Lacuna: The Prelude to Eternity (27 page)

“Cheung to surviving Broadswords, continue close support and engage targets of opportunity, we’ll check out that wreckage.”

“This is
Harlot
.
Bruiser
is breaking to engage targets. We’ll remain here and cover you while you extract the wounded.”

If there are any
, Cheung thought to herself. As she drew closer, though, she saw a small hammer smash one of the cockpit windows and a bloody figure climb halfway out, appearing to get stuck.

She and O’Hill scurried up the crumpled hull to the cockpit, her hands reaching for the pilot’s. “Stay still,” Cheung said, “you might have spinal injuries.”

“I feel fine.
You
look like shit, though.”

For a moment, she thought she was being genuinely insulted but then remembered what her suit must look like to an observer—covered in blood and scorch marks and pitted with sand. “Hey, you want me to leave you here?” she asked, reaching down and grasping hold of the metal frame of the window, grunting as she worked the metal. “O’Hill, help me with this.”

Together, groaning with the effort, the two managed to pry an inch or two of extra room, and the pilot wiggled free.

“Anyone else in there?”

“Heaps. The crew. We gotta get
‘
em all out.” The pilot looked around, dazed. “Where’s the SAR team?”

Cheung grimaced, looking through the hole in the glass at the crumpled inside of the ship. “We’re it.”

“Oh.”

“We have to secure the area,” said O’Hill, “and wait for support to extract these crew.”

That was going to be difficult. “Defence perimeter, then.” Cheung snatched a claymore from her pack. On the front was written, “FRONT TOWARD ENEMY”.

“Don’t tell me how to live my life,” she said, jamming it into the ground. It was an American design, similar enough to the Type 66 she’d trained on.

“What?” said O’Hill.

“I was talking to the mine.”

He laughed. Cheung laughed. The pilot stared incredulously.

Her radio crackled. “How’re you doing down there, Lieutenant?” came Anderson’s voice. In the background, klaxons wailed, alarms she recognised as overload warnings and system outage alerts.

“Having a whale of a time, Captain. Christmas came early this year.”

“How are you finding the resistance?”

“Glorious, Captain. Bevra drones light up real good when the Wasps strafe them with their cannons, and we’ve got Broadsword gunships running close air support for our Marines. They just took out a fuck-off massive, previously unseen model of tin can, but we lost
Switchblade
. I’m assisting with the crew recovery now. Could use a hand.”

“Very good, Lieutenant. We’re encountering increasing resistance up here, but I think that big guy was controlling them. We’ve got them on the defensive. Stand by for good news.”

She laughed, reaching out and clapping the dazed pilot on the back. “Always ready to hear good news, sir.”

The hull of the ship began to move, rumbling as though threatening to take wing once more. She reached for her rifle as the sand surrounding the ruined ship erupted, revealing the burrow-holes of nearly a dozen constructs. They quickly shook off the sand and, with clinical precision, aligned their weapons on the group, pointing them directly at the three Humans sitting atop the ruined Broadsword.

“Any time now.”

C
HAPTER
XI

Phase Two

*****

Operations

TFR
Beijing

Orbit of Qadeem

I
T
WAS
A
NEW
SENSATION
for Liao, observing a ground battle from above with little she could do to contribute. Iraj was coordinating the ground assault. She was in charge of everything else. She double-checked the next set of targets, red dots on a field of sand.

“Fire.”

The
Beijing
’s missiles streaked toward the surface, falling stars striking antiorbital guns and throwing up roiling clouds of dust. Railgun slugs slammed into the ground, their path marked by trails in the sky, like the fingers of some giant god pinching and crushing a target on the surface.

“Missiles away,” said Jiang, a chant that had become their mantra. “Impact in fifty seconds. Loading.” She frowned, and her hesitation broke the rhythm. “Weapon crews report a jam in missile tube two.”

“Lock down that tube,” Liao said. “Load all remaining tubes. Charge the railgun capacitors. Engage targets of opportunity as they appear.”

“Aye aye, Captain.”

Liao turned to Saara. “Engineering, how long until we can shut those damn constructs off?”

[“The command authorisation has been approved,”] said Saara, her face scrunched in confusion. [“The order was given to switch them to autonomous mode, to no effect. They are still being directed by some third party.”]

Liao looked to the room. “Options.”

“Broadcast a jamming frequency,” said Ling. “That may force them into autonomous mode. They’ll still fight, but they won’t be anywhere near as coordinated. It will interfere with our own communications, but by using microburst transmissions, we should be able to cut through most of it.”

A worthwhile risk.
“Do it. Advise our teams on the ground before they begin.”

Ling worked at his console. The delay seemed intolerable to her. Every second the Bevra drones on the surface were active was another second the precious few Human Marines, augmented by the occasional Kel-Voran volunteer, fought and died.

The Marines were punching above their weight class, but they were Tiger tanks. The Toralii Alliance could produce Bevra drones far more quickly than the surviving Humans could breed and train more soldiers.

“The signal is active,” said Ling. “Minimal effect.”

Saara worked at her console, a faint hiss escaping her lips. [“This makes no sense!”]

“Hold on.” Liao touched her headset, routing the audio through Saara’s console. “
Beijing
to
Washington
.”

The reply that came through was scratchy and distorted, no doubt due to the jamming signal. “Anderson here. Send it.”

“The access codes are being accepted, but they don’t seem to be shutting down the drones. We need a better option.”

“There’s one,” said Anderson. “Decker-Sheng might know a way.”

Liao grated at the thought of involving him in the mission, but with her soldiers fighting and dying below, this was no time for her pride. She forced away her doubt. “Ask him,” she said. “Get the thing fixed.”

Anderson muted the line for a moment. “He says he might have a solution.” Decker-Sheng was there, physically, in the room with him? Knowing that rankled Liao further, but she said nothing. “He says to instruct your engineer the following: instead of placing them into noncombat mode, override their power setting. Make them think they’re out of juice, and they should go into maintenance mode.”

Saara said nothing, but her frantic typing increased. [“Initiating,”] she said, and the whole Operations room went quiet as they waited.

Qadeem

Cheung clicked the detonator on the claymore mine. It exploded with a thump, sending a spray of steel ball bearings out into the sand; hundreds of projectiles dug into the sand, kicking up dust and dirt, while others tore into the drones’ metal, punching them full of holes.

Smoke, flame, metal and blood. She shouldered her borrowed rifle, scanning for more targets.

“See anything?” asked O’Hill.

The sand below their feet shifted, and as though refuting his answer, a metal claw reached out and snatched O’Hill’s leg.

Cheung twisted a dial on the rifle, loading armour piercing instead of high explosive—at such a tiny range, it would not detonate anyway—and blew the claw away.

O’Hill fell back off the wreckage as the drone reared up, sand pouring off it like water. It regarded the two with bright-blue eyes, cold and unsympathetic, as its weapons hummed and charged. Cheung lined up the sights on her rifle, pointed to centre of mass, and squeezed the trigger.

Click.
The breech was locked back, jammed.
 

Instinct took over. She tried to clear it, but the inside mechanism was completely clogged.

“Welp,” she said, tossing down the useless hunk of metal, “that just happened.”

O’Hill scrambled for his weapon. The drone lined up its weapons on her, and then, with a soft groan, twisted and jerked, and the light in its eyes died. All around her, drones fell, suddenly unmoving and inert, slumping over like drunks. The tac-helm couldn’t differentiate between destroyed and deactivated drones, so her vision was still filled with fields of red squares. She looked up, searching for some explanation, but Cheung saw only falling stars drifting out of the sky, leaving thin white trails behind them, smaller cluster munitions breaking off and falling to the ground separately, a metal rain upon the barren desert sands. Each warhead went in, unerringly and with palpable force, and the ground beneath them shook and shuddered as a seismic shockwave passed by them, fading to a rumble as the planet stilled, returning to its natural state, a calm sea of desert.
 

“Well,” said Cheung, touching her talk key while patching in O’Hill and the pilot, “can’t fault your timing, sir.”

No response. That was not entirely unexpected. Kamal had a lot on his plate. Inhaling the high-oxygen air her suit was feeding her, Cheung reached out and clapped her newfound Ranger friend on the shoulder. “O’Hill? You fight pretty good for a capitalist pig-dog.”

“And you do pretty good for a dirty red commie.”

They laughed, then the moment was interrupted by the search-and-rescue Broadsword
Archangel
moving overhead, the whine of its engines changing pitch as it levelled out. Men began fast-roping down from the bird, and Cheung and O’Hill stepped off the wreckage, moving out to the inert drones.

“We should find some way of permanently disabling them, just in case the bastards get up. In their default configuration, these drones are supposed to be autonomous, after all.”

O’Hill casually kicked one of the silent machines. “I think if they had that capability, they would have exercised it by now. Best leave them intact for intelligence to comb over.”

Although she wasn’t entirely happy with it, Cheung nodded reluctantly. “Yeah. The temptation to just pile them all up and thermite-bomb them to ashes is pretty high, I gotta say.”

O’Hill smiled. “I know the feeling.” He nodded. “Anyway, I should find my squad. Y’all take care of yourself, a’right?”

Cheung saluted crisply. “I gotta go make sure my German friend hasn’t bled out. Good hunting, O’Hill.”

“Good hunting, Cheung.”

It took her almost ten minutes to walk back to the place she’d left Keller. As she put boot after boot, she felt the painkiller her suit had administered begin to wear off, and the burning on her face returned.

Adrenaline kept her moving. It would take more than a few superficial burns and bruises to slow her down. However, with the threat of battle fading, other thoughts returned, dark thoughts. Cheung walked through the pain, cresting the rise where she’d left Keller and the Iranian corpsman, relieved to find them still there.

“Hey,” she called, waving an arm as she approached. “We won.”

The look on Keller’s face, though, stole the levity from her. Cheung turned to the corpsman. “How is she, doc?”

“Not good,” he answered, “she’s lost a lot of blood. I’m giving her an emergency transfusion, but the wound is severe. She needs surgery. I put her out for now, to try and keep her heart rate down. It’s risky, but it should pay off.”

Cheung crouched beside him. “I’ll make sure
Archangel
swings by and picks her up. I’m not going to let her die out here.”

“Neither am I,” the corpsman said, “she’s German by her uniform. Did you work together on the
Knight
? The
Rubens
,
perhaps?”

Cheung shook her head. She wanted to say more, but for some reason, it seemed inappropriate, as though drawing a personal connection would make it less likely Keller might pull through. “I just really hope she makes it.”

“Me too,” the corpsman said, his gaze returning to the prone woman, her light skin a ghostly pale. “I hope so too.”

Cheung touched her radio. “
Beijing
, this is Cheung. We’ve secured the facility.”

Iraj’s voice came back to her. “Well done, Lieutenant. Away teams are being dispatched from the
Washington
.
Have your teams proceed into the structure.”

“Of course,” she said. “We are ready to proceed.” She hesitated, looking down at Keller’s bloodied form. “I have wounded people down here. Mind if I catch a ride back up to the
Beijing
?”

“Stay on post,” Iraj answered, which was the right call. “Secure the perimeter. Let the teams from the
Washington
take care of the interior.”

“Roger,” she said, watching as they loaded Keller into the
Archangel
. She reached out and took one of the weapons from the medics—her second borrowed firearm of the day—and checked it was loaded. “Securing perimeter.”