The train bucked and rolled underneath our feet as I got Sho tied onto Jane’s back again; we were powering through the debris on the tracks, and all it would take was one loose piece of rebar rolling into just the right position underneath the wheels to send us jolting free and smashing over the side of the bridge, but that was the least of our problems.
It took everything I had to concentrate on the buckles and the straps of Sho’s harness, to not look behind me to see if the . . . thing was gaining. Of course it was gaining; it had been gaining before, when we were shooting at it, and nothing had changed. Still, my hands were slick and sweaty as I pulled the last of the knots tight, then squeezed Sho’s shoulder once and rapped my knuckles on Jane’s body armor, to let her know I was done.
I turned around then, and the thing was still gaining. Because . . . yeah.
I reloaded Bitey and started shooting at it. Again. That seemed the thing to do. Again, it didn’t actually have any effect. The thing was close enough that I could actually make out details in the armor now—not just a chunky outer chassis, but one whose lines hugged tight to a body instead, completely unlike any of the other exosuits I’d seen. Those pieces of tech, favored by the security forces on Sanctum, were huge, heavy, unwieldy things, massive slabs of armor that could only be lifted into place with the help of pistons and hydraulics, all powered by a fusion battery. This was almost like a second musculature, tracing the outline of a form that didn’t match any alien species I’d ever seen, but that had to be purely ornamental—if it was actually as tight as it looked, there was no way it could have shrugged off the rounds we’d already fired at it. Either that, or the being inside was impossibly thin.
Also, the flying. I’d never seen that before, either.
“Hold on tight, Sho!” Jane shouted over the roar of the wind around us. “Esa!” She pointed her gun at the access hatch in the roof of the train car, long since welded shut back when no one had ever thought this thing would ever get moving again. I gritted my teeth and put a burst of telekinesis through it; it ripped clear, the whole thing, the speed of our passage tearing it free of the car completely. That was a little more than I’d meant to do, but I was under a great deal of pressure, and modulating the fine motor control of my teke actually took more work than the big stuff.
With a grace that would have been impressive even if she hadn’t been carrying an entire adolescent on her back, Jane hung first from the metal plates welded onto the windows, then reached up to grab the edges of the busted hatch, hauling herself up and through, onto the roof above. I did the same—using a burst of teke in lieu of the same level of natural athleticism—and then I was on top of a moving train car, and I had a single moment to wonder what the fuck I was doing: I had to anchor myself to the metal of the roof with my teke before the wind blew me right the hell off the speeding vehicle.
I was trying to stand on top of a moving train car while being chased by some sort of flying robotic thing as we fled the site of a nuclear explosion, heading toward a midair extraction with our approaching starship. My life was . . . strange sometimes, even to me.
Jane had managed to get to her knees, one hand holding tight to a low bar that ran along the side of the roof, the other gripping her pistol even tighter. Based on what we’d seen so far, the bullets from her revolver weren’t going to do shit to the thing coming after us, but it wasn’t like I was letting go of Bitey, either.
We both turned to face back toward the explosion, toward our pursuer. Just in time to see the thing tuck its wings behind it one last time, and dive for the train car.
It smashed into the back of the roof like a missile, hard enough and heavy enough to send a jolt through the entire frame, one I could feel even through the vibrations of the train’s motion and the howling wind around us. Those clawed gauntlets lashed out and tore into the metal of the roof with a terrible screeching sound, the weight of the armor dragging the figure backward until it anchored, and the thing managed to get to its knees, finally giving us a good glimpse of it.
I hadn’t liked the look of it before, at distance, and I sure as shit didn’t like it now, up close. The strangely designed armor, more like metal flesh than a hydraulic exosuit; the razor-sharp alloy wings, folded so tightly to the creature’s back that you likely couldn’t even see them if you were facing it head on; twisting designs, etched or carved into the metal skin like gleaming tattoos, words or ideograms or mathematical expressions in a language I most definitely did not speak, or even recognize.
And the mask that covered whatever face was underneath it. Stylized fangs; a sharp slit of a mouth that wasn’t actually an opening, just a raised relief on the metal; the same was true for the wide, glaring eyes, ovoid and strange. Most disturbing of all were the tracks of tears that flowed underneath those reliefs, except I couldn’t tell if they were actually supposed to be tears at all, or if they were meant to be flames instead.
The overall effect of the features was purposefully species-neutral; it could have been meant to give the impression of a human face, or Tyll, or a dozen other alien races. There was even the slightest hint of a muzzle that might have made it Reint or Wulf instead. It was as if it were meant to conjure up a demon from every culture that it could have resembled.
With another shriek of tearing metal, it ripped one claw free, then sank it into the roof again, closer to us. Did the same with the other. Even in all that heavy armor—and skintight or not, strange alloy or not, it must have weighed a hundred pounds, not even including the wings and the jetpack—the thing was still advancing across the roof, inch by inch, pulling itself toward us. It had no expression, made no sign of its intentions—there was just the grinning snarl, and the scene of utter devastation behind it. It still hadn’t said a word.
Jane shot it in the face.
The round glanced off the mask without even making a dent, though it did at least snap the thing’s head back, making it pause in its relentless forward motion, for just a bit. That gave me enough time to pull my gaze away from the creature and look over the side of the train instead. If bullets weren’t going to work, I needed something else to hit it with, something heavier. I frantically scanned the passing roadway beside the tracks, trying to find something that would work—no, no, no, no, no, no, there.
I reached out with my teke and an open hand, ripping the snapped and abandoned piece of rebar toward me even as we left it behind, making sure the arc of its passage toward my grip led through the relentless armored figure crawling along the train roof.
The metal pierced through its back like a six-foot-long arrow, bursting free of its chest until half of the jagged makeshift projectile was sticking out the front of it. Take that, you fucking . . . you fucking . . . you whatever the fuck you are, you.
There wasn’t any blood—not on the piece of rebar, not oozing sluggishly from around the wound, either. Whatever the hell this thing was, it didn’t bleed.
I hadn’t even managed to try and figure out what the hell that meant before it raised up one of its gauntlets, wrapped it around the metal shaft driven through its chest, and started pulling.
It was pulling the rebar through itself the way I might thread a needle through a piece of cloth. It made no sound as it did it—no cries of pain, no shrieks of rage. The blank eyes of that horrible mask just kept staring at us, never turning away even as the metal was torn entirely clear of its body, then thrown unceremoniously from the roof of the train.
There should have been mangled flesh left behind in the wake of the shaft’s passage through the creature’s form. There should have been just a ruin of internal organs and ruptured bone, visible through the large hole the rebar had carved through its armor. Even if it had been Barious, there would have been sparking wires and damaged components. There wasn’t anything like that at all. There was just light. A weird, terrifying cerulean glow, like what was contained within wasn’t a person at all, but just liquid luminescence instead, luminescence that wasn’t spilling or flowing out of the wound, that just glowed in the center of the thing’s broken chest.
I think I actually said “What the fuck,” or at least mouthed the words, but I couldn’t hear myself over the wind. I’d seen some weird shit in the last three years. This still took the cake. It took the cake, and the dish the cake had come on, and the whole goddamned bakery. Maybe even the whole bakery’s block.
And that was before the thing lifted up its hand—the same one it had used to pull the metal shaft free from its body, the other still anchoring it to the train car roof—and raised it, palm up, toward me. And the metal skin retracted, and the palm within started to glow with that same light.
Whatever happened next, I doubted I was going to enjoy it much.
Thankfully, it didn’t happen at all, because at that moment the cobalt glow from the creature’s . . . whatever was suddenly matched by a piercing line of azure brightness from behind us, a laser that slashed through the back half of the train car, cutting free the section of roof that the creature was clinging to. The thing went sailing free, back down toward the bridge below—then the train was lit by floodlights, and a welcome voice came through the comm in my ear:
“What the hell was that thing, and why was he glowing at you?” Schaz asked. “Rude.”
I turned—it took some effort to rip my eyes away from the section of track where the roof had smashed down; I doubted that little fall was going to end the whatever-it-was—and saw Scheherazade on approach, her forward lasers still glowing slightly as they cooled. She pulled into a smooth loop, matching the train car’s direction and speed, her cargo ramp lowering so that it was almost touching the roof. Jane clambered on, Sho still clinging tightly to her back, then both of them reached out to help me do the same.
“Circle back around!” Jane commanded Schaz, one hand clinging to an anchor strap for stability, the other raised to the comm in her ear. “Whatever the hell that thing is, I want to make sure it’s dead!”
“Your ship is awesome!” Sho cried over the wind.
“Yeah, she is!” I shouted back, grinning. I remembered the first time I’d laid eyes on Schaz too—it had been in similar straits.
The train vanished from beneath us as Schaz cut her forward momentum, then slowly began to arc around; she couldn’t match the loop she’d made earlier with us still hanging out of the combination airlock and armory that was Schaz’s ramp access. Or rather, she could have, but then we would all fall out, and she’d have to pick us up again, if we weren’t all dead and splattered far, far below.
“Do you see it?” Jane shouted at me as Schaz’s spotlights searched the bridge. I didn’t see it, but I found the crumpled metal that was the piece of the train Scheherazade had cut free, and I pointed at it; Jane thumped on the last door of the armory lockers with her fist, and the whole thing sprung outward, releasing a massive mounted cannon, a .50 caliber machine gun built onto a swivel rack anchored inside its little hidey-hole.
I had not known that we had that.
Jane got herself behind the gun, pulling the bolt back and priming it to fire, the ammunition snaking up into the chamber from a belt line that led back inside Scheherazade. “Do you see it?” she asked again, swiveling the big gun around, looking for her target.
I shook my head, still scanning. “No, I—”
“There!” Sho pointed; he was half-twisted around on Jane’s back so he could still look. Jane followed the line of his extended arm, as did I: the creature was standing on the bridge, its wings still folded, that single iridescent hole still bored through the center of its armor, where its heart would have been if it had been human. It didn’t seem the worse for wear for having been thrown from a moving vehicle, then having half a train roof dropped on top of it.
Jane spun her giant gun on its swivel, aiming down at her target; I started building a teke slam in my fist. Schaz had slipped into hover mode, keeping us about twenty feet above the bridge, and I could actually smell the ionization as her rear turret began heating up as well.
Whoever this motherfucker was, he was about to have a real bad day. . . .
A crackling, high-pitched whine filled the comm bug in my ear, like a feedback loop, then a voice, low, mechanical, almost grinding, rising from the sonic depths of the interference. “Her great reckoning will not be so easily diverted. The day will arrive—but not yet. Do not doubt your place in the fires.”
That shouldn’t have happened. We were using an encrypted frequency.
From where it stood on the bridge, oblivious to the very large weapons directed at it, the mechanically angelic creature raised a gauntleted hand toward us, and pointed. Right at us. The implication was clear—it was the exosuited figure that had hacked our comms. Whoever our pursuer was, they’d just cracked Justified encryption like it was nothing.
We opened fire. The static still filled our comm channel, the noise almost a kind of laughter, even as the lasers and the giant fucking bullets and my own teke blasts tore through its armor like paper, revealing more of that awful cobalt glow beneath. It didn’t matter where we hit it—the chest, the mask, the wings—that’s all that was inside. Just that terrifying liquid light.
It didn’t matter that the thing’s armor was cracking apart, shattering and melting under the sustained fire; it didn’t matter that at this point the thing was more blue glow than actual form. It still broke into our comms one last time, and said: “Her existence is a scream.”
Then the bridge collapsed beneath it under the weight of the barrage and it was gone, falling into the buildings below, lost to the dust and smoke.
For a moment, I simply stood on the ramp, my breath heaving in my chest; I’d put absolutely everything I’d had into that barrage of telekinetic attacks, and I barely even had the strength to stand. So I didn’t.
I dropped down to a boneless squat on the edge of the ramp, utterly exhausted. If I hadn’t been holding on to one of the anchor straps with my free hand, I might have just kept sliding until I was right back on the bridge below. Not at all my intention.
“Sho,” I told our cargo, “don’t take this the wrong way, but: fuck your planet. I hate it.”
“Try living here,” Sho replied with something almost approaching equanimity.
“If everyone’s so unhappy to be here, can we please leave?” Schaz asked. “A pulsed atmosphere like this doesn’t get more comfortable the longer I’m in it, you know.”
“Time to go,” Jane agreed, though there was something in her voice—a kind of catch—that I didn’t quite trust; it was the way she sounded when she wasn’t quite lying, but when she had a more . . . distant relationship to the truth than usual. Either way, though, she’d already stowed her big fuck-off gun so she could reach down and give me a hand up, and whatever she was thinking, she was going to keep it to herself, so I reached for her outstretched hand, groaning as I took it; moving was bad. Then again, sitting on the ramp when Schaz closed it would be worse.
I pulled myself into the armory proper, and Schaz started closing her doors, giving us one last glimpse at the just-now-starting-to-dissipate mushroom cloud that was all that was left of Sho’s factory city, one last glimpse of his terrible homeworld, where the tens of thousands who had died today would be just a drop in the ongoing flood that was the endless war raging across its surface.
I stood by my statement. Fuck this planet. I was ready to be off it.
Schaz kicked in her engines, and I got my wish.