Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
The Ring, Hell System, Hunter Space
WARHORSE
Thump.
Target-rich environment. First Fang pounce into action, crash into the Hunters. Weapon up, barge forward, fire. Can’t miss.
Ambient temperature of minus fifty. Hunter blood freezes the second it hits air, puffs of purplish-red snow, treacherous underfoot.
Report from HOMEPLATE, two human survivors unaccounted-for.
Male: Alive, being yanked back from the fight by STARFALL, dropping his knife, shaking and starting to weep.
Female: Falling back into BASEBALL’s arms. Length of Hunter claw protruding from her chest.
Dead.
No.
Rush to assist. Fatal cardiac injury, impaled right through the sternum. BASEBALL shaking out a stasis bag. Only hope is to prep her for emergency surgery.
Her eyes are still open. She looks like she wants to cry.
No words. They both know what to do.
Patient already cannulated. Intraosseous, drilled through the point of the shoulder into the marrow of the Humerus. Maximum Crue-D dose. Won’t do her any good this second, but might help her survive on the operating table.
Draw fusion knife, cut down the foreign body to within an inch of the chest. Long enough to get a grip on and extract, short enough to stay out of the way.
Helmet-mounted medical scanner, full-body sweep. Damn: her heart is destroyed. If the surgeons can fix this one…
Focus
Tissue sample. No time for subtlety or swabs, gotta get her in the bag fast. Sampler leaves a little bleeding wound on her arm.
Intubate while Base shoves her into the bag. Last steps: hands clear, bag closed, field on. Attach tissue sample and upload scan.
Smacks on the arm from ‘Base. “I got her!”
Stand up, back to the task at hand.
Hand-off the male survivor from STARFALL. He’s weeping, staring at the bag, totally disoriented. No time to play nice: throw over shoulder. Light. Skinny. Malnourished. Uninjured, though.
Defenders have the Array built. Bag and male survivor onto platform, he sits down heavily, stares at his boots.
Step back.
“Clear!”
Thump
Wall of impenetrable black, becomes Brothers. Turn.
Aggressors making headway: pitched battle. Join the formation…
Kill.
Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Air Engineering Technician Jack “TWO-SEVENTY” Tisdale
Thump
Jack and Miller’s job now that MOHO and the Lads were away was to help keep the jump room clear. He darted onto the platform. They had a turnaround of seconds, so there was no time to be nice. He left the stasis bag to the medics, grabbed the skinny guy who was slumped in the middle of the platform, heaved him to his feet and with Miller’s help got him off the platform.
He fought them, tried to claw back and stay with the bag, screaming a name.
“Ray! RAAAY!”
A calm, dispassionate voice in the back of Jack’s mind noted that he had no trouble at all holding the thrashing man back. Was he really that strong nowadays, or was the guy just that weak?
“Hey, hey,” he soothed, “We’re gonna do everything we can, alright?”
Miller had his back. “Let the medics work, man, c’mon…”
The guy finally stopped pulling and watched the medics load the bag onto a gurney and hustle it out of the Array room, giving Jack a chance to finally study his new charge.
Benjamin Cook, he decided. They’d been briefed on all seven members of the Dauntless crew. The pictures were like ten years old now and the guy’s face was all sunken, skinny and he’d picked up more than his share of wrinkles and silver hairs, but… Well, he was a white dude. Based on the known casualties, that narrowed him down to only one possibility.
“You’re Ben, right?” he asked.
Cook seemed to snap back a little and turned to look at him. God, there was ice on his cheeks where his tears had frozen. How fucking cold was it over there? He was shivering like crazy, and Jack couldn’t tell if it was from the cold, the adrenaline or sheer emotion. All three, probably.
“…Whuh?”
“You’re Ben? Ben Cook? I’m Jack, this is Rihanna.”
Cook didn’t acknowledge the question. He just turned to look at the doors as they swung closed behind his friend and then, very very slowly, Jack watched him completely fall apart.
It started in his eyes. They darted wildly around the room, took in the personnel, the equipment, the uniforms, back to Jack’s face…
Jack had seen eyes like that before, on the day his parents had told him Sara was dead. People used words like “hollow” or “dead” but those weren’t quite right. They weren’t hollow, but so full of horrible sights that there was no room for anything else. They weren’t dead; they saw nothing but death.
They were the eyes of a man who’d just had the only thing that kept him moving forward taken away from him. Wild, unfocused, bereft of any idea how to cope.
Jack had the presence of mind to let Cook collapse onto him rather than just letting him crumple into a fetal ball on the floor. The guy weighed nothing, he was lighter than most Gaoians, but he hugged as hard as MOHO and Jack could tell that he was finally, finally letting go after God-knew-how-many years.
There was nothing dignified about pain like that.
There was nothing to say, either, so Jack didn’t even try. He just became a pillar of calm strength and let the poor bastard get it out of his system.
Eventually, with many soft words like “C’mon man” and “let’s get you outta here,” plus some gently applied strength, he and Miller finally managed to coax Cook down into a wheelchair, put a blanket around his shoulders and get him out of the way. There were still a couple of Operators, Whitecrests and some gear to go through the Array, but the strike force was pretty definitively through at this point.
He pulled the wheelchair over to where Deacon and Hargreaves were looking after the other two survivors, Spears and Choi. Both were obviously doing better than Cook was: Spears was staring deep into a mug of coffee but he looked up as they brought Cook over so he was clearly in the here and now. Choi looked… stunned, but alert. He was looking around the Array room with interest, taking in the technology. They’d have to relocate in a few minutes, but for now the three needed a second to adjust.
Then there was the Gaoian, Garaaf. He was sniffing noses with Champion Genshi and keening softly in a different corner, but he seemed to be coping surprisingly well. Jack had no idea what was going on inside that fuzzy head, but Whitecrests had always struck him as a little too cool sometimes.
Really, this wasn’t Jack’s area of expertise, but there was nobody on base whose area of expertise it was so… About the only thing to do was be warm and human and calm.
Cook had an interesting reaction to being handed a mug of coffee: he stared at it in horror for a second then threw it violently away from him. Across the room, Green danced aside to avoid taking a metal mug full of hot coffee to the leg.
“Hey, hey…” Jack soothed. “What’s wrong, man?”
“It was… “ Cook tailed off and just shook his head.
“…Ben?” Spears reached out and put a hand on his crewmate’s shoulder. Cook flinched.
“…Hhhot. Hot. It was hot.”
“…Okay. We’ll get you a cold drink,” Jack promised. Miller nodded and made herself busy: She looked more uncomfortable than he’d ever seen.
“…Ray?” Choi asked. “Was that…? We had to leave her, is she—?”
Deacon put a hand on his shoulder. “She’s in the best hands possible,” she promised.
“She got stabbed in the heart, man,” Cook hiccuped and groaned. “Right in the… in the…”
Jack tried to project reassuring confidence. “Medical technology’s come a long way since you guys left,” he said. He wasn’t about to lie and pretend it would be a cakewalk, but that much was very true. Adam and John wouldn’t have sent her back in stasis if they didn’t think there was some hope for her.
It didn’t seem to help Cook at all. He just shook his head and mumbled something that sounded too much like ‘shoulda been me…’
“Goddammit…” Spears hung his head.
Choi closed his eyes. “…And Holly?”
“She’ll be up and walking in a couple hours,” Hargreaves promised.
“…You’re kidding.” Choi blinked at him. “She had a nine-inch nail in her gut!”
“Like Jack said. We’ve come a long way.”
“Holy shit.” Choi looked down at his coffee then drank it with a shaking hand.
The techs looked at each other and decided things had calmed down enough now.
“Look, why don’t we get you guys somewhere quieter?” Deacon suggested. “You’ll need checking out by the medics and stuff, but let’s do it somewhere peaceful.”
“…Right.” Spears nodded. “Yeah, please. Somewhere quiet…. Ben?”
Cook looked up sharply from whatever infinitely distant thing he’d been staring at. “Whuh?!”
“…C’mon man. We’re gonna get you somewhere more comfortable, get you checked out. Okay?” Jack didn’t help him stand, just stepped behind the wheelchair. Cook didn’t reply, just drifted away to wherever his mind was at again.
They negotiated the trio out down the hallway and finally settled on dropping them in the same break room where they’d been waiting with the Lads just before the alarm bell rang. The Couch was still in there, still facing the TV that was still playing Looney Tunes shorts: nobody had bothered to turn it off in the scramble to get moving.
Choi gaped at it. “…Holy shit. Cartoons.”
While Deacon went to call Mears and update him on where his patients were, Jack turned the volume down slightly. “Yeah. Sorry.”
Choi shook his head. “No, man. Just… I’d forgotten those were even a thing.”
“…We fucking made it,” Spears breathed. “…Jesus Christ. I…” He sat down abruptly. Deacon was at his side in a flash and promptly found herself being hugged tight and cried into.
Choi sat down awkwardly by his colleague’s side and put a hand on his back. “…Yeah,” he agreed. “Holy shit, we’re back on Earth.”
“Uh… Sorry dude, but not quite.” Hargreaves told him.
“Huh?”
“You’re not on Earth.”
“We aren’t?” Spears asked. He looked around as though expecting the windowless, simple room to yield further insights.
“This is the city of Folctha, on the planet Cimbrean. Humanity’s first extrasolar colony world.”
Choi stared at him dumbfounded for a moment then sat down. Distractedly, he ran a hand through his hair then rested them lightly on his knees as though he didn’t know what else to do with them.
“…Things really did change, huh?”
“Yeah. the colony’s existence was made public a couple weeks after you left.”
“How big is it?” Spears asked.
“We’re knocking on the door of a hundred thousand people nowadays,” Jack told him.
“Way more than that if you include the Gaoian refugees…” Deacon pointed out.
Choi angled his head. “Refugees?”
Jack, Deacon and Hargreaves looked at each other, then reached an unspoken conclusion.
“It’s… a long story,” Deacon began carefully. “And it kinda begins with San Diego.”
They told them everything. The Hierarchy, the war on Gao… everything.
They didn’t take it well.
Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Xiù Chang
Either Julian’s musical taste was rubbing off, or Xiù was too lazy to change the playlist. But she had to admit that his music usually accompanied her morning workout pretty well. It wasn’t tranquil enough for Taiji but for moving heavy things around he’d figured out about the perfect soundtrack. Aggressive and inspiring without going full thrash death scream like the Lads of the HEAT preferred.
Besides: It was Julian’s, and she missed him. Messages a couple of times a day just weren’t the same thing.
♫♪—I will not be forgotten, this is my time to shine! I’ve got the scars to prove it, only the strong survive! I’m not afraid—♪♫
She’d woken up to a lonely bed. Well, okay, the first time she’d woken up she’d been cuddled up to Allison, but Allison had taken her brothers to school and gone to work while Xiù had fallen asleep again. She’d woken an hour or two later alone and with a nasty tangle in her hair that took some ruthless and painful brushing to remove.
She was getting kinda sick of being the housewife. Sure, she’d asked to take a good long break so she could get the house up and running, but she was definitely ready to step back into the world of doing stuff again. As satisfying as making a nice house had been, she wasn’t interested in just rattling around it all day being domestic.
Technically she still worked for MBG even if she was using all of that leave time she’d saved up over the years of the Misfit expedition. She was looking forward to see what they had for her next.
The music was interrupted by a phone call, and she took a quick swig of water before answering.
“Hello?”
“It’s me, babe.” Allison had a breathless, slightly frantic note in her voice.
“Hey! Is everything alright?”
“Uh… Kinda-sorta maybe maybe not? We just got a call from Sharman, they’ve got some of our guys over there!”
Xiù blinked. “Our guys? Like… MBG guys?”
“An EV crew! One of the missing ones!”
No wonder she sounded so off-balance. “You’re kidding! Which one?”
“Dauntless! Number three! Uh… we kinda got a message back from Kevin. He’s coming over here with Moses but the first jump they can make is this evening. He’s asking if you could go—”
Xiù jumped on the chance before she’d even finished asking. “Of course! I’ll head over there as soon as I’ve showered and changed.”
“Babe, you’re an angel. I think Levaughn might actually faint… I guess you’ll be hearing from Kevin pretty soon.”
Xiù giggled. “Thanks for the heads-up,” she said dryly, and was rewarded with a laugh. “I’d better go get ready.”
“You do that. Wo ai ni.”
“Wǒ yě ài nǐ. I’ll see you this evening.”
She hit the shower just long enough to freshen up while doing her best to keep her hair dry, and brushed the water out while she studied the contents of their closet, which was big enough that with a desk in there it could have been a comfortable small office.
She didn’t need long to select a businesslike graphite pants suit with a red blouse that was a pretty good match for the MBG corporate livery. No jewelry, just a simple minimalist hair clip, and the lightest touch of makeup. She considered herself in the mirror and nodded: She looked professional and composed.
Her phone buzzed just as she was about to summon a cab. It was an email, and it wasn’t from Kevin.
Miss Chang,
I understand from our people at Chiune that you’ve stepped up to handle the EV-03 situation. Thank you, I really appreciate it. Right now we don’t know much, just that they’ve been recovered. We know there were casualties, but it’s not clear how many. Might be two, might be three or four. Sure appreciate if you could clear that up and establish the facts of where they were and what happened to them.
The press are likely to be on this pretty quick: Go ahead and talk to them. We don’t want to release the names of who’s back and who didn’t make it until we’ve had a chance to talk with next of kin, so I’d appreciate it if you could be cautious and if in doubt decline to comment. If you’re asked about the other lost expeditions, be realistic but cautiously optimistic.
We depend on AEC’s good will, so it’s probably worth asking them if there’s anything they don’t want us to say. …Kevin tells me I’m just telling you what you already know. I say you can’t blame me for worrying, but he’s right. I have total faith in you. Represent us well.
Warm regards,
-Moses Byron
Well. No pressure, then.
She opened the cab app, ordered a car, and composed her reply as she was lurking by the front door in wait for it.
In the end, after a few revisions, it came down to two sentences:
Mr. Byron,
I don’t blame you for worrying. I’ll hold the fort until you get here.
-Xiù Chang.
She sent it just as the car arrived. She locked the door behind her, took a deep breath to steady herself… And went to work.
Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
The Ring, Hell System, Hunter Space
Brother Daar (“Tigger”) of Stoneback, Great Father of the Gao
They were all gonna die, most likely.
So long as they took the fuckin’ ring with them, it’d just about be worth it, but… Fyu’s nuts. He’d hafta spend his most bestest Brothers t’do it, First Fang and SOR.
Nothing coulda hurt more.
The worst part about the whole fuckin’ mess was how completely, obviously necessary it all was. The Hunters were a threat to all sapient life, and they were really the only major meatspace tools the Hierarchy had left. Destroying the ring would end them. Not at first, maybe. In fact there’d still be a long road ahead if they were ever going to be completely wiped from the galaxy… but up until this moment they’d been unassailable.
A monster they could kill was a lot better than a monster they couldn’t. Daar would gladly die to make that change happen.
If only he could do it without sacrificing his Brothers…
Those weren’t appropriate thoughts for a battle, though. Not even one that was going well. What had at first seemed like a limitless sea of Hunters at their beachhead had faltered to a trickle. The HEAT knew all the Hunters’ tricks now: the first hint of a nervejam launcher brought down waves of overlapping firepower. The merest suggestion of a heavy Hunter saw it torn apart by grenade rounds. The HEAT made an outstanding spear-tip, gaining ground relentlessly and steadily while First Fang obliterated everything along the flanks and rear, ready to swarm forward and tear into any Hunter force foolish enough to brave the front.
All of which was just a stalling action. They needed a route to the surface, ideally one that the Hunters couldn’t control or easily ambush them through. To do that, they needed to know where, exactly, they were inside the Ring’s geometry. The damn thing was as thick as territories, if they went the wrong way it was a five-day march to the surface.
Thank fuck for good intel: The surface was five klicks that-a-way. Not as close as Daar would have liked, but close enough…. They just had to get through a thick door first. The Hunters had closed it once their assault became an obvious failure, and the damn thing was thick.
Fortunately, if there was one thing both Stoneback and the HEAT knew, it was blowing shit up. Sikes needed to do nothing more than look back over his shoulder and hold up the solution. “Hotball?”
Daar duck-nodded. “Hotball.”
The Hotball was basically just a tiny jump array the size of an ordinary grenade. All Sikes had to do was set it down on the floor and align its camera on the doors.
“Fire in the hole!”
The Humans had brought some of their most bestest toys, and nearly all of them linked back to the Deep Space Strategic Weapons Reserve at Minot AFB on Earth. In the case of the Hotball, the Keeda-fuck crazy assholes had decided that what a team of Operators really needed was the ability to call in naval firepower or missile strikes no matter where they were. It had everything: sixteen-inch guns, five-inch guns, sixty-mil autocannons, even nukes if it came to that… any kind of boom they might need, Minot were happy to provide. All Sikes had to do was dial in exactly how much devastation he wanted to cause, and the rest…
Well, the rest was overpressure so fierce that it briefly reminded Daar of getting his tail nuked on Akyawentuo. The doors didn’t stand a chance. Neither did the handful of Hunters in its immediate vicinity.
Brother Fiin and his hand-picked team were doing an amazing job keeping Daar un-harassed enough to think, too. He thought best while he was moving, and here moving meant fighting, but not so much he couldn’t pause an’ think ‘bout what unique delights the damned tactical problem were giving them. Or, really, enough that he couldn’t stand back and savor the destruction that balls-crazy Hotball unleashed.
The HEAT didn’t wait for the smoke to clear. They didn’t need to. The few Hunters that had survived on the far side of the destroyed doors got ripped to pieces before they’d even recovered their wits.
ABBOTT sounded ice-calm and steady as always as he reported the situation on the far side. “Per the map, looks like a road.”
That “road” was some kind of arterial tunnel for moving big shit about inside the Ring. It ran all the way up to within a few hundred meters of the surface… and it presented exactly no cover and no room to maneuver. If they went that way, they’d be easy to find, easy to pin down. It was the only good way outta their arrival chamber, but Daar weren’t nearly fuckin’ dumb enough to walk in a straight line down a shooting gallery.
Fortunately, he didn’t need to. He strode through the smoke and grinned at the sight of RIGHTEOUS finishing off a red hunter by twisting its skull clean off with one massive gauntleted hand, then exploding the dripping trophy just by closing his fist.
That man was exactly the kind of brutal that Daar could appreciate. He chirped First Fang with his radio and indicated the tunnel ceiling to their right. [“Make a pile!”]
The Brothers didn’t need telling a second time. Stoneback had plenty toys of their own, and Daar didn’t bother paying attention to which one they used. All that mattered was that seconds later there was another massive detonation and the tunnel caved in, neatly protecting their flank and rear from a Hunter counterattack. Weren’t nothin’ but several days of good honest labor with plenty of heavy machinery gonna fix that mess.
The HEAT meanwhile were already moving to secure their way outta the shooting gallery. The map said there was a big open space just through the tunnel wall about a hunnerd meters down. Probably it was in vacuum, but that just worked in their favor: The whole strike force were geared up for EVA combat.
MOHO and KIWI deployed their fusion cutters, and Sikes strung in some explosive charges into the resulting holes. They were working smoothly, well-rehearsed and cool. It took seconds.
“Brace for decomp!”
WARHORSE planted himself and grabbed onto a few of the smaller team members. First Fang dug their suit claws into the floors and walls, the Whitecrests deployed their sticky-paw gloves and boots. In seconds, everybody was holding onto something and ready.
Daar, for his part, grabbed Brother Finn and pinned him to the floor, just in case. He weren’t about to lose anyone that Fyu-damned valuable to the Void.
This third explosion was different. Loud, yeah, loud enough to make his bones jump, but this time tonnes and tonnes of air tore the wall inwards, and shoved it out into the space beyond. The whole deck heaved and a gale like Daar had never felt started hauling indiscriminately on debris, metal panels and men alike.
Something pink-white and broken thumped past him: A Hunter corpse that went spilling out through the breach and vanished from sight. In seconds the cryo room they’d come in through was empty of air and the wind from behind them dropped to nothing, but from up front it was an endless torrent that rolled on and on, tearing up the walls and floor and leaving them all with no option but to hang on and endure…
Silence landed on them like a dropped bag of wet sand. The compartment had finally run out of air.
Daar was left hearing nothing but the hiss of air past his ears through his helmet, and radio noise. He let go of Fiin and noted that the wind had managed to drag the both of them an arm’s length toward the hole, leaving ragged gouges in the metal where their suit claws had cut in. ‘Horse actually shook his arm out when he let go of the tail of men he’d been anchoring.
“We have an egress.” There was a note of dry humor in ABBOTT’s voice.
Daar charged up to the torn hole they’d made and stopped on its threshold. He pant-grinned inside his helmet: The gravity was doing screwy things around the hole’s edge.
Experimentally he picked up a chunk of debris that had skittered to a stop just before tipping into the void, and flung it out into the open space beyond. It dropped… but only very, very slowly, and in the wrong direction. The ‘gravity’ out there was from the Ring’s own centripetal spin, not from the presence of field generators.
Exactly what they needed.
“In,” he ordered, then indicated the tunnel further up in the other direction. “First Fang, make a pile.”
When the road was no good, they’d just make their own… and stop the enemy from following. He knew that this was just the first and most easiest bit, and that things weren’t about to stay so good all the way. They were all about to die, most likely…
…But he was looking forward to this.
Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
Builder Hive, Hunter Space
The Alpha-of-Alphas
The Alpha-of-Alphas had observed Human tactics many times by now. They were much more concerned with self-preservation than Hunters were; most Hunters largely lost any fear of death when gripped by the Hunt. Humans on the other hand fought cautiously, conserved their resources. They only engaged when absolutely necessary and they sold their lives dearly or when there was no other option.
This attack was not consistent with what it had seen of them before. When the other Humans had built a jump device, it had expected to see them swiftly and efficiently extracted, with a large bomb left behind once the rescuers had departed.
This time, the Humans were fighting almost like Hunters. They were fixated upon their Prey, and they were pursuing it no matter what stood in the way.
They were heading directly toward the surface. Sensibly, they were avoiding the Ring’s arteries and transit network and making their own route through the unused parts of the superstructure that were neither pressurised nor equipped with gravity generators, but aside from that their course was straight and true.
This should not have been a problem. The Hive was home to hundreds of millions of Hunters, all of which were theoretically only instants away via jump devices. Devices that the Alpha-of-Alphas was absolutely certain it had ordered deployed.
None had been. The Builders were busily at work, that much was clear, and yet despite their activity nothing seemed to be happening. There were whole broods of Red Hunters and a few hundred Alphas that were all nearly as heavily augmented and shielded as the Alpha-of-Alphas itself, all of them slavering to throw themselves into the fight and feast.
All of them should be descending on the Humans in an unstoppable tide, despite the obstacles the invaders were throwing in their way.
They weren’t, and the Builders were proving elusive to contact. They returned terse but deferential assurances of hard work but no more than that.
There would be a reckoning, later.
For now, the Alpha-of-Alphas had to consider how to stop this invasive lance of an assault using only the meagre resources in that part of the Hive and their limited ability to relocate using vehicular transport.
Its projections were not satisfactory.
Without an obvious solution available, it turned its attention to alternative. If the Builders would not deliver the simple numbers needed to wash the invaders away, then the Alpha-of-Alphas needed to find some other advantage. Thus, it sorted back through the sensor telemetry looking for clues, openings, advantages that it could claim.
It didn’t need long before it found one.
Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
The Ring, Hell System, Hunter Space
Captain Anthony “Abbott”” Costello
“Sir! We just lost the wormhole link to Minot!”
What came back over the radio was a short, rapid burst of contrabass cursing in Stoneback battle-cant. The translator didn’t get the meaning but there was no mistaking the tone.
The Great Father recovered almost instantly. “Was wonderin’ if they might do that.” There was a pause while Daar noticed a Red Hunter charging at him, spun around and…well. Two quick shield-breaker rounds from his personal guard lowered its defenses just as the Great Father slammed into it. Daar was fast, brutal, and left the Red Hunter torn in half almost before it seemed to notice it had been destroyed.
And he didn’t miss a beat. “Options? We’re gonna miss that naval art’y awfully fuckin’ quick.”
Costello was already thinking through the consequences. “…If they’ve got a wormhole suppressor, especially something like Farthrow, then most of the plan’s fucked,” he pointed out. “No wormholes means no jumping in nukes and no jumping ourselves out. Good thing we brought one bomb with us.”
He looked back at IRISH, who’d drawn the unlucky task of hauling it around when Daar had plodded over with a sinister grin and literally dropped the damn thing in his lap. The weapon itself was contained within a stasis field so as not to give away the game to any nosy radiation sensors, but that did nothing to reduce its bulk or its frankly absurd mass; Costello could hardly budge it. Apparently, eighteen-point-seven gigatons of boom didn’t come in a small package.
Their third Protector noticed the attention and gave Costello a cheery kind of upward nod. IRISH may have been the newest and “smallest” member of the Beef Bros but that didn’t slow him down one bit. He and TITAN—almost a Beef himself—had to work together to maneuver the massive charge through low-gravity, but IRISH bore it under gravity like a turtle bore its shell.
On the plus side, if that thing went off while they were anywhere within a few hundred miles of it, they’d never feel it.
“Meaning,” he said via the command channel for Daar’s ears only, “That if it all goes completely to hell, our mission’s already a success. We already got what we need right here.”
“Yup, that was always in the cards. Sometimes you gotta play Ta’Shen with the worstest hand.”
“Don’t mind admitting I’d rather be a long way away when that thing goes off, Great Father.”
“Me too, I wanna die of a heart attack while fuckin’ a pile of Females! When I’m a hunnerd!”
Costello snorted inside his mask; big and lecherous defined the Beef Bros, especially Daar. “Okay, so the plan’s unchanged. We just need to go through thinner walls, save our explosive charges. Stick to the routes we can cut open with fusion blades. We’ll HELLNO to dirtside…”
“An observant enemy’s gonna notice that,” Daar noted. “Not that it’ll matter.”
“I think it’s safe to say that our enemy knew which way we were going anyway.” Costello glanced around. The HEAT were doing what they always did anytime there was a lull in the gunplay: they were slamming down energy supplements while they hoofed it to their next objective. Daar and Costello were doing the same thing which was giving their conversation a strange mono-sentence, staccato feel to it.
He took a pull of the energy drink his helmet was giving him. The way it behaved on his tongue suggested that a chemical factory had briefly been shown a picture of a cherry, but that made it the most palatable mix by far. The others were… violently flavorful.
“Well, ‘Horse has me on this special ‘Juice’ o’ his,” Daar commented, then spoke again after a moment. “It really does taste like getting face-fucked by a lime. Dang.”
“There aren’t many who’re ‘worthy’ of his brews, Great Father.” Costello caught his breath for the spare second while the men cleared an intersecting hallway. “Be proud. Direction, sir?”
“Straight over. There’s another big void just beyond. This one we’ll maybe float through ‘cuz we’re above it and we’ve gotta save time. We’ll see when we get there.”
Costello darted across the intersection at a sharp hand signal from Firth. “Got it.”
One of the Whitecrest scouts reported in. “ABBOTT, ROCKET. Signs of civilian activity up here.”
“What kinda signs?”
“Trash, graffiti, makeshift beds. Audio sensors are picking up a lot of noise in the space above that structural void.”
The Whitecrests easily had the best sensors on their suits. Costello called up the map and consulted it. There was an oval space about the size of a stadium directly above the structural void. Best-guess analysis had pegged it as some kind of goods yard or vehicle park. If it was actually one of the shanties from Garaaf’s report…
Blasting through the floor to make another unpressurized shortcut would kill every single sapient being in that shanty, in seconds.
“We reconnoitre an’ if it’s a bunch o’ meat-slaves, we go around,” Daar instructed.
Costello suddenly hated himself for what he was obligated to point out. He raised his point over the command channel. “Respectfully sir, we’re gonna be killing them all today anyway.”
Daar’s reply started out as just a menacing grumble of annoyance at first. “I know. My soul’s not gonna be able t’take murderin’ em just ‘cuz it ain’t gonna matter and it’ll save us a few minutes.”
Faarek’s contribution was simple. “Wilco. Reconnoitring.”
Well… Daar was in charge. It was his call. And frankly, Costello agreed. Nuking all those poor bastards didn’t sit right anyway, but at least it would be clean and instantaneous. Suffocating after their homes were opened to vacuum was a very different thing indeed.
…Fuck, he was going to need a long session with the chaplain after this one.
They all were.