“You must think something,” Lopez said. “You’ve met Raximander before. Fought him on Skullface and Hecate Prime and . . .”
“Christ, kid, you know more about these things than me. I try to forget all that stuff when we’re not in the killzone.”
“Kid’s just worried,” bellowed Ragequit. “He’s never seen a Brood up close before. Closest he’s got are the tac sims on Grid.”
“Then he knows as much as I do.” Which was true. Sims are pretty realistic. Most of them were taken from direct sensory input. Some of it mine.
“How many you think you killed?” Lopez looked directly at me. His brown eyes were wide and trusting. I suppose he just wanted reassurance that they could be killed. The Brood can be intimidating, with their linked consciousness and all. It gives them this spurious aura of invincibility. Like you can’t really kill them. They play on that.
“Does it matter?” I said. “They are all one really.”
“Kinda creepy to think that.”
“No more so than our drones,” said Medico Mark, chewing his lower lip as he studied his hand of cards. “They are all really part of the Grid. Software downloaded into hardware. The Brood are just the same.”
“You would say that,” shouted Ragequit. “You like digging around inside people. Brood are organics. Not computers.”
“Does it make much difference what the software runs on?” Mark asked. “As long as it runs.”
“You really think that is all there is to it?” Lopez asked. “We’re just software on meat machines.”
“I think that’s been proven. Why you think we have memory recordings? What do you think happens when your mind is downloaded into a clone body? You think your soul comes with it, like these primitives here on Faith?”
“They don’t think that way,” I said, remembering what had happened when Maria was dying. “They would never upload their minds or grow clone bodies. It’s against their religion.”
“You think that’s why my folk hate the A.I.s so much?” Lopez asked. “Because it draws the basis of faith into question?”
“You religious, kid?” I asked. It happens. The Fed Gov discriminates against no one. When it comes to recruiting cannon fodder, it’s an equal opportunity employer.
“Parents were classical Christopians,” he said.
“Surprised you ended up toting a gun for Big Government.” Ragequit slammed down a red two as if he intended to break the table.
“Just because I believe doesn’t mean I don’t agree with democracy.”
Ragequit chortled. “Maybe we should send you out to explain this stuff to the militias. You might be able to talk them out of shooting you. On the other hand, they might just nail you to a cross.”
“There’s no need to be blasphemous,” Lopez was trying to keep his tone mild, but his cheeks were a little flushed. His eyes had narrowed.
“No offense intended,” bellowed Ragequit. “I just think there’s a serious possibility they might do it.”
“They should be too busy worrying about the Brood, to nail up a few of us,” said Mark.
“You been listening to broadcast?” Ragequit said. His tone was not much louder than a grenade going off. “There are no Brood on Faith. It’s all just a scheme cooked up by Fed Gov so we can annex their precious planet. The Jihad call it Stage Two. Putting the refugees here was Stage One.”
“You think that will happen?” Lopez asked. “Will we annex?”
“We can’t,” said Mark. “Faith is already part of the Republic. It’s just that some of the locals hate to admit it.”
He put a blue two down on top of Ragequit’s red one. “You got anything, 13?”
I shook my head and picked up a card. Blue nine. Down it went.
“Are they really so dumb they think we made up this stuff about Assimilators, just so we can take over this hellhole and give them social security benefits?” Ragequit sounded annoyed but then when did he ever sound anything else?
“When has the Federal Government ever lied about doing stuff like that?” I asked.
Ragequit gave a savage laugh. “You mean in total, or just the times we’ve had direct experience of?”
Lopez squinted at his hand and played a wyrmhole. “Green.” He picked a random card from Ragequit’s hand just to emphasize his point. “The Fed Gov wouldn’t lie about stuff like that. Too easy to find out.”
Raqequit laughed out loud. “Ah, the idealism of youth. I wish I still had it. Bastard got my mandala card. I was saving that for a late run.”
Mark said, “The locals will find out soon enough who’s lying when old Raximander pays them a visit.”
As if on cue, the alert klaxon sounded louder even than Ragequit shouting. “All personnel prepare for deployment, maximum force. Brood contact made in Sector Nine Sternheim.”
We dropped our cards and picked up our weapons, heading for the shuttles. Warbirds slashed the sky, heading for the east of the city. “Looks like you’ll get your first taste of fighting the Brood, Lopez,” Ragequit shouted. “Hope your memory chip’s in place and sealed. It’s time for BastardForce to see some action.”
Lopez looked a little green about the gills. I slapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, kid. We’ll look out for you.”
“And who’s gonna look out for us?” asked Mark. “That’s what I worry about.”
Ragequit began singing the StarForce anthem off-key as all hell, substituting BastardForce for StarForce. His drones joined in. Then the rest of us.
“Maniacs,” said Mark, running toward a white medical bubble-carrier.
I reached the shuttle. Maps and grids scrolled across my field of vision. Orbital was going whole hog now. Direct neural input. I flexed some synapses and the shuttle responded by opening its door. Drones already occupied their deployment cells. We took off.
Two Mastodon cybertanks erupted from the dropzone and rumbled through the streets toward the battle. Our shuttle lifted off and accelerated smoothly. It marked a zig-zag course. Even now Command was unwilling to violate the airspace of the militias who would not give us overflight permission. They felt there was no sense in needlessly antagonizing our potential allies.
“What sort of half-assed way to fight a war is this?” Ragequit asked. His voice came through Grid loud and clear.
“It’s the StarForce way,” I said. He began howling the BastardForce anthem again.
Raximander was hitting Orthodox territory hard. Corpse warriors filled the streets of the North Eastern Sector where it bordered the financial sector. They were kind of hard to tell apart from the rest of the population unless you zoomed right in on them. Then you caught the greenish skin and the glassy eyes. Some had claws and little horns as well. Mutation was setting in.
Doubtless, if we left them to it, they would get cloven hooves and spiked tails fairly soon. Raximander enjoyed his little jokes. Or maybe it was just sound psychology, using devil-forms on a world colonized by Christian militias. Maybe he was sending them a message. Probably that he worked for the Federal Government. Those good old boys down there were die-hard believers that FedGov and all its minions are servants of the anti-Christ.
Bar code numbers of the beast were supposed to be tattooed on our foreheads and all. That was why Ragequit had gone out of his way to get one, just to be offensive. He was not exactly sensitive to the needs of a peacekeeping mission, but then who am I to criticize? I got one on my butt.
The streets were swarmed. Folk were running from their improvised shelters and hab bubbles. Crowds swirled panicked in the streets. Militiamen shot at anything they thought was threatening.
“Greenskins in Aryan colors,” I said into my helmet. The words would be relayed to the rest of the squad and the drones they supervised. The words crackled a little. Jammers again. I wondered where they had got the tech from. It was a little high grade for this place. Then I remembered the Weapon Ship. No doubt they had supplied them at a price. “Those are Rax’s boys.”
“Un
less maybe he’s infected a few Orthodox already.” Mark’s voice broke up a little. Static was getting worse.
“Always a possibility,” I said.
“What are those?” Lopez’s slightly garbled voice broke through the hiss.
I looked in the direction of the cursor superimposed on my vision indicated. Black chitinous monsters scuttled through the streets, a centaur hybrid of human and scorpion complete with poison stinger and an assault rifle in each arm. “Stingers,” I said. “Brood cavalry.”
“At least they got nothing better than those pop guns,” said Ragequit. Somehow he managed to be loud even through the volume-capped Grid.
“Don’t need them if they get close. Those stingers can pierce kinetic exchange armor. They got acid as well that will cause structural damage. Plus I don’t think they are aiming for us or our golems. I think they have those citizens in mind.”
The shuttle’s pop-down turrets slid into position. Pulse cannons targeted the stingers. One of the monsters burst in two, puffs of superheated steam spurting skyward from the plasma impact. The rest took cover in buildings, behind cars, behind the concrete plant holders that had once decorated the strip mall. A wave of bullets rose to meet us as Rax responded to the assault. They pinged off the shuttle’s armored sides like light metallic rain.
Scout drones dropped from their pods on the shuttles undersides, flashing downwards on grav-neutralizers, firing as they went. I brought the shuttle round and surveyed the space.
It was not just corpse warriors and stingers down there. Some sort of arachnid biomachine scuttled along as well. It had heavy weapons embedded in its carapace and was firing them up at us. These did more than scratch the shuttle’s sides. I sent a burst of plasma from the shuttle’s turrets and the spider exploded, splattering the side of a building, obscuring some obscene graffiti in the local script.
I brought the shuttle in and dove for the door. Lopez and Ragequit did the same. Their entire complement of drones deployed and then the aircraft rose up again to give us covering fire.
I called up a tactical insert so I still had a view from my shuttle’s belly camera. It looked like Raximander had been breeding. The streets seethed with biomachines. There were thousands of them. Two thousand three hundred and two to be precise, according to Orbital’s quick eyeball estimate.
I remembered other battlefields fighting against what seemed like uncountable hordes of them. Happy days were here again.
I aimed my reaper at a balcony where a group crouched. My plasma bursts cleared it. I took cover behind a concrete crash barrier and surveyed my surroundings.
While I was racking my brains, he sent a flanking force around my position. Corpse warriors mounted on the back of stingers, supported by another arachnid mobile gun platform. I aimed my reaper, willed the power-feed to max and vaporized the leading units. There were plenty more behind them.
I ordered some grunts to cover me, and raced backward leaving a grenade on time detonation where I had been standing. It blew the frontrunners of Raximander’s cavalry sky high and left a smoking crater for some more to stumble into. I blasted them, leaving the bodies to pile up and trip some more. No doubt Raximander could use eyes outside the dust cloud to guide his units but momentum was against these boys.
The shuttle kept a steady stream of fire pouring down. A rocket erupted from one of the buildings. One of the Panzerfaust Neos that the Jihad had used against me. The shuttle’s ECM could not stop it. It was on a straight short line from the building window to the aircraft.
A turret swiveled around and managed to clip the missile, detonating it. The shockwave threw the aircraft sideways, carving a chunk of its fuselage. It tumbled, impacted on a nearby building, glanced off, and plunged into the ground.
I was suddenly glad of the bureaucrat who had enforced the subnuclear damper ruling. If it wasn’t for that, I would be doing a pretty convincing impersonation of those bodies smoking in my grenade crater. The only difference would have been that the crater would have been on a much more massive scale.
As it was, the shuttle skidded along the street, smashing groundcars and trucks aside until it came to rest against the side of the building, a long trail of skid-marks furrowed out of the concrete behind it.
One of the lulls so common on the battlefields settled over us after the crash. For a moment all was silence. Everything hung suspended. I focused on the updates flooding in over the tactical grid. Drone and magnified orbital imaging showed me that Rax’s forces had more or less encircled the borders of Orthodox territory as if he was trying to quarantine the area. It looked as if he was starting to move inwards, pushing everything before him. It was as if he was the beater of a hunt, driving game before him. He even seemed to have left clear corridors for his prey to flee down.
“What is Raximander up to?” I asked no one in particular.
Chapter Fifteen
“Recruitment drive,” suggested Ragequit. “Trying to infect as many people as possible.”
“Any progress with those prisoners were picked up, Mark?” I asked. “Any reason why they were immune to the Assimilation.”
“Nothing we can see yet, 13. We’re still working on it.”
I studied the insert maps again, expanded them till they covered half my field of vision in semi-translucent frame. Another wave of corpse warriors was moving in. I sent some grunts to intercept. They were heavily outnumbered but much better armored and equipped unless Raximander had some more surprises to spring.
“How’d he get here without being spotted?” Lopez asked.
“Tunnels,” said Ragequit. “There’s a whole other city beneath the ground and he’s using it to avoid aerial detection. Same way as the Jihad ambushed 13 the other day.”
“We need to get some scout drones into the deep bunkers,” I said. “Establish a tripwire detection relay.”
“We don’t have enough drones for that right now,” said the Colonel over Grid. “We’re printing them but it takes time. Raximander will probably just start uprooting them anyway. He’s not a fool.”
“Any idea what his objective is?” Lopez asked. It was not a dumb question. If we could work out what Raximander wanted we could stop him getting it, or at least lay a few traps along the way.”
“Probably just to infect as many people as possible,” said Ragequit. “That’s what the Brood always do. A couple of days and we’ll be swimming in a sea of them.”
The Colonel said, “We need to evacuate the city, get the citizens into cleaning camps and then we can burn this whole place to the ground if we have to. Pump the tunnels full of gas. That will put paid to Raximander.”
“Good plan. Good luck in getting the cooperation of the citizens,” I said.
“There is that,” said the Colonel.
The grunts engaged, scything through Rax’s corpse warriors. Undead flesh and assault rifles were no match for Dyson fields and reapers. Raximander knew that.
“This whole thing stinks to high Asgard,” I said. “What is Raximander doing on this world, let alone in this city? How did he get here? We’ve found no traces of a spore ship.”
“Sleeper seeds?” suggested the Colonel. “Or maybe he was just burrowed in.”
“This place was surveyed. You would have thought something would have showed up. It’s not like we don’t test for this stuff.”
The thought of the sealed pods I had seen in the warehouse struck me. Someone had brought Raximander in by means of a method designed to make detection impossible.
Those pods could have been smuggled in through the spaceport. Of course, they should have been checked but customs systems can always be subverted. The ones on Faith would be particularly primitive—probably just a case of bribing a few officials, or putting pressure on them or appealing to their factional patriotism. I could see a Jihad member going for it in return for the promise of a few blasters.
My attention was diverted back to more immediate problems. More of the scorpion cavalry emerged onto t
he street near me. We did not have enough golems to contain them all and the shuttles could only be in so many places at once.
I called in a warbird strike. The drones dive-bombed the cavalry, tearing up the streets with their rockets. They did not have too many strikes left before they would need to revert to their pulse cannon.
Still we needed to work with what we had. I checked on the reinforcement feed. More warbirds were dropping from Orbital. There were pods on their way containing freshly printed grunts. Worst came to worse we could call down a bombardment from Orbital itself although that was a bit spray and pray. Orbital’s barrages do not exactly have pinpoint accuracy.
What the hell was Raximander up to? I could only think of one way of finding out. I was going to have to ask him. I picked myself up from my cover, ordered a couple of golems to flank me and set off to find me some corpse warriors.
It did not take long to find some more greenskins. They were rounding up Orthodox in a burned-out bubble house. I took direct motor control over one of my grunts, blew away all but one of the corpse warriors. I shot off the last one’s hands so he could not shoot me then I punched him to the ground.
“Hey, Raximander, how’s it going?” I said.
“It is a fine morning for killing humans,” Rax’s mouthpiece said.
“Is that what you are doing here?”
“I am a Brood warlord. What else would I be doing?”
“I’ve kind of been wondering that myself.”
“If you will forgive me for saying so, Stormtrooper 13, it would be foolish of me to discuss my plans with you.”
“But you are quite prepared to chat.” I noticed Brood warriors starting to converge on us.
“If I cannot make time for my oldest surviving enemy, who can I make time for?”
“Also this conversation will distract me in a way that it will not distract you.”
“A marginal tactical advantage but one I am always prepared to take. Often victory comes from the slow accumulation of such. You know this yourself.” Some stingers came around the corner. I reduced them to plasma burned husks. As I did so a sniper took up position on the wall above me. I blasted him before he could get a shot off.