Authors: Christopher McKitterick
“
. . .only way I see is to get inside the tower itself,” Tilden finished. “Of course, I don’t have any schematics, but I’m showing that the heaviest internal feedtraffic’s inside there, pitching feed from the antennae and then back out. No promises—”
“
All units,” Nadir commed, “objective B is the tallest tower, that silver one with round walls at the center of this place. When we’re inside, I’ll give you further orders. Move out!”
Nadir started for a second as he focused and saw the Sotoi Guntai Commander sprinting toward him. The Chinese man tramped to a halt less than a meter away and his eyes bored into Nadir’s.
“
What’s the meaning of this?” The man gesticulated wildly at the chaos around them. A whirlyjet screamed toward a gun emplacement full speed, toppling as it plunged, and impacted with a roar and cascade of flame. The R-type stopped firing.
Nadir drew a deep breath laced with smoke and fumes. The battle was deafening. “We’re no longer blacked out,” he told the man.
The Commander’s face grew pale, his eyes opened to reveal bloodshot whites. “You
. . .
you!” the man stammered. He raised his rifle as if to strike Nadir with the stock.
Paolo appeared out of the melee and swung a length of wiring conduit against the back of the Commander’s skull. The man staggered toward Nadir, his face twisted in confusion, and dropped his weapon. Paolo raised the pipe again, but Nadir shook his head sharply.
“
You are the fox,” the man said as he crumpled to his knees. His rifle clattered to the metal beside him, sending little ripples across the gleaming plates as they re-oriented themselves on their pivots.
“
Trouble, Boss!” an EarthCo Warrior 3-verded Nadir. “The damned Sotoi Guntai are turning on us!”
Just then a cascade of other 3VRDs began to flicker to life before Nadir, but he cut them out.
“
Valentine’s,” he cursed. Paolo’s eyes asked a question. “Well,” Nadir said, “we can’t just wait to get killed here, can we? To the tower.”
He began to run, Paolo beside him. They passed aircraft wreckage and disemboweled bodies, smoldering craters and sparking stumps where spires had stood. Nadir chanced a backward glance and winced at what he saw: EarthCo soldiers battling NKK regulars and Sotoi Guntai; aircraft weaving smoke trails through the sky; R-type turrets emitting steady blasts into the air and at ground troops wearing all colors of uniform. He clenched his fist tighter around the receiver of his rifle and ran. Only a few other soldiers seemed to be heading in the same direction, the rest occupied with survival.
They had run perhaps 50 yards when the next line of defense appeared. Tiny balls embedded in the infrastructure crowding around them spun, revealing glass eyes. Pulses of energy shot toward the running soldiers, enough to disable a man. Cries of surprise and pain filled the air ahead of Nadir. And then he discovered another of Feedcontrol’s weapons.
The world around him exploded into white noise, full fivesen feed overloading every receptor in his brain. Nadir couldn’t tell if he had fallen or been shot or was still running, couldn’t even order his own muscles to keep moving or cease. His nerves lied and screamed, lightning crawled along his spine, cramped his arms and legs. Inside his head, pain throbbed and threatened to shatter his skull. He felt tendons tearing loose from muscles. He was helpless, a failure, a piper who had led the world’s last great hope into oblivion right at the place where society’s poisons were manufactured.
Blind and incapacitated, Nadir finally allowed his rage to vent. He thrashed through his memory, seeking ways to defend against this kind of attack, vowing to die before he gave in, and found only one: He must disable his own headcard.
Seconds passed like decades in hell as Nadir fought to locate even the most simple command key. His mind played tricks on him, creating patterns in the white noise, and many times his virtual fingers depressed what turned out only to be grain in the overload feed. At last he found the self-destruct icon, the last-resort modification in all EarthCo Warriors’ cards. This would mean, of course, that Nadir would be completely isolated from what remained of his army, unable to warn them of this new danger.
The pain continued, different now, sizzling at the base of his neck and behind his eyes. Nadir found himself lying on a cement walkway in a pool of his own urine and blood, shadowed by a dish antenna. Paolo spasmed near his feet, soiled himself, bit his lips.
Nadir rose on shaking arms and legs, wincing with each movement. He crawled to his companion and nearly fell on the boy, but regained strength enough to reach out with one hand and pinch a certain spot on Paolo’s neck. Sick with what he was doing to his friend, Nadir held a centimeter of flesh between thumb and forefinger as hard as he could, seeing the skin turn bright red and then purple. At last Paolo’s eyelids flickered.
“
Paolo, do you hear me?”
“
I
. . .
what. . .”
Nadir gasped and shuddered, but managed to keep up his strength. “You’ve got to self-destruct your card. Self-destruct! Find the self-destruct.”
The boy began to convulse again, making Nadir’s job even tougher. All around, lasers and energy weapons continued to lick the electropolis clean of its invaders. A circling one-man fighter captured Nadir’s attention as it held steady fire on the central tower, which rose from a concrete platform only meters from Nadir. Plasma gouted from the point of impact. Meanwhile, hundreds of laser beams lashed out from the cylindrical walls, several of the R-types
rrrrip-rrrrip-rrrriped
up at the tiny craft, and even now missiles began to rocket out of their nooks. The moment of heroism held Nadir rapt. Here, a man fought with the kind of bravery fostered only in the sure knowledge that he was sacrificing himself for the greater good.
A few seconds later, the aircraft transformed into a grey-green cloud pulsing with redundant blasts. Then it was only a brief rain of wreckage and a smear in the sky.
“
Subbs?” a feeble voice asked.
Nadir turned his attention to Paolo, whose convulsions had ceased. “Did you self-destruct?” he asked without removing his pinch on the fibers that connected energy-cells to the boy’s headcard.
“
Yeah. Could you let go of my neck?”
Nadir did so. A crooked smile crossed Paolo mouth. “Crash, subbs, that was deep hack, man. I can’t move.”
“
Get up!” Nadir said. He forced himself to stand without revealing the pain pulsing through his knees and back. He managed to remain upright.
Paolo struggled to his feet. His whole body shook. “There’s a wreck center in Barcelona where a guy would pay a lot for that kind of vixperience.”
Nadir shook his head. “Can you keep going?”
“
What the hell, eh? Do we have any choice?”
The shakes were starting to fade from Nadir’s nerves. He glanced about and saw a few other twitching bodies strewn among the scaffolds and domes. Paolo joined him in repeating the pinch process. Before long, eight men—seven EarthCo Warriors and a dazed looking NKK regular—marched with them back toward the central tower’s pedestal. Two others never pulled out of the brainburn.
They watched smoke roll along the corridors, avoiding the laserbeams—electronic tripwires. The bare face of stone revealed nothing, so they followed the wall, seeking entrance. After some time, Nadir heard a howl of turbines and looked up as the shadow of a heavy NKK hovercraft passed over him. Missiles sprayed in all directions, chaff puffed in great sparkling clouds, liquid fire gushed from a hose normally used to fuel the vessel, and every weapon fired down at the bristling surface. Nearly a hundred meters long, it was called a “target” by EarthCo soldiers. And it was living up to its nickname, collecting fire as a drop of water collects dust when it falls to dry earth. Nadir had no idea how the craft had managed to approach so closely.
Then it listed crazily. A seam appeared near the center of the massive hull; all forward momentum twisted the aircraft in two, each section hurling in right angles to the other. Ground fire continued to pummel the vessel, but now its missiles began to detonate all around, the explosions hidden by towers and spires.
Suddenly, the thousands of wall-mounted lasers that laced the structures flashed to life, searing the air around Nadir’s ragged unit. One man cried out as light stabbed his neck.
“
Hit the dirt!” Nadir shouted, but his throat was raw and he had no 3VRD to back up his words. Two more men fell, their bodies spouting smoke and blood; the beams weren’t strong enough to kill, but plenty enough to wound—especially when their fire was so dense. Paolo dropped so fast Nadir thought he, too, had been shot.
“
Paolo,” he said, crawling beneath the solid beams toward the boy. “Paolo!”
“
I’m clean, subbs,” the other said, rolling onto his back. “Drop your butt or it’ll get burned off.”
Then, just as suddenly as the attack began, all the little ball-swivels fell quiet. They dropped loosely, rocking in their mounts as if their power supply had—
“
Here’s our chance!” Nadir said, rising again. He didn’t look back as he forced his tortured body ahead. Along the cement wall he ran, seeking entrance. At last he found an open platform hanging by a cable—a service lift with manual up/down controls mounted on the railing that enclosed it. He waited until Paolo and the remaining five soldiers had climbed inside, then hit the
UP
button. Nothing happened. He noticed the stench of urine permeating his men’s uniforms.
“
All right,” he said, “you all know how to climb. Let’s go!” He took hold of the thick cable and began to pull himself up hand over hand, legs wrapped around it and boots providing enough friction to assist his weakened arms. The tower’s base rose ten meters above ground level, sheer and featureless. When he reached the top of the cable, Nadir pulled himself along the hoist-arm and stepped onto the top of the monolith. A few seconds later, Paolo joined him on the roof of the pedestal, then three others. Nadir learned that the final two couldn’t manage the climb, and he thought it best to leave them behind—they’d only slow him down.
Above them rose the windowless skyscraper, dull silver in the wan light. The cylinder smoldered in a few places, but overall it appeared nearly perfect. Nadir turned to survey the rest of the electropolis, but his gaze didn’t remain there long. Nowhere among the steel bristles and domes and turrets could he pick out a moving soldier. His artillery men, pilots, and pyrotechs had managed to knock down every autocannon mushroom, which lay in wreckage amid steel plates and fallen antennae. Fires and pillars of smoke told the story of his air force, the remains of which lay burning in the fields surrounding Feedcontrol. A few groundcars raced over the nearby hills and disappeared. One man crouched behind the hulk of a Tora tank and fired his EMMA randomly at the smashed city.
At least, at very goddamned least, Nadir thought, we’ve busted things up enough so people will be forced to see the real world. Maybe they’ll find the treachery in their own lives; we can’t be the only ones.
“
Where to, Boss?” one of the soldiers asked.
Nadir turned and looked at him, a wiry man with the heavy features of Northern Europe. He studied the others, each bearing the traces of divergent ancestry. The NKK soldier had survived. Last he looked into Paolo’s eyes, brown and encircled with bruises and traces of blood.
“
Inside.” He cocked his head toward the oversize door facing them, no handles visible.
The other soldiers grew looks of horror. Paolo perked up.
“
Yes, Boss!” Paolo said, and took off in a ragged sprint across the stretch of concrete.
Nadir smiled and followed. He heard bootfalls behind him.
The air rushed cool and metal-tinged through Nadir’s mouth. Every muscle in his body burned. Blood washed salty across his tongue. Wind tousled his sweat-matted hair.
He was still alive. Life was good.
In space and on the Moon, Luke Herrschaft’s war was being waged with great success. His robotic body sat upon a great leather chair behind a granite slab desk, in one of his administrative offices, deep under Feedcontrol. A running tally of ongoing battles flickered before his eyes, overlaid on the desktop as if it were a monitor screen: So far, EarthCo had lost nearly 5,000 manned spacecraft, tens of thousands of aircraft, and every one of its space and lunar stations had been compromised. More importantly, the numbers revealed that NKK no longer possessed a space fleet in the Earth-Moon system, nor a significant number of Earth-based aircraft.
However, two things gnawed at him. He hadn’t gauged anywhere near the scale of robotic hunters and AI missiles with which the crafty Niks were currently pummeling EarthCo’s Earthside installations. But those weapons had to be finite in number. No, the primary issue bothering Herrschaft was that his hub, his sanctuary, was itself under attack!