19

Inside the shadowy storage room Amira and I wasted no time struggling into our armor. She’d piloted us both around distant footsteps, the sounds of plasma fire, and screams to get us here in one piece.

“Never thought I’d be this happy to get back in this damn thing.” I leaned into my splayed-open suit and smiled as it wrapped itself around me. I gritted my teeth as the suit wormed its way into my spine, but then relaxed as the neural interface synched up. I clenched a fist, feeling power surge through my forearms.

“Hold still,” Amira said. “I’m disabling the training protocols. We don’t want the suits locking up in a real fight.”

“Shit.” I hadn’t even thought of that.

“Okay. You’re good to go.” Amira walked over to the door. Her helmet snapped up out of the collar ring and she held up a finger to silence me.

I snicked my helmet up with a thought.

“What’s up?” I asked. With the helmet up, my voice wouldn’t carry. And with our quantum-encrypted comms, no one would be listening in.

“Gunfire. Hear it?”

Not with my own ears. And though I was interfaced with the suit, I wasn’t quite as good as Amira at getting it to amplify things like that for me. That was going to be in the training ahead. Training we hadn’t gotten to.

But then even I heard the crack, just down the corridor. “Quick, behind the open suits,” I said. There were rows and rows of them on their wheeled racks, plugged in to base power and recharging.

Amira moved away from the door and joined me at the very back. We stood like statues in the ready position near several other broken, closed armor sets. I darkened my helmet. “We still don’t have any weapons,” Amira said.

“All we trained with were toys anyway,” I replied. “We have the suits. That gives us a chance. More than we had when going up against them with an ax and no protection. Hopefully they won’t even notice us.”

The doors slid up, the light from the corridor outside spilling in. Two shadows darted inside. I could hear hushed whispers.

“They’re human,” Amira said with relief.

“I know.” I slid my helmet down. The loud snicking sound made the shadows jump.

“Who’s there?” someone hissed nervously.

I stepped forward with a thump, gauntleted hands raised. “Devlin Hart,” I whispered.

Someone moved from my right. I hadn’t even seen them detach and work around the row of suits. A flashlight blazed into life, and the end of a nasty-looking submachine gun jammed up near my cheek, making me wince.

“That’s not a trainer,” I muttered.

I turned and found myself face-to-face with Ken. He started laughing. “It’s me, Ken Awojobi,” he said, as if we hadn’t seen each other in years. He grabbed the back of my neck and pulled our foreheads together. “You, you made it. Yes, you are too damn annoying and full of yourself not to. I love it. I am so happy to see you.”

“You have real guns,” I said, not sure how else to respond but to focus on the obvious. “How did you get them?”

Ken held up a hand and looked back at the door. “Everyone, in,” he said with a wave.

More shadows slipped in, and one of them closed the doors. Once they were shut, someone flicked the lights on.

Amira shifted in her full armor behind Ken. He jumped away. “Fuck! How did you do that? I didn’t even see you there.”

She smiled. “How did you get the guns, Ken?”

Ken tapped the submachine gun. “You like my MP9? I’ve been waiting for us to go live fire. I wanted to see what our inventory was like, and one of my team members, Boris, was a recruit originally with the class in front of us. Held back for injuries. He knew where the good stuff was, and so did I. We went on a raid. Boris!”

“Incoming,” Amira said.

A short recruit with a sharp chin joined our huddle. He held up a phone in one hand. “Raptor team,” he confirmed with Amira. She nodded, agreeing.

Boris had a distinct South London accent. I imagined him loitering around an Accordance relief camp in the bombed-out ruins around the Thames, selling trinkets to struthiforms on leave.

Someone cut the lights, and we all tensed as raptors ran by outside.

“Okay,” Boris said.

On some unspoken agreement, we didn’t turn the lights back on. Amira lit her suit up, using blue shoulder lamps to create a soft pool of light around our sudden conference.

“How’d you get a pair of networked phones?” Amira asked.

“It’s like lockdown back at home, isn’t it?” Boris said. “Been playing keep-away with ET since I was yea high.” He waved a hand near his waist.

“Boris gets you things,” Ken said. “He had emergency air under his bed, in case Zeus tried something funny.”

“Sadistic fucker,” Boris said.

“We got more emergency breathers and hunkered down,” Ken said. “Then the explosions and screaming started. We figured out it wasn’t a drill.”

“Shit went pear shaped,” Boris put in. “So we snagged everyone with breathers willing to listen and made a dash for the weapons locker.”

“A raptor jumped us on the way out.” Ken rubbed his forehead. “It killed five of us before we put it down.”

He wasn’t bragging. Not trying to score points. He looked shaken mentioning the deaths.

“How many are near the door?” I asked.

“Outside of me and Boris, five others.”

So just nine of us in the room. “Have you seen anyone else?”

“Just screams and bodies,” Ken rasped. “Efua, you said you saw something?”

One of the other survivors had moved closer in the dark and spoke up. “We did see a cloud of crickets drag Commander Zeus off,” she said. “We don’t know what happened, though. Normally they don’t take you alive . . . they just start firing first.”

Commander Zeus must have had some value to them alive, I thought to myself. Unlike the recruits.

“I’d thought, once we had guns we could get armor and then fight back,” Ken said softly. “But after that raptor . . . I realized we aren’t ready for this. We barely started training. They’re seasoned killers. After that encounter, I just wanted to get suited up and find a place to hole up. Fight only if cornered.”

I nodded. “Amira and I were going to armor up, then go hide in the mines. See if we could get somewhere safe from there, or find out what’s going on. Is it just here? Or is everything under attack?”

Ken looked up. “Like Earth?”

“The Conglomerate is here, and they usually come for whole systems,” Amira said.

“Fucking hell,” Boris said. “The mines aren’t a bad idea.”

“Can you really reach out from there to find out what’s happening?” Ken asked.

“If anyone can, it’s Amira. Anyone have a better idea to stay alive?”

Ken took a deep breath, then shook his head. He looked at Boris, who also shook his head.

Amira held up a hand. “Crickets,” she said. “They’re going door-to-door.”

I turned to Ken. “Give Amira and me the MP9s you and Boris have, you all get into armor, and we’ll hold them off.”

Ken hesitated for a second, then handed me his submachine gun. He handed me an extra magazine. “Shoot sparingly, not a lot of magazines left. And we lost most of the other weapons in the fight. We just have some handguns passed around now.”

Amira pointed at a rack of suits. “Ken, Boris, those suits are all the same arm. We’re going to need to stay on the same network that they can’t hack so we can chat. Everyone else, just make sure you’re all in the same arm.”

I stomped my way forward toward the doors and checked the MP9. “Is this the safety?”

Amira leaned forward and flicked up the switch I’d indicated. “Firing mode. Keep it off full automatic for now. Save ammo. The safety is in the trigger on this one. Just keep squeezing.”

“Right.” I didn’t ask how she knew all this, but raised the gun and flipped my helmet up as the sound of skittering outside got louder.