A sharp metallic hiss. The unmistakable whine of a rocket motor igniting. It cuts through the ringing in Rand’s ears just long enough for instinct to take over. He grabs Lila by her tank top and yanks her sideways, throwing them both against the interior hull as the personnel door they just sealed erupts outward in a storm of shrapnel and fire.
The blast wave hits them like a wall. Rand curls over Lila, shielding her head with his arms and shoulders. Metal screams. Heat washes across his back like an open furnace. Something heavy clips his calf and pain flares white-hot. He doesn’t let go. The world narrows to the girl under him, the ringing in his skull, and the smell of burning clothing and melting insulation.
He cannot hear her scream. He feels it. The vibration against his chest. The way her body jerks and tenses under him.
When the initial roar fades to crackling flames, Rand forces himself up on one elbow. His ears are full of high-pitched static. Blood trickles from one nostril. He tastes copper.
Lila is alive. Eyes wide, pupils blown, mouth open in a silent yell. Her hands claw at his arms, not fighting him, just needing something solid to hold. He hauls her to her feet. She sways and her legs buckle. He hooks an arm around her waist and half-carries her. There is no sign of Toku anywhere.
The hub around them is an inferno. Flames lick the ruined doorframe. Through the smoke and heat haze the warden’s voice booms over external speakers, amplified and almost conversational in its calm.
“I am Warden Magne Pilae. There will be no escape. All prisoners will be apprehended and processed accordingly.”
The word lands like cold steel. Processed. The same word they used when they shoved Rand into cryo. Most likely the same word for the pods tumbling in the dark outside, each one a person who got processed right out of existence without anyone filling out a second form about it.
Another rocket flares to life from the direction of the docking bay.
Rand doesn’t think. He drags Lila along the wall toward the massive bay doors. The rocket streaks through the cavity that used to be the personnel hatch, close enough that the heat of its exhaust washes across his scorched skin. It slams into a stack of cargo crates eight meters in. The impact is a thunderclap. Secondary explosions ripple outward as fuel cells and munitions cook off in a rolling wave of fire and debris that blooms behind them.
They hit the deck hard. Rand twists mid-fall and takes the impact so Lila lands on top of him instead of the floor. His ribs scream. Something in his shoulder pops with a wet sensation that promises he will regret it later. He grits his teeth and rolls them both toward the bay doors.
The warden tears through the remaining gap in the blasted bulkhead and sweeps the burning hub with those red optics, searching. Rand does not know if the warden can see them through the smoke but assumes he can. There is nowhere to run in the blazing open chamber. If they can get back through the main cargo doors into the docking bay the warden is now behind them and not between them and the ship. It would be a straight run to the Solvo’s airlock.
Where is Toku? Did he take the ship and go? No. That’s not the man I’ve spent the last few hours fighting beside. But Rand cannot afford the thought right now. He could simply be dead. One problem at a time.
The main cargo doors are still there. Buckled and scorched from the rocket blast, cracked open a vertical slit roughly thirty centimeters wide. Enough for a man to squeeze through if he is desperate enough.
Rand is desperate enough.
The reinforced metal feet of the mech suit ring on the deck as the warden advances through the choking smoke, each step deliberate and unhurried. The red optics sweep toward them.
He shoves Lila toward the gap. “Go. Now.”
She freezes for half a second, shock locking her joints. Then she scrambles forward on hands and knees. Rand follows, sucking in his gut, scraping across jagged metal that tears at his tattered prison uniform and opens burned skin across his back and shoulders. He does not care. They spill out into the docking bay on the other side.
The smoke is thinner here but still choking, rolling in thick gray-black curtains across the floor, lit by flickering orange strobes and the distant green pulse of the Solvo’s airlock at the far end of the bay. Rand hauls Lila behind the nearest cover, the damaged autoloader forklift the guards had been sheltering behind before the massacre. Its forks are bent and its body is riddled with scorch marks and bullet holes, one tire shredded flat, but the chassis is heavy enough to matter. He risks a quick glance over the top. No sign of the LegionaryX robots anywhere in the shifting walls of gray. He cannot tell if they are powered down, destroyed, or waiting in the haze. The green light of the Solvo’s airlock pulses through the smoke like a distant beacon. He ducks back down.
Lila curls against the autoloader’s side, breathing in short ragged gasps, her hand pressed flat against the chassis like she needs to feel something solid and real. Rand watches the gap in the bay doors behind them and the hole in the far wall, trying to determine which direction the warden will come from.
He doesn’t have to wait long.
The massive shadow fills the gap in the ruined cargo doorway. The warden does not rush. He grips the inner edges of the main bay doors with both gauntleted hands and pulls. Metal groans. Sparks shower in orange arcs. The doors screech apart another meter, then another, the mech’s actuators screaming under the strain until the gap is wide enough for his bulk. He steps through and stops just inside.
His head tilts. Red optics sweep the bay in a slow, methodical arc, moving across bodies and wreckage and curtains of drifting smoke with the patient thoroughness of a man who has nowhere else to be and knows it.
“Perhaps there is room for you in the Consensus.” His voice carries through the speakers with almost conversational warmth, the tone of a man making a generous offer he already knows will be refused. “Whoever you are.”
Rand stays down behind the forklift. He does not answer. He looks at Lila instead.
She is shaking. Not the fine tremor of cold or exhaustion but the deep, full-body shaking of someone running on the last fumes of what they have. Her eyes are locked on nothing, fixed on some middle distance that has nothing in it. He has seen that look before. Seen it on men twice her age in situations half as bad as this one. The body making its own decisions about what it can handle.
He puts a hand on her shoulder. Firm. Grounding.
She blinks. Focuses on his face.
He holds up two fingers and points toward the green light at the far end of the bay. Then he points at her. Then he makes a flat pushing motion with his palm. Go. She follows the gesture and her eyes track to the Solvo’s airlock, then back to him. He can see her doing the math, the same math he has already done, and he can see the moment she gets to the part where he is not in the equation anymore. Her jaw tightens.
He shakes his head once. Not a debate. Not a discussion.
She looks at him for a long moment. Something moves behind her eyes that he does not have a name for. Then she gives him the smallest nod he has ever seen.
Rand turns back to the bay. He checks the AK2K one more time even though he already knows the count. Eight rounds against a shielded military mech suit with a weapon arm the size of a man’s torso. He runs the numbers the way he has run numbers like these before, in doorways and alleys and the backs of burning vehicles, when the math came up short and someone had to make it add up anyway.
The Solvo’s airlock is green. Lila is fast and small and smart and she knows how to move through smoke. If he can pull the warden’s attention and hold it, she gets clear. That is the arithmetic. That is the only arithmetic that works.
He does not feel heroic about it. He does not feel much of anything about it except tired and certain, the way a man feels when he has stopped arguing with the answer and started figuring out how to make it count.
Eight rounds. Make them matter.
He watches Lila go. She stays low and hugs the side of the autoloader, boots scraping softly, darting from cover to cover through the smoke. Every few steps she glances back. He gives her the smallest nod each time. Keep going. Every time she looks back he wants to tell her to stop looking back. She doesn’t stop. He keeps nodding. Keep going.
She disappears behind a stack of scorched cargo pallets.
Rand exhales once. Long and slow and quiet.
Then he stands up and steps out from behind the forklift into the open.
Rand raises the AK2K and sights on Warden Magne Pilae. The barrel is steady despite the blood running down his forearm.
The warden’s optics snap to him instantly. The red lenses flare brighter, cycling up to full intensity the way a predator’s pupils contract when prey steps into the open. He does not raise his weapon arm. He does not move at all. He just looks at Rand the way a man looks at something small and interesting that has crawled out from under a rock.
The moment stretches.
Then the warden laughs. Low and mechanical through the speakers, a sound that was probably a human laugh once and has been processed into something that only resembles one. “Well.” The optics run over Rand slowly, top to bottom, the way you might appraise livestock at auction. “A2-451-F-076-ANDERSON-R. Former military. Sentenced for treason.” A pause that feels almost theatrical. “You survived cryo. You survived my LegionaryX units. You survived the hub.” Another pause. “And now here you stand. Alone. With a rifle.” The weapon arm stays down. Deliberately. Pointedly. “Go ahead then.”
Rand speaks first, voice rough from smoke and pain. “Hell of a leadership plan. Lining up your own men and mowing them down. That what they teach in warden school?”
“Order requires sacrifice.” The warden takes one slow step forward, then stops. Savoring the distance. “The weak endanger the whole.” He tilts his head slightly. “You understand that. You were military. You have made those calculations yourself.”
“I’ve made hard calls,” Rand says. “Never enjoyed them.”
“No.” The warden’s tone carries something that might be pity if pity were a sound a machine could make. “That is why you are on this side of the gun.”
Rand squeezes the trigger. One round, center mass. The bullet sparks against the energy field and blue-white light ripples outward from the impact point in a clean, contemptuous ring. The shield holds without effort. The warden does not flinch. Does not step back. Does not even adjust his posture. He simply watches the ripple fade with the patient satisfaction of a man who built the wall and is now watching someone throw themselves against it.
Seven rounds left.
A green beam lances back immediately, but it does not go for center mass. It finds Rand’s right shoulder, a precise, surgical burn through fabric and muscle. Pain flares hot and bright and specific. Rand grits his teeth and keeps the rifle up.
“Could have finished me already with that shot,” Rand grits out, forcing himself upright. His left arm hangs useless at his side. He adjusts his grip on the rifle with the only arm still working properly. “But here we are.”
“Yes,” the warden replies, taking another slow, measured step forward. “But not yet.”
The warden takes another slow step forward. The deck rings under the suit’s weight. “I find myself curious about you, A2-451-F-076-ANDERSON-R. Men who stand in the open when they have nothing left are usually one of two things. Brave or stupid.” A beat. “You do not look stupid.”
“High praise.”
“It is merely an observation.” The warden’s optics narrow slightly. “Though perhaps I give you too much credit. You are buying time.”
Rand fires twice more, quick shots aimed at the knee joints. Both rounds spark off the shield. The energy field flickers but holds. Five rounds left.
The warden looks down at his knee, then back up at Rand. Unhurried. “You are trying to find the weak point. There isn’t one. Not with what you are carrying.” He steps forward again. Closing the distance with the slow confidence of something that cannot be stopped and knows it. “But please. Continue.”
Another green beam. This one finds Rand’s left shoulder. Flesh sizzles. Pain explodes white behind his eyes and he staggers, dropping to one knee. He does not fall.
“Missed the vitals again,” Rand spits, a bitter grin cutting through the pain. “You really suck at this.” His neither arm is not responding the way he wants it to, but he keeps his grip on the rifle.
“You are an interesting specimen.” The warden stops a few meters away. Close enough that Rand can see the augmentation ports along his neck, the places where flesh ends and machine begins, the thin line of scar tissue around each one that suggests the conversion was not entirely voluntary. “I am taking my time with you. Consider it a professional courtesy.”
“Courtesy.” Rand laughs. Short and painful and genuine. “At least my ex-wife had the ‘courtesy’ to go straight for the vitals.”
“You keep talking,” the warden says. “Most men beg by now. Or break. You keep talking.” The optics study him. “What are you waiting for?”
Rand does not answer that one.
Instead he raises the rifle and fires three rounds in rapid succession, not at the warden but at the thick cargo strap above him, the one holding a heavy metal crate straining against its tether overhead. The strap snaps with a sound like a gunshot. The crate drops and slams down onto the warden’s shoulders in a shriek of metal on metal. Blue-white energy flares brilliantly. The shield stutters and crackles under the overload, the emitter nodes throwing sparks in long fizzing arcs.
Two rounds left.
The warden shrugs the crate aside. Fully straightens. The mech suit sparks at its joints and the shield sputters in and out, cycling in ragged bursts. He looks at the crate on the deck beside him, then back at Rand. If the face behind the visor could form an expression it might be something approaching respect. It settles instead on the cold flat patience it has worn since the beginning.
“Clever.” The weapon arm rises. A green beam burns across Rand’s ribs. Skin chars. Muscle sears. He stumbles backward and his back hits a crate. He stays on his feet. Barely.
Rand laughs again. Shorter this time. More air than sound. “See, that’s the part they can never upgrade out of a man like you. The cruelty. The pettiness. You could have ended this four shots ago. But you want to play.”
The warden’s optics narrow. Rand isn’t sure if the warden intended the non-lethal shot or if the crate drop misaligned something in his sensors. Either way the pause is there, half a second of the warden being something other than completely certain, and Rand files it away without showing anything on his face. “Playtime is a luxury I rarely indulge.”`
“You’ve been indulging it since I stepped out from behind that forklift.” Rand raises the rifle one final time, arm shaking with the effort of holding it level. He aims at the center of the warden’s forehead. “So let’s finish the game.”
He fires twice. The bolt locks back on empty after the second round. The shield flares violently, sparks showering from the emitter nodes around the helmet in a sustained cascade. A high-pitched warning tone sounds from within the suit. The warden rocks back half a step. There is a pause, longer than any that came before it, and for just a moment the red optics lose their flat predatory patience and something else moves behind them. Something that might be the ghost of a man who was not always made of metal and certainty, remembering what it felt like to be unsure of an outcome. The shield held. Barely.
Rand drops the AK2K. It clatters on the deck. He swings the MP12 from its sling with a pained grunt, full magazine seated and ready, and raises it one-handed because the other arm is mostly not working anymore.
The warden straightens. The warning tone fades. The shield flickers back to something resembling stability, thin and stuttering but present. He looks at the empty AK2K on the deck, then at the MP12 in Rand’s one good hand, and the sound he makes through the speakers is almost gentle.
“Fun while it lasted.”
Rand holds his eyes. Holds them steady. Does not look toward the cargo pallets where Lila disappeared. Does not think about whether she made it. Just holds the warden’s optics and keeps his face neutral and his breathing even and the MP12 level.
He flicks the selector to full auto and holds the trigger down.
Flechettes hammer into the warden’s shield until it cuts out completely. Rounds slam into the the cracked faceplate in a tight, sustained grouping. Flesh tears away in ragged strips. Blood sprays freely across the deck in a wide arc. Metal gleams underneath the ruin of his face. One optic lens shatters in a shower of sparks and glass. The warden staggers back a single step, and for just a moment the flat patience behind the remaining optic flickers and the moment closes and he is machine again.
Then his hands come up. A slow, almost contemptuous gesture, like a man blocking rain.
The whine of a large electric motor rises from somewhere behind Rand, followed immediately by the grinding shriek of metal on metal and the tortured screaming of hydraulics being pushed well past their rated limits.
The damaged autoloader forklift surges forward from the smoke. Its bent forks are raised and its hydraulics are screaming. Lila is visible in the cab, teeth bared and eyes wild, lit from below by the glow of overloading circuits, her face still dusted faintly orange-red from the Watney’s spice powder now like warpaint. She is not looking at Rand. She is looking at the warden. Her jaw is set and her hands are locked on the controls and she is not stopping.
Rand has just enough time to think you were supposed to run before the forklift hits.
One fork punches through the warden’s abdominal plating with a shriek of shearing metal that fills the bay and bounces off every wall. Hydraulic fluid erupts from ruptured lines in wide arcs, spattering across the deck and bulkhead in thick black fans. The warden is slammed backward into the wall, arms flailing, the mech suit’s systems screaming warnings in overlapping cascades, red lights strobing across every surface of the suit’s exterior.
Rand empties the last few rounds of the MP12 into what remains of Pilae’s exposed face. Flechettes strip away the last of the flesh in wet ragged sheets and expose the gleaming alloy of the skull beneath, slick and dark with blood. The remaining optic lens explodes in a cascade of sparks and glass that rains down across the deck.
The warden is still moving. Blind and leaking fluid from a dozen ruptured lines, the mech suit’s actuators still firing, still pushing against the fork pinning him to the wall with the dumb relentless insistence of a machine that has not been told to stop yet. His weapon arm swings up wildly. A switch clicks. A long wide fan of ignited napalm belches out in a sticky burning arc, sweeping across a broad section of the bay floor in a roaring sheet of orange and black. Rand grabs Lila by the back of her tank top again and hauls her backward out of the cab and away from the fire before it reaches the forklift’s already overloading fuel cells. He drags her under the chassis of the wrecked autoloader as the napalm splashes across the deck around them, the smell of burning fuel and charred metal choking the air beneath the frame, heat pressing down on their backs like a hand.
A shadow drops from the overhead I-beams.
Toku lands on the warden’s shoulder with a hard thump that rocks the entire mech suit sideways, dreadlocks whipping around him, the nodachi already moving. One smooth downward arc, both hands driving through with everything he has. The blade shears through neck actuators and cabling with a sound like a cable car snapping its wire, a single catastrophic crack that echoes across the bay. The warden’s head comes free. It tumbles from the shoulders, hits the deck with a wet metallic clang, and rolls a meter before coming to rest against a cargo pallet. The empty optics stare at nothing, sockets in a metallic skull. The crackle and hiss of failing electronics fades in slow stages to silence.
The mech suit collapses and sags on the fork its impaled on. Knees buckling first, then the torso folding forward in slow stages, hydraulic fluid pooling black and thick beneath it in a spreading lake that catches the orange light of the strobes.
Silence settles over the bay. Broken only by the creak of cooling metal, the distant tick of flames, and the soft drip of hydraulic fluid from the forklift’s ruptured lines.
Toku steps off the fallen shoulder. He is breathing hard, blood running freely down his face from a gash above his left eye that has soaked into his collar. He looks at Rand. Then at Lila. Then down at the severed head near his boot.
“Sorry I’m late.” His voice is measured. Almost sheepish. “I came here in after the first rocket. Cleared the remaining LegionaryX units while you distracted the warden.”
Rand coughs wetly, leaning out from under the autoloader frame. Everything hurts. He tastes blood with every breath. “Distracted.”
Toku looks down at the severed head, then back at Rand. “I may have driven a blade into a robot’s battery pack. It discharged. I was knocked unconscious.” A pause. The faintest trace of something that might be embarrassment crosses his face. “My fault. The girl woke me.”
Lila crawls out from under the autoloader and gets her feet under her, legs shaking visibly. She looks at Toku. Then at the warden’s head on the deck. Then at the green light of the Solvo’s airlock at the far end of the bay. Then she looks down at Rand, still half on the floor with his hand pressed to his ribs, blood seeping between his fingers.
“You were going to stay here and die,” she says quietly. Not an accusation. Just a fact she is saying out loud because she needs to hear it said.
Rand pushes himself upright, ribs grinding with every centimeter. Shoulder burning. Thigh bleeding. He limps forward without answering her.
“Come on.”
They move together toward the open airlock, shambling and battered, all three of them leaving small red trails on the deck behind them. Nobody speaks. There is nothing to say that the silence does not already cover.
Rand enters the Solvo first but climbs the steps to the bridge last. His body has been running on debt for the last hour and the bill is coming due in slow, thorough installments. Every step up the companionway costs him something he is not sure he has left to spend. He drops into the captain’s chair with the careful deliberateness of a man who does not trust his legs to hold him upright one second longer than necessary. The chair creaks under him. He does not care. He lets it take his weight and he breathes and he does not think about anything for a moment.
Lila stands and looks around at all of the controls and stations on the bridge. “Anyone know how to fly this thing?”
Rand replies, “It shouldn’t be any different than any other transport, this one looks old, close to our time.”
Toku looks at the controls for a long moment, then looks at Lila, then back at the controls. “I have flown three things in my life. Two of them were shot down.” He steps back. “Your odds are better.”
Lila shrugs and slides into the navigator’s seat. Her hands find the controls and her Neuro-T hums to life, the displays blooming around her in cascading light as twenty-two years of stored ship data surfaces and begins sorting itself into something usable. Flight manuals. Docking protocols. Thruster response curves for a dozen vessel classes. None of it is the same as having actually flown one before and she knows it and she starts working anyway.
Data’s old. Ship’s older. But it’ll fly. It has to fly.
Toku takes up a position by the hatch, hand pressed to the gash above his eye, saying nothing.
Clamps disengage with heavy sequential thumps that travel up through the deck and into the soles of their boots. Thrusters hum. The Solvo shudders once, a full body shudder like an old dog shaking off water, and then pulls away from the docking cradle with a low grinding complaint from the port side coupling that makes Lila’s jaw tighten. The ship slides free of the airlock and the dark opens up around them.
Lila turns the nose toward open space and the displays settle and the grinding stops and for about four seconds it feels like they might actually be alright.
Then the view through the forward screens opens up fully and all three of them see the cryo-pods.
Dozens of them. Hundreds. Drifting in loose tumbling clusters against the dark, frost glinting on the glass in the faint light reflected off the station’s hull. Each one a person. Each one sealed and cold and spinning slowly in the void with nobody coming for them. The prisoners who got processed right out of existence. Rand stares at them and does not have words for what moves through him and does not try to find any.
Then he sees the other ships.
Not any human design he has ever seen or imagined. Not any design that belongs to anything that thinks the way humans think. Grotesque and bloated, their scaled and ribbed hulls glistening with a wet organic sheen that catches the light wrong, like something dredged up from the bottom of a deep ocean and inflated to the size of a city block. Beneath their main bodies, long bony tendrils reach out into the drift with slow patient certainty, snatching pods from the tumbling clusters and drawing them inward toward sucker-like ports that envelop each pod whole. Consuming them. One at a time. Unhurried. The way something eats when it has never once had to worry about being interrupted.
The cold that hits Rand’s spine has nothing to do with the station he just escaped.
His mouth is open. He closes it. Opens it again.
“Get us the fuck out of here.”
His voice cracks on the last word. When Lila does not immediately respond, still frozen with her hands on the controls and her eyes locked on the forward screen and her face doing something he does not have a name for, he shouts directly at her.
“NOW.”
She snaps back. Her hands slam the thrust controls forward without a word. The Solvo shudders and shakes, its old frame complaining at every join and weld, rumbling ahead with everything it has. The stars on the forward screen begin to move. Slowly at first, then faster. Tears blur Lila’s vision but her hands stay on the controls and her jaw stays set and she does not look at the harvester ships again. She cannot afford to look at them again.
The ship grazes the edge of a comm tower on its way out and clips several tumbling pods, sending them spinning faster into the dark, and she flinches at each impact but she does not slow down and she does not stop.
All the instructions in all of the manuals stored in my head are no match for not really knowing what the fuck I’m doing.
But she gets them clear.
Rand watches the LIDAR display as the cluster of dots representing the station, the pods, and the harvester ships falls behind them and shrinks. He watches until the dots are small enough that he can cover all of them with his thumb. He watches until his vision begins to tunnel at the edges and the pain that his body has been holding at arm’s length for the last hour starts arriving all at once, moving through him in slow thorough waves that start in his shoulders and work their way down.
He lets himself sink back into the captain’s chair.
The last thing he sees before the darkness takes him is Toku moving fast across the bridge toward him, and the last thing he thinks is that for a man who was ready to die twenty minutes ago, things turned out reasonably well.
| Book 1: Ares Alcatraz | Next Chapter Coming Soon |
