Extensis Vitae: Empire of Dust

by Gregory Mattix

A brief commotion sounded above Reznik, followed by a shout of surprise. A guard flew over the railing and slammed hard onto his back across a jagged boulder with a sickening crack. The skin lay still for a moment before flailing his limbs and rolling awkwardly to the sandy ground. He shook his head like a wet dog, momentarily trying to get his bearings, and clumsily attempted to regain his feet.

  Reznik fired a short burst from the pulse rifle into the man’s face, and he lay still. A moment later, a rope dropped silently beside Reznik. Rin gave him a thumbs-up before disappearing back inside the guard tower. Reznik dubiously surveyed the guard’s torn jumpsuit as a result of his fall. “Smith,” the name tag read.

  “Guess this will have to do.” He quickly relieved Smith of his uniform and pulled it on over his own clothes. He considered whether or not to wear his tactical vest on top of the guard uniform since wearing it beneath would look odd. Deciding to save time, he pulled the uniform over it. The guard was big enough that it fit. I’ll look out of place either way. Just need to get inside the main building.

  “What’s taking so long?” Rin asked over a private Datalink channel. “Towers are secure, but we have to move quickly before this place goes into lockdown.”

  “I don’t see a badge or anything on this one to access the doors.” Reznik rifled through the pockets but found nothing.

  “Try the chip in the right hand. Heads up.”

  Reznik looked up just in time to see Rin drop her katana over the side. He caught it by the hilt and studied the corpse. Realizing there wasn’t time to dig around for the chip, he hacked off the dead guard’s right hand.

  “That won’t raise any suspicions,” Rin said wryly.

  He glanced up to see her roll her eyes. He chuckled to himself. “I don’t have time to screw around. Here.” He tossed the katana up, followed by the severed hand. He then quickly climbed the rope and joined her in the guard tower.

  The yard inside the wall was silent. The spotlights panned around randomly, apparently automated. Yamashita and the rest of Rin’s men occupied the other two towers.

  “How we looking, Ichiro?”

  [I crashed the DefenseNet—Shiru vessels are inbound to the primary location. I blocked several data packets sent from the detention center’s internal alarm that activated when you disabled the perimeter sensors. Reinforcements won’t be alerted; however, internal security forces will be on heightened alert. I also put the external video feed on a loop, so that should buy you a little bit of time. I will continue monitoring network traffic to and from the facility.]

  “Outstanding. Everyone ready?” he asked Rin.

  She nodded and polled her men on the Datalink. When everyone responded, she turned back to Reznik. “Let’s do it.”

  ***

  Mason peered over the crown of the roof at the main gates of the TI complex. Darkness had fallen hours before, and the traffic was fairly light at the gate, not surprising considering the lousy weather. Cold rain came down in sheets, often blowing sideways in the wind. Roving guards patrolled the grounds inside the compound, and a couple CorpSec squads milled around the main gate. Every vehicle going in or out was thoroughly searched by pole-mounted scanners and by physical inspections. Foot traffic entering the property, light as it was from the weather, passed through an advanced scanner monitored by heavily armed skins.

  A huge railgun battery was mounted atop a tower near the center of the campus, from where it could fire on any line-of-sight targets selected within the compound while a ring of batteries covered the perimeter to defend against outside attacks. Mason remembered those details from his CorpSec days. A bolt of lightning crackled and lit up the night sky, allowing Mason to just barely make out the small antennas rotating atop the nearest railgun battery. The railguns were controlled through the DefenseNet. Mason’s main concern was making sure the central railgun battery stayed offline, or the attackers would be shredded.

  A frontal assault wouldn’t have been Mason’s preferred choice for the mission, but they had to draw attention away from the operation at the detention center, which according to his HUD, would be happening within fifteen minutes. Almost time to rock n’ roll. They better get Marcus and his girlfriend out of there safely. He tried not to worry about events beyond his control—his job was to ensure the extraction team had the maximum chance of success while taking care of his own people, as he was reminded by Keeva crawling up into a prone position next to him on the roof.

  “How we looking?” she whispered. She wore a hoodie pulled up over her head. Her violet eyes glittered from the bright neon lights of the clubs and cafes below. She didn’t need to whisper due to their distance from the gate and the noise from the nightclub below, but the team’s nerves were on edge for the pending attack.

  The roof they lay on rumbled and shook from the deep bass of the music pumping through the nightclub below. A mere two blocks from the gate of the TI compound, the bars did brisk business with employees that didn’t care to brave the less savory parts of the District further away.

  “Heavy security at the gate, as expected,” he replied. “This is gonna be a quick suicide mission if that DefenseNet isn’t taken down and Shiru’s troops and your father’s reinforcements can’t join us.”

  “They’ll be here—have faith, my man.”

  Mason had been relying on himself for so long, he had almost forgotten what it was like to trust others to watch his back. “Everything in place?”

  Keeva bobbed her head. “Couldn’t have picked shittier weather for this, but I suppose it helps us. Junior’s got the van rigged to go. Ciera and Mack are in their sniper positions. Turner is waiting in the alley below.”

  “Just waiting on that defense grid to go down, then. Sure you don’t want to hang back with Ciera and provide cover fire?” It had been weighing on Mason’s mind how to break the news to Royce if anything happened to his daughter.

  Keeva’s eyebrows shot up. “What? No! That’s not what we had planned. We go through the breach as a team.”

  “I’d be more comfortable with you watching my back from up here.” He saw from the resolute look on her face that she wouldn’t reconsider. “All right, fine. No hero bullshit, all right? We wait for the airstrikes to hit the military positions, and then we go in.”

  “Yeah, I got it. It’s almost showtime.”

  Minutes ticked by, painfully slow. At five minutes before the hour, the night shift showed up, so the gate was doubly staffed for a few minutes.

  Time to hit them here. Less backup we have to worry about. The Shiru gunships will hit the barracks buildings. That excludes roving patrols, contingents stationed in headquarters facilities, and those units mingled with civilian populations. Hopefully, there won’t be any more than a few hundred CorpSec skins, mercs, and augmented grunts for us to tangle with.

  Mason worried about the civilians. Avoiding civilian casualties was going to be nearly impossible—the goal was to try to minimize them. The stream of traffic at the gate had seemed to die down. People who usually left were likely off campus to enjoy the night life, and it was too early for most to come back.

  “We’re on,” Keeva announced over the open Datalink channel she maintained with her squad. “The DefenseNet is down—airstrikes incoming.”

  “Send the van, Junior.” Mason watched anxiously as, a moment later, the old panel van they had used the past few weeks rolled out of a nearby alley and advanced to the checkpoint at the gate. The bored guards motioned it forward, not noticing it lacked a driver. “Run the barricade!”

  The van suddenly accelerated, tires squealing on the slick pavement. It fishtailed briefly and sped past the first two skins. Blat blat blat. Pulse rifles fired, and grunts raced out of the booth to open fire. A heavy alloy pop-up barrier deployed out of the ground. It caught the van beneath the front tires, launching it into the air enough for the rear tires to land atop the barrier. The front end bottomed out, tearing off the bumper, and sparks flew. The rear tires gained purchase atop the barrier,
and the crippled vehicle lurched forward. When the drive wheels hit the ground, it began trundling away inside the campus. A dozen skins surrounded the van, pumping energy bolts into it, eventually disabling the engine and melting all the tires. The van sat there smoking, riddled with glowing holes for a moment… before the car bomb went off.

  CorpSec grunts flew like matchsticks. The booth buckled and collapsed, and an enormous fireball rose into the night sky.

  Mason and Keeva raced down the fire escape. They exited the alley, and Turner fell into step beside them as they approached the gate. Mason shouldered a gawking bystander aside, sending the young man sprawling into a puddle in the street. Then he hefted his gatling laser into position. He could barely hear the muffled report of Ciera’s and Mack’s sniper rifles firing overhead.

  Mason’s feet slapped the muddy ground as he sprinted toward the war zone. A fiery crater filled with blackened metal emerged ahead of them. Thick smoke billowed, and flames licked at the guard booth and admin buildings framing the gates. Mason ran past the twisted remains of the main gate, slowing as he scanned for danger.

  A shape loomed out of the flames. Mason spun and fired automatically. The skin had had his right arm and about a quarter of his torso blown off from the car bomb, but he was still on his feet. Mason put him down for good with a couple dozen holes burnt through him.

  Keeva and Turner’s assault rifles rattled off staccato bursts nearby. Mason’s HUD flickered an alert, detecting movement in the doorway of a nearby building. Mason braced himself and opened fire, concentrating a stream of energy bolts into the doorway that a group of skins were piling out of. The gatling laser hummed smoothly in his hands. He let off the trigger, and all was still in the doorway. Raindrops sizzled quietly against the hot barrel.

  Gunfire stitched the ground, throwing up sprays of water as it sliced toward him. Mason whirled, but his target was already falling as the top of his head was blown off by a sniper round. Ciera, he guessed. She’s a hell of a shot.

  The roar of aircraft engines sounded overhead. The night lit up from explosion after explosion as missiles tore into military targets across the TI campus, destroying barracks buildings, guard posts, and railgun batteries.

  “That’s our cue. Let’s move forward to rendezvous with Father and his men at the rally point,” Keeva called over the channel.

  Mason advanced with his comrades, scanning for danger. Now we’re past the point of no return.

  ***

  Reznik, Rin, and the Yakuza enforcers quickly descended from the towers and converged on the inner fence. Yamashita and one other enforcer also wore stolen prison uniforms. When they reached the fence, Yamashita withdrew a clumsy-looking, thick-bladed weapon with a foot-long blade. He twisted the weapon’s hilt, and it began to hiss faintly. Within a couple seconds, the blade’s edge began glowing a brilliant red. He cut a wide arc through the chain-link fence as easily as if carving through a stick of melted butter.

  “Nice toy. I should get me one of those,” Reznik remarked.

  Yamashita kicked in the section of fence, and the group rushed to the heavy blast door leading into the facility. Reznik took lead, Yamashita and the other enforcer holding weapons trained on the group, as if those not in guard uniforms had been taken prisoner. This is a stupid idea, but we just need to get through the door.

  He held the severed hand up to the scanner at the door. It beeped, and the heavy door swung open. Reznik strode into the prison as if he belonged there, hoping the ruse would pay off for the precious seconds needed to get inside. The rest of the group hung back.

  A few yards inside the door was a guard booth situated at a Y-intersection. Inside the booth, a group of guards clustered around a console with flashing lights. One of them barely glanced in Reznik’s direction as he approached.

  “What are you doing away from your post?”

  “Open up.” Reznik gestured to the interior door. “Caught some people trying to infiltrate the yard.” He could see the video loop Ichiro had put up on a monitor—it still showed one of the guards in the tower, as if nothing was amiss.

  The supervisor, whose name tag identified him as Jones, looked puzzled as the group marched inside and the outer door slammed shut. Jones stepped out of the booth and looked them over. “What the hell? You aren’t Smith—”

  Reznik launched himself at Jones and chopped him across the throat, sending the big man slamming hard into the glass.

  Rin darted toward the door, catching it before it could close. She held it open so Yamashita and several other enforcers could barge into the room, opening fire on the shocked guards. Escape was impossible in the cramped guard booth. The prison guards were filled with lead, tripping over each other and dropping where they stood.

  Jones ripped his sidearm free of its holster, firing the laser pistol, but Reznik was faster. He knocked the man’s pistol hand wide, drove the barrel of the tactical shotgun into the guard’s chest, and pulled the trigger point blank. Jones rocked back against the wall, chest rippling from his dermal plating around the point of impact. He fell to his knees but shook off the blast, scowling as he raised the pistol again. Reznik put the next slug through Jones’s head. His dermal plating seemed to reflect part of the blast from his eyebrows down, but the top of his head came off, splattering the window of the guard booth with brain matter and skull fragments. Jones remained on his knees, mouth opening and closing soundlessly, his eyes unfocused like an automaton.

  “Would you just die already?” Reznik pulled the trigger again, and the rest of Jones’s head disappeared. He tried to put the creepy image out of his mind. When he looked around, he saw the group was taking up defensive positions.

  “Okay, good. Let’s have four men hold position here. The rest of you, let’s go. Ichiro, where are we headed?”

  [Ayane Takahashi is in Cell Block E, #12. Marcus Mason is in Cell Block C, #25. Updating your HUD maps.]

  “Copy that. I’ll get Marcus. Rin, do you want to find your niece?”

  “Sounds good.” She took off down the hallway to the left with Yamashita and two enforcers while three others followed Reznik down the right corridor.

  Chapter 25

  Another skin reeled backward under the barrage from Mason’s gatling laser. The weapon suddenly chirped and went dry as the energy cell hit empty. He mechanically dropped the cartridge and popped a new one in.

  Red Royce pivoted and put a couple rounds into the skin from the .50 cal he was firing from the hip. The big gun thundered, and the skin’s arm was blown off and a huge hole appeared in his midsection. Just then, three more of Royce’s fighters concentrated their assault rifles, firing at the skin until the grunt fell and lay still, a mangled ruin from the heavy gunfire.

  The main rebel force of Royce and his several dozen fighters had been airlifted inside the campus to a sprawling field about a mile from the main headquarters building. Two units of Shiru ground troops had dropped in as well: the attackers formed a horseshoe shape, with Shiru troops at the ends and the rebels at the base of the U.

  Mason’s group had rendezvoused with them a short time earlier, and they had fought their way toward some outbuildings. During the battle, he had gotten separated from Keeva and the others and had ended up falling in with Royce’s unit. Resistance had proven fairly light thus far, but Mason knew it was only a matter of time before the defenders got organized.

  The field was clear ahead of them, save for one remaining heavy-assault skin taking cover behind a reinforced barrier. He fired a railgun with deadly accuracy, the heavy weapon’s penetrating power devastating to any rebel venturing across the open ground, no matter what armor they wore. Royce and his men were effectively pinned down.

  “I’m out,” Royce hollered, his smoking .50 cal running dry after blasting large divots in the barricade. The rebel commander wore his crimson suit of power armor—an obvious target, but one that served to inspire his troops. One of his men lugged an ammo box forward, but Royce waved him back.

&nb
sp; Mason waited for the tank to pop up from cover. As soon as the skin moved, he was already squeezing his trigger, sending a burst of energy bolts pounding first into the barricade and then across the top, catching the stock of the tank’s railgun. The energy cell exploded, spraying shrapnel from the weapon and rocking the tank backward. A puzzled look came over the skin’s face at the now useless weapon.

  “Come on, you big bastard,” Red Royce challenged. He dropped the empty .50 cal aside and charged forward to meet the tank.

  The huge skin smiled. He tossed his destroyed weapon aside and vaulted over the low barrier.

  Mason did a double take. The tank was huge—the same size as Royce wearing his bulky power armor.

  The skin ran at Royce, leaped fifteen feet into the air, and came down with a punch that would’ve split steel. Royce ducked under the tank’s attack. He reached up and grabbed the skin’s leg while he was in midair, clamping down with his armored fists, and whirled, hurling his opponent to the side.

  The big man impacted the side of a light truck, crushing the side and bending the vehicle’s frame around him. Glass exploded outward from the collision, and the vehicle lurched to the side several yards.

  “Take that, arsehole!” Royce crowed.

  A convoy of vehicles was streaming out of the Thorne armory, moving to break through the rebel line and isolate Keeva’s group.

  “Hell no, you don’t. Cover my girl and her men!” Royce’s fighters streamed out from cover, concentrating their fire at the convoy to prevent it from breaking through their line.

  Royce lumbered forward and threw his shoulder into the lead vehicle. The truck flipped over, spilling men from the open bed onto the ground before rolling atop them. The rebel commander turned and slammed a fist through the hood of the next truck, knocking the electric motor loose from its mountings just as the front end slammed into him. His armored feet dug deep furrows in the muddy ground as he clung to the front of the vehicle until it lurched to a stop. With his massive, armored hands, he ripped the engine bay apart then punched through the glass of the cab. Gore painted the shattered windows as he crushed the driver and passenger to pulp where they sat.