part0032

Corpses—mostly Waverley’s bodyguards—littered the street and alleys. There were bodies, pieces of bodies, puddles of blood and viscera, and pudding-like remnants of what had minutes earlier been human beings. It was all so bright and vivid in the early morning sunlight. The stench was probably testing the limits of the armor’s already laboring filters.

Meyers continued, trying to keep a meaningful stride despite the pain in his heel. His breathing sounded wrong—wheezy and desperate. It was all he could hear.

In the shade of the north alley, he nearly lost his footing in one of Waverley’s bodyguards, who had been torn in two, apparently by friendly fire. Meyers had mistaken it for two separate corpses. It wasn’t.

The channel came alive again, and Meyers stopped, straining.

“Colonel! Colonel Meyers! Um, shit! Mayday! Mayday!” It was Starling. “We’re going down! The pilot’s…gone.”

Other sounds leaked through her armor’s sensors—the Dart’s engines, whining, static, the sort of popping that might be systems overloading. He imagined that the Dart’s small passenger cabin was already filled with smoke, although he wasn’t sure what to think when she said the pilot was gone.

“Private Starling, this is Colonel Meyers.” He started running again, listening. “I’ve lost your positioning.”

“Um…um…” Her audio was weak, cutting in and out.

“The Dart.” He tried to remember where the comm antennas were on a Dart. “Switch to the aft antennas.” It was a different frequency range, but the BAS could handle that.

“Colonel?”

“Good! You’re clear now. Where are you?”

“We’re…it’s in a spiral. Agent Barlowe’s unconscious. He banged his head hard. There’s buildings below us. I see the soccer field off to…”

Meyers stopped at the end of the alley and glanced left, where Reyes’s haulers had been. They were still there, seventy or eighty meters away, sitting at the southern edge of a clearing that led up to the soccer field with people scattered around in clumps. Civilians, most of them crouching, some lying face down. Reyes’s men danced around the haulers, assault rifles raised high, as if they’d brought the aircraft down.

“Use your mapping. Where are—” He glanced right and saw the Dart, north of his position, probably 300 meters, just east of Guevara Highway, spiraling lazily, losing altitude. “I see you. Marking you now.”

He brought up the battlefield map and tagged the Dart’s location just as its engines stalled and it fell.

“Colonel!”

The Dart dropped, disappearing from sight. Meyers brought up the data Starling had managed to gather on Turning Point. The buildings in the area were warehouses, empty. Seized by Reyes, he remembered. Farmers Road.

The cheering of Reyes’s men stopped, and the haulers’ engines whined as the drivers backed up.

They were going for the Dart.

“No!” Meyers sighted in on the nearest clump of men and fired. One of the men fell. His comrades didn’t even notice at first.

Meyers set his CAWS-5 in its back brace and ran as quickly as his heel allowed back down the alleyway. He searched among the dead, finally finding a serviceable assault rifle. Waverley’s men had plenty of ammunition. He took five magazines, then headed back to the end of the alley.

“Colonel Meyers?” The voice sounded like Private Perkins. Meyers confirmed.

“What is it?”

“I-I thought I heard Becky. Is she okay?”

“The Dart’s down.” Meyers tagged the location and forwarded it to Perkins. “Warehouses up there, about 400 meters from my position. Maybe they landed on one. Farmers Road.”

“Permission to head to that position, Colonel.”

Meyers set the assault rifle to automatic and opened fire on the group of Reyes’s men who were now looking down at their fallen comrade. That got their attention. “Those haulers are getting back onto Cáceres Road. I’m pretty sure they’re trying to get up to that warehouse.”

“I see ‘em, sir.”

“If you want to try…”

“I do, sir.”

Reyes’s men were gathering, building up courage. They crouched, became tough targets. Meyers waited until they charged forward, then he sprayed the group with automatic fire.

“Colonel?”

“Go. This area’s crawling with locals.” Bullets thudded into the wall around him, a sound too soft to be right. It couldn’t be the lingering effects of the explosion, since he was hearing transmissions okay. Then he remembered—he’d cut back audio on everything but the communications channel. He adjusted the setting and returned fire. “Perkins, give me a full feed, audio, video.”

Perkins’s video came through crisp. He was dropping into the alley between McNutt’s building and Gerhardt’s, using the silicone grips on a section of wall that didn’t look very sound. Gerhardt’s voice droned in the background, an internal discussion.

“Just fucking cover me, Titan.” Perkins slid over the side of the building, dropped at a dangerous speed, and thudded into the alley with a grunt, then he pulled down the grips and ran into the street.

Meyers struggled with a moment of disorientation as Perkins glanced west and sprinted ahead of machine gun fire from the last flyer, all while Meyers laid down another automatic burst on Reyes’s advancing men. Meyers shrank Perkins’s feed to about one-third display area and half opacity, good enough to track his progress. He was hugging building fronts, heading east, past the shivering proxy and Waverley’s smoking hauler to Guevara Highway.

“McNutt, you still conscious?” Meyers swapped in a fresh magazine. With so many close-packed targets, he liked being able to just send rounds downrange, but he hated the speed he was burning through ammunition.

“Back on my feet, yeah. I’m pulling out of the sprint competition, though.”

“The Dart’s down. Perkins is heading to its position. I want you to redeploy your squad—” Meyers ducked back as bullets thudded into the ground centimeters outside the alley. “I want you to redeploy your squad to Banh’s position. Tell him to hook up with Perkins ASAP, hold that building.”

McNutt gasped, probably testing the limits of his body. “His squad any better off than mine?”

Meyers thought about that. Banh’s squad had been chewed up badly by the haulers. “Master Sergeant Paxton? Carl?”

“I heard you, sir. Just linked up with Sergeant Banh’s squad. They’re under fifty percent effective. Colonel Ramawat and Captain Singh are here as well. The colonel’s in a particularly pleasant way.”

“Hold your position. I’ll be there as soon as possible.”

Paxton chuckled. “That’s gonna please the colonel so very much.”

“All right, McNutt, take your squad up to the Dart.” Meyers tapped in the route Perkins had taken. “That last flyer’s still up there, west side of the street, but I think they only have partial control of the flight systems.”

“My wounded,” McNutt said. His voice was raw and heavy with concern.

“Corporal Gerhardt, get a fire team over to McNutt’s building—retrieve his wounded.”

Gerhardt hissed something unintelligible.

“Corporal Gerhardt, did you—”

“I heard you. I’ve got people on the way.”

Meyers set the assault rifle to burst fire and started testing its accuracy. He dropped two of Reyes’s men with three bursts. The rest dropped to their stomachs and contented themselves with firing on his position at full auto. He fell back and swapped out the magazine.

“Colonel, sounds like your dance card’s full, but just so you know, there’s a lot of local boys who would love some time with you here.” Paxton’s audio carried a near-constant stream of automatic gunfire and other sounds of combat.

“Is it just Reyes?”

“Just, sir? There’s gotta be a hundred screaming lunatics all around us. Not disciplined or bright, but there’s a lotta lead flying.”

“What’s left of the MARCOS?”

“Ten, and that’s being nice. Banh’s men rescued three. There’s a couple people ain’t gonna make it, still trying to hang in there. Tough soldiers.”

“Corporal Gerhardt, when that fire team returns with McNutt’s wounded, send them over to Sergeant Banh’s position.” Meyers popped around the corner, sprayed some automatic gunfire toward the pinned-down men, then pulled back into the alley.

Static roared in Meyers’s ears.

“Shit!” He tweaked the volume down slightly.

“Colonel Meyers?” Starling sounded shaky.

“Private Starling? Are you okay? Can you get me a video feed?”

Meyers filled half his display with Perkins’s video feed, then when Starling’s feed came through he put it in the other half.

Perkins was running north along Guevara Highway, only occasionally looking down and ahead at the cracked blacktop. He was glancing west, toward what looked like the soccer field. He’d been spotted by Reyes’s men and was using the shack houses lining the western side of the highway for cover.

Starling’s video took a moment to figure out. The orientation was all wrong, with what looked like a catwalk visible through a hole where the cockpit used to be off to her left. The view seemed to be almost parallel with the catwalk, maybe four meters down from a ceiling, but it was looking at the underside of the catwalk. Meyers suddenly realized the hole he was looking out of the cockpit through was in the floor. The Dart had to be upside down. It had fallen through a warehouse rooftop.

“I think I may have busted my leg, sir.”

“Upper or lower?”

Starling gasped. “Upper. Left leg. It kind of hurts just breathing.”

She would still be in her harness, he realized, so her thigh would be pressing against that. Any movement…“Okay, just hang in there. Private Perkins is on his way. McNutt’s following as fast as he can.”

“Ladell’s breathing. I think I heard him groan.” She shifted, gasped again, and her video captured Barlowe, across the cabin from her, definitely upside down in his harness, head lolling, blood trickling up his cheek and disappearing in his helmet.

Meyers couldn’t see anything horribly wrong with Barlowe. “He looks okay.”

“He’s kinda pretty, huh, sir?”

Meyers laughed. “Yeah. I’m going to need you to hang on, okay? Can you promise me that?”

“Just hanging around, Colonel?”

That drew a smile. “Yeah. We’ll get—”

Something in Perkins’s feed drew Meyers’ attention. He expanded it to fill his display, realizing as he did what it was: the flyer. Its shadow—zigging and zagging—flew past, then came back. Gunfire came through Perkins’s audio, and the road ahead of him shattered into doughy clumps. The video jerked and darkened, and Meyers realized Perkins had dove off the road. A moment later, he was ducked down at the side of one of the shacks, screaming for everyone to stay low and out of sight. The machine gun fired again but quickly stopped. The shadow bobbed and twisted, as if the pilot were drunk. When it looked like the flyer had flown past, Perkins sneaked a peek.

The flyer was maybe twenty meters up. White smoke curled around all four of the fans, almost managing to obscure the belly gun, which seemed to be searching for a target, spinning, spinning. There was a definite wobble to the flyer, almost like what had happened with One-Six-Three, except the flyers had no wings.

“What’s the matter, sir?” Starling asked.

“Private Perkins is having a problem with the last of the flyers.”

“I got it, Colonel,” Perkins said. He watched the flyer for a moment longer, then he ran out from between the shacks and sprinted up Guevara Highway.

“Okay, he’s back on track.” Meyers flipped from both videos to a clear display and peered around the building corner. Reyes’s men had found their nerve again and were rising. He let them run forward before bringing the assault rifle up and emptying the magazine. Two of the men fell and didn’t get up. The rest started crawling back.

Meyers shrank Perkins and Starlings’s feeds to the top third of his display, then got up and limp-jogged south through the alley, dropping the assault rifle on the corpse that had been torn in two. What remained of McNutt’s squad was forming up ahead of the opposite alley.

“That flyer’s still up.” Meyers tapped the location on the map. “Limited flight control, looks like, and I’m not sure how long it can stay up with the fans like they are, but keep an eye out.”

McNutt waved in answer, then he led his team in a slow jog onto the street, past the finally still proxy and Waverley’s smoking hauler. Meyers risked a quick glance, and he thought he might have seen Waverley and the driver slumped forward in their seats.

Meyers headed west, hugging the building fronts where he could, scanning rooftops and alleys, expecting one of Waverley’s men to pop out at any time. There was no way to get a meaningful count of the dead at the moment. Had Ramawat agreed to put his people on the secondary network, they could have built out a full model of the battlefield. They could have marked the enemy and tracked each time they dropped one of them.

Every complication, every misstep had been Ramawat’s. Meyers was sure of it. He had a case for relieving Ramawat of command. The ERF had nearly been destroyed on the mission, all because of his arrogance.

Meyers checked the display for Banh’s location. His squad was definitely banged up, three flatlined, two with ugly vital signs.

Meyers entered the apartment building through a gap that had been created by heavy weapons fire. Inside, a foyer held several small bodies, some crushed by the collapsed wall, some torn to pieces by the same bullets that had torn the building front to pieces. They were young kids, maybe as old as Rimes’s boys had been. Meyers stepped over the dead carefully and thought back to all that had happened in the last year, all the stupid deaths and the killing. He reminded himself this was about bringing closure to the Metacorporate War. It was about healing. That helped him get past the corpses.

The foyer connected to the hallway, where he stopped to listen. Sporadic gunfire. A break in the combat. He glanced down the hallway.

The back third of the building was a gaping hole.

Apartments, the common laundry room, a maintenance room—everything was visible to some degree. Someone had set up a crude triage where the two hallways met. There were MARCOS and ERF wounded there, on litters. And corpses. The haulers and their guns had ultimately proven to be as big a problem as Waverley’s more advanced weapons platforms. And Reyes had a small army as well.

Paxton was a green wireframe stooped behind a wall a few meters away. Meyers approached, not seeing Ramawat until it was too late.

Ramawat drove his right palm into Meyers’s sternum, which was effective only because of the surprise. “I will have you up on charges the second we return to the Valdez ! Your career is finished, Colonel!” He waved his sidearm and slowly brought it around to point at Meyers’s faceplate. “I should execute you now! I have every right!”

It barely registered for Meyers that Ramawat’s armor was caked in dried, grit-heavy blood. His face was grimy, clear only where sweat trailed down it.

“Get your hand off me,” Meyers said.

Ramawat just glared. His eyes wobbled, as if he couldn’t focus.

Meyers slapped the pistol away and punched Ramawat in the throat. He reeled back, and Meyers followed, backhanding across the face, chopping at a shoulder joint. Ramawat crashed into the lower half of a wall, knocking a small chunk free.

Singh came from around another wall and inserted himself between Ramawat and Meyers. “Colonels, we are in the middle of an engagement!”

Meyers’s head and neck throbbed. His throat constricted so that speaking and swallowing were a challenge. He opened his faceplate and sucked in the air of the ruined building, drawing strength and resolve from the stench of death. “You’re relieved of command, Colonel Ramawat.”

“I think not.” Ramawat raised his pistol. “Your actions warrant execution!”

Singh turned. “Colonel, please.” He twisted back around, eyes pleading. “Colonel Meyers, is it possible this could wait?”

Meyers relaxed, suddenly feeling foolish. “I’m sorry. All this death—”

“There will be one more,” Ramawat screamed.

His pistol was a deafening crack in the momentary quiet of the battlefield lull.