part0019

Exposed. Vulnerable. Defenseless.

But that was Gerhardt, Meyers reminded himself. Gerhardt was at risk. Meyers thought about that: one of the soldiers under my command, not me.

He shivered and switched to Zacharowski’s feed. His audio was quieter, but it wasn’t as crisp, even though his video came through clean. He was almost wriggling like a snake through low grass. His path was shorter than Gerhardt’s, but it ran closer to the patrol than the others. The flyers were visible in grainy profile from his current position. Perkins’s speculation about belly guns was looking more and more likely the closer Zacharowski got.

Meyers switched to McNutt. He was working hard, crawling on forearms and thighs, moving faster than the other two. It made sense, since he was the least likely to be spotted. A short distance from the edge of what looked like tilled soil, he paused and unsheathed his dagger, then he crawled forward again.

“At the edge of the garden,” McNutt said. “About six meters north of the road. No sign of sensors. No one’s been out here for a while.”

The image became grainier as McNutt moved fully into the darkness. He looked to his right, revealed a line of low scrub between him and the main building. He crawled closer to the scrub, then onto the tilled earth. His gloves plunged into the dry dirt, then he inspected them for a moment before digging into the ground with the knife.

Meyers flipped back to Gerhardt’s feed. He was frozen, eyes locked on the shoulders of two of the guards, standing fourteen meters away, partially hidden by the camouflage netting. They seemed to be talking.

“Private Perkins, can you get an angle on Corporal Gerhardt?”

After a few seconds, Perkins said, “I see him, Colonel. Two security guards standing just inside—”

“Good. Keep an eye on them. Don’t fire without my say.”

“Yes, sir.”

Seconds ticked by, then the guards disappeared behind the camouflage netting.

“Private Perkins, Gerhardt lost visual on the guards.”

“I’ve got them. They’re coming out of the camouflage netting on the far side. Wait a second. They stopped again.”

Gerhardt’s view shifted right, as if he were rolling onto his shoulder and craning his neck. The guards were nowhere to be seen. Meyers imagined being in that position. The Commandos always cautioned to use patience, to wait for the right time, but Delta’s training was—

The view shifted. Gerhardt was crawling forward.

“Private Perkins, can you—”

“They’re still in position. If Titan keeps moving, he’ll come out right where they can see him.”

Meyers muted and let out a string of curses. Titan—Gerhardt’s—suit was in passive mode, shut off from the BAS network Meyers had set up for the rest of the ERF team. Even if Gerhardt could receive a message, any transmission so close to the facility would be risky with the BAS likely compromised.

Gerhardt accelerated.

Meyers looked around, desperate for any means of contacting Gerhardt. Short of running across the field to get within whispering range—

The Condor’s rangefinder!

Meyers shrank Gerhardt’s view and filled the main display with the Condor’s interface, and then brought up the optics interface. With most of the sensitive guts in little pieces spread across the desert, the interface only had a few options online. That made it easy getting to the rangefinder. He swiped through the options, selecting ultra-violet pulse and then searching for the interface to the camera system.

It was offline, too.

“Colonel, he’s almost to the netting.”

“Working on it.” Meyers brought up the camera system and derived Gerhardt’s coordinates from the Condor’s internal positioning system, then he did the same for the edge of the netting. He copied both values into the rangefinder.

“Colonel—”

“Thank you.” Meyers split his view, Gerhardt’s feed filling the right half, the Condor’s feed filling the left.

He activated the rangefinder and the Condor fired off a pulse of UV laser light at the netting coordinates—just as Gerhardt looked off to his right, in Zacharowski’s general direction. Gerhardt reached for the netting; Meyers triggered the rangefinder again. This time, the beam showed up on Gerhardt’s display, an almost white dot on the back of his hand.

Gerhardt froze. “What the fuck?”

“Come on.” Meyers gritted his teeth and willed Gerhardt back.

Nothing.

Meyers fired the pulse again, but he tracked it down Gerhardt’s side, back to the original coordinates Meyers had copied into the rangefinder. Gerhardt’s view captured the rangefinder’s movement. He was watching it, but he didn’t move otherwise.

“Anybody seeing this?” Gerhardt asked.

Meyers repeated the pulse.

“Colonel, I think something’s up.” Perkins’s voice was loud. “They’re moving toward Titan’s position.”

“Okay.”

Meyers fired off the pulse again and closed his eyes. Gerhardt wasn’t getting the message, but what Meyers was doing was pretty close to the Concord’s limits. No, he realized, there was more that could be done.

He went back into the optics, found his own coordinates, and copied those into the rangefinder, then fired off a pulse that ran from Gerhardt’s hand, along his side, across the open field, and into the tree line. Gerhardt’s view showed him twisting around to follow the pulse, then looking back at the netting.

“Is that you guys?” Gerhardt pulled his hand away from the netting and slowly reversed back into the open field.

“They’re at the netting, Colonel.” Perkins swallowed hard. “Do—do you want me to take a shot?”

Gerhardt’s view was focused on the netting. When the security guards came around the edge, his view shifted to the ground.

“Hold fire. What are they doing?”

“Looking out into the field. Shit, they looked right at Titan.”

“Did they see him?”

Perkins whistled. “Negative, Colonel. They’re walking away.”

Meyers nodded. “Thank you.”

Meyers waited until Gerhardt looked up again, then reversed the rangefinder burst to move toward the netting. This time, Gerhardt understood immediately; he crawled toward the netting. After looking around, as if searching for the rangefinder, he pulled back the netting and looked.

Lights reflected off the hull of a ship as big as the yacht Meyers had seen on Sahara. Bigger, Meyers thought. It could hold thirty or more, depending on how uncomfortable people were willing to live.

Waverley’s security force, Meyers thought.

He switched to Zacharowski’s view. The image was inconsistent—one moment clear, the next choppy. He was moving beneath the roof, crawling under the bellies of the flyers. In some of the images that came through, the armor and belly guns on the flyers were clear. Most appeared to be machine guns, but Meyers thought he saw a railgun on the largest of the flyers. It wasn’t a very practical weapon on a flyer unless there were dedicated batteries in the extra space, and even then, the gun would chew through power quickly.

For show, Meyers thought. Or to punch through armor the lighter machine guns couldn’t handle. No matter what, it had limited application.

One vehicle stood out from the others—larger, lower to the ground, with heavier armor. Its doors were closed. From what Meyers could see of it, he thought it was a small hauler rather than a flyer. It seemed even more limited in use than the large flyer.

Zacharowski crawled clear of the roof and held up eight fingers. “If you’re listening, eight flyers, seven with light machine guns, one with a pretty hefty railgun. And a big-ass crawler or small hauler. Like an armored security car. They’re all up-armored. Mostly ablative plex-armor. Good enough to stop what we’ve got. For a bit.”

Eight flyers. One with a railgun, seven with light machine guns. Up close, the flyers looked even uglier, as if they’d been sitting in a junk heap for a while or had been scavenged from parts.

Up-armored and burdened with guns and ammunition, their range would be reduced. Zacharowski’s images at least gave them a starting point to make estimates on threat level.

Meyers switched back to McNutt’s feed in time to hear him snort. “Well, Zombie mystery solved.” He tugged something out of the hole he’d dug with his knife: a pale, beefy hand with modified nails—thick and pointy like claws. “Smells like they’ve been dead for a bit.” He released the hand and scooped dirt back into the hole. “A garden this size, you could easily plant a hundred Zombies.”

McNutt’s view spun right abruptly, and Meyers caught lights sweeping over the top of the crude roof where Zacharowski was checking out the flyers.

“Something on the east side of the facility,” McNutt said. “Lights moving.”

“Private Perkins, we’ve got something on the east side of the facility. Lights, something—”

“I see the lights, Colonel. There’s something out there, but it’s…it’s projecting something that’s flooding my scope. I think it’s UV.”

“UV?”

“It must be. Trying thermographic imaging.”

Meyers switched to Gerhardt’s view. He was looking east as well, and he was close enough to pick out more details. Whatever the lights were attached to, it was moving, and its top rose above the roof.

Meyers repeated the rangefinder pulse for Gerhardt, running it from his position back to the trees.

“Heading back,” Gerhardt said. He turned and crawled toward the open field.

Gerhardt passed through an area bathed in reflected light from the research facility’s exterior floods. He moved much slower and more cautious than before, or at least it seemed to Meyers’s eyes.

“I don’t know if you can hear me, but sons of bitches got machine guns. Heavy ones. Automated. I saw two under the netting.” Gerhardt’s voice was shaky. “Covering this field. Fuck!”

Machine guns. Probably tied to sensors. Meyers wondered what sort of sensors and how far out they covered. Not good enough to catch the intrusion so far.

When Gerhardt was deep in the shadows again, Meyers switched to the Condor’s feed. The east side of the facility was darker than the rest, the only light coming from the research facility. And the shed. The door had been rolled up at some point.

“Private Perkins?”

“I’m pretty sure there’s something moving down there, sir, something big, but it must have some pretty good thermo-baffles. I can make out a vague shape sometimes, but that’s it.”

Thermo-baffles. Big. Not something they were armed to deal with.

Meyers went back into the Condor’s optics interface and searched for Zacharowski. He was out of sight, no longer transmitting, somewhere under the roof again. Meyers spent a second considering whether to run a rangefinder burst from the edge of the roof to the trees, but couldn’t see how that would help. On top of that, Zacharowski was far enough under the roof that he couldn’t be seen by the Condor, so the odds of him seeing the laser pulse were negligible.

Meyers switched to McNutt’s position and copied the coordinates over Gerhardt’s, then ran a pulse from McNutt to the tree line.

“Was that you, Colonel?” McNutt looked skyward. “Something’s going on at Zacharowski’s position. Gonna check it out.”

“No!” Meyers repeated the rangefinder pulse.

McNutt froze. “That’s got to be you, Colonel. Repeat it again if you’re ordering me back; otherwise, I’m checking on Zacharowski.”

Meyers repeated the pulse.

“Yeah, I get it.” McNutt headed for the trees.

Meyers filled his display with the Condor’s video and tried to bring up a smaller window with Zacharowski’s feed. The image came through choppy, the audio slightly better. He was somewhere under the roof, but close enough to the edge or a gap that his signal was getting through.

“You’re gonna love this one, Colonel.” Zacharowski held a hand up, but before Meyers could make out what was in the hand, the signal cut out.

Meyers went into the optics interface and took the coordinates for the southwestern corner of the roof. He pasted that into the rangefinder and prepared to fire a pulse from the roof to the woods, but at the last second, he stopped.

Something taller than the roof, capable of moving up near the flyers without Zacharowski hearing its approach and flooding UV and defeating thermographic optics. That sounded like the sort of thing that would probably be able to see UV laser pulses.

Zacharowski’s feed kicked back in. He was holding a brick of plastique. “—small case of this. Probably enough to take out this little fleet. What do you say, Colonel?”

“Get out of there,” Meyers whispered. “Move, dammit.”

Zacharowski stuck a detonator into the brick. “Little surprise for our friends, huh? I know you’d want me to. Just like this.” He held the brick up so the detonator was visible, then dropped it into a satchel filled with more bricks, all of them blinking. “I think they were making improvised explosives. Maybe for us.”

Floodlights washed over the hoods and roofs of the flyers, and Zacharowski’s video feed caught the thing. It stood three and a half meters high and was half as wide at the shoulders, then tapered down to maybe a meter at the midsection. It had two arms and legs, and was blockish, with exaggerated human dimensions. The arms ended in human-like hands. Instead of a head, it had a bump with mounted floodlights and what were probably UV projectors. Mounted below the right arm was a heavy machine gun, complete with large ammunition drum.

“Fuck me,” Zacharowski whispered.

Meyers nodded. They were all fucked.