy could count as it moved. Some legs grabbed at the pipeworks, while others were raised to feel at the area around the mech. The tip of each leg looked easily narrow enough to have been the weapon that murdered each of the corpses in the data storage chamber.
For its bulk, the mech appeared to move lightly among the pipes, adjusting its position with rapid shifts then hanging motionless.
As Andy watched, the mech extended one of its legs toward a pipe that was at least a meter in diameter and scraped its toe along the metal, creating another long screech like they had heard before.
Andy raised his weapon, aimed at the exposed central leg-joint below the mech’s body, and set the rifle on its highest velocity.
The Andersonian sent two grenades at the mech’s body, each landing expertly in the top of its central mass.
The mech rocked under the attack, ragged craters appearing in its armor. The body spun, pointing a blunt edge toward Andy and Harl. It pressed against the wall, then leapt across the room. It landed heavily at the center of the bridge, sending a cloud of the dried blood-dust in the air, then shot backward to hang above the lift doors. The mech scrabbled across the metal wall and slipped back into the pipework running along the walls beside the lift.
Andy said dryly.
Harl raised his rifle abruptly and fired at movement on the wall to their left. A black shape behind a column of pipes shifted away, dropping down below the bridge and their line of sight. The sound of hammers on pipes rose then faded, leaving echoes in the long room.
Harl lobbed two grenades into the space past Andy’s left shoulder. The grenades exploded, followed by the hissing rush of angry steam. A cloud of water vapor filled the air around the data center. Harl pointed the transport’s nose at the lift and sent it forward. He followed, firing short bursts into the steam billowing from below the bridge.
Andy moved quickly after him, checking the steam—which rose in thick white clouds on the other side of the bridge. If anything was moving behind the screen, he wasn’t going to see it until it was already dropping on top of them. He timed his fire to interleave with Harl’s.
They were halfway across the bridge and Andy was starting to think the mech might have given up when the clouds of steam near the ceiling directly above the bridge parted to show the thing hanging almost directly above them.
Andy immediately aimed for one of the masses on the mech’s body that looked like sensors.
Harl grabbed the mule’s control yoke. The transport jerked forward, lurching toward the side of the bridge. Harl struggled to right it and the mule almost tipped over. Andy sprinted after him as the mech shifted back toward the data storage center, then dropped to the bridge.
Andy pulled the launcher to his shoulder, barely seeing the mech adjusting its legs on the flat bridge, body listing from side to side. He lobbed two grenades into its center of mass. The mech seemed to recognize the incoming rounds and froze, then scuttled backward until its rear legs were inside the open door to the data center. The grenades hit the exposed bridge and exploded, sending bits of metal flying back toward Andy.
As the steam cleared, Andy could see that the bridge now hung in two pieces with the mech clinging to the wall above the data center’s door. Corpses had been flung back inside the room and one abused body in a faded red lab suit, hung from one of the mech’s rear legs.
The drone hunkered down on its legs and leaped across the open space to land on the broken edge of the bridge. Its legs scraped to find purchase, grabbing at the bent remnants of the railing, then pulled itself up over the edge. The mech shot forward, legs hammering the metal deck.
The lift doors were open and Harl had the transport half-inside. Andy lobbed three more grenades at the mech and the section of bridge in front of him. The explosions rocked the remaining stretch of the bridge, knocking the mech backward again. More steam billowed up from punctured pipes.
Keeping the weapon trained on the mech, Andy moved quickly backward until he felt the transport at his hip. He glanced at Harl and moved to the other side, then slapped the lift’s control panel.
The doors slid closed, hiding the struggling mech from sight.
Before Andy could move away from the control panel, a leg slammed through the wall above his head like a black sword. The lift jerked beneath them, seized in place by the mech as it drove a second limb through the wall on the other side of the door.
CHAPTER FIVE
STELLAR DATE: 11.22.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Laughing Fury
REGION: En route to Cruithne, Terran Hegemony
Brit felt more comfortable with the TSF and Mars 1 Guard gone, but that only cleared space in her mind for worry about Andy and the kids.
The governmental organizations had pulled their people—including Colonel Yarnes—back to their respective ships, to return to their commands to perform damage control. The news of the clinic’s explosion had hit the newsfeeds, along with the registry data of the surrounding ships, and now there was hell to pay between Mars and Terra.
Ngoba Starl appeared to find it all endlessly amusing, telling them all that he could do whatever he damn well wanted around any blown-up asteroid in Sol.
“Nobody’s pulling me back in to look all sad in front of a general’s desk,” he said, straightening his light-blue bowtie as he leaned back in the leather chair at the head of his conference table. While Starl didn’t captain the Laughing Fury himself—that job went to a bald, muscled man named Crick—he did appear to enjoy occupying the command position in the officer’s planning room.
All that changed when news of Proteus’s demise hit the feeds, blotting out any mention of a random facility supposedly contested between Mars and Terra.
For the last four hours, a holodisplay of Proteus exploding hung over the middle of the conference table, half of Neptune forming a blue backdrop. The loop continued until the moon was a cloud of sparkling particles, then rewound, sucking the rubble back into a gray orb that boiled white-hot and exploded again. Starl found the display amusing, too.
The news was like tar in the bottom of Brit’s stomach. With Petral’s help, she sent a message through various secure relays back to Sunny Skies. Once that was done, she cleaned up in the quarters Captain Crick provided, running her black armor through a cleaning and diagnostics cycle, before rejoining everyone off the command deck. Though she knew it was a seven hour round trip to Neptune at lightspeed—and she’d have to wait even longer to hear back—she still couldn’t shake an anxious edge as the turnaround time on her message stretched longer.
She had no way of knowing if Andy had even reached Neptunian space. She could hope that once he saw the explosion, he would adjust course and change p
lans.
Other screens around the room showed talking heads from newsfeeds, personal responses from other media, and on-the-ground recordings from mining rigs around Neptune. Habitats around Uranus and Saturn would soon receive waves of refuges. Other simulations showed the ring Proteus’ rubble would briefly create around Neptune and the inner moons before pummeling every population center in the area for at least a year.
On top of the Proteus explosion were the still-unexplained launches from Larissa.
Starl seemed hit especially hard by the news about Proteus. He stared at the feeds with his mouth pressed closed, brows furrowed. He hadn’t smiled since news of the explosion had first arrived. Now, he seemed obsessed with the general database entries listing the individuals who had supposedly lived on Proteus: junk dealers, miners, scavengers, data relays, families squatting where no one would bother them. At least a million had died.
“No one’s going to give a damn about those dead poor people,” Starl moaned. “It’s like a bomb hit Cruithne and all they can talk about is what’s going to happen to Mars and Terra.”
He glanced at Brit. “Any word from Captain Sykes?”
She shook her head.
Petral heard the question as she entered the room. “I’ve got a couple NSAI monitoring ship registries coming back through the Cho. My guess is that even if they were part of everything happening at Neptune, they’d be getting the hell out of there as soon as possible. When they show back up in civilized space, I’ll get word of it.”
“Thank you,” Brit said. She averted her eyes from the holodisplay and nodded to Jirl who was entering the room. The three of them sat at the table with Starl in silence for a while, letting the various feeds wash over them. Brit couldn’t keep the crying families out of her head.
Eventually, Jirl cleared her throat to speak. She sat in her composed way, shoulders straight and hands clasped on the table’s surface. Brit had noticed how, when Jirl wasn’t caught up in violence, she had a calming effect that probably made her quite valuable to high-powered CEOs like Arla Reed.
“Colonel Yarnes told me he would help me,” she said.