by J. N. Chaney
Maksim blinked at him as if he weren’t sure how to accept the backhanded praise. He nodded once, as if acknowledging John’s comment but storing it away for later.
As if by magic, the shoving on the other side of the metal sheet stopped. One second, we were fighting to keep the steel piece in place, and the next there was complete quiet. There was utter stillness on the opposite side of the barrier.
I looked over at the others, who had taken their helmets off as well. They mirrored my confused expression.
“What is he up t—”
Stacy’s words were cut off as something large hit the opposite side of the metal barrier.
I was flung from the door, backward, and landed with a heavy thud. My helmetless head bounced off the hard floor underneath me and darkness wrapped its inky fingers around my vision as I lost consciousness.
17
As the light turned back on in my brain, I could hear people shouting. Their voices were far off as if they were yelling at me from across a field or hall. I blinked a few times, trying to remember where I was. When I did finally remember, I muttered a few obscenities, took in some deep breaths, and tried to assess the damage.
I rolled over onto my hands and knees as their voices cut through my head like an axe. Pain erupted throughout my skull as if it were in fact being split in two. I winced, looking up at those yelling. Tong lay on the ground, not moving. A line of blood soaked the ground underneath the back of his head. I hoped he was just unconscious, not dead.
Stacy, Maksim, and John were still on the door, holding up the metal sheet against it. They were yelling at one another, me, and Tong. I didn’t see Dama or Sulk.
I tried to make sense of what had happened.
Get up, Dean, I told myself. Get up. You have more to give. You’re not out of this fight yet.
I rose to my feet, blinking as something wet fell over my face. I wiped a hand across my brow, which came back sticky and red with my own blood.
“Here it comes again!” Maksim yelled. “Hold!”
Something like a battering ram hit the opposite side of the steel plate so violently, it actually put a dent in the metal. The defenders lost their grip on the metal barrier. Stacy was thrown to the floor. She tucked her chin and went down on her side to protect her head.
“Helmets back on!” John boomed, placing his bucket onto his head once more, and holding onto the metal at the same time. That was no small achievement, with his injured shoulder and other impediments.
“What is it?” I asked, reaching down for my own helmet. I ignored the pain in my head and rejoined Maksim and John at the barrier. “What’s doing that?”
“I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter,” Maksim said, gasping as he hung on. “All that matters is that we don’t let them through.”
Stacy got up and went over to check on Tong. “He’s breathing, but I need to stop the bleeding,” she shouted as she knelt over his still form.
“Do it,” John growled. “We’ll hold the barrier.”
Another strike sent us off the steel barrier. The blow was so intense, it sent a tremor through my entire body. Now, as I anticipated the impact, it was easier to keep my feet. I absorbed as much of the blow as possible before letting off the steel sheet.
Another imprint on the steel we were holding showed what looked like a massive hammer head.
Stacy worked diligently, stripping off a piece of Tong’s shirt and wrapping his head with it. The amount of blood the Remboshi lost and was still losing was terrifying. His breath came shallow and labored.
The strikes on the opposite side of the barrier descended again and again. It was as if some ancient god had chosen this piece of steel as his anvil.
Each time the object on the other side struck, my teeth rattled. Pain exploded in my head. I felt like I was going to throw up, raising my suspicions more than ever that I might have a concussion. Another reason to stay awake, I thought as another wave of sickening nausea rolled over me.
Not in your helmet, I told myself. Throw up in your helmet and this day just went from horrible to the worst ever.
This thought raced through my mind right before a strike hit the barrier twice as hard as any of the others. All three of us were flung into the room, landing on our backs. Thanks to my helmet, my head was saved from the blow of the ground.
I looked up from where I was lying to see the sheet metal barrier that had been our last hope flung from the entrance like a piece of trash.
Two infected so large they made John look like a little kid stood there with war hammers in their gigantic hands. Each infected easily cleared six feet, with enough muscles to have been bodybuilders in their previous lives.
Thus far in our altercation with Legion, he had used Rung to battle us in their bunker. He must have called on his larger human troops at some point and it seemed they had arrived just in time—or at the exact wrong time, depending on whose side you were on. For me and my crew, it was obviously the most inopportune time, as Dama and Sulk were still missing, seeming to take forever to get the armor, and the rest of us were taking an unscheduled break courtesy of their hammering talents.
Maksim was first on his feet. He launched at the two colossal infected, burying a dagger he held in his right hand hilt-deep into the throat of one before turning to the other.
I saw the blow coming for him in slow motion. I fought to my feet, but I was too slow. The second infected brought his hammer down on Maksim, pulverizing his left leg.
Maksim cried out in pain. A wave of infected squeezed through the door like water through a burst dam. They fell on the already wounded Maksim, tearing at his eyes and throat.
John, Stacy, and I were rushing into the fight when we felt the floor shake. Mechanical gears whined and bright lights punctured the darkness around us.
“Down!” Dama’s voice sounded like it came through a speaker of some kind. I obeyed, pressing myself to the floor.
The rhythmic beat of heavy weapons lit up the room. Even with my helmet on, the sound was deafening, like being caught in the middle of a thunderstorm.
I looked over to my rear to see two black power armor suits doling out death. Twin cannons with rotating barrels sat on each of the power armor’s shoulders as they cut through the infected at the door.
The infected didn’t have a chance. Rounds punctured them like a knife stabbing paper over and over again. The large infected, still carrying a hammer, took enough rounds to the face and chest to leave nothing of his upper body at all.
Just as suddenly as Dama and Sulk had opened fire, they stopped.
The infected on our side of the hangar doors were either dead or in the process of dying.
“Sulk, watch my back and make sure no more get through,” Dama ordered as they moved toward the door in the power armor suits, then disappeared through the opening.
On the top of each of their power armor’s vambraces, a thick square opening rested. At the same time they clenched their fists, sending a stream of fire through the entryway, cooking any infected that sought to gain entrance to the hangar.
“Maksim?” I said, shoving dead infected from the pile where I saw the assassin go down, fighting down my squeamishness at touching them. “Maksim, can you hear me?”
I still had no love for the man, but something was bonding us now. Fighting alongside another person had a way of doing that. I understood that he had sacrificed himself to buy us those few extra seconds to keep Legion at bay. If not for him, the power armor suit would not have been able to put a cork in the entryway so easily.
They might not have been able to stop them at all if Legion had gotten inside to the scores of power armor suits still empty. The thought of an infected in a power armor suit sent another round of chills down my spine.
“Maksim?” Stacy called out as she and John helped me sift through the bodies. “Maksim, can you hear me?”
“Here,” John called out, rolling over a dead infected from the center of the pile. “He’s here.”
&nbs
p; “Oh no,” I said, going over to where Maksim lay.
I was no doctor, but I knew a serious injury when I saw one. His leg was bent at an odd angle behind him, and his throat was slashed and oozing blood. A dozen other cuts lay over his face and torso.
“Brother,” Maksim wheezed as he lay on the ground, staring up to the ceiling, although I doubted he could actually see anything.
“Hold on. Let me get something to stop the bleeding,” Stacy said, looking around frantically.
“My time is done here,” Maksim managed to say weakly just above a whisper. “I need to speak…to my brother.”
I pulled off my helmet, making my way through the piles of bodies, and knelt next to Maksim. A war raged inside of me as to what I felt for the man. Half of me could never forget what he had done to destroy so many lives on the Orion and the dreams of others. The other half saw the more recent image of him jumping to defend the doors and sacrificing his life in the process.
Maksim reached for my hand and gripped it tighter than I thought he’d be able to in his weakened state.
“It’s on you to kill him now.” Maksim moved his eyes from the ceiling to look me full in the face. “Swear to me you will not let him leave this planet.”
“I swear,” I told him, swallowing hard. “He’s not going anywhere.”
“In another life, you would see that we were in fact brothers, cut from the same cloth,” Maksim said, turning his blank-again gaze back to the ceiling. “Kill Legion, brother. Kill him.”
Maksim let out a long, shuddering exhale of breath and lay still.
There on my knees over his dead body with the sounds of the flamethrowers going off behind me, I was left at a loss as to what to feel.
I wasn’t sure how long I knelt there. Seconds, minutes maybe. The sound of steel snapping eventually broke me from my trance-like state.
I looked over to see Sulk tear a piece of steel from between the two hangar bay doors. The doors worked once more and closed a moment later.
Stacy was with Tong as he woke from his unconscious state. I figured he had a nice splitting headache at this point, but at least he was alive. I couldn’t take any more of my friends dying at this point.
John had found his way to the control panel, trying to figure out how to turn on the lights in the hangar bay room.
“I’m not going to even pretend to know what I’m doing here,” John said, looking at the control panel in exasperation. “Why does this section of the bunker have these blue lights and everything else was dark? There has to be power here, but why can’t we turn on all the lights?”
Now that the hangar bay doors were closed, Dama piloted her mechanical armor over to where John stood over the controls. She pressed a button that opened a section of the giant armor’s center chest plate with a hiss.
She jumped down the remaining feet to the ground below and sidled up next to John, pressing keys on the control panel.
“The hangar for the power armor is on a different system than the rest of the bunker. It does, in fact, still have power, but it transferred to conservation mode when the hangar was locked down. I’m resetting the power now,” Dama said, working over the controls.
A second later, brilliant white light lit up the hangar bay. I winced, shielding my eyes as we went from dull blue lights along the floor and ceiling to what seemed brighter than day inside the hangar.
What I saw took my breath away.
The hangar was a giant room deeper than it was wide. Along the far wall stood an army of power armor suits. They were shoulder to shoulder, with their impressive black and grey forms gleaming in the brilliant light. I got my first good look at them. They ranged from eight to ten feet tall, covered in robust metal plating from the helmeted head to reinforced booted feet.
One thing I hadn’t noticed before was they were all equipped with a tail like the Rung and Remboshi as well.
“There’s enough here for our own army,” Tong said, standing with Stacy’s support. “We can do this. We can finally take the fight to Legion.”
“There’s a separate exit above us that we can use to get out,” Dama instructed. “We’ll circle around and free our people. We can then go to other Rung bunkers and free them to help in the fight.”
“We need to get back to the Orion,” I said. “I don’t think Legion was lying when he said it was under attack. We need to go back and help.”
“Of course,” Dama answered. “But you’ll need a crash course on how these are piloted first.”
18
Dama wasn’t kidding when she said, “crash course.” She taught us the basic movement controls and the weapons systems, and then we were on our own.
The center chest piece of the power armor suit opened like a door, and a short step ladder folded out, allowing access to the inside.
The suit, however, was made for a smaller-than-human-sized Rung pilot, which meant it was tight inside for me. I couldn’t imagine how John felt.
Hold it together, Dean, I told myself. Hold it together. You’re in control; you can get out anytime you want. I never did like the feeling of being closed in.
When the door to the power armor hissed shut behind me, I had a sense of claustrophobia. I stood in a mechanical get-up inside the larger power suit. My feet were placed in stirrups inside the power armor’s legs, and my arms reached into the arms of the unit. My hands grasped a controller on each side.
As soon as the door to the chest piece closed, a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the room opened up in front of me. It was like I was the armor instead of just being inside of it.
When I looked down, I could see my feet. When I looked up, I saw the ceiling to the hangar high above.
“This thing is so crazy,” Stacy said over the comm line we shared in the units. “How is this even possible?”
“It will take some time getting used to, but when inside our armor, your movements become the movements of the armor unit,” Dama coached us. “When you move an arm or leg, so does the unit. Go ahead and try it now.”
“This thing tight for anyone else?” John asked as he stumbled forward in his mechanical suit. “I feel like my huevos rancheros are in a vise grip.”
“Huevos rancheros?” Tong asked as he practiced in his suit. “I don’t understand what that is.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said with a laugh despite the hour. “Let’s just say it’s tight in here.”
“They were designed to hold the largest Rung, but even a large member of our species is only the size of a small human,” Sulk said.
Chatter continued as Stacy and Tong asked questions about the armor’s capabilities. The suits used several types of energy to recharge. If we were outside, we would be using the solar energy of the two suns. While we were inside, that energy was harnessed and channeled into the power armor. It was a technology I was hoping our scientists would explore further once we were back to the Orion.
I focused on putting one foot in front of the other. True to Dama’s words, the suit obeyed without hesitation. When my right knee came up, so did the suit’s. When I changed into a defensive stance and lifted both hands in front of me, the suit obeyed immediately. I practiced a little more and could see it wouldn’t take too long to become proficient at navigating the suit despite the tight fit.
“Imagine going around in these things?” John said, moving to stand in front of me. He weaved back and forth, bouncing on his toes. “Legion has no chance.”
“On the lift,” Dama said, waving us over to a large circular platform. “We have no time to lose. We need to get to Legion and get rid of him before he does any more damage.”
“What about weapons?” I asked as we moved to obey. “We’ll need those sooner rather than later.”
“Flamethrower on the back of your left forearm and blade on the back of your right,” Sulk said as he maneuvered his suit onto the platform. “To activate each one, your fist has to be closed, then press the button beside your thumb.”
&nbs
p; “Cannon on your shoulder is activated by shrugging your shoulder inside your suit,” Dama said. “When you shrug, you’ll then have the option to press your shoulder back. Doing this will open fire. A targeting system in your screen will allow you to aim.”
I soaked in all of this information as we gathered on the raised platform. Truth be told, I couldn’t wait to try the weapons out. With them in our arsenal it was hard to imagine a scenario where Legion would be able to stand against us. Finally, for once, we would have the upper hand and we could put an end to this.
The ceiling above us parted in the middle as the circular lift took us to the open air above.
“Wow, watch it,” Tong said as the suit John was in activated the blade in his right arm’s vambrace.
“Sorry, sorry about that,” John said, not sounding sorry at all but rather a little giddy, like a child with a new toy. I hoped we wouldn’t injure each other by accident, but then again, didn’t the armor guard against that problem?
A single steel blade six feet in length sprouted from above John’s closed fist.
“You were going to use these weapons against the Remboshi?” Tong said in a quiet voice. “I mean, after you defeated Legion?”
“We’ve all made mistakes,” Dama said, matching his somber tone. “I’m just glad we fight together now. We will never have to wage war with one another with these machines now.”
I had lost all sense of time underground in the Rung bunker. When we were lifted to the desert landscape overhead, I was surprised to see it was the end of the day. The twin suns were beginning to disappear against the horizon.
“We’ll head for the Orion,” Stacy said, moving off the platform onto the soft sand. “I’m not sure how fast these things can move, but if we travel through the night, we might be able to get there by morning.”
“You will. There’s an autopilot when springing,” Sulk answered. “It’s by your right foot. Once you start running, tap your foot to the left to engage and disengage.”
“We’ll head to free this bunker and then others,” Dama said. “We’ll have enough pilots to arm more power suits but not all of them.”