Authors: Zachary Brown
18
I tapped Amira. “Wait.”
I kicked at the yellow emergency box on the wall. Once, twice. The cover was warped, but remained closed.
“Come on!” I hissed to myself.
“Hold a second,” Amira said, tapping my shoulder to make contact. “It's locked to recruits. Let me spoof the recognitions.”
The warped cover twisted open as she waved a wrist over it, careful not to catch her suit on the sharp edges.
“Take the ax,” she said.
“Sweet.” I grabbed the ax inside. The handle, made for larger, alien hands, twisted and bulged awkwardly.
But it was a weapon, and holding it made me feel better.
Amira grabbed a can of fire suppressant.
We passed through the utility corridors in the subsections, walking right around clogged emergency airlocks and through gaping holes. Trolls, it seemed, liked punching
through
things. Several times we stepped over the bodies of dead struthiforms near reinforced bulkheads. They'd been waiting for the enemy to come at them through the doors.
Not through the solid walls.
It appeared the trolls had punched through the struthiforms as well. Alien blood saturated the walls and piles of organs lay on the floor.
We were going to have to pass the dorms to get to the armor. How many dead people were inside their rooms?
Amira slowed down ahead of me. I put my hand on her shoulder. “The sensors up ahead are down,” she said. “I don't see any movement behind or ahead of the dead spot, though.”
“Should I take a peek?” The emergency lighting faded away ahead. A pitch-black corner menaced us.
“My eyes are better,” Amira said with gritted teeth. “You can't see in this.”
She pushed my hand away and ever so slowly leaned around the corner.
Nothing happened.
I let out a deep breath. “Come on,” she said.
We stepped around the corner into the dark. I lit up the corridor with the light on my shoulder, just in case anything dangerous was lurking there.
A crouched form cast a shadow on the gray floor. It turned a reptilian head toward us.
“Shit.” Raptor.
The reddish armor jerked as the alien moved away from a body it had been inspecting on the ground and stood.
Amira shoved me back toward the corner, making contact for a second. “Run!”
I was already backpedaling as she passed me by, watching the raptor's long arms pull some kind of rifle up. The beady black eyes stared directly at me, cold and focused. I smacked the light off, plunging the corridor back into darkness, and scrabbled around the corner as a line of pure, coherent energy struck the spot I'd been standing in just a split second before.
“Shit, shit, shit.”
The beam carved up the floor toward the corner, leaving molten metal behind it, until it struck the other side of the wall.
Safely on the other side, I spun around and ran after Amira.
Damn, she was fast. Left, right, I struggled to keep up with her turns. She was using a map in her head of the facility we'd already walked through and was moving us quickly back through it to try to shake the raptor.
But then she abruptly stopped and I stumbled into her. “This corner, make a stand,” she gasped. At least she was also out of breath.
“We should run,” I said.
“We can't. It's following us. It's catching up. I can't shake it. But I
can
see it. Get ready with the ax. We'll probably only get one chance.”
How the fuck was she so calm?
I stood, my own heavy breathing filling the helmet, condenÂsation trickling down it. If there were atmosphere, we would hear footsteps. But now I had to rely on Amira's vision of the raptor through the cameras.
“When I say âswing,' ” she said, “swing. Right at this height. Two feet out into the open corridor.”
I shifted on my feet. This was happening. Now.
“Get ready. Three, two, one: Swing!”
Raptors, even in armor, stood only a foot higher than a human. I adjusted the ax and swung on pure faith as hard as I could. And at the end of the swing, the raptor turned the corner. The ax smacked into its faceplate.
It didn't shatter. Instead, the ax rebounded, hard. But the impact clotheslined the raptor, its feet flying out from underneath, and it landed hard on its back.
Amira leapt forward and triggered the fire suppressant. She aimed it at the helmet, and gallons of foam covered the visor the moment she pressed the trigger.
I leapt forward with the ax and chopped at the raptor's helmet again. Foam and ax bounced away as we struggled.
The raptor got to its feet, us clinging to it. Amira dropped the fire can and went for the rifle the raptor was holding. The alien swung around, trying to shake her loose, so I climbed up onto its other arm.
Its vision was obscured from the foam, but it sensed the extra weight and started throwing elbows. The ax went flying, so I punched at its helmet: a useless gesture, but one I hoped at least alarmed the creature. I heard my suit rip as a claw grabbed at me, but I didn't have time to worry about it.
As Amira wrestled with the trigger guard, the rifle jerked up and around my head. I grabbed the barrel, shoving it toward where I though the raptor's chin might be, and my vision exploded with light.
We all three fell together.
My vision returned. There was no helmet anymore. Just a cauterized stump of neck where the armor stopped.
For a moment we lay on the alien's body, breathing hard, grateful to be alive. “We got lucky,” Amira said.
“I'll take lucky.” My hands shook. Each breath dizzied me. I'd been hit hard in the stomach, maybe broken a rib.
Amira fiddled with the rifle. “Shit. It's security tagged. It won't let me fire it. The rifle only fired because the raptor still had control of it when we were fighting.
Damn it.
”
I wasn't paying full attention. The dizzy feeling was all wrong. It wasn't from getting hit. “I'm losing air,” I said, as I realized why the sensation felt so familiar. I remembered the ripping sound when the raptor's mechanical fingers had tried to grab and break me as I wriggled and squirmed. “My suit's ripped.”
I patted myself down, panicked, and found the long tear. The suit was trying to compensate by blowing air in for me to breathe as fast as it could. But that spiky, bruised feeling was my skin being exposed to vacuum.
I grabbed the ripped edges and pulled on them, then twisted them around until I could hold the rip somewhat shut.
Losing air still, but not nearly as badly.
The suit began a gentle beep near my ear. Low air warning.
“Quick,” Amira said. She picked up the ax as we went past it and pulled me along with her other hand.
I staggered after her, my vision stuttering as I got to my feet. More lefts, more rights, as Amira guided us back through. I hesitated as we plunged into the dark again. And this time I didn't light it up. Let the monsters in the dark come for me. I didn't want to see them.
Amira stopped on the other side.
“We can't take the elevator or big stairs to get up above. Here's the emergency ladder.” She lit up a shoulder light.
I stared at the orange ladder on the wall leading up to a hatch. “I only have one hand free.”
“It's this or run into crickets. And I think there's a raptor coming down to check on its buddy who's gone mysteriously silent.”
“I'm almost out of air.”
“So move quickly.”
I grabbed the nearest rung.
“Faster,” Amira said.
I grunted my way up toward the hatch with little grace and a lot of swearing. “How do I open it?”
Amira was silent, her hand on my ankle. “Shit. Came down with loss of pressure. There's air on the other side, but it doesn't want to open. Give me a second. Excuse me, hug the ladder.”
She pulled herself up behind me, holding me against the ladder and looking up from my back at the hatch. I relaxed against her. I was getting dizzy, and I didn't have the energy to hold on. My hands were shaking, my legs close to giving out. The suit had switched to beeping insistently, and breathing was getting hard.
“Hey, you're getting heavy,” she said.
“I'm sorry.” I tried to pull myself forward.
Amira grabbed a latch and pumped it six times. “Okay, it's charged.” She yanked it out, and the hatch popped open. “Fucking go!”
I launched myself through.
She closed the hatch behind us. I ripped my helmet off, flopped to my side, and took a deep breath of fresh, invigorating air.
Breathing. I would never take it for granted again. Such a basic, beautiful, primal thing.
“We can't stay here,” Amira said. “There's movement. And we made a lot of noise. We have to keep out of their sight.”
“I know,” I said. “Just give me ten seconds to sit here and breathe. That's all I ask.”
19
Inside the shadowy storage room Amira and I wasted no time struggling into our armor. She'd piloted us both around distant footsteps, the sounds of plasma fire, and screams to get us here in one piece.
“Never thought I'd be this happy to get back in this damn thing.” I leaned into my splayed-open suit and smiled as it wrapped itself around me. I gritted my teeth as the suit wormed its way into my spine, but then relaxed as the neural interface synched up. I clenched a fist, feeling power surge through my forearms.
“Hold still,” Amira said. “I'm disabling the training protocols. We don't want the suits locking up in a real fight.”
“Shit.” I hadn't even thought of that.
“Okay. You're good to go.” Amira walked over to the door. Her helmet snapped up out of the collar ring and she held up a finger to silence me.
I snicked my helmet up with a thought.
“What's up?” I asked. With the helmet up, my voice wouldn't carry. And with our quantum-encrypted comms, no one would be listening in.
“Gunfire. Hear it?”
Not with my own ears. And though I was interfaced with the suit, I wasn't quite as good as Amira at getting it to amplify things like that for me. That was going to be in the training ahead. Training we hadn't gotten to.
But then even I heard the crack, just down the corridor. “Quick, behind the open suits,” I said. There were rows and rows of them on their wheeled racks, plugged in to base power and recharging.
Amira moved away from the door and joined me at the very back. We stood like statues in the ready position near several other broken, closed armor sets. I darkened my helmet. “We still don't have any weapons,” Amira said.
“All we trained with were toys anyway,” I replied. “We have the suits. That gives us a chance. More than we had when going up against them with an ax and no protection. Hopefully they won't even notice us.”
The doors slid up, the light from the corridor outside spilling in. Two shadows darted inside. I could hear hushed whispers.
“They're human,” Amira said with relief.
“I know.” I slid my helmet down. The loud snicking sound made the shadows jump.
“Who's there?” someone hissed nervously.
I stepped forward with a thump, gauntleted hands raised. “Devlin Hart,” I whispered.
Someone moved from my right. I hadn't even seen them detach and work around the row of suits. A flashlight blazed into life, and the end of a nasty-looking submachine gun jammed up near my cheek, making me wince.
“That's not a trainer,” I muttered.
I turned and found myself face-to-face with Ken. He started laughing. “It's me, Ken Awojobi,” he said, as if we hadn't seen each other in years. He grabbed the back of my neck and pulled our foreheads together. “You, you made it. Yes, you are too damn annoying and full of yourself not to. I love it. I am so happy to see you.”
“You have real guns,” I said, not sure how else to respond but to focus on the obvious. “How did you get them?”
Ken held up a hand and looked back at the door. “Everyone, in,” he said with a wave.
More shadows slipped in, and one of them closed the doors. Once they were shut, someone flicked the lights on.
Amira shifted in her full armor behind Ken. He jumped away. “Fuck! How did you do that? I didn't even see you there.”
She smiled. “How did you get the guns, Ken?”
Ken tapped the submachine gun. “You like my MP9? I've been waiting for us to go live fire. I wanted to see what our inventory was like, and one of my team members, Boris, was a recruit originally with the class in front of us. Held back for injuries. He knew where the good stuff was, and so did I. We went on a raid. Boris!”
“Incoming,” Amira said.
A short recruit with a sharp chin joined our huddle. He held up a phone in one hand. “Raptor team,” he confirmed with Amira. She nodded, agreeing.
Boris had a distinct South London accent. I imagined him loitering around an Accordance relief camp in the bombed-out ruins around the Thames, selling trinkets to struthiforms on leave.
Someone cut the lights, and we all tensed as raptors ran by outside.
“Okay,” Boris said.
On some unspoken agreement, we didn't turn the lights back on. Amira lit her suit up, using blue shoulder lamps to create a soft pool of light around our sudden conference.
“How'd you get a pair of networked phones?” Amira asked.
“It's like lockdown back at home, isn't it?” Boris said. “Been playing keep-away with ET since I was yea high.” He waved a hand near his waist.
“Boris gets you things,” Ken said. “He had emergency air under his bed, in case Zeus tried something funny.”
“Sadistic fucker,” Boris said.
“We got more emergency breathers and hunkered down,” Ken said. “Then the explosions and screaming started. We figured out it wasn't a drill.”
“Shit went pear shaped,” Boris put in. “So we snagged everyone with breathers willing to listen and made a dash for the weapons locker.”
“A raptor jumped us on the way out.” Ken rubbed his forehead. “It killed five of us before we put it down.”
He wasn't bragging. Not trying to score points. He looked shaken mentioning the deaths.
“How many are near the door?” I asked.
“Outside of me and Boris, five others.”
So just nine of us in the room. “Have you seen anyone else?”
“Just screams and bodies,” Ken rasped. “Efua, you said you saw something?”
One of the other survivors had moved closer in the dark and spoke up. “We did see a cloud of crickets drag Commander Zeus off,” she said. “We don't know what happened, though. Normally they don't take you alive . . . they just start firing first.”
Commander Zeus must have had some value to them alive, I thought to myself. Unlike the recruits.
“I'd thought, once we had guns we could get armor and then fight back,” Ken said softly. “But after that raptor . . . I realized we aren't ready for this. We barely started training. They're seasoned killers. After that encounter, I just wanted to get suited up and find a place to hole up. Fight only if cornered.”
I nodded. “Amira and I were going to armor up, then go hide in the mines. See if we could get somewhere safe from there, or find out what's going on. Is it just here? Or is everything under attack?”
Ken looked up. “Like Earth?”
“The Conglomerate is here, and they usually come for whole systems,” Amira said.
“Fucking hell,” Boris said. “The mines aren't a bad idea.”
“Can you really reach out from there to find out what's happening?” Ken asked.
“If anyone can, it's Amira. Anyone have a better idea to stay alive?”
Ken took a deep breath, then shook his head. He looked at Boris, who also shook his head.
Amira held up a hand. “Crickets,” she said. “They're going door-to-door.”
I turned to Ken. “Give Amira and me the MP9s you and Boris have, you all get into armor, and we'll hold them off.”
Ken hesitated for a second, then handed me his submachine gun. He handed me an extra magazine. “Shoot sparingly, not a lot of magazines left. And we lost most of the other weapons in the fight. We just have some handguns passed around now.”
Amira pointed at a rack of suits. “Ken, Boris, those suits are all the same arm. We're going to need to stay on the same network that they can't hack so we can chat. Everyone else, just make sure you're all in the same arm.”
I stomped my way forward toward the doors and checked the MP9. “Is this the safety?”
Amira leaned forward and flicked up the switch I'd indicated. “Firing mode. Keep it off full automatic for now. Save ammo. The safety is in the trigger on this one. Just keep squeezing.”
“Right.” I didn't ask how she knew all this, but raised the gun and flipped my helmet up as the sound of skittering outside got louder.