"Better move it up. I'm leaving your squad in charge of its defense while we look for the control center in this place."
Magnum motioned to Rockhead and Blades. They left and returned a few moments later carrying the chunk of castcrete Ethan had seen earlier. That confirmed it was the Eclipser.
The ceiling shook with a muffled boom, and chunks of bactcrete rained down, thunking off their armor.
Atta peered up through a hole above her head and nearly got a face full of pulse lasers for her trouble. She and the Rictans scattered as the ceiling came alive with lancing beams of light.
"They're coming down on top of us!" Atta roared.
Ethan hunkered down behind an overturned tower of databanks. He peeked over the top to see drones dropping down from the ceiling like spiders, their optics glowing crimson in the gloom. Gors raced at them, lavender-hued pulse lasers flashing. The drones fired back, but the Gors kept going. They closed to hand-to-hand combat with the drones and produced scythe-shaped energy blades. Ethan raised one arm and aimed at the nearest drone, but he couldn't get a clear shot. He thought about jumping into the fray with his own energy blades, but more drones dropped down by the second, crowding the room, and the Gors who'd gone hand-to-hand with them were being picked off fast.
Lasers crackled out with intermittent flashes of light. Zephyrs fired back from points of cover, ripper cannons flashing gold through the drifting clouds of dust and smoke. Energy blades sizzled.
It was utter chaos. Ethan heard Magnum call out for them to retreat further into the building. Ethan couldn't even see the Rictans through all of the commotion. He was cut off and pinned down, but so far none of the drones had noticed him.
Clank-clank. Clank-clank-clank!
Ethan saw a flicker of movement on his right peripheral display. Then to his left. Red optics cast crimson beams of light through the smoky room. Ethan saw those beams sweep across the floor to either side of him.
His heart pounded in his chest and his breath reverberated inside his helmet. Ethan glanced at his sensor display. There were no friendly contacts around him. He saw a few retreating further into the building, chased by swarms of drones. He was alone with these four drones. They had to have detected him by now.
Clank-clank-clank-clank!
They were rushing him!
Ethan steeled himself, watching the enemy approach on his HUD, red outlines growing larger by the second. He raised his arms above his head, and waited, counting down the seconds.
Clank-clank-clank-clank!
He could feel the floor shuddering with their footfalls. One was coming straight at him, the other three flanking to the sides. Ethan waited another half a second, and then he flexed his hands into fists, extending his energy blades with a sizzle of activating shields. He jumped up out of cover at the same moment as the drone in front of him sprang over his cover. He lashed out as the drone sailed toward him, and it fell apart, gushing green coolant.
The other three rounded the overturned data tower, forearms sweeping up to fire. Ethan lunged toward the greater threat, the pair of drones to his left. He slashed across the barrels of their pulse lasers before they could shoot, and then he bisected them both with an uppercut. They clattered to the ground. He whirled around, looking for the third drone, just in time to be blinded by a crimson beam of laser fire shrieking out from the third and final drone. The laser bolt glanced off his chest, burning his armor to a molten ruin and searing his skin with a nauseating sizzle.
Opening his fists to retract his energy blades, Ethan activating ripper cannons instead and fired back at the drone. Twin streams of golden tracer fire roared out from his gauntlets, the impacts jumping the drone's aim so that lasers flashed all around him, but never hit. The sound of shells plinking off the drone's armor was deafening. Ethan rushed the drone, keeping up a steady stream of fire as he ran. When he came within an arm's length, he extended energy blades and slashed, cutting the drone in two molten orange-glowing halves.
Ethan stood over the enemy gasping for air, his chest burning like it was on fire. He glanced down at his chest and felt abruptly sick. Blackened char stared back at him.
It was tough to tell how badly he was injured. Between adrenaline and the stims that his Zephyr auto-injected, the pain was a fraction of what it should have been.
Ethan grunted and scanned the room for more enemy contacts, but friendlies and enemies alike were all gone. He was alone.
Ethan checked his map for friendly comm beacons, but saw no sign of his squad, or any other squad for that matter. He was out of range.
He opened his comms to see if he could get back in touch. "Rictan One reporting, does anyone copy?"
A fierce crackle of static answered.
Frek.
Ethan turned in a quick circle to get his bearings. Smoke curled in drifting curtains, concealing everything. Looking up, Ethan saw the holes the drones had burned in the ceiling. Dozens of gaping apertures. He saw a flicker of red HUD outlines. They were coming again. A quick look at sensors revealed at least fifty drones coming down.
The next wave.
Ethan didn't have time to decide which way his squad might be. He spun around, looking for a way out. He spied a door close behind him and ran for it. Bringing his energy blades up as he reached it, Ethan quickly sliced a hole big enough for him to crawl through on his belly, which he promptly did. On the other side he saw yet more glowing blue towers of data, but these had yet to be shredded by weapons fire. Before he even regained his footing on the other side, he glimpsed drones dropping down behind him on his rear viewscreen. A fan of crimson light flickered through the hole in the door. Drones scanning the room he'd come from.
Clank-clank-clank!
"Frek!" Ethan growled. They'd found him already. He bounced up and ran, hoping desperately to find backup soon.
He tried the comms again. "Rictan One reporting! I need backup!"
Static crackled, and Ethan grimaced. He was on his own. He ducked and wove between glowing data towers, wishing he could fly over them instead. Then the door behind him burst open with a flash of light and an accompanying boom.
Clank-clank-clank!
Here they come . . .
Chapter 39
Binary explosives punched a hole. Six squads of Zephyrs and an endless stream of Gors went storming through. Atta followed them, expecting to see more of the endless rows of data towers, but this room was different. There were control consoles and holoscreens for data input, not just data storage and processing. This was a hub, one of the access points that drones used to perform maintenance on the systems throughout the omni-node.
"This is it!" Atta called out. "Secure all the entrances. We don't want to get interrupted before we're done here."
She turned to see squads of Gors and Zephyrs taking up positions at all the doors. Two squads covered the hole they'd entered by, while another four hurried back through the shattered wall to cover them further back. Tech experts peeled out of their Zephyrs and sat down behind control consoles to get to work. Atta checked her sensors to make sure there wasn't a whole company of drones racing up behind them. Nothing yet, but she still felt naked.
She'd left at least half of her battalion guarding entrances back the way they'd come, while another third escorted the Rictans and the Eclipser deeper into the city. Atta had been surprised and upset to hear that Ethan was MIAPD, but there'd be time to grieve their losses later. The rest of the Rictans were to rendezvous with the Second Battalion and carry the Eclipser down into the Null Zone for safe-keeping. Their secondary objective down there was to recruit a civilian army of Nulls, but not even Nulls would fight until they heard the truth.
Fortunately, they would be easy to convince. First, because they were Nulls and inherently distrustful of Omnius, and second, because they weren't even supposed to have Lifelinks. Just the fact that they would be able to see Therius's message would be enough to convince them of its veracity.
There was one problem, however.
In order to send their message to everyone all at once, they needed to disable the Eclipser. That meant Omnius would have a small window of opportunity to get his forces organized.
Striding over to the nearest console, Atta asked, "How much longer?"
The tech turned to her with a frown. "We're hacking into a supercomputer, ma'am; a smart one. If you want this to work, you need to give us time."
"And if you take too long, we're going to be up to our eyeballs in drones."
"We can't rush this or network security is going to shut us out when we try to send our message."
"I thought Therius gave you the encryption keys?"
"That doesn't make this any easier. We need to infect the system in a million different places with every kind of virus you can imagine just to distract Omnius long enough that he won't be able to stop our message. We have a one minute window, and as far as Omnius is concerned, that's a lifetime."
"The message is five minutes long," Atta said. "How are you going to pack all of that into one minute?"
"We're not streaming; we're downloading, and it would be a lot faster, but we don't have the bandwidth in this node to send to everyone at once. We've busted the transmission up into batches, but even like that we're only going to reach about 90 percent of the population."
"Good enough," Atta said. "Let me know when you're ready so I can coordinate with the Second Battalion to disable the Eclipser. If you need me, I'll be watching your asses by the door."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Techs!" Atta muttered under her breath. She wasn't a fan of cyber warfare. She'd take a pulse rifle or a ripper cannon over a battle of bits and bytes any day.
As Atta approached the ragged hole they'd blown to get into the control room, she heard a stutter of ripper fire, followed by a shout of warning over the comms.
"Fall back!" someone yelled. It was Delta Two.
"Deltas, report!" Atta commed back.
"They're coming through!" Delta One replied amidst a deafening roar of weapons fire.
"Drones?"
"No, Peacekeepers! Thousands of them!"
Atta checked the Deltas' position on her scanners and motioned for the squads standing guard with her by the shattered wall to move up. They preceded her out of the control room, and she commed back, "We're on our way, Deltas. Hold your position!"
"We'll do our best, General."
Thinking fast, Atta called for reinforcements from the Second Battalion. They couldn't be too far off.
The comms crackled with a response from the battalion's Gor general. "We come under heavy fire! I cannot reinforce if we are to keep advancing."
"Frek it," Atta muttered. "Then stop advancing! Pull back to the control center. We can't afford to lose it! Not until our message gets out."
"What about the Eclipssser?"
"Bring it with you! If we're running into this much resistance already, then digging deeper is a mistake. At least we know they'll refrain from using heavy weapons while we're inside one of the omni-nodes, but as soon as we poke our noses out, they're going to hit us harder than ever."
"Yesss, you are right."
"Of course I'm right."
Atta watched a surge of green begin moving back up the tower, converging on her position. She hoped it would be enough. Atta ran to catch up with the two squads she'd sent to reinforce Delta squad. She heard weapons fire again, but this time it came via aural sensors rather than over the comms. The Peacekeepers were close.
Atta raced through a room full of overturned data towers, her feet crunching noisily through the debris. Up ahead, just on the other side of a shattered door she saw ripper cannons and pulse lasers flashing. Atta ran up to the door just as the squads she'd sent came boiling through. A flashing silver sphere appeared in their midst, and Atta screamed, "Grenade!"
Then it exploded, but instead of incinerating both squads with a roiling ball of fire, it picked them up and threw them, sending them flying and tumbling away in a radius around the grenade. Atta went flying back the way she'd come and landed with a crunch in a pile of shattered data towers.
Dazed, she shook her head and climbed unsteadily to her feet. Dead ahead, Peacekeepers came trudging through the rubble in their glowing, mirror-smooth armor. Their face plates shone through the gloom like flashlights. Here and there, they raised their palms to fire dazzling bursts of energy. Atta raised her arms to open fire, but the Peacekeeper nearest to her raised both his palms and hit her with a violent gust of wind from his grav guns, and she went flying once more. This time she hit the far wall. Despite the padding inside her armor, the impact was enough to stun her. The Peacekeeper walked up to her, a blue cape fluttering behind him, his palms raised and humming with a repelling force that held her pinned to the wall.
"Who are you?" the Peacekeeper asked, speaking in broken Versal.
Atta used her chin to flick from comms to external speakers. "Tourists," she said.
"A sense of humor. Interesting. Let's try again. What are you doing here? I'm going to count to three. On three, you're either going to start talking, or we're going to start shooting."
Atta noted that half of the sixteen soldiers she'd come with lay motionless in the rubble, while the other half had been pinned to the walls and floor with grav guns, just like her.
"One. Two—"
"Wait, let me explain," Atta said.
"You've got one minute."
"That's all I need."
* * *
Ethan cut his way through door after door, to get away from the drones pursuing him. He managed to stay one step ahead of them, but the thunder of clanking footfalls and the crackle of laser fire intermittently flashing out behind him was a constant reminder that being one step ahead wasn't good enough.
Before long he ran out of doors to carve through and ended up standing before a wall of windows, gazing out into a gaping chasm between buildings.
Clank-clank-clank!
Ethan spun around, looking for a way out. The door he'd carved open last lay right behind him, the edges of the hole he'd cut still glowing molten orange. Ethan glimpsed red HUD outlines swarming toward him. He didn't have much time.
Remembering the grav pack strapped to his back, Ethan turned to the windows. Extending his energy blades, he carved a hole and punched out an oval section of glass. It went tumbling away, and Ethan poked his head out, staring down into the cavernous gap between buildings.
Orderly lines of air traffic sat gridlocked below him. Below that, about twenty levels down, was a pedestrian street level. Pedestrians walked along it in colorful streams. They didn't look to be in a hurry. Clearly they had no idea what was going on, but then again, how could they? In Etheria all the news nets were controlled by Omnius and Omnius was offline.
Ethan eyed those streets, looking for a way to get down. Then the piece of glass he'd cut out hit the streets and pedestrians screamed. Ethan grimaced, but he didn't have time to worry about them. A screech of laser fire sounded out behind him, followed by a crimson beam hitting the wall of glass and shattering it with explosive force. Ethan turned to see a glint of drone armor appear in the open doorway behind him. Lasers crackled out once more, and Ethan fired back with ripper cannons. Laser bolts went streaking by him.
He didn't have time to hesitate. Ethan turned and dove through the open window. He screamed himself deaf as he fell, his arms and legs windmilling for purchase on something solid. Then he recovered his wits enough to grab his gravpack controls. He pulled them out and used a pair of miniature joysticks to right himself so he was falling feet first. As soon as he'd righted the pack's axis of lift, he ignited the grav lifts on high power. A violent jerk sent all the blood rushing into his feet, and Ethan saw black. Terror filled him. If he blacked out now, he was dead. His heart pounding, he blinked rapidly to clear the spots from his eyes.
The ground rushed up, and he bent his legs to land with a ground-shaking boom! Pedestrians scattered in all directions. But one man stood frozen and staring.
> "You're a Sentinel!" the man said in broken Versal, his brown eyes wide and glowing.
"It's not what you think," Ethan tried to say.
"Get him!" someone else said, more distantly. Ethan turned to see a pair of Peacekeepers pushing through the crowd. They raised their palms, grav guns already powered and glowing, and Ethan turned and ran the other way, heading for the densest concentration of people. Peacekeepers wouldn't fire on him if it meant a chance of hitting Etherians.
As Ethan ran, more people stopped and turned to point at him. Recognition spread like fire, and the crowd parted down the middle. Many of these people had come from the Imperium, but he was surprised they still recognized a Zephyr after all these years. The crowd continued to part, forming a living tunnel. At the end of it Ethan saw a whole squad of Peacekeepers charging toward him. He was trapped.
"Frek!" Ethan skidded to a stop and dove behind a bus stop. A withering rain of laser fire followed him, turning his cover to a molten ruin.
Ethan risked peering over the railing at the edge of the street. The city disappeared below him in a dizzying swirl. The next level of streets was almost too far down to see. Pulse lasers continued screaming into the ruined bus stop. The heat of that assault radiated through both the debris and Ethan's armor. He was pinned down, and there was only one way to go.
Before he could take too long to think about it, Ethan jumped out of cover and leapt over the side of the street. Again came the sickening sensation of free fall, but this time he was in control. He fired his gravpack on low power to slow his descent while dropping past a level of gridlocked air traffic. Passengers in the cars pointed at him as he fell. A young child waved. Wind whistled by aural sensors, and they faithfully reproduced the sound inside his helmet, setting his teeth on edge.
The next level of streets came rushing up. Ethan dialed the power up to full and simultaneously bent his knees as his feet touched ground. Pedestrians backed away from him, and again the crowd parted. More Peacekeepers appeared in the distance. Ethan dashed into an alcove, and pulse lasers chased him there, digging chunks out of the bactcrete walls.
Dark Space- The Complete Series Page 208