Empire of the Fallen, page 36
They embraced briefly, then Aker was physically pushing her away, towards Hvare, who was motioning towards one of the open doors.
Gia didn’t say anything. The last she saw of Aker was of a solitary figure standing in front of the door, her railgun up, waiting to buy them some time. Then Hvare was tugging at her arm, and tears were running down her cheeks, and she was moving down yet another corridor ringing with alarms and glowing with emergency lighting.
She moved with a speed and wantonness that only a bereavement could engender. The prototype was housed in a strong room with the trappings of a PRISM bunker on the fourth sublevel. It pulsed on her IHD map of the installation.
‘How does it work?’ she asked Hvare. The man was struggling to keep up with her.
‘It just interfaces… with a Mantix suit,’ he replied in between gasps. ‘Plug it… in to your… exoskeleton.’
They moved through the crumbling facility as explosions rumbled through the walls and holos urged them to leave. It reminded her of Ruestock Academy as Ascendancy lasers carved through supporting walls and pillars and the school collapsed around her and Lucy. For a second, the déjà vu was so intense that she had to slow to allow a wave of vertigo to pass.
They reached the prototype workshop after a few minutes of sprinting. Hvare had managed to open the doors in advance of their arrival through executive override, speeding their progress. Inside was a wide chamber, spherical for architectural strength, bisected by a metal lattice floor that was snaked with cables and filled with dozens of consoles and workbenches. Gia had expected the prototype to be kept in some kind of illuminated glass case in the centre of the room, but Hvare just picked it up from one of the benches. It was a small, silver/black ring with a trio of nanoconnector rods.
‘That’s it?’ she asked.
‘This is it,’ Hvare replied. He moved round the back of her and pressed it into one of the multifunctional slots. Immediately a NEW HARDWARE: SYNC? message winked into existence on Gia’s HUD. She selected the affirmative, and another message read PFS1179.9 PERSONAL FORCE SHIELD PROTOTYPE NOT SUITABLE FOR COMBAT USE.
‘Comforting,’ Gia said.
‘You will only have a few minutes once it is activated,’ Hvare said, flinching as a monumental blast shook the installation. ‘Your Mantix will be sluggish, too.’
‘So I’d be sacrificing movement for protection?’
‘Precisely,’ Hvare said. ‘I wouldn’t have said it was worth using but your boss—’
‘I know,’ Gia said, cutting him off. She didn’t want to hear about Aker right now, in case her grief overwhelmed her. Instead, she ran a higher dose of Fight and Flight and scanned the installation schematic. She had lost data for a few of the upper floors, and a mass of red was making its way down.
‘We need to get out of here,’ she said. ‘To the tunnels! Fast as you can!’
They ran, this time back upstairs, through corridors and accessways, back to where Aker had made her last stand. This time, however, instead of a low-ceilinged confluence of hallways, there was a huge open crater, a massive pile of grey rubble, twisted rebar and boiling flames where the roof had collapsed. Directly in front of them, a handful of kaygryn soldiers moved through the destruction, picking towards a hole at the far end that had been cleared—judging from the glowing, molten concrete that drooled around the excavation like magma—with phase fire.
Gia pushed Hvare back into the corridor with an exo-powered shove, activated the blade, and charged without hesitation. She stumbled a few times as her Mantix boots turned awkwardly against the rubble, but the element of surprise was on her side, and the kaygryn directly in front of her were not Imperial—at least, they were not carrying Imperial weapons or armour.
The first kaygryn managed a half-yell before her blade found the crown of its furry head and chopped it in half like a claymore through a watermelon. The second kaygryn turned enough to take the next swing in the bicep. The charged blade passed through the armour with the briefest of hesitations, before sliding through the alien’s chest, retarding the molecules that made up its flesh like two magnets of the same charge. Gia withdrew the blade as it cut through the kaygryn’s spine, and span around, searching wildly for the next foe.
She didn’t have to wait long. Less than a second later, her Mantix took the brunt of five solid hits from a railgun. The kaygryn near the main access door, less than twenty metres away, had opened up with its SIR. It was like being pummelled by a champion boxer.
‘Fucker,’ she moaned, winded, and powered through the storm of tungsten. The kaygryn tried to back away, tripped over a red-hot slab of rebar, and was bloodily hacked to death.
‘Come on!’ she shouted to Hvare, who was peering round the corner at the end of the corridor. There had been one other kaygryn, but it had gone. She tried to track it on her warm body scanner, but the static interference here was too strong.
Hvare ran cautiously into the smashed hallway, eyes wide as he took in the three kaygryn corpses and Gia’s blood-splattered Mantix.
‘Let’s go!’ Gia shouted, and this time led him towards the evacuation route. She jumped down into the glowing borehole sliced into the rubble, and once again found herself in a dark, red-lit corridor. ‘Sears, can you hear me?’ she asked, activating her comlink and tuning the bandwidth to the widest possible setting. There was nothing but static. There was nothing on the warm body scans either, no trace of the scientists. She hoped that it was the interference and not something more sinister.
They pressed on, harder and faster than before. Gia knew that the kaygryn bodies and radio silence they engendered would attract Imperial attention like flies to shit. Now she moved like a woman possessed, using her three-dimensional schematic and the illuminated ground arrows to whip through the corridors of Hermit at reckless speed, the charged blade held out in front of her with a little more expertise than before.
The installation trembled as another blast shook it, dislodging more of the roof. Hermit had no more alarms to scream with. It was like a bison being brought down by a pack of wolves, one bite at a time. Now it was in its death throes.
‘The last of the data has been purged,’ Hvare puffed behind her, evidently monitoring the facility’s electronic vitals. ‘The VIs have burned all of it.’
‘Good,’ Gia said brusquely. ‘Nearly there.’
They reached the fifth sublevel via a blast door which had been reduced to a bubbling pool of molten polymers. On the other side was a cavernous hallway criss-crossed with walkways and false window holos. It gave the disarming impression that they were actually back on the surface of the promontory, rather than hundreds of metres below the surface.
‘Come on!’ Gia shouted, picking up a trace signal of the fleeing scientists. They all seemed to be alive, though there were foreign body warning graphics on her scanner, like a medical holo picking out cancerous cells. There were only a few. They must have been advanced elements while the body of kaygryn troops cleared the upper levels and tried to access Hermit’s junked data feeds.
They ran across the hallway and through another door, but then Hvare cried out from behind her. Gia whirled around to see the man collapsing to his knees, a halberd protruding from his chest. The smell of burned blood filled the air.
‘Ty!’ she shouted, but he was already dead. Behind him, twenty metres away, a four-armed kaygryn was recovering from its javelin-throw pose and moving towards the corpse of the scientist.
Gia closed the gap with reckless speed. The kaygryn broke into a charge, foregoing the halberd, its four hands outstretched, but Gia could see, despite its alien features, that it had only just clocked that the blade she was carrying was one of Imperial manufacture. It tried to arrest its now implacable momentum, failed, and succeeded only in falling awkwardly to the floor. Gia brought the blade up and sliced through all four of its forearms as it tried futilely to fend off the blow, before she slashed at it until burned fat and organs were spilling out on to the marble floor and the arrogant, wretched creature was as dead as Hvare.
‘Fuck!’ she shouted, then screamed her frustration. Them more Imperial kaygryn appeared at the far end of the hall—these ones with APRs.
‘Oh shit,’ she snapped as the air filled with the banshee keening of high-energy death. Without thinking, she activated the PFS Hvare had given her. Immediately, two things happened: the first was that her HUD filled with warning graphics about foreign software; the second was that the power to her Mantix exoskeleton practically failed, as if a hundred-kilo trooper had suddenly jumped on her back and clung to her shoulders and legs.
The plasma rounds hit home. Gia flinched violently. It was a textbook burst of fire that in other circumstances would have sliced cleanly through her armour, any intervening body tissue, and a good ten centimetres of the solid concrete wall behind. Instead, they fizzled and died against the force shields like sparks on water.
Gia looked down, an expression of mild, detached interest written across her features. There had been nothing: no sensation of being struck, no buzz or vibration or tingle, no translucent ripples. The shots had simply ceased to be, with no visible interference from the force shield whatsoever.
The aliens shouted in Argish, angrily checking their weapons. Gia didn’t wait. Once again, she closed the gap, sword held out in front of her, shrugging off hundreds of plasma shots. With the exoskeleton hanging off her, the weight was dreadful. Every step became nauseatingly laborious. Her breath rasped in her throat. The kaygryn didn’t know what to do. One turned and ran; the other had its head cut in half and slumped to the floor.
Then it was Gia’s turn to run. She was picking up stronger warm body signals for the scientists now. They had made good progress through the facility and were entering the emergency tunnels. In a few more minutes of solid progress, they would be exiting into the valley below. From there… well, Gia had no idea what they would do. In all likelihood, they would simply all be killed.
She pressed madly on. Sweat trickled down her forehead and soaked the foam padding of the Mantix helmet. It was like running in a full suit of heavy medieval plate mail through treacle, but there was nothing now, nothing to do but run. The mission came above everything else. She had to protect the civilians.
She reached the final stage—a wide, low corridor, bare concrete and thick supporting beams—and saw the kaygryn there, three Imperials, advancing quickly on the terrified, clamouring mass of scientists. The one-way sealable blast door to the tunnels was beyond, surrounded by warning markers. The kaygryn had not seen her, but already they were turning, their faces transforming from savage delight to surprised fury.
‘Go! Run!’ Gia shouted over her helmet speakers to the scientists. She expended the last reserves of her energy charging the kaygryn down. Two lowered their laser halberds and fired; the third levelled his at the crowd of civilians and began to cut them down.
‘No!’ Gia screamed as the laser beams scythed into the force shield and were harmlessly dissipated. The first kaygryn barely had time to look surprised as Gia’s charged blade sank into its chest up to the hilt. It let out a single grunt and slumped to the floor.
The second kaygryn roared something in Argish. Gia’s charged blade met its charged blade, and they clanged with a redundant noise that she had not expected. Suddenly, the haft was arcing towards her, but it connected harmlessly with her armour. Gia turned awkwardly to the right and brought her own blade round in a long, sideways chop. The kaygryn automatically brought its halberd up to block it, and found itself dumbly holding two halves where split seconds before it had been a whole. Then a large section of its abdominal armour fell away, and a huge dollop of wet red intestines with it, and the second kaygryn pitched forward clutching at its ruined guts.
The third Imperial had paused its massacre by now. Gia had no idea how many of the scientists it had managed to murder, but there seemed to be at least ten smouldering bodies clustered on the floor around the blast door. The rest of them were pouring down the tunnel, the sound of their footsteps ringing off the cold, unadorned subterranean stone. She knew that if she could not kill this alien, then every last one of them would die.
Her force shield expired in that moment. With an unceremonious, anticlimactic bleep, it failed. A small amount of power flowed back into her exoskeleton, but it was still a slack skeleton of heavy components clinging to her like a drowning man.
The kaygryn span the halberd around expertly, ostentatiously, between its four hands. All it had to do was level that quad-powered laser prism at her on the crown of the haft and fire, but as far as it was concerned, she still miraculously had force shielding.
She gripped the handle of her charged blade, and the two of them circled one another.
The kaygryn was the first to strike, a lunge that saw the halberd swinging towards her jugular. She parried it clumsily, but the monofilament edge still nicked her gorget seal. Warning icons blared into life on her HUD as the nanoform armour parted like skin under a scalpel.
She darted back. The kaygryn leered. The blast door to her left closed and sealed with the heavy metallic thud of magnetic locks.
She moved forward again, swinging once, twice at the kaygryn’s centre mass. It avoided both and jabbed the butt of the haft into her visor. It cracked under the savage blow, stunning her momentarily, and she gambled on ducking low. It was fortunate she did; the halberd scythed through the air where her neck had been seconds before.
The kaygryn roared its frustration. Gia thrust her blade forward inexpertly, and caught the alien on the calf of its left leg. Preternaturally, she hurled herself to the right, and avoided another lethal blow as the halberd slammed into the ground and gouged a huge scar into the stone.
She rolled back up on to her feet and brought the blade back into a two-handed grip. She was sweating heavily inside her Mantix, here in this subterranean coffin bathed in red light and screaming with alarms. Her opponent growled something in Argish. It had charcoal-grey fur, lightening to ash around the muzzle, but its blood was red enough.
‘You gutless motherfucker,’ Gia said in a low voice. She brandished the charged blade. ‘Killing civilians like a bitch. Come here! I’m going to kill you with your own fucking alien sword.’
The kaygryn lunged again. The halberd sang past her right ear. She brought the sword round in a tight, sharp arc and caught the haft just beneath the blade. The kaygryn had a few seconds to look surprised before the halberd end clattered to the floor. Then it leapt backwards as Gia pressed her advantage, swinging the charged blade like a club. She pressed the alien all the way to the back wall, slowly chopping off bits of haft until there was nothing left for the kaygryn to defend itself with. After ten seconds, it was brandishing nothing more than its hands. It lost all four of those, too.
‘That’s it! You’re done, asshole!’ Gia screamed, and she brought the blade crashing down on to the alien’s head. In the space of a second, the blade had passed through the entirety of the kaygryn’s body and was biting into the stone floor below. The two halves of the body slid apart like a butchered pig’s corpse, slapping grossly against the floor.
Gia screamed to the ceiling, brandishing the sword like a primitive who had just discovered stone tools. She screamed for everything, everything that had brought her to this moment in time, to this underground installation on Cicero with three Imperial kaygryn corpses around her and the smouldering bodies of ten UN scientists. She screamed for her parents, for her classmates and friends and the hundreds and thousands of bodies that had brought her to this moment. Most of all, she screamed for Warrant Officer First Class Elizabeth Aker, who had sacrificed herself to buy her a few more minutes to complete the mission. How pointless it all seemed now, with the data burned and the prototype expired and her own death assured.
More Imperials appeared at the far end of the chamber. They looked at the corpses of their countrymen on the floor, and then they looked at her.
Gia roared, holding the sword out once more.
‘Stand back, Gia Raman!’ came a voice over her comlink; a narrowband, penetrating laser flash of information beamed directly to the receiving antenna in her Mantix.
‘What?’ she said, her features contorting in confusion, as the room was suddenly filled with the blinding white light of phase fire.
Gia collapsed to the floor as the Imperials were vaporised, along with tens of metres of rock. The blast forced her back against the blast door and caused her HUD to go demented with EXTERNAL CONDITIONS HOSTILE warnings. Even as the sun-like heat and power of the phase strike was washing over her, charring her Mantix, threatening to cook her insides, she was replaying the voice in her head over and over.
Could it be?
When the beam stopped, and the smoke cleared, Gia found herself staring through a bore hole fifty metres deep, directly into the white sky of Cicero above. Rain splattered through the glowing breach, hissing where it hit the semi-molten rock. Figures appeared at the end: the unmistakable form of zhahassi ZENs, and another form, wearing white-and-green armour plating.
‘Zasha?’ she breathed.
‘Gia Raman! Take the rope!’ the Peacekeeper Commando shouted. There was a whistle, and an arrow trailing a spider silk paracord buried itself into the blast door over her left shoulder. A clip with two handles slid down it a few seconds later, and Gia unhesitatingly grabbed it in both hands, crossed her legs over the top of the cord, and allowed herself to be winched up at speed, avoiding contact with the magma-hot cylinder of slagged rock. The closer she got to the surface, the more the wideband opened up. Suddenly, the voices of hundreds of men and women and zhahassi filled her ears.
‘What’s happening?’ she shouted as UN and zhahassi space fighters screamed through the sky above. The ZENs grabbed her roughly by the biceps and hauled her free of the breach. Her HUD dimmed to allow for the bright white light, but she still blinked and squinted. It took her a moment to realise why. Hermit had gone, along with a few kilometres of surrounding forest. All that was left was a blasted hellscape, a blackened rock plain for hundreds of metres in all directions, pocked with craters and embedded with the occasional shredded tree trunk. ZENs and Peacekeeper Commandos picked through piles of kaygryn corpses amidst crates of equipment and portable consoles, inspecting Imperial halberds. In the distance, massive cylindrical ships were slowly landing, lowering themselves down on to the rock plains to the north and anchoring themselves to the ground with gigantic claws.
