21
The barrage melted lunar regolith and threw boulders into the air as rock exploded. Stabbing energy blasts dazzled my eyes as I scrambled for cover.
“They’re climbing higher for an angle on us,” Ken shouted after a few minutes of chaos and hell.
Someone started whimpering on the arm’s channel. I sympathized as I huddled down into the shadows of a niche in a crater. “Stay still,” Amira said. “The suits have adaptive camo. They have countermeasures built in for Conglomerate sensors. Heat, UV, color, EM. Just don’t move, and the suit has the capacity to hide us. Move and it can’t keep up.”
I was already gray as the rock around me.
“Everyone should call in,” Amira continued in a calming voice. “Who made it out? We didn’t have time for names back inside. Who’s in our arm?”
“Boris, me, you, and Efua are one arm,” Ken said. “The other four are another arm.”
If we used the common channel, the Conglomerate would use the radio chatter to find us. The quantum entanglement only worked for intra-arm communication.
“Which one of us is closest to someone in the other arm?” Amira asked. “Are they moving around?”
“I am,” said a voice that wasn’t Boris’s recognizable accent, Amira, or Ken’s deep voice. She recognized the need to identify herself. “Efua here. I’m ten feet away from someone in the other arm. I don’t know the person’s name, but whoever it is saw us all stop moving and hide, and is copying us.”
Good. I hadn’t even thought about comm issues. If we’d been supported by properly trained octaves we’d know how to pass communications through from arm to arm, as well as ways to pass information up to leaders.
But we had no idea what we were doing. Amira was our most competent technologist, and she’d been hit by the electromagnetic pulse.
“Efua, can you safely get to this person and touch their armor?” Amira asked. “That’ll set up a direct comm link, and you don’t have to do anything. The suit should figure it out for you.”
“I think so.” Efua was silent for a long moment. “I’m going over.”
We waited for her to do that. I winced as more energy struck the dirt nearby. But it was random fire.
“Where is everyone?” I asked after a few minutes. I hadn’t been paying attention as we’d run for it. I’d dived into a crater a couple hundred feet away from the base. Ken was close to the bottom of the same crater, behind a boulder that had rolled down the slope. I didn’t know where anyone else was.
“A little farther ahead on the other side of the ridge,” Amira said. “I saw Devlin dive in. I risked the fire to get more distance.”
“I’m right next to Devlin,” Ken said flatly.
“Um . . .” Boris cleared his throat. “I’m near the rover bay, hiding behind one of the transport shuttles.”
“You doubled back to the base and moved around to the bay?” Ken asked, beating me by a split second.
“Well,” Boris said, “flying out with a shuttle when they’re distracted might be easier than trying to leg it out, yeah? Also, I thought there might be some useful bits lying around.”
“And?”
“I found a welding torch,” Boris said. There was a faint hint of satisfaction in his voice. “It’s supposedly strong enough to go through walls. I think it might go through raptor armor.”
“Anything else useful?” Ken asked.
“Explosives,” Boris added.
“Where’d you find those?”
“Locked away somewhere I had to use the torch to get at,” Boris said.
“You could have blown yourself up,” Ken snapped.
Boris made a noncommittal sound.
“We’re all in danger,” Amira said. “It’s as good an idea as any. He may yet be the one that makes it out now that the damn ship is trying to melt us into the surface.”
Efua interrupted us. “Okay, I have contact with the other arm. Is there anything you would like me to say to them for you?”
“Stay put,” Ken said. “Tell them about the camouflage, okay?”
“Okay. I am telling them.”
The light show stopped. The ground stopped shaking underneath us.
“What’s happening now?” I asked.
“Want to take a look over the edge?” Ken asked. I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not. But someone was going to have to.
“Give me a second,” I told him.
“Wait . . .”
I did it slowly, trying to give the suit time to adjust to the change. Hopefully anyone looking at this tiny little space at the crater’s lip would see nothing but gray.
“Devlin, what are you doing?”
I tensed, waiting for a bolt of energy to smack into my helmet and take the top of my head clean off. Nothing happened. I kept moving until I finally peered over the edge of the crater.
I stared at the lumpy, bell-shaped head of a troll standing tall farther down the slope of the crater. “Oh shit.”
It leapt into the air, passing over me and sailing into the center of the crater.
Ken rolled away from the boulder and started firing at it. The gun silently puffed smoke in the vacuum out of the barrel, and bullets chipped away at the troll’s bulky ankles.
“Ken! Run!” Amira bounced onto the tip of the crater. She must have leapt as hard as the suit possibly could, maybe even killing overrides for safety, to make it back from the ridge in a single bound like that.
The large rock she’d been carrying continued on as she smacked into the ground. It struck the troll right in the temple, and the alien swung to look at her.
Ken leapt out of the crater. So did I. But Ken shot at the troll again, clipping it in the head, getting its attention back on us and away from Amira.
“Those bullets aren’t doing shit!” I yelled. “They’re good for crickets, that’s it. We’re just pissing it off.”
“I know.” Ken popped up like a tick, bouncing from boulder to boulder, zigzagging and staying well away from the troll. “Efua, get your arm to the mining facility while we have the troll’s attention!”
The troll stopped trying to catch him and pulled out a large weapon strapped to its back. More cannon than gun. Well, more sawed-off cannon than cannon, really. It was squat and oddly bulky. In fact, it was wider than it was long. A weapon that was almost all mouth.
“Cover!” I yelled. The cannon glowed white and blue, then spat a long line of darkness. Light bent and wobbled around it. The boulder Ken hid behind was plucked right off the ground.
“What the . . .”
Ken swore as he watched the large chunk of rock sucked toward the troll in a cloud of fine gray dirt.
I opened fire. “Jump away, Ken!” I shouted.
Bullets struck the cannon, knocking it sideways just enough that the line of darkness wobbled off to the right. With the cannon beam’s hold on it broken, the boulder dropped, and Ken made like a grasshopper, shooting off for the ridge Amira had come from.
“What the hell was that?” he asked.
“I think it’s packing something like a portable wormhole in there. A weaponized tractor beam,” Amira said. “Ken, keep coming for the ridge, there are places to hide on the other side.”
I leapt the other way, heading back for the craters. The troll bounded after me. Every time I landed, I spun off in a new direction, waiting for the line of darkness to reach out and grab me. Or for a giant rocky foot to plaster me against the surface.
I was rabbiting away, swerving this way and that as best I could, but it was slowly, ploddingly, getting closer. It had thrown the wormhole cannon away. Had I broken it?
“Hold on,” Boris said. “I think I can distract it a second.”
I turned my head back in midleap and saw the sparkle of an explosion in the bay doors. The troll paused the next time it landed, and then turned back for a second.
That’s all I needed.
I skimmed low across the landscape and made it over a nearby set of ridges. Once I had lunar mass between me and the troll, I randomly bounced this way and that from hard, rocky surfaces so I didn’t leave footprints.
And then I dug in and froze.
No looking over the lip and getting spotted this time. The troll was out there stomping on bugs, and I was going to be a good little cockroach and stay put in the dark crevice I’d found.
“Dev?” Amira whispered, even though she didn’t need to. “You there?”
“Yeah. Ken?”
“Yeah. Boris?”
No reply.
“Boris?”
A loud grunt, some spitting sounds, and a metallic screech filled our ears. “Boris!” we all shouted.
“I’m still here,” Boris panted.
“You okay?”
“I’m happy to report that the welding torch does cut through raptor armor,” he said. “However, the downside is a bit limiting: You have to get rather close to them. Hang on.”
The silence stretched. And none of us seemed to want to jinx it by saying anything.
Then Boris was back. “I’m sorry, I have to blow something else up.”
A very distinct thump came through my helmet.
Amira swore.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“The other troll just jumped past us, headed toward the mines. I think they spotted some movement.”
“Efua?” I called. “Did you hear that?”
She didn’t respond.
“There are,” Boris interjected, “a bloody shitload of crickets swarming out of here. I’d stay very, very still for a long while.”
“Are you going to be okay?” I asked him.
“I think I convinced them I blew myself up. I found a nice hiding spot in the wreckage; they’re not pawing through it. So let’s just wait for everything to die down, shall we?”
“Sounds like a plan.” I was on my back, shoved deep into a crack. I stared at the rock above my helmet.
I’m a shadow, I told the lunar landscape. A shadow in the dark under this rock. A shadow that wasn’t going to move for a good long time.
But that wasn’t good. I had stopped running. Stopped moving around. Stopped reacting.
I had time to think now.
Time to think about all the recruits’ faces that I’d seen mangled and staring past me as I passed them in the airless corridors.
Time to realize that Casimir wasn’t going to ever bark orders at me. Katrin wasn’t going to give me a disgusted look for breaking Amira’s ribs due to my stupidity.
Right now, I’d trade anything for their frosty silence at the table.
I suddenly wish I’d never known their names.
And then I felt horrible for wishing it. I closed my eyes and began to shiver, hoping it wasn’t causing my armor to twitch.
“Dig in!” Ken shouted.
The explosions started again. The Conglomerate ship, apparently not wanting to wait for the trolls to dig up every rock and crevice, floated over the landscape. A full-on barrage of furious light and energy danced around us. Rocks jumped and tumbled around me. New craters spewed liquified moon rock up into the dark, where it slowly misted and settled back down to the ground.