Six
Ash, it seemed, had finally heard enough. “What do you need us to do?” she asked.
“I have converted a Cabal of my fellows who agree with my reasoning – if the Hierarchy endures, it will lead inevitably to the death of the Igraen people. They will force that conflict, and they will lose.” Six replied. “We have a plan, but we lack certain critical information.”
“Such as?”
“On the rare occasions when the Hierarchy deem that a crisis has reached the point where the authority of the low numbers such as myself is insufficient, we compile a gestalt intelligence identified as ’One’.” he told her. “One uses the combined perspective and intelligence of every Igraen on the network to draw conclusions and to decide the collective will of our species. It is an entity of formidable intelligence, but it is also inherently democratic rather than logical. Dissenting opinions are heard, but it is the majority opinion that matters.”
“So?”
“We intend to commit electoral fraud.”
”How?”
“One may be a digital sapient, but – speaking as a digital sapient – we are still vulnerable to being ‘hacked’ – indeed, I’ve done it myself. A fellow agent called Seven was the one who rescued me from my captivity, and his reward was that I hollowed him out and slithered into his mind, in much the same way as I did to this biodrone.”
She gave him a sickened look. ”Why?”
“Seven would have been my most competent adversary: His destruction was necessary. Instead, armed with his knowledge and authority, I have been able to build and protect the Cabal. One is, in theory, vulnerable to the exact same.”
“In theory.” She repeated, voice dripping with sarcasm and contempt.
“Better protected.” Six explained, letting the attitude slide. “But there is no such thing as a secure system. One is hardened, supremely so, but it is still attackable, penetrable, compromisable.”
“So why do you need humans?” Ash asked, clearly getting tired of repeating herself.
“Because the most important part of One’s protection is that no member of the Hierarchy knows where its physical layer is.” Six explained. “And doing what we intend to do will require us to access the physical medium that stores the seed algorithms from which it is compiled, and effect alterations.”
Ash’s lips parted in batant incredulity. “How in the – do you have any idea where it is?”
“Somewhere in this galaxy.”
She stared at him some more, then shook her head. “Now, I’ma give you another shot at that.” she said. “Try giving me a useful answer this time.”
“That is the only answer I have. Somewhere in this galaxy.”
“Weren’t you lecturing me on physics a while back?” She asked. “You’ve got to know how big the galaxy is!”
“Rather more clearly than you do, I suspect.” Six agreed. “Fortunately, while I don’t know where the systems that house One itself are, I do know the coordinates for a routing station in the Irujzen Reef… I believe human astronomy refers to the volume as the Sagittarius Star Cloud, or Messier 24.”
He produced a slightly old-fashioned USB drive from his pocket with a flourish and offered it to her. “Galactic volume, star, planet, and co-ordinates on said planet. It’s a class eleven, one of our… historical cases. Heavier surface gravity than Earth, and the atmosphere is warmer, denser, moister and richer in oxygen.”
“You mean you killed the people who used to live there.” Ash accused.
“Yes. My first such in a supervisory role. They called themselves the Miorz. Unpleasant creatures – Deeply tribal, very warlike, fond of slavery. Their coming-of-age ritual involved a one-on-one fight to the death, and if the winner was too badly injured they were promptly sacrificed. You should have seen their greedy little eyes light up – all five of them – when they learned how to split the atom: By the time the last bomb fell, we barely even needed to send in the Abrogators.”
He smiled at her shocked expression. “I’m sorry, did you imagine that all Deathworlders are pleasant and civilized? Some of the things we’ve killed needed killing or they would have been a worse plague than the Hunters. There’s a reason I’m pinning my hopes on humanity. When I listed all those species humans have wiped out, you seemed uncomfortable – The Miorz would have laughed and bragged about it.”
Ash took the drive, still giving him a wary dark look. “And this routing station will lead us to One.” She said.
“More likely it will lead you to another routing station. And that routing station may well lead you to another routing station. It is a vast network. But, there can only be a finite number of steps to the hub.”
“And how will we contact you to organise all of this?” Ash asked.
“Oh, don’t worry.” Six told her. “I’ve already made all the arrangements.”
Roy Vinther
“Hey, Barkeep…”
“Yeah?”
Walsh looked up from his tablet. His expression was grim. “The drone’s tracking a convoy coming in…”
Six
“What the hell do you mean you’ve ’made arrangements’? Like what?”
“Nope. My turn to ask the questions.” Six denied her.
“But-!”
“You don’t need to know. In fact it’s much better if you don’t.” He told her, truthfully. “My turn. Tell me the link. Tell me the relationship between events that led you here.”
Ash hesitated, and Six gritted his teeth. In truth, he’d got everything he needed, but it would be torturously irritating to leave this particular itch un-scratched.
“The link is a woman named Terri Boone.” Ash revealed, eventually.
“I know of her. A relative?”
“My… adoptive father investigated her death.”
A cascade of data points connected themselves, and Six relaxed with a happy sigh. The laws of probability and causality were vindicated. The chain of events as he could see it now was tangled, yes, but no less probable than any other sequence involving the lives of dozens of people.
“…Then that would make you…” Her expression hardened, and he decided that it would be more fun to leave her guessing. “Hmm. Thank you for your honest answer, ‘Ash’.”
She stood. “Are we done here?”
<+Priority1:PerimeterAlert:bExpected=False:refIndividualOfInterest=InsufficientData+>
Six hesitated, then nodded. “You know, I believe we are.”
She gave him a murderously cold glare, and pushed past him. she opened the door in the surprised face of ‘Barkeep’, who had been about to knock.
The two blinked at one another.
“You done?” he asked.
“We’re done.”
“Good, ‘cause we got incoming.” He raised a small device, and ‘Ash’ presented her cranium to him. Some kind of ultrasonic scanner, if Six was any judge. It produced a happy ping and a green light, and Barkeep issued a satisfied grunt.
“Incoming?” She asked, looking past him to stare warily at the ribbon of light coming off the highway and up the access road.
Barkeep took the opportunity to conspiratorially whisper a question to her. Six turned up the gain on his auditory cybernetics and listened in.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Just talking to that creepy fuck gave me a headache.” She murmured back. “But I’m fine. Thanks.”
Barkeep turned to Six. “They with you?”
Six shook his head. “They are not. I suspect the Hierarchy has found us.”
He stepped back into the office and produced a revolver and several speed-loaders from a desk drawer. “If I were you, I would call in whatever reinforcements you have.”
Owen Powell
”STAINLESS, DRINKIN’ BUDDY, we’ve got probable BIG HOTEL rolling up on us. ASH is in hand with vital data, overland egress is not plausible. Requesting support, over.”
Powell spat a curse. For a few bright and hopeful moments there, he’d started to entertain the idea that they might make it through this thing without anything going wrong. He waved a hand furiously to grab Thorpe’s attention.
“Copy DB, we’re almost ready. ETA,” he glanced at Thorpe who held up three fingers. “Three minutes?” The suits were just beginning to settle on the men and they needed to be fully seated before they deployed. The loadmaster, overhearing the conversation on the party line, shook his head and flashed both his hands twice. “Scratch. Aircrew thinks up to twenty.” Another gesture informed him of the reason. “We need to re-circle our orbit to get into position. Fook.”
The wait on the line was a grim one. When Walsh replied, he sounded like a man who’d just been swearing violently. ”…Understood, STAINLESS. Out.”
Powell sprang to his feet and shook the deck as he approached the loadmaster with a purpose. Loadmasters were a hardy breed who regularly dealt with the angriest and most violently-inclined Army personnel on drops and exercises, but this one still flinched ever so slightly. Even his career had probably not prepared the man for well over three hundred pounds of angry, desperate astronaut with more combat training and experience than the most hardcore operators and an academic education to match, and more than a hundred pounds of suit and the weight of combat gear beyond that. Given that Powell fancied that the pilots were probably feeling the plane wobble just a little with every heavy EV-MASS footfall, he could hardly blame him.
“Staff sergeant, we very much need to get there faster.” Powell explained, keeping his voice level but urgent.
The loadmaster nodded and briefly conversed with the aircrew. “Are your men ready, major? We’re flying easy and level for your techs’ benefit.”
A quick glance showed they were, and the techs were already packing it in. “SOR! Sounds like we’re in for a rough ride. Get everything secured!”
He turned back to the loadmaster. “We will be shortly.”
“Yes sir. Let me know.” He grinned slightly, “The pilots are gonna love this.”
There was a squeal of metal on metal from down the bay – Warhorse had put his back into shoving one of the suit stations back onto its transport pallet. Baseball was bracing himself to do the same. The loadmaster cringed visibly, and doubly so when the second and third stations were stowed with similarly physical efficiency that undoubtedly did serious damage to the load handling system and floor plating. His crew chief would murder him when they got back.
Powell could hardly blame the man for the way he put a hand on top of his head and stared forlornly at the damage. “Fuck. Imma need t’buy beers for the whole goddamned MXS.”
Powell clapped him sympathetically on the shoulder. “Tell them to take it up with me, lad. We’re in a bit of a hurry. As you can see, we’ll be ready momentarily.”
The loadmaster swallowed and nodded. “Yes sir,” he said, taking refuge in deflated stoicism.
The techs knew the business of stowing their stations, and the words were barely out of the loadmaster’s mouth before the equipment was all crated, strapped and locked down. The Globemaster could have performed a barrel roll and they would have stayed comfortably in place. Thorpe aimed a thumbs-up at Powell as he threw himself into a seat and strapped in, his work finished for now.
The loadmaster took his cue. “Get seated and strap in. We’ll be starting decom, too.” He headed to his workstation–forward in the cargo bay, and starboard, near his drop management station–while the other two aircrew set up stations near the rear of the aircraft.
Powell nodded, tugged his suit’s air mask off the velcro on his leg, clipped it securely into place – high altitude as this jump was, there was no need to do a full vacuum-safe seal check – and accepted Warhorse’s help and shrugged on his mission gear before installing himself in one of the chairs, waiting for the go signal.
Once everyone was seated, and the aircrew did a final check to ensure everything was, in fact, secure, the pilot was notified.
The flight got interesting.
Roy Vinther
“Motherfucking shit-ass son of a fucking fuck!” Walsh aimed his head at the sky, took a deep breath to compose himself, and then keyed his mic. “…Understood, STAINLESS. Out.”
Coombes broke the silence. “…Bad news?” he asked.
“Twenty minutes.” Walsh grabbed his binoculars. “They’re gonna be here in… five.” he estimated, aiming down the road.
Vinther took them off him. “Why is it always white fuckin’ Toyota Hiluxes?” he mused to himself, trying to guesstimate at a headcount of their approaching enemy. Even his most optimistic lower boundary was an unhappily large number.
Firth and Murray approached. “Plan?”
“Hunker down and wait for the cavalry.”
“That’s us up front, then,” Murray nodded to Firth, who produced the single most predatory grin Vinther had ever seen.
“Yup.” From under his terrible Hawaiian shirt, Firth produced a Ka-Bar of obviously custom and superior make. “Guess I’ll be the distraction, then.” He reached down and made sure his boots were properly done up. “Good thing I didn’t wear my sandals.”
Vinther raised his eyebrow at the sandal comment but nodded his approval, and turned to the others. “Pavlo, Coombes, we’re over there.” – he indicated the cover offered by the heavy mining equipment, where the three of them would have excellent fields of fire as the arriving trucks pulled into the open space.. “Walsh – you see those rocks up there?” he indicated a spot on the hillside above the foreman’s office with a good vantage point down the village’s two main roads. “You live there now. You.” he turned to Ava. “Stick the fuck right by me and keep your head down.”
The first thing they’d done upon seeing the approaching pickups was to shove Rìos into her armor. She was trembling but alert, and nodded emphatically.
“Alright. Clear the trucks out and then block the access road with them. We’ve got four minutes. Move!”
Six M4 carbines, plenty of ammo for them, a Mk20 for Walsh, grenades, and all the equipment they’d brought with them was easily unloaded and hustled to the safety of their defensive position. Walsh put his muscles to use and took all his gear up the hill in one go, and the two SOR men drove the two SUVs into position and then actually lifted them to swing their back ends round and create a firmly immobile roadblock.
The efficient bustle ended with a minute to spare. Vinther was knelt behind the monolithic mechanism of the rock-crushing machinery, which was probably solid enough to deflect anything the hostiles might have, short of a tank. He laid everything out, checked that Ava was in place and decided that it couldn’t hurt to arm her.
She took the gun as if it was made of uranium, but managed to mumble an acknowledgement and thanks.
That was as safe as she was ever gonna get. Firth, Murray, Pavlo, Coombes and Walsh were all in position, and if Vinther was any judge, Firth was taking a moment to pray, head bowed and a hand on Murray’s back. Vinther looked upwards.
“Hey… Lord? If you don’t see fit to see me through this… please forgive me all the wrong I’ve done.” he prayed. “…and all the wrong I’m about to do. Amen.”
He heard Ava whisper an echoing “amen.” and the first truck came round the corner.
Owen Powell
With actively moving cargo, the flight crew had kept the g-forces under control: pointing straight down into the decking and at a constant “weight” so as not to injure anyone walking about – the so-called “bus driver” mode of operations.
Now that the cargo was locked down, the pilots were freed to unleash the frustrated part of their soul that had wanted to fly fighters, and for all that the C-17 had a not undeserved reputation as a boring cargo plane, it was also a cargo plane built for performance. Now, instead of doing a wide, sweeping, gently rolling turn at cruising speed, the pilot could do a combat drop. This involved a rapid series of hairpin turns combined with steep dives to recover kinetic energy. Seen from outside, such a maneuver was deeply alarming. From inside, it was a sideways roller coaster.
What would have been a ten minute slow circle was shaved down to less than a minute. They still weren’t going to be able to jump for longer than Powell would have liked – lining up on a drop required finesse and for the plane to be travelling at a safely low airspeed. Then there was the need to decompress so that nobody on board got the bends, and the time involved in falling to Earth which, from their current altitude, would take a minute or two.
Still, they’d shaved five minutes off their ETA. Those five minutes might make all the difference.
Powell glanced at the loadmaster, who raised a thumb for him, flashed both his hands once and then offered three fingers. Decompression was already well under way – Powell could see the pressure and temperature both plummeting in his HUD – but he wondered about making a recommendation through Admiral Knight to see if Boeing might be persuaded to develop a new C-17 with forcefields and superbatteries. Armed with those, the crew inside could have stayed warm and comfortable while the SOR in their spacesuits stepped through a pressure-retaining field.
It would have saved the poor techs from fidgeting and shivering at least.
“DRINKIN’ BUDDY,” he sent, “STAINLESS. Revised ETA is thirteen, that’s one-three minutes, over.”
Walsh’s voice came back tense and focused against a backdrop of gunfire. All he said was ”Copy, STAINLESS.”
Anthony Pavlopoulos
The moment when Firth and Murray struck was so sudden and so violent that Pavlo almost forgot to fire his weapon.
The convoy was undeniably hostile. Every human body – male and female – sitting in it was armed and had the characteristic blank expression of a biodrone that wasn’t actively pretending to be a person right now. In fact, Pavlo could swear that he recognized one of the passengers in the lead truck from the gunfight in Cairo.
This much had been established before it stopped at the impromptu roadblock. The drones in the back of the lead Hilux began to efficiently – and in eerie unison – gather themselves to disembark and clear the obstacle, but Firth was faster.
He vaulted the roadblock, sprang across the gap and landed with both booted feet on the hood of the stopped pickup. There was a horrible crunch of metal and the car sagged as if its front axle had been damaged. The impact rocked the drones in the back so badly they had to take a moment to recover their balance, and in that moment Firth was down off the hood, and had wrenched the driver-side door off the car and dispatched the driver and shotgun passenger so quickly that Pavlo couldn’t even clearly see what he’d done. By the time he’d processed the encounter, Firth was already clear of the engagement zone and barreling towards the next truck, jinking with every step.
The drones in the back of first truck made to pile out and attack him, only for Walsh to put a round straight into the first one’s center-mass, and when Vinther, Pavlo and Coombes raked the Toyota’s flank with an accurate volley the drones clearly decided that they needed to get out on the other side.
This was a mistake: Murray was waiting for them.
Pavlo couldn’t see exactly what their softly-spoken Scotsman did, but to judge from the calm way he popped up after a few seconds to drop an incendiary grenade into the truck’s flatbed and then faded from view, it had been effective. The grenade went off and the truck was a fireball in seconds, definitively blocking the road in a way that the two parked SUVs hadn’t. Even biodrones probably weren’t going to try and shove a steel inferno out of the way.
The second truck didn’t go nearly as well as the first. What biodrones lacked in free will, they made up for in communication, responding almost like a single organism. By the time Firth barreled into the second truck’s worth, the full queue beyond them were vaulting down to the ground.
Freed from constraints such as giving a fuck about their comrade’s lives, they rapid-fired into the melee.
Firth retreated into the limited cover offered by the second truck, holding up a jerking biodrone corpse as a bullet-catcher. Walsh fired again, scoring a second kill, and the biodrone army spread out and went to ground.
This suited Pavlo just fine. The Delta team laid down waves of fire into the cover the drones were using, buying Firth the opening he needed to slip away and blur across a short stretch of open ground, throwing a frag grenade as he went. Part of the rocky patch where a tough knot of drones had taken root became a rain of dust and flesh.
Over the open line, he heard Walsh acknowledge an update from major Powell, which he passed along. “Paras ETA one-three minutes!” before taking another shot.
Pavlo grinned, aimed, and drilled a biodrone with a three-round burst as it crawled up out of its impromptu foxhole and took careful aim in Firth’s direction. By some miracle, things were actually going well.
Something made a hideous shrieking sound that seemed to fill the whole sky. Whatever it was that gave the SOR their strength also gave them reflexes to match it seemed, as both Firth and Murray dived in opposite directions away from the truck they’d been using for cover an instant before something crashed down on that truck hard enough to smash it flat into the road, pulverising the road for good measure.
The smoke from the burning lead pickup billowed, flattened and burst open exactly as if something had flown through it, and the bottom dropped out of Pavlo’s stomach. He snap-fired to keep the biodrones’ heads down and got on the comms.
“Barkeep! It’s that fucking UFO! We gotta-!”
The alien ship fired a second time, and the only saving grace for sergeant first class Anthony Pavlopoulos was that he never felt the blast that destroyed him.
Owen Powell
”Man down. HANGOVER is KIA.”
Murray was always softly-spoken and economical with his words, but anybody who knew him understood that he was never terse. The fact that his voice was now as level and cold as a frozen lake meant the situation had just gone from serious to dire.
The live feed from Walsh’s UAV meant that Powell didn’t need a sitrep. He plainly saw the way that the bulldozer sheltering Coombes lurched a meter sideways as a third pulse cannon shot battered its flank. Coombes himself only narrowly escaped being pulped.
“BARKEEP, STAINLESS.” he ordered. “Pull back into the village, you need overhead concealment.”
”Copy, STAINLESS.”
”DRINKIN’ BUDDY, can you get a fix on that UFO?”
”STAINLESS, DB. Workin’ on it sir. It’s cloaked.”
“DB, Para drop cannot go ahead while BIG HOTEL have air superiority.”
”STAINLESS… UFO is producing zero emissions, and it’s transparent to all sensors”
“Surf the damn thing and tape an IR flare to it if you have to, support is not available until that UFO has been splashed.” Powell repeated.
“Understood, STAINLESS.”
Movement in his peripheral vision drew Powell’s attention to Baseball putting a comforting hand on Warhorse’s shoulder. Arés for his part was completely still: his fingers weren’t even fidgeting nervously. Aside from the mechanical rise and fall of his breath and the occasional jolt as the C-17 fine-tuned their approach, he wasn’t moving at all.
Wishing he could say it aloud, Powell willed the young man to hold it together, and willed Walsh to find a way. There was nothing worse than being helpless.
Roy Vinther
The fourth and fifth pulse cannon shots hammered the rock-crushing machine with such force that a few hundred tonnes of metal actually shifted on its treads. Both Vinther and Ava flinched away from it, though neither could dare to stray too far without exposing themselves.
Retreating into the village was a good order. It was one Vinther would have loved to follow immediately. The problem was that it would involved a dash over nearly fifty meters of open ground in full view of the UFO and the biodrones, a prospect that was made even less appealing than it had already been when a sixth shot wrecked the conveyor belt, which collapsed with a wail of tearing metal.
Ava made a terrified noise. She was curled up in a ball with her arms over her head and hyperventilating, and there was absolutely nothing Vinther could do for her as the rock crusher took another hit and rocked alarmingly.
Gunfire erupted at the far end of the loading area, and the bombardment ceased.
Vinther gritted his teeth and poked his head out of cover, expecting at any second to be reduced to a puddle of blood and liquefied tissues at the bottom of a crater like poor Pavlo.
An army of biodrones had emerged from the village to engage the Hierarchy drones. Armed with the numerical advantage and complete disregard for their safety, they caught the advancing Hierarchy units in enfilade and swung the battle in the opening fusillade.
The UFO’s engines screamed as it turned in the rising column of dust it had kicked up, and turned its cannon on the advancing Cabal troops. Each shot blasted through them like a wrecking ball, crushing and bursting them as if they were water balloons, but by God it was an opening.
“UP! RUN!” he yelled, grabbed Ava by the back of her armor and hauled her behind him. She took a few steps to find her footing, but put her head down and sprinted alongside him.
They made the first thirty meters unnoticed and unopposed. with twenty meters to go, the Hierarchy drones shifted their focus from their Cabal opposite numbers and opened fire in their direction. Behind him, Vinther heard Coombes curse and stumble as a lucky shot winged him. Ava yelped and nearly tripped as another round struck her square in the back, but her armor’s SAPI plate held and she kept her footing and ran.
Ten meters to go and the biodrones were forced to put their heads down as Murray appeared in an upper storey window and sprayed them with suppressing fire. There was nothing he could do about the UFO though, which howled as it banked back across the open space and lined up directly behind the runners.
Vinther gave Ava a solid shove in the arm, pushing her towards a gap between two houses. She stumbled, fell and rolled safely into the concealment offered by the alleyway.
Vinther jinked right. The pavement to his left cracked as another of those impossibly powerful pulse shots slammed into it. He angled towards the next gap that offered itself. There were only three steps to go before he was-
Ava Rìos
A pulse cannon round scythed down the street, blowing out the corner of a house and obliterating Vinther in mid-stride. The building – a cheap construction made from concrete bricks and wooden beams – promptly collapsed and buried the horrific slurry of crushed meat and shattered bone that was all that was left of him.
Concrete dust filled the air. The UFO’s high-pitched roar tracked futilely up and down the street as it presumably tried to scan through the dense cloud and failed, before it gave up and backed off toward the other end of town to assist in the gunfight between the biodrones.
Ava was too busy shivering and trying not to throw up to really pay attention, but she did pay attention when panting, footfalls and swearing heralded the arrival of Coombes, who stumbled into her alleyway and seemed to nearly collapse with relief upon seeing her.
“Christ. Jesus. Fuck.” he suggested, eloquently.
Ava could only nod. She wasn’t sure she could remember how to speak at that moment.
Coombes shook his head and raised a bloody hand to his communicator. “DRINKIN’ BUDDY, BOUNCER…. BARKEEP is KIA. I’m wounded. ASH is…” He glanced at Ava, who managed to give him a shaky thumbs up. “…A-OK. We have cover and concealment near Point Charlie.”
Walsh’s reply was quiet. Unlike the rest of them, running from his position hadn’t been an option, and the best that Walsh could do was stay down, stay camouflaged, and watch. ”BOUNCER, we need to light that UFO up right now, ‘cause the cavalry ain’t coming ‘til it’s gone. Only thing I can think of would be hitting it with a firebomb or something.”
Coombes tried to haul himself upright, grimaced, and collapsed. Ava realised that his breathing sounded strange, like he was short on breath and wheezing. “LIGHTWEIGHT and GUINNESS, you hear that?”
All they heard from Murray was a clipped. ”Copy.”
“LIGHTWEIGHT, come back?”
There was a too-long pause, then a terse ”Copy. Busy here.” in Firth’s angriest tones.
Coombes nodded. “Okay. Ava. I’m gonna need your help with this. Just do what I tell you, okay?”
Ava nodded, and he handed her a plastic syringe applicator covered in simple diagrams to demonstrate its proper use. “I’ve got a… wound, down here…” Coombes said, leaning forward with a pained groan and lifting his shirt. Ava’s stomach lurched. that was a lot of blood, and it was… bubbling…
“Hold it together!” he snapped. “Now…” he coughed. “Step one, I need you to find the entry wound. It’s below my shoulder blade on the back. This is gonna hurt like a motherfucker, but I need you to shove that applicator right in there and empty it. To hell with how I respond, okay?”
“Okay. Okay.” It was a relief to say anything, even if it was just the same word over again, but finding her voice at least gave Ava the impetus she needed to do as she was told. She shifted around and found the wound site. Some detached, chilly part of her noted that under normal circumstances she would have balked at getting blood on her, but right now that did not seem like an important issue.
“Ram it in there good.” Coombes ordered, bracing himself. Ava swallowed hard and obeyed. An off-white foam boiled out of the applicator’s nozzle and neatly filled the wound, solidifying in seconds. Though it clearly hurt like hell, he bore it in silence.
“G-good.” he managed. “Gauze. And tape.” He tapped at the open medical kit beside him. Ava piled into it, found the requested items – thank God for clear labelling – and did her best to affix them securely.
He bore her clumsy medicking stoically, and handed her a square pack of some kind the moment she was done.
“Put that… over the exit wound…” his breathing was definitely getting more difficult. “It’ll stick down…just fine…through the blood… but you gotta… stick it down good… y’got that?”
“Got it.”
The most difficult part by far was opening the packaging with blood making her fingers slick and sticky. The circular patch inside was transparent and clearly labelled, and sticking it on really was as easy as following orders and trying to ignore the way he squirmed and clearly wanted to scream as she pressed firmly on his wound.
He waved her off. “Okay…. okay…. Whew….”
There was a nasty blowing noise coming from the patch she’d stuck to his ribs, but Coombes seemed to start feeling better within only a half-dozen breaths or so. By the time he’d taken a half-dozen more, he was almost breathing normally.
“Hey… I’ve had worse medics.” he joked, weakly. “You did good.”
“Please don’t get shot a second time.” Ava requested. She was feeling a lot better herself. Grim as it had been, having something, anything to do was a world better than curling up in a ball and praying.
Coombes chuckled, even though it plainly hurt. “Ow… heh. Okay. Last step is I need to be in the recovery position. Help me tip over, that way.” he waved his right arm.
That part was much easier, and Coombes was getting his limbs settled into the right position when Ava caught a glimpse of movement across the street. Firth glanced up and down and darted across the open space faster than a manic cat.
“Biodrones are warring.” he reported. “How bad are ya?”
“Doctor Rìos here did a pretty good job.” Coombes replied.
Firth gave Ava a skeptical look, which turned into grudging respect when he saw the blood on her hands. “You hurt?” he asked.
“I’m fine.” Ava told him. “My armor stopped a hit.”
“Good, ‘cause if you die Warhorse is gonna kill me.” Firth grunted. He turned and checked up the street again. The sleeve of his shirt was soaked red.
“Firth, you’re wounded!” Ava pointed out.
He glanced at it. “Ain’t nothin’. Look, Coombes, we got a serious problem. Ain’t no gasoline in this village. It’s all diesel.”
“So Walsh’s firebomb idea’s a non-starter.” Coombes observed. He shivered. “Ava, there’s a foil blanket in the kit, I’m gonna need it.”
Glad for something to do, Ava dug into the kit looking for it.
“Not unless Hajji started drinkin’ whisky.” Firth grunted. “No, I think I’ma have to do something really dumb.”
Staff Sergeant Timothy Walsh
The one nice thing about living in the space future was that nobody had turned out to have stupid bullshit-o-tron sensors that could detect life signs through walls or anything like that. The EM spectrum was the EM spectrum for everybody, and that fact was the only reason that Walsh was still alive. Mylar reflected infrared just fine, and whatever sensors the UFO had, they weren’t space-magic-fuck-you sensors that could spot Walsh underneath his camo blanket.
Or at least, they hadn’t, yet. Still, if the biodrones below figured out where he was, he probably wouldn’t know it, he’d just become another bloody crater in the ground, identical to Pavlo’s.
Tha t meant not moving. Never mind the sharp itch inside his right boot. Never mind the stone pressing into his knee. Never mind any of that. Motion – or at least anything more than the most glacially restrained motion – would mean instant death.
Even answering his comm had to be done slowly and quietly. x ”DRINKIN’ BUDDY, LIGHTWEIGHT. Please tell me our angel’s got an AIM-9X on it.”
Walsh resisted the urge to sag. That meant the firebomb option was a no-can-do. Firth knew what he was asking.
The F-22 did indeed have a AIM-9X, which would have locked onto the UFO just fine by tracking the friction of its movement through the air, if the fucking thing would just remain in motion. Unfortunately, the alien ship just flitted from standstill to standstill, never in motion long enough to secure a good target lock.
”LIGHTWEIGHT: It does… But the UFO keeps standing still. No lock.”
”Timing on the strike if you could get a lock?”
“Six seconds.” Walsh replied promptly. That number had remained at the forefront of his mind ever since the UFO had first shown up.
He knew more or less where it was. It was dancing around the west end of town systematically flattening buildings to crush the Cabal biodrones that had entrenched within them. Unfortunately, that knowledge didn’t translate to a viable target.
“Any way we can bring that down to below four?”
“Not without the UFO maybe seeing it. Our angel’s gonna have the kinetic energy, but that fuckin’ spaceship’s got the acceleration and tech edge. The hell are you thinking, anyway?”
”Thunder run.”
It would work. That part was immediately obvious. If they timed it properly then all they had to do was launch the missile and force the UFO to move. There was just one small flaw in the plan.
“That’s suicide.”
“Maybe. I’m pretty quick.”
”No other options.” Murray chimed in. “The Cabal drones are being overrun.”
Walsh had to agree.
“Alright. We’ve got… five minutes until the paras can drop.” he said. “I’ll set it up. LIGHTWEIGHT, you… get ready.”
“Just so we’re clear, I get to fuck your sister after this, right?”
Walsh suppressed a fatal urge to laugh. “You’d need to do a lot more than this. Get in position.”