Armor World Page 11

  Sargon went down. Carlos was gone—I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him.

  Harris and I made it into the entrance—one of the mushy openings in the burning, dying mass of flesh. Behind us were a dozen or so others. Among them was the veteran from the 6th. I thought he was pretty lucky to still be alive, but the expression on his face suggested he might not agree.

  Inside, it wasn’t lit, and it wasn’t pretty. We used our suit lights and stumbled deeper into what looked like a digestive tract. The walls were covered in growths. It was beyond disgusting, and the worst part was the unmistakable impression that the thing was still alive, shivering in pain.

  The walls ran with secretions. Choking smoke filled the passages, and we flipped down our visors so we could keep walking and breathing.

  In the core of thing, we found the main waiting room—or maybe it was a medical ward. It had once been filled with beds for the sick, but we found a different kind of technology there.

  This wasn’t meat. It was metal and crystal, and it was hooked up to the rest of the odd equipment in the room by thick humming cables. I recognized it because I’d seen something like it before, years ago.

  In the center the machine was a bright spinning light inside a metal cage. It was just like the one I’d seen on Dark World, powering the orbital factory we’d tried to capture in a failed campaign.

  -19-

  We gathered around the flashing light, and we shot the workers that wandered the place. For a few seconds, we contemplated the strange machine in our midst.

  “That’s got to be a power-source,” Harris said. “It’s a fusion reactor maybe—it must run something big.”

  I nodded. “It’s a reactor all right. What’s more, I’ve seen this kind of power generator before. I found one back on Dark World, on that space station we tried to take over.”

  “You mean when we met up with the Vulbites?”

  “Yeah. But I don’t think this was built by Vulbites. I think this is Rigellian tech. They owned that space factory, and I’m thinking they sent these freaks here to pay us a visit, too.”

  “Huh… what are we going to do with it, Centurion? Those giant storks can’t get in here, but I’m sure something else will soon. Either that or the building will burn down and kill us all that way.”

  He was right of course. If we were going to do anything effective, we’d have to do it now.

  “We’re going to turn it off,” I said. “These aliens aren’t just growing troops like radishes, they’re putting metal parts on them and powering a force-field as well. That means they have to have a serious source of power. I think we just found it.”

  “That’s got to be right…” Harris said, circling the abomination. “You found the heart of this alien base, McGill. You really did. How did you destroy the one back at Dark World?”

  “Uh…” I said, remembering.

  I’d actually used my helmet. After spreading the bars of the cage, I’d stuck my head into the reactor core. That had shorted it out and destroyed the entire orbital—but I figured that was information that wasn’t going to be helpful to my men just now.

  “Well… take a look around, everyone. There has to be a switch or something around here.”

  They all tore their eyes from the spinning light and began searching. While they did so, I steeled myself. If another wave of the enemy caught up with us in here, I was going to have to try once more to short it out personally. I doubted anyone in the Hammonton would survive.

  “Hey, I’ve got it!”

  Turning, I saw the veteran from 6th unit bending over a cable on the floor.

  “Hold on—!” I began to shout, but it was too late.

  These cables weren’t like our human equivalents. They weren’t shielded for safety.

  A massive spark leapt out, uniting the veteran, the cable, and the cage that surrounded the spinning singularity.

  “Damn, boy! He lit himself on fire!” Harris said, kicking at the veteran to knock him loose.

  The dead man fell away, leaving smoking parts behind. He’d been flash-fried.

  “Nobody else touch the cables,” I suggested. I needn’t have bothered. They’d all scattered like kicked dogs.

  “At least it was quick,” Harris said, grimacing at the smoldering mess on the floor.

  “Hmm,” I said, eyeing the cage and the spinning light.

  It had died down some when the veteran had made his fatal error. That gave me an idea.

  “Cooper!” I shouted. “Come out, now!”

  For a few seconds, it was crickets. Everyone looked around in confusion. We hadn’t seen Cooper since I’d sent him back to report to Graves. That was hours ago.

  Any reasonable officer would figure that he’d lost his way or maybe been killed at some point. After all, these aliens could detect him, stealth suit or no.

  But I wasn’t a reasonable man. What’s more, I knew Cooper very well. He reminded me of a sneakier version of myself as a younger man.

  “Get over here, on the double!” I boomed.

  Three splashing steps, and Cooper materialized with a smile. “Yes sir! What can I do for you, Centurion? I’ll scout the perimeter if you—”

  My big index finger hooked him by the collar and dragged him back before he could dance away and vanish again.

  “I don’t need a scout right now. I need a volunteer.”

  Harris hooted. “You just volunteered, boy!”

  Cooper shot him a pissed look. Then he turned his eyes toward me. He looked resigned. “Is this because I’ve been invisible since—?”

  “It’s best you don’t remind me about that right now,” I told him. “But no, it’s because you’re the only lightly armed, lightly armored man I have left. Normally, you’d be useless at this point. But I’ve got a special mission.”

  “What kind of special…?”

  He followed my pointing finger toward the generator, then the live high-voltage cable. The blackened corpse of the first man who’d touched it was a contorted heap nearby.

  “Seriously?” Cooper asked in dismay.

  “Yep. Get a belcher—or some other long solid metal object. Jam it into the cage and touch it to that cable. Mission accomplished.”

  He looked pretty unhappy. I couldn’t say that I blamed him.

  He opened his mouth, and I expected a litany of excuses and dodges. He had the sore-back, stiff-necked shits, I was pretty sure.

  But before he could speak, a lot of sounds began in the passageway. Squelching feet advanced.

  “Something has found us,” Harris said.

  “A whole lot of somethings by the sound of it,” I said.

  “What do I get out of this?” Cooper asked.

  The rest of the squad and a half I had left alive took up defensive positions at every entrance and exit. Harris took a moment to throw an answer over his shoulder.

  “You get the pleasure of knowing you’ve served the legion, boy. You’re about to give your all, Cooper, and I salute you!”

  Harris was a bastard. His eyes were lit up, and I halfway considered making him do it, but I passed on the idea. Cooper hadn’t done much of anything useful on this mission so far, and I’d much rather have Harris at my side in any final confrontation—even if he was a dick.

  “Hey, I found a metal strut!” Harris trotted up to us, his boots splashing. “Damn, this whole nest-thing is dead now, I think. It’s getting all goopy.”

  He was right. The life had gone from the flesh that had overgrown the medical center. The veins no longer pulsed, and the walls had become still and dry.

  But there was still the generator. It was spinning, full of malice and powering something.

  “Here,” I said, taking the strut from Harris and handing it to Cooper. “If you figure out a way to live through it, that’s cool. I don’t care, as long as you short out that generator. Besides that, I’m not asking you to do anything I haven’t done myself.”

  Cooper looked at the length of metal d
oubtfully. He put it against the cage, and it looked like he planned to drop it onto the power cable.

  “That’s not going to work!” Harris boomed at him.

  Harris walked up, shoved the strut into the cage, and it immediately flared into a hot burning mess. The metal was melting, releasing a screaming sound. This seemed odd, as the spinning light looked cool enough from the outside—but somehow he’d interrupted the field that contained all that power.

  “Whoa!” Harris shouted, lifting his hands from the strut. He backed away a step. “Okay, bunny. Now all you have to do is connect these two, quick-like.”

  “Is that an order?”

  “Damn straight it is! Move your—!”

  Cooper was quick, agile and mean. That’s why he’d become a scout in the first place. Sweeping a foot low, he hooked Harris’ ankle. His hand pushed on a balancing point, and Harris pitched backward.

  I saw right off what his plan was. He’d figured out that a lot a weight was needed to bend that strut down to touch the cable on the floor. The weight of a large man would do the job nicely.

  Harris wasn’t an easy man to take down, however. You could trick him, but you might just pay a price for it.

  The adjunct’s long arm shot out, grabbed Cooper and dragged him down too. They fell together on the strut, which then levered down to touch the cable.

  There, they did a little dance until they burst into flames. Cooper looked surprised, which was only to be expected.

  But Harris? To be honest, he looked determined. He had Cooper wrapped up in a bear-hug. There was no escaping death for either of them.

  After that, the lights went out. My men in the tunnels wandered out.

  “Those aliens, the humanoid types, they were coming at us, but they stopped.”

  “What do you mean they stopped?” I asked.

  The specialist shrugged. “They just stopped, sir. They keeled over and stopped moving. I’m not sure if they’re really dead or just playing opossum, but I’ll take it.”

  “All right, go back and man your post.”

  “McGill!” Leeson said a moment later, “you did it!”

  “I would give Harris the credit, actually.”

  The two men who’d given their all, Cooper and Harris, were no longer with us. Their bodies were, in fact, still on fire.

  “No, no,” Leeson told me. “I mean our tappers are live again. We’re on the grid!”

  Glancing down, I saw he was right. I immediately contacted Graves.

  “McGill?” he asked. “Is that really you? I had you marked down for dead hours ago.”

  “No way sir, I’m harder to kill than a swamp rat.”

  “Excellent. The dome is down—I’ve got a confirmation of that coming in now. How’d you pull that off?”

  “Well sir, we found one of those whirly-gig generators, like the one I came across back on Dark World. We killed that, and the power went out for the force field.”

  “Upload that vid, will you? And push all your survivor engrams, just to be sure.”

  I frowned, but I worked my tapper to do as he asked. “What’s up now, sir? What’s the big picture like? We’ve been cut off for so long, I don’t—”

  “No time now, McGill. I’ll brief you back at Central. You’ve earned that—well done.”

  I opened my big mouth to talk to him further, but I closed it again with a frown. The channel had closed.

  “So what’s the story?” Leeson asked. “Can they spare a lifter for the crew of heroes we’ve got here?”

  My eyes came up from my tapper. They met Leeson’s. He saw the truth there, the dark suspicion that I couldn’t get out of my head now that it had come inside to roost.

  “Aw… are you shitting me?” Leeson asked. “After all this?”

  “Let’s go outside and talk to those bird-things for a second.”

  “A blaze of glory, huh? Why not? I swear, I should quit Varus and become a hog.”

  “That’s an awful thing to say, Adjunct.”

  We walked outside with our weapons ready. A dozen surviving troops followed us. They were all wary and ready to shoot—but there was nothing much going on outside.

  “Huh…” Leeson said. “Do you think they’ve run off?”

  “Maybe when we killed the queen and their power supply, they got orders to move and defend another target.”

  “They are machine-like. An organic critter would have probably stuck around for revenge.”

  Whatever the case, the plaza had been transformed. It was light now, the dawn having lit up the sky with a pink glare.

  I have a vague memory of the following moments, but its ragged and incomplete. It seemed to me later that I looked up at that sky, that the other fighters I’d led all night came out into the open and whooped in celebration.

  And why shouldn’t they? The enemy was nowhere in sight, and the sun had come out. The dome of force that had enveloped us, shutting out the rest of the planet, was gone.

  But there was something. A roar, perhaps. An aircraft? Flying so far overhead it was invisible to my eye from the ground? That was my impression, but as I say, it’s all hazy now.

  What happened after that moment? I’m not sure. But I stopped existing, as did everyone else within the township formerly known as Hammonton.

  We’d been nuked.

  -20-

  The next time I was revived, I was a little peeved. Graves wasn’t even there to preside over my rebirth. That was disappointing. He’d been super happy to see me the last time, after we’d blown the jawbone off the invading ship. Maybe he felt differently today.

  “Score?”

  “Seven point five. Make that an eight—he’s tuning in.”

  It was true. My mind, my senses, they were all beginning to operate again.

  “I’ll take an eight. Get off my table, McGill.” It was the voice of some bio technician who I didn’t recognize.

  “Where am I?” I whispered. “Is this Central?”

  “No such luck, Centurion. You’re aboard Legate. Head for Gold Deck. They’re waiting for you upstairs.”

  The steamy chamber smelled like piss and blood and hot chemicals. I slipped off the table while blinking, clawing at my eyes and trying not to breathe too deeply. Doing stretching exercises, I got my eyes and fingers working—at least well enough to pull on some clothes. Dressing sloppily in a uniform, I stumbled out of the stinking chamber.

  The bio people didn’t even give me a second glance. They were already reviving someone else. I got the feeling they’d been working for long hours, functioning as slaves to their alien machine.

  That was the first inkling I got that something was wrong. Not desperately wrong, mind you, but this was certainly not the hero’s welcome I’d been expecting.

  Shrugging it all off, I straightened and walked tall. My confidence was increasing with every step. By the time I reached Gold Deck, my spine was rigid, and I was standing two meters tall again. Even my sandy blond hair had begun to dry out.

  Finding the main conference room, I barged inside. No one stopped me.

  Six people looked up from the star map displayed in three dimensions on the table between them. Turov, Graves and Winslade were all there. For the most part, that wasn’t surprising, as this was clearly a meeting of Varus officers.

  But why Winslade? I almost opened my mouth to ask, but I caught myself and sat down at the seat Graves indicated with an impatient wave.

  “Please join us, Centurion,” Graves said. “We thought you might be able to enlighten us with what you found under that dome.”

  “Didn’t you get the vids?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Not all of them. Just the last few you pushed. What we got was confusing… walking machines with leg muscles? Are they robots or not?”

  “Not exactly. They’re cyborgs. Half metal and electronics, mixed with meat and nerves.”

  Galina gave a tiny shudder.

  “What about the power supply?” Winslade asked. “Are you
sure it matched the design of the unit you destroyed on Dark World?”

  “Sure did. You could have just brought up the reports and checked those manually.”

  “Not actually,” Winslade said. “We’re far from Earth now, and a lot of things didn’t survive.”

  “We’re flying then—after the aliens.”

  “Yes, we’re in pursuit.”

  My mind was trying to catch up. I hadn’t expected to die during an attack from the ground, then wake up in mid-flight, chasing after our alien attackers.

  “You said something about survival, sir?” I asked as a feeling of coldness came over me. “ What exactly was there to survive back on Earth?”

  They paused and looked down. Galina was the one who answered me. “James… when we repelled their landing, the aliens didn’t take it lightly. They destroyed a large portion of Central City with missiles.”

  “Nuclear missiles?” I asked, feeling sick all of a sudden.

  She nodded.

  My mind leapt suddenly to Etta and Della. “What about Central itself? Was it destroyed?”

  “No,” she said. “We set up defensive batteries and a shield—but the city around it…”

  “I understand,” I said.

  I felt a surge of relief which was quickly followed by guilt at having experienced a good sensation in the face of so many tragedies. “What happened next?”

  “The ship turned and ran,” Graves said. “It left the Solar System. The damage you did to their main hatch—they didn’t seem to be able to fix it immediately.”

  “But they might do it out in deep space somewhere,” I said in alarm. “They might come back and dust off our whole planet.”

  Galina nodded, leaning toward me. “Now you see the nature of our mission. It is urgent and essential. We’re aboard Legate, and we’re following the enemy vessel.”

  I let this sink in for a few moments. “Good.”

  Graves smiled slightly. He liked it when I got into a killing mood. I wasn’t sure if that was because he felt I was good at it, or if he just liked killing on principle. I suspected it was a little of both.