Armageddon (43 page)

Ethan heard a sudden
clank,
followed by a
screech
of laser fire
.
He felt a wash of heat on his right side and whirled around to find himself face to face with a drone. He raised both arms to fire, and the drone smacked him in the chest with an open palm. He went flying into a nearby wall, ripper cannons blazing a second too late and tearing ragged holes in the ceiling.

The drone
clanked
up to him while he was still struggling to get up. He took aim, and then someone burst through the hole in the wall where they’d come in. Energy blades flashed, and the drone fell in three pieces, the severed ends glowing bright orange while its red cyclopean eye went dark.

Ethan’s rescuer turned out to be Atta. Her HUD outline was gold, rather than green, marking her as a general. She held out a hand to help him up, and yanked him to his feet. He took in a scene of utter destruction. Flames crackled as flammables burned. Smoke clogged the air. Twitching pieces of drones littered the floor, their wires sparking. A few downed Zephyrs and at least twenty Gors glowed pink on the HUD, while others with red cross symbols crouched beside them, giving aid.

“We’ve got company coming up behind us!” Atta called out over the comms. She crunched through the debris, and Ethan followed her over to one of the brighter green HUD outlines. Ethan saw from the text floating above the Zephyr’s head that it was Magnum.

“How many?” Magnum asked.

“A few hundred for now, and those are just the ones we’ve spotted on the surface. Our air support has them pinned down, but at least half made it through.”

“I thought Omnius wouldn’t be able to rally a defense while we’re jamming him?” Ethan said.

Atta turned. “Drones are not brainless. They’re dependent on Omnius, but they’re still capable of organizing to a certain degree.”

“We’d better hurry then,” Magnum said.

“Where’s the Eclipser?” Atta asked.

Magnum jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “A few rooms back, sitting in a corner with some other debris.”

“Better move it up. I’m leaving your squad in charge of its defense while we look for the control center in this place.”

Magnum motioned to Rockhead and Blades. They left and returned a few moments later carrying the chunk of castcrete Ethan had seen earlier. That confirmed it was the Eclipser.

The ceiling shook with a muffled
boom
, and chunks of bactcrete rained down,
thunking
off their armor.

Atta peered up through a hole above her head and nearly got a face full of pulse lasers for her trouble. She and the Rictans scattered as the ceiling came alive with lancing beams of light.

“They’re coming down on top of us!” Atta roared.

Ethan hunkered down behind an overturned tower of databanks. He peeked over the top to see drones dropping down from the ceiling like spiders, their optics glowing crimson in the gloom. Gors raced at them, lavender-hued pulse lasers flashing. The drones fired back, but the Gors kept going. They closed to hand-to-hand combat with the drones and produced scythe-shaped energy blades. Ethan raised one arm and aimed at the nearest drone, but he couldn’t get a clear shot. He thought about jumping into the fray with his own energy blades, but more drones dropped down by the second, crowding the room, and the Gors who’d gone hand-to-hand with them were being picked off fast.

Lasers
crackled
out with intermittent flashes of light. Zephyrs fired back from points of cover, ripper cannons flashing gold through the drifting clouds of dust and smoke. Energy blades
sizzled
.

It was utter chaos. Ethan heard Magnum call out for them to retreat further into the building. Ethan couldn’t even see the Rictans through all of the commotion. He was cut off and pinned down, but so far none of the drones had noticed him.

Clank-clank. Clank-clank-clank!

Ethan saw a flicker of movement on his right peripheral display. Then to his left. Red optics cast crimson beams of light through the smoky room. Ethan saw those beams sweep across the floor to either side of him.

His heart pounded in his chest and his breath reverberated inside his helmet. Ethan glanced at his sensor display. There were no friendly contacts around him. He saw a few retreating further into the building, chased by swarms of drones. He was alone with these four drones. They had to have detected him by now.

Clank-clank-clank-clank!

They were rushing him!

Ethan steeled himself, watching the enemy approach on his HUD, red outlines growing larger by the second. He raised his arms above his head, and waited, counting down the seconds.

Clank-clank-clank-clank!

He could feel the floor shuddering with their footfalls. One was coming straight at him, the other three flanking to the sides. Ethan waited another half a second, and then he flexed his hands into fists, extending his energy blades with a
sizzle
of activating shields. He jumped up out of cover at the same moment as the drone in front of him sprang over his cover. He lashed out as the drone sailed toward him, and it fell apart, gushing green coolant.

The other three rounded the overturned data tower, forearms sweeping up to fire. Ethan lunged toward the greater threat, the pair of drones to his left. He slashed across the barrels of their pulse lasers before they could shoot, and then he bisected them both with an uppercut. They clattered to the ground. He whirled around, looking for the third drone, just in time to be blinded by a crimson beam of laser fire shrieking out from the third and final drone. The laser bolt glanced off his chest, burning his armor to a molten ruin and searing his skin with a nauseating
sizzle.

Opening his fists to retract his energy blades, Ethan activating ripper cannons instead and fired back at the drone. Twin streams of golden tracer fire roared out from his gauntlets, the impacts jumping the drone’s aim so that lasers flashed all around him, but never hit. The sound of shells
plinking
off the drone’s armor was deafening. Ethan rushed the drone, keeping up a steady stream of fire as he ran. When he came within an arm’s length, he extended energy blades and slashed, cutting the drone in two molten orange-glowing halves.

Ethan stood over the enemy gasping for air, his chest burning like it was on fire. He glanced down at his chest and felt abruptly sick. Blackened char stared back at him.

It was tough to tell how badly he was injured. Between adrenaline and the stims that his Zephyr auto-injected, the pain was a fraction of what it should have been.

Ethan grunted and scanned the room for more enemy contacts, but friendlies and enemies alike were all gone. He was alone.

Ethan checked his map for friendly comm beacons, but saw no sign of his squad, or any other squad for that matter. He was out of range.

He opened his comms to see if he could get back in touch. “Rictan One reporting, does anyone copy?”

A fierce crackle of static answered.

Frek.

Ethan turned in a quick circle to get his bearings. Smoke curled in drifting curtains, concealing everything. Looking up, Ethan saw the holes the drones had burned in the ceiling. Dozens of gaping apertures. He saw a flicker of red HUD outlines. They were coming again. A quick look at sensors revealed at least fifty drones coming down.

The next wave.

Ethan didn’t have time to decide which way his squad might be. He spun around, looking for a way out. He spied a door close behind him and ran for it. Bringing his energy blades up as he reached it, Ethan quickly sliced a hole big enough for him to crawl through on his belly, which he promptly did. On the other side he saw yet more glowing blue towers of data, but these had yet to be shredded by weapons fire. Before he even regained his footing on the other side, he glimpsed drones dropping down behind him on his rear viewscreen. A fan of crimson light flickered through the hole in the door. Drones scanning the room he’d come from.

Clank-clank-clank!

“Frek!” Ethan growled. They’d found him already. He bounced up and ran, hoping desperately to find backup soon.

He tried the comms again. “Rictan One reporting! I need backup!”

Static crackled, and Ethan grimaced. He was on his own. He ducked and wove between glowing data towers, wishing he could fly over them instead. Then the door behind him burst open with a flash of light and an accompanying
boom.

Clank-clank-clank!

Here they come …

Chapter 39

B
inary explosives punched a hole. Six squads of Zephyrs and an endless stream of Gors went storming through. Atta followed them, expecting to see more of the endless rows of data towers, but this room was different. There were control consoles and holoscreens for data
input
, not just data storage and processing. This was a hub, one of the access points that drones used to perform maintenance on the systems throughout the omni-node.

“This is it!” Atta called out. “Secure all the entrances. We don’t want to get interrupted before we’re done here.”

She turned to see squads of Gors and Zephyrs taking up positions at all the doors. Two squads covered the hole they’d entered by, while another four hurried back through the shattered wall to cover them further back. Tech experts peeled out of their Zephyrs and sat down behind control consoles to get to work. Atta checked her sensors to make sure there wasn’t a whole company of drones racing up behind them. Nothing yet, but she still felt naked.

She’d left at least half of her battalion guarding entrances back the way they’d come, while another third escorted the Rictans and the Eclipser deeper into the city. Atta had been surprised and upset to hear that Ethan was MIAPD, but there’d be time to grieve their losses later. The rest of the Rictans were to rendezvous with the Second Battalion and carry the Eclipser down into the Null Zone for safe-keeping. Their secondary objective down there was to recruit a civilian army of Nulls, but not even Nulls would fight until they heard the truth.

Fortunately, they would be easy to convince. First, because they were
Nulls
and inherently distrustful of Omnius, and second, because they weren’t even supposed to have Lifelinks. Just the fact that they would be able to see Therius’s message would be enough to convince them of its veracity.

There was one problem, however. In order to send their message to everyone all at once, they needed to disable the Eclipser. That meant Omnius would have a small window of opportunity to get his forces organized.

Striding over to the nearest console, Atta asked, “How much longer?”

The tech turned to her with a frown. “We’re hacking into a supercomputer, ma’am; a
smart
one. If you want this to work, you need to give us time.”

“And if you take too long, we’re going to be up to our eyeballs in drones.”

“We can’t rush this or network security is going to shut us out when we try to send our message.”

“I thought Therius gave you the encryption keys?”

“That doesn’t make this any easier. We need to infect the system in a million different places with every kind of virus you can imagine just to distract Omnius long enough that he won’t be able to stop our message. We have a one minute window, and as far as Omnius is concerned, that’s a lifetime.”

“The message is
five
minutes long,” Atta said. “How are you going to pack all of that into one minute?”

“We’re not streaming; we’re downloading, and it would be a lot faster, but we don’t have the bandwidth in this node to send to everyone at once. We’ve busted the transmission up into batches, but even like that we’re only going to reach about 90 percent of the population.”

“Good enough,” Atta said. “Let me know when you’re ready so I can coordinate with the Second Battalion to disable the Eclipser. If you need me, I’ll be watching your asses by the door.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Techs!”
Atta muttered under her breath. She wasn’t a fan of cyber warfare. She’d take a pulse rifle or a ripper cannon over a battle of bits and bytes any day.

As Atta approached the ragged hole they’d blown to get into the control room, she heard a stutter of ripper fire, followed by a shout of warning over the comms.

“Fall back!” someone yelled. It was Delta Two.

“Deltas, report!” Atta commed back.

“They’re coming through!” Delta One replied amidst a deafening roar of weapons fire.

“Drones?”

“No, Peacekeepers! Thousands of them!”

Atta checked the Deltas’ position on her scanners and motioned for the squads standing guard with her by the shattered wall to move up. They preceded her out of the control room, and she commed back, “We’re on our way, Deltas. Hold your position!”

“We’ll do our best, General.”

Thinking fast, Atta called for reinforcements from the Second Battalion. They couldn’t be too far off.

The comms crackled with a response from the battalion’s Gor general. “We come under heavy fire! I cannot reinforce if we are to keep advancing.”