Two of the modified corpse warriors turned, as did another human, in the uniform of the Aryan Jihad. It was strange that he was with them, even stranger that he was carrying a blaster. He turned it to face the golem and aimed. I did not expect the blaster to fire, but it did. The weapon was powerful. It chopped through the Dyson field and melted the carapace of the robogrunt before it managed to turn its own weapon on him.
As it was doing so the corpse elites leaped upon it, fast as wolves. Their claws bit home into the melted patch in the golem’s sides. They sliced through electronics. The golem did not stop though; it kept firing and kicked one of Raximander’s minions in the ribs. These broke cleanly. I could see it because they were part of the exo-skeleton.
I entered the room and blasted it. The golem stitched the elite’s chest with reaper bolts and took him down. The human wounded by the initial burst of fire kept aiming at his target and shot it in the head. My war golem fell.
I shot the Jihadi in turn, making sure he would not be getting up, then I gave my full attention to the wave of elites sweeping toward me. There were a lot of them and they were exceptionally well coordinated. Some broke left, some right, some rolled in low, others fired assault rifles.
None of them went for the Ishtarian blaster, for which I was profoundly grateful. I found myself buried beneath a wave of mutated flesh. Claws scratched at my armor. Blades drove home. It looked like I was about to be overwhelmed.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I rolled and punched, rising amid the mass and throwing them off of me.
As I did so, more robogrunts entered the room and poured fire on my attackers. I took advantage of it to break free and mow down the last few enemies. The room was clear. I went over and inspected the corpse of the man who had been carrying the blaster. His skin wasn’t green, he showed no signs of mutation. I ran the sensor array over him.
“What do you make of this, Mark?” I asked. I heard a sharp intake of breath on the other side of the Grid.
“He’s still human.”
“No shit.”
“No. I mean as far as your sensor pickup can tell, he’s not been infected with the Assimilator virus. He’s just a normal guy.
“You mean aside from being dead and in possession of an Ishtar super-weapon.”
“Yeah, exciting isn’t?”
“I could do without this sort of excitement.”
More of the corpse warrior elites came in. More Jihadis accompanied them. They all had blasters and they all looked set to fire at me.
“What is wrong with this picture?” I asked.
“Nothing. They are just doing what we’ve all wanted to do for years.”
“Thanks,” I shouted as I threw myself behind a door jamb and lobbed another grenade. I hoped those blasters had dampers. I did not fancy the chain reaction if they all blew up at once.
There was another blast of light and heat and the screams of burning men. I did not have too much sympathy since they would have done the same to me.
I crouched low, pushed the snout of the reaper round the edge of the door and aimed via the camera feed on its barrel. It’s not the easiest way of shooting but I’ve had a lot of practice. I think the toasting militiamen felt better for being put out of their misery.
“I came here to fight Raximander, not Jihadis,” I said. “What’s going on?”
The Colonel patched some more video feeds in. I accepted them since they were not distracting me from anything at that exact moment. They showed more men, some of them in the colors of the Orthodox, some in the uniform of the Jihad. All of them were moving toward the building corralled on either side by the elites. It was like watching dogs herding sheep in a Grid vid of the olden days on Terra. The sheep were armed with assault rifles and for a wonder were not shooting at Raximander, which seemed contrary to their religion if you asked me.
“Bloody hell, what is Raximander up to now?” I asked.
“Guess we’ll find out.”
“You think he’s made some sort of alliance with the Jihad?”
“That seems like the most likely explanation. Those don’t look like corpse warriors. Best take one or two alive and see if they’ve been infected,” said the Colonel.
The expressions on the faces of the militiamen had none of the usual beatific savagery you see on the features of those who have been assimilated. They looked horrified, worried and unhappy in equal measures, just about the expressions you would expect to see on the face of any normal person forced into combat. It just lacked a sprinkling of berserker rage to be perfect.
“They don’t look assimilated,” I said.
“Maybe Raximander is trying some new scheme?” bellowed Ragequit. “He’s a tricky bugger.”
“That he is,” I said, adding one more item of data to my store of strangeness for this campaign. This was completely unlike the usual flow of an Assimilator invasion. Maybe it really was just Raximander trying something new. He always liked to explore new tactics.
“Get me a prisoner,” the Colonel said, like she was telling me to go down to the corner store and pick up a six pack of beer.
“Will do,” I said. “Any particular brand?”
“Jihadi or Orthodox, either will do, or maybe one of each if you are feeling particularly ambitious.”
“Let’s see what they have to say about it.” I sent my robogrunts through the corridors toward the entrance that Rax’s new allies were using. Their reapers spoke as they blasted a clear path. Warbirds dive-bombed the new arrivals. They seemed to be being particularly careful to shoot at only the corpse warriors and not their militia allies. Clearly the Colonel was not going to shoot them until they were shooting at us. Something told me that that would not be a long time in coming.
I followed the path cleared by my robogrunts, down the stairs into the vestibule. Normal corpse warriors were there, along with elites. One of them launched himself at me. He was fast as a thunderbolt and wielding a big, big chainsaw. I ducked under its swing and extended the force bayonet of my reaper. It went through his eye and out the back of his head, and I wiggled it around to do the maximum damage. Then I brought it down neatly bisecting the body. There were plenty more lining up for similar treatment.
I shot a couple of them and let the grunts do the bulk of the work. The militiamen were in the door now, opening fire for all they were worth. Their assault rifles were not very good against my armor but that did not seem to stop them. Reaper fire did. The Colonel had said she wanted a couple of prisoners. She had not said she wanted a score. These might have been citizens but I was not feeling particularly merciful at that moment.
They fell to the ground, one per headshot, going down much easier than any corpse warrior would. Any doubts I might have about them not being assimilated were vanishing fast. Curiosity was killing me.
I kept shooting and they kept falling. It would have been simpler to use a grenade but then there would have been no prisoners.
“What the hell are you up to, Raximander?” I bellowed like a crazy man but he was not talking to me today. Maybe too much of his attention was focused on herding the militia, or maybe he was just scared that he had already said too much.
I shot a few more of his corpse warriors to bring my pique to his attention. He paid no mind to that either. He just kept on fighting—and along a broad front, as I could tell by the reports coming in over the Grid.
“Just shoot, don’t talk!” Ragequit shouted. “It’s the only thing he understands.”
“Just like yourself,” I said.
“Say what you like,” said Ragequit. “Violence has a poetry all of its own.”
I gave myself up to composing a few verses. My grunts added a few choruses and, almost before I knew it, the whole vestibule was cleared and I was hauling a skinny man in the colors of the Jihad off to one side. I pulled him right into an antechamber that had probably once been an office. It looked like something out of an ancient historical drama. Desks, computer terminals, printed books
on shelves. The inhabitants of Faith took their primitivism seriously.
I pushed my prisoner down into a chair and set a couple of the robogrunts to holding the door. It did not mean that much. If Raximander was really determined he would come in through the ceiling or the floor, but at least I felt some sense of privacy and security.
“What the hell were you doing?” I shouted, doing my best impression of Ragequit. “A good old Aryan boy like yourself, fighting alongside the Brood.”
The man was skinny, and he needed a shave. His protruding Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as if a beetle was moving under the flesh of his neck or maybe some sort of wandering gland. “Kiss my donkey, Fed. I don’t have to take lip from your sort.”
“No. You’d rather just collaborate with xeno scum like Raximander.”
“I don’t give a toss what you think.”
“You going to be asking for your lawyer next, are you?”
“Nah! I just don’t need to talk to the likes of you.”
I picked him up by the front of his leather jacket. I did it one-handed so he got the message. I slammed him into the wall a little. He looked as if a couple of his teeth might have come loose.
“Now here’s the thing,” I said. “This is what we call a state of emergency, and I am empowered by the Federal Government to do whatever it takes to normalize the situation. Working alongside Raximander makes you a traitor to humanity. The penalty for that is summary execution.”
“Go ahead and do it,” he said, and he sounded as if he meant it. What the hell had Raximander done to this guy. He made it sound as if I would be doing him a favor. I checked on his bio-medical readings. As I had suspected, no trace of infection.
“First of all tell me why?” I said. “Why are you so keen for me to take the top of your head off with a reaper bolt.”
“Because I have seen what is waiting for this planet and there’s not a thing you can do about it, Fed boy.”
“I could call down a hail of nukes biblical in proportion.”
“You would be doing us all a favor.”
“You think? You so tired of living. You not got a family, kids?”
That’s what broke him. He let out a sob and stared at the wall. I started to see him as a person and not just someone who had been shooting at me. I tossed him back into the chair to put some distance between us.
“I got kids,” he said. “Why you think I am here? Why you think I am fighting alongside him? I ain’t no traitor to humanity.”
“Except you are,” I said. “That’s what fighting alongside Raximander makes you.”
“If I don’t, he kills my little girl and my wife and all of the rest of them too. He told us that.”
I patched the Colonel into this. She would want to hear. I wasn’t sure I did but I kept pushing on anyway. “He told you what exactly?”
“If we did not come in here and fight, he would kill them. He’s got them penned up below ground where you’ll never get to them.”
“Raximander is taking hostages?” the Colonel said. “This is a new development.”
Indeed it was. This was a new tactic, maybe even the start of a whole new strategy. He was using leverage on the locals. The real question was why. Why not just assimilate them?
“So what are you supposed to do?” I asked.
“Whatever we were told,” the man said.
“And what was that?”
“We came up here to get some of those new guns. We were going to pick them up from the Legionaries.”
It struck the Colonel at the same time as it struck me. “Clever,” she said. “He gets access to the Ishtar blasters that way because they have broad clearance on their bio-locks. No one infected is shooting them.”
“I can’t believe the Weapon Ships don’t have a way to shut that down,” I said.
“If they do they will never admit it,” said the Colonel.
“We should inform them anyway.”
“Already way ahead of you,” she said. “I’ve patched them in to this feed.”
“No static this time,” I said sourly, just to make sure the Captain-Pilot and her snakey buddy got the message.
“We can hear you,” said the serpent man.
“I was hoping you could. Anything you can do about Rax’s little plan?”
“Nothing,” said the Captain-Pilot. “We do not possess any override codes for the weapons we sell. It would defeat the purpose of the thing.”
“I am very surprised about that,” I said.
“We’re here to discuss the possibility of Ishtarian weapons falling into the hands of the Assimilators,” said the Colonel. “Raximander seems to have found a way around your anti-xeno sensors.”
“It does sound bad when you put it like that,” I said.
“I do not care for your sarcasm,” the serpent man said.
“Nobody does, unfortunately,” I replied. “It’s a pity because it’s often well deserved.”
The Captain Pilot stared in disgust. “We will do what we can to help you but there are no override codes for those weapons.”
“It does not trouble you,” the Colonel said, “that some of your weapons are now in the hands of humanity’s greatest enemies?”
“I have every faith that you will find some way of dealing with that,” the Captain Pilot said. “If you do not, we shall.”
She sounded as if she meant it. She probably did. Who knew what resources the Weapon Ships could bring to bear on this problem. I could almost feel sorry for Raximander if he upset them. Almost. I was a bit more concerned about what would happen to me if he had those weapons in his tentacles.
The Jihadi looked up at me. He could clearly understand Anglish. I think the implications of what he had been hearing sunk in. It was not an inspiring thought, the idea of Raximander having access the sort of super-technology that the Weapon Ships provided. It would mean that not only could he outthink them, he could outshoot them. I felt like telling him this but even I could not quite reach the heights of nastiness required.
“What you think?” the Colonel asked. “Is there any way that we can part Raximander from those guns?”
“The people carrying them may prove to be somewhat unreliable,” I said. “That’s the best we can hope for.”
“Really?” The Colonel asked. “The Assimilators have never done anything like this before.”
“Raximander was never in charge before,” I said.
“Do you really think that he is now?”
“I don’t know. That’s the worrying thing. All of this could just be some new strategy that the Brood is trying.”
“Well,” the Colonel said. “We better get on with it. Raximander is not going to kill himself.”
I picked up my reaper and got ready to do battle. We strode into the building, flanked by robogrunts and begun the long slow process of driving Raximander out.
It took the better part of an hour to clear the upper floors of the building. Rax’s allies were using energy weapons quite capable of breaching our armor and that meant we had to be a lot more cautious. It also meant that the robogrunts took a lot more casualties than usual. It was proving to be a hard night at the end of a hard day.
We were starting to run out of reinforcements and the clock was ticking.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Inside the command bunker everything was quiet. Outside we could hear the warbirds dive-bombing distant targets and the massive pulse canon of the Goliaths smashing into buildings. Everybody in the room looked pale and strained.
The Colonel called a war council. For a wonder, all the faction leaders agreed to attend. They were all taking the Brood presence seriously now. I got to come too. I think the presence of the man who had blown up a progenitor was supposed to be reassuring.
Doctor Olsen was there, representing her people, currently a much reduced force, mostly existing in the refugee camp within the spaceport perimeter.
Father Chernenko lounged back in his chair, flanked by two y
ounger priests and a bodyguard of hard-faced, crop-haired paramilitary.
The Fiscal Loyalists were there as well. Their expressions were set somewhere between I told you so and terror. I imagine that the presence of Raximander was responsible for the latter. They glared at us as if somehow we were not justifying the payment of their taxes. Under the circumstances, I thought we were doing pretty well.
I got my first look at Representative Monger in the flesh. The head of the Loyalist delegation. He was a white-haired old man in a hoverchair, lower body wasted. His face was avuncular and if he had not been trying so hard to contain his fear he would have looked positively friendly. As it was he merely looked tense.
We had a surprise guest appearance from the Weapon Ships. The Captain Pilot was there along with her serpent man buddy. She had brought a force of mercenaries with her. It was almost as if she didn’t trust us. Shame on her. If anybody should be mistrusting, it was us.
The last stragglers arrived. It was Beecher and his retinue. He at least looked calm. He studied the leaders of the rival militias to see how they were taking it. Chernenko looked angry. I suspected that his anger was merely a cover for his fear. He had been the first to come in with his bodyguards, demanding access to medicines that would prevent him being assimilated.
The Colonel marched up toward the improvised podium. She looked around and gave a tightlipped smile.
“I’d like to thank you all for coming,” she said. Somehow she managed to sound sincere, possibly because she really was. The Colonel had more faith in these people and I had. I suspected that they would be bickering over scraps of power even as Raximander demolished their city.
She looked at me as if to tell me to keep my mouth shut and then continued, “We’ll pause for a brief update as to the situation. It could be better.”
She paused to let that masterful understatement sink in. “I’d like to think that we have Raximander contained but it does not look all that plausible. At the moment all we’re doing is killing his host bodies and as long as the city is occupied we have to believe that he can replace those almost indefinitely.”