Collateral effects drop.., p.9
Collateral Effects (Drop Trooper Book 14), page 9
I was so relieved to be back on my feet, I nearly forgot to check for bad guys before I jumped out of the exit and had to pull back my foot and advance with the carbine ahead of me. To be honest, I couldn’t tell much different about this section of the city than the one we’d come from, but Gandish obviously could. He didn’t even try to get out of the tunnel, shrinking back instead.
“I can’t go with you,” he told me. He pointed to the right. “Travel that direction for one hundred meters until you reach an intersection, then turn left. The Ghost Nexus will be where the corridor ends. Good luck, human.” Well, at least that translated.
Then Gandish was gone, fading back into the darkness. Leaving me alone. Sighing, I jogged in the direction he’d indicated, using my pace count as Top had taught me. Yeah, the ‘link would be more accurate but I had to keep my eyes up, and even taking the time to set the distance would have been a waste.
Left at the intersection, and I still hadn’t seen or heard anything. I was beginning to wonder if Gandish had either given me the wrong directions or if he’d been wrong about where the Nova had taken Lilandreth. After all, this area was taboo to his people. He could have been making assumptions about the intentions of the Nova based on his own superstition. I thought that right up to the point where I nearly walked into the back of three of the Nova soldiers who’d set up at the end of the corridor.
Not facing my way but oriented toward a clear wall, as if they were more worried about what was inside than what might be overtaking them. Clenching my teeth against the curse that tried to explode out of me at the sight of the soldiers, I pressed my back against the wall and held my breath. If even one of them turned…
They didn’t, still fascinated by whatever was going on past the transparent wall. I slid back along the wall and tried to look past them. Inside the glass, or transparent aluminum or whatever the stuff was, the room was nearly bare. No control panels, no readouts, nothing except for a vent in the ceiling and a one-piece cot that seemed to have grown out of the floor, like most Predecessor furniture. From the vent flowed… something. I could have sworn I saw a glittering rain of particulates, but it was nothing I could pin down, nothing I could focus on even with the enhanced-vision glasses.
Strapped to the gurney, lying beneath the rain of glitter… was Lilandreth.
10
I nearly lunged forward, finger tightening into the trigger guard of my carbine until I saw what was on the other side of the chamber. It was a transparent cylinder, and Gandish hadn’t been mistaken about there being two approaches to it. I’d taken the secret passage while the Nova had gone the main corridor, which meant most of them were still on the other side.
Over a dozen of them. Some of the soldiers had gone once they’d delivered Lilandreth to the chamber, but there were still seven or eight of them, as well as other Nova lacking armor, dressed in the same basic harness as the commander who I’d talked to before their attack. Officers, maybe, or, given what they were doing, maybe scientists or technicians.
There was a door on this side. The outline was faint but visible, and the security panel was the same as I’d seen in other Predecessor installations and on their ships. If I shot the guards in front of me, I could get through it… just in time for the soldiers to come through the other side and kill me.
I needed a diversion, something to make those guys on the other side look the other way.
A hand fell on my shoulder, and the self-control it took to keep from crying out nearly caused me to rupture myself. I spun around, finger milligrams away from pulling the trigger of my carbine, until I saw the wide eyes and golden skin of Jay and Bob.
They both looked like they were about to yell in surprise as well, and I put a hand over Jay’s mouth, confident in Bob’s ability to stay silent. I motioned urgently for them to retreat back the way we’d come, hoping that one of them wouldn’t drop their carbine or trip over their own feet. Somehow, they managed to stay quiet until we were back at the intersection and around the corner.
“What the fuck are you two doing here?” I demanded, somehow managing to yell at them in a low voice just above a whisper. “Why aren’t you on the drop-ship?”
“We, like, kind of fell out, man,” Jay confessed.
I blinked, looking at them again. They both looked like they’d fallen off the back of a drop-ship, their fatigues stained and torn, their armor scuffed and caked with dirt, and both of them had dirt matted in their hair.
“How the hell did that happen?” I wanted to know.
“It was really terrifying, you know? When those Nova dudes attacked, Vicky called for the drop-ship and, dude, when Lt. Watson took off, it was like a bat out of hell.” Jay shook his head. “I didn’t think a boat that big could maneuver like that! Shit, I was strapped in and I thought I’d get slammed against the wall anyway!”
“Bulkhead,” I corrected absently.
“Right, bulkhead. So, we got to the dust-off and Chief Sackett tells us to open the ramp and guard it while the platoon boards.” Jay motioned between Bob and himself. “So, we do that, you know? We’re standing there at the bottom of the ramp with plasma and energy beams and all that shit going off everywhere, waiting for your Marines to get on board. Then, when the last of them is on the ramp, I go to close it… but we get a hit right in the side of the ship from one of those plasma guns and Lt. Watson just hits the jets.” He threw up his hands. “The whole damn ship tilts sideways, and the next thing I know, I’m on the ground and the drop-ship is fucking taking off!”
I looked to Bob and spread my hands.
“And how did you wind up falling off?”
Bob shrugged and pointed at Jay.
“He’s my friend, man. I jumped.”
I sighed, shoulders sagging.
“And how did you get here?” I waved around us. “Because honest to God, guys, I don’t even know where here is.”
“Oh, that Resscharr priest dude brought us,” he explained, waving back in the direction of the tunnel. “After we fell off the ship, we ran in here, obviously, because there was nowhere else to go. That priest dude caught us wandering around and sent us in here, said this was where you would be.”
“Wow, Gandish really is desperate.” I frowned, slugging my brain into motion. “Here’s what I need you guys to do…”
Lilandreth jerked against the restraints holding her to the gurney and I flinched in sympathy, a muscle twitching in my cheek. It took everything I had not to jump the gun and go in shooting right then, but Jay and Bob weren’t in place yet.
I wanted to curse them for that, blame them for being too slow, but that wasn’t fair. It took a long time to get back through that tunnel, I knew that from experience, and they didn’t have a guide to help them through. But if there was any way that my urgent and angry energy could make them go faster, well… I was pushing my thoughts through space and pushing them both along.
Lilandreth thrashed, screamed, and that was it. I wasn’t waiting a second longer. I’d already made the decision to charge in when the echoing crack-snap-boom of pulse carbines sounded faintly from the other side of the transparent chamber. Jay and Bob. Lightning flashed, muted and pale, filtered through whatever material the chamber walls were made out of, and two of the soldiers on the other side staggered before the others rushed forward, their own weapons discharging with a deep-throated boom.
That was my cue. I rushed forward just as the three soldiers on this side sprinted for the door to the chamber, hesitated as if they weren’t sure whether they should go inside even to face the attackers, which probably meant they had strict orders not to. I wasn’t about to let them.
I’d had a good ten minutes to consider where to shoot them and decided on the gap between the sloping rear face of their helmets and the collar of their chest-plates. It was a vulnerability, but a necessary one if the soldiers ever wanted to look up. I’d synched the targeting reticle from the carbine with my enhanced-vision goggles while I waited and didn’t even have to raise the weapon from my hip before I fired.
No kick, of course. No solid projectile to produce recoil. But there was a vibration, the explosion of hyperexplosive cartridges inside the ignition chamber, channeling all that heat energy into the lasing rod and out the crystalline muzzle. It was durable, uncomplicated, and ideal for use in a vacuum, or in microgravity, but it frankly sucked as an infantry weapon. I found out why when the flare of the first burst nearly blacked out the polarization of my goggles.
The laser itself was invisible except where it interacted with particulates like dust, and there just wasn’t much dust inside the city. But the heat from the pulses ionized a cylinder of atmosphere, creating a miniature lightning bolt between the muzzle and the poor son of a bitch octopus who I shot. The crackling tube of static electricity didn’t actually blow his head off his body… it was the laser. But it sure as hell looked like it did.
The polished helmet clanged to the floor, weighed down by the head inside it, and the Nova trooper didn’t so much fall as collapse in on himself, blood so dark it was nearly black splattering across the floor. The other two reacted in slow motion, as if neither of them had even considered there might be a threat from behind them, and by the time the last of them was halfway turned around, I’d already shot the second.
No decapitation this time, which was just as well, since I didn’t need multiple fish heads rolling around the floor trying to trip me up, and by the time the third Nova got turned, I was less than two meters away from him, coming up inside his guard before he could swing the muzzle of his weapon around. He fired anyway, a concussive blast that hammered at my ears and sinuses, punching me in the chest. An echoing explosion battered the wall behind us with a ringing ricochet of debris.
I shut out the noise, the pain, the shock, and braced a hand against the side of the Nova weapon, shoving the muzzle of my laser under the soldier’s chin. Just a tap on the trigger, as short of a burst as I could manage, then I threw myself back away from him. Not quickly enough to avoid the backwash of burning blood, and I crouched, spitting out the disgusting, congealed matter. It sucked worse for him.
My shoulder slammed into the door about the same time as the palm of my hand hit the lock plate. If the Nova had somehow secured it with a code or a biometric seal, I would have been screwed, but the door slid aside and I was inside with Lilandreth.
And all that glittering dust. Shit. Hadn’t thought that part through.
A chill ran up my back, and I wasn’t sure if it was psychosomatic or they’d kept the AC cranked up in the lab just like they did in the medical bay on the Orion. Or it was that shit coming in through the vent mutating me into an alien slug. Nothing to be done about it now.
Lilandreth’s eyes were wide and feverish, staring through me without seeing me.
“Can you hear me?” I asked, checking the restraint straps holding her to the table. “Lilandreth?”
It took a few seconds for me to find the release for the straps, and when I did, I immediately regretted it. Lilandreth thrashed and struck out blindly, and I had to grab her arms and push them down before she connected with one of the wild swings.
“Come on!” I urged, pulling her up to a sitting position, pinning her arms to her side with a hell of a lot of effort. “Snap out of it! It’s me, Cam!”
That seemed to calm her down and she relaxed, eyes finally focusing on me.
“Cam?”
I sighed, letting loose of her arms, though I was still ready to duck if she attacked again.
“Let’s go,” I said, guiding her off the table. She stood, unsteady, supporting herself against my shoulder, and I slipped my left arm around her waist, the right pushing the carbine out ahead of me. “Jay and Bob are drawing them off, but we don’t have a lot of time here.”
Well, Jay and Bob probably didn’t have a lot of time. I had my doubts that they could do anything in a firefight other than surrender or die, but hopefully they could run faster than the Nova.
Lilandreth didn’t speak, her breath still coming in short gasps as I half-carried her out the opposite doorway into the main passage. She was heavy. When I’d been in the suit I hadn’t realized it, had been concentrating on watching my strength and not hurting her, but now I could barely keep her upright. She had to be nearly a hundred and fifty kilos, and maybe half that was resting on my shoulders. It was gonna be a bad situation if any of the soldiers who’d gone off to chase after Jay and Bob came back before we were out of here.
At least two of them wouldn’t be doing any shooting. The two former Confederation mining techs had proven pretty good at backshooting from ambush, which might not have been the kind of reputation either of them had wanted, but it had served us all well this go-around. I assumed they were both dead anyway. Their eyes looked dead, though since they were octopus-people, they might have looked that way all the time. I was tempted to salvage the Nova weapons, but the things weren’t built for human hands, or even humanoid ones, and I wasn’t about to split my concentration enough to figure out how to fire them.
I did pause long enough to put a burst of laser pulses into each of the weapons, not wanting any enemy to come up behind me using a gun I’d left functional. Sparks flew up and pieces melted off, and I jerked away from the spray of molten metal and hoped that would be enough to disable the guns. I’d turned from the dead soldiers back to the passage before I saw the two unarmored Nova who I’d noticed before.
They were cowering in a corner, as if they’d hoped I wouldn’t be able to see them, and I pushed free of Lilandreth, aiming the carbine at a point between them. They weren’t carrying any obvious weapons, but that didn’t mean anything.
“Please, don’t shoot!” one of them pleaded in the Resscharr language. “We weren’t going to hurt her!”
“Then what the hell were you doing to her?” I growled, finger tightening on the trigger.
“We were exposing her to the Transformation Virus,” the other one said. Somehow, despite the fact that they were both hairless, rubber-skinned cephalopod people, I had the sense that this guy was the older of the two. “We’re scientists… we’ve been studying the daemon ever since we found the first records. That’s how we knew this lab was here.”
“What’s the Transformation Virus?” I demanded, losing patience. “Unless one of you starts speaking plain and short right now, you’re both going to be doing some transforming yourself. As in transforming from a live asshole to a dead one.”
I hadn’t met very many Nova, and when I had it had been under very formal and controlled conditions. I’d gotten the impression they were cold and unemotional, devoid of fear or compassion or anything between. Apparently, that was only the case for their high-ranking military officers, certainly not for their scientists, because these guys were scared shitless and it showed.
“It’s something that was left over from the war with the Skrela,” the older one said quickly, worm-fingered hands raised as if he thought they could block the laser. “A weapon.”
“And how the hell do you know about it?”
“We were part of the war.” He waved at his companion and I wished he wouldn’t have, because the sinuous motion of those boneless fingers contrasted with the strange combination of tentacle and skeleton in the arms threatened to make me physically ill. “We were the Unquestioning, the servants of the Reconstructors… they created us to do their bidding, to build their cities and guard their gateways. Then they left us behind once they were done with us.” The tone of the translation turned bitter, and I don’t know how the algorithm parsed the emotion, but it seemed accurate. “They built a paradise for themselves, and we couldn’t be part of it because we were beneath them.”
Sighing, I pressed the focusing crystal of the laser against the Nova scientist’s chest.
“The point. Get to it.”
“The Reconstructors were terrified that the Skrela would follow them here,” he said, speaking so quickly the translator could barely keep up. “They found a way to tap into Transition Space without machinery, without a drive field, without a captive singularity… just by using their brains.”
“What?” I snapped, nearly pulling the trigger at the very inanity of the statement. “That’s fucking ridiculous.”
“They did it, somehow,” he insisted, arms waggling even more violently. “They used a nanovirus to alter the brains of the daemons, to grow a nexus there that could access Transition Space, funnel mental energy through that dimension, and bring it back to this reality as physical, kinetic energy. They planned to use the daemons to fight the Skrela if they came… but the Skrela never came. And the daemons…”
“Destroyed everything,” the other Nova finished. “They went to war with each other. Each was hungry for power and couldn’t abide any other daemon existing. They brought all of this down to ruin, and all that was left were the primitives of the Remainder.”
The bottom fell out of my stomach. If he was telling the truth, that would mean this whole journey had been wasted, that there were no more Reconstructors to help us get home. I wanted to smash the Nova scientist in the face, then on a more rational level, wanted to demand if he knew about the Northwest Passage, but neither would help me right now. There was one more thing I needed to know.
“If the daemons destroyed all this, why the hell were you trying to turn her into one?” I indicated Lilandreth with a backward wave of my hand.
The two scientists looked at each other as if they felt guilty or embarrassed.
“It wasn’t our idea,” the younger one said. “We’re exiles from the Nova government… they consider us to be heretics, you see. They worship the Reconstructors and consider it blasphemy for any of us to trespass in their space… and when our people originally discovered that the Reconstructors were gone, their empire fallen, they blamed us, forced us out of our homes into this wasteland where we’re forced to scavenge whatever we can from the ruins simply to survive…”
