Chapter Forty-Four

The descent was bloody awful.

It would forever more reside in the back of my mind, the helo vanishing above me, whited out as soon as it was more than a few dozen meters away, and the howl of the storm making it impossible to maintain a stable electronic connection.

I’d shot him the location of the cliff, one of the few fixed points of reference I had, and I had a solid hour to get there, two and a half miles away, through the blizzard, the storm, the fucking nightmare that was a mountainside frozen hell.

It should be easy.

I was in a goddamn armored suit that could run at a solid sixty miles an hour without any issue, two miles? A piece of piss.

Hell, Part of the basic APS training schedule included walking five miles in the armor on ‘low power mode’. It was basically like walking while naked and wearing a suit made from a cheese grater, and weighted to fuck, but it proved that even when most of the power had failed, we could still fight.

Two miles was insanely easy.

Or it would have been, if I could see any land.

“Go!” Came the transmission from the wanker in the helo above me, as he released my connections.

One minor issue became readily apparent, as he banked sideways and the cable vanished into the wind… He’d not gotten a solid fix on the cliffside.

I fell maybe ten meters, slamming into the ground on a twenty degree angle and falling over instantly, the servos in both legs creaking and screaming under the weight and impact.

My mind filled with warning symbols, projected half strength pain to let me know what—and where—had just been fucked up, and diagnostics that flashed warning me that the landing had just done serious damage to my lower legs.

The short-range jump jets were down to forty percent capacity.

I cursed, no, I didn’t just curse, if I’d been able to speak old world Latin I’d have fucking summoned half the demons in hell, I screamed that fuck abuse after the fucking helo pilot as they flew off on their merry way, but after a minute, I accepted my fate, and turned, locking in the Lidar and boosting the signal as far as I could.

The fingers had been partially mapped in places over the years, of course it had.

It was ridiculous to think that somewhere so close to the city, and frankly so fucking weird, as a mountain that had been chewed to shit by a load of experimental orbital weapons, and that people would just nod and leave it alone.

People had tried to explore it. Corporations had tried to map it and mine the metals that were left here, all that remained of the mighty engines of war that battled so long ago. Scientists had come exploring, students had studied here, and yeah, lunatics had tried to climb the fucking fingers, ‘conquering’ the mountains over and over.

Almost all of them had given up in short order, or they’d died.

What they’d done was contribute tiny fragments to the maps that were freely available, and that was wonderful, but without points of fixed reference, until I was actually on the ground, those maps were useless.

There were also massive black zones on the maps where things just didn’t link up, and where there were only the tiniest fractions actually explored.

That meant I had a half useful, and half fucking use less map. One that I was adding to as I started hobbling along, teeth gritted as I stumbled over hidden rocks in the snow.

The only consolation, in this white landscape, surrounded by white snow, and a heavy, leaden, goddamn snow-filled sky, was that the wind hadn’t given up.

It was scouring the rocky landscape clear almost as fast as the storm could lay more, keeping the ground more or less in a constant state of covering and uncovering.

I picked up the speed, the pain gradually decreasing as I jogged, the directional indicator clicking away merrily as I wove around boulders and leapt across small crevices, triggering the jump-jets over and over, gritting my teeth as I barely managed to clear the distance each time.

Minute by minute I closed on the virtual beacon, and hope slowly rose in me… until the ground started to angle downwards.

Steeper and steeper it went, until for every meter forward, I was going at least one more down, skidding and sliding.

Cascades of frozen rocks clattered past me as I dug my hands into the side of the mountain, the angle getting worse as I picked up speed, until I was forced to trigger the jets again, this time to slow myself.

I skidded to a halt, bare inches from the edge of a cliff, a second cliff a six or seven meters ahead angling back out and over me, as I stared up in dismay.

Looking down? There was a definite drop that I didn’t like, and looking upwards? I didn’t like that much either. I squinted, wondering if the patterns in the rocks nearby, and the combinations of broken and scoured mountainside were my imagination or…

“Fucking bastard luck!” I cursed in disbelief a minute later, crouching and tearing at the ground, pulling a battered and broken shield projector free shortly after.

I twisted it around, searching for the tell-tale marking on the back, and while the identification tag was too badly damaged to make out, I was sure.

This was my fucking shield generator that I’d lost on the mountain.

That meant…

I looked down into the dark crevasse, squinting, then nodding to myself as I spotted sections here and there, even with the limited visibility.

No wonder I’d been so messed up when the SARS had found me, it looked like the cliff I’d thrown myself down in my idiocy had ended in a crevasse, that partially slalomed down the fucking mountainside.

I mean, sure, I’d wanted some distance between me and the cave where I’d left the others, but fuck me sideways with a vibrating peacock, I must have made it halfway down the mountain!

It was blind luck they’d actually found me instead of giving up and fucking off for their supper!

That meant…

I looked across and up, then cursed.

It meant I needed to climb the fucking cliff-face, to get to where I’d jumped from. A vertical overhang cliff-face, in a storm, in a suit of power armor that weighed several tons.

I couldn’t even test the goddamn handholds because the bottom of the cliff was over the crevasse!

I shook my head in disbelief, sincerely believing that whatever god controlled my fate with his die, was rolling fucking snake-eyes every damn time.

Looking across I hesitated only a brief second, searching, and glad that I’d secured my rifle to the magnetic plates on my back earlier.

I folded back the railguns with a silent order, both shoulder mounted systems twitching before turning around to face behind me, and then folding down, leaving me with two short pinions like wings laid down my back.

That done, I locked the cluster-bomb ports—not like I was going to need them on a mountainside, best not to let the likely flying stone and ice get into there—and took a few steps back, crouching and spreading ‘my’ fingers wide.

The suit faithfully replicated the gesture, clicking the stubby talons together as I checked they deployed, and then I ran at the edge, leaping out, and reaching for the cliff.

I crashed into it, hands scrabbling for purchase, and immediately bounced back, starting to fall, when I triggered the jump jets. Normally I could have used them in fast, high powered bursts, and I could have made it to the top of the cliff in short order. Normally of course, I’d have been on a specialist obstacle course if I was trying this shit, and if some sadistic drill sergeant bastard had come up with this?

I’d have been cursing his name for the entire time.

Which was kinda what gave them the warm and fuzzies, a tiny calm part of my mind commented, while the rest of me frantically kicked, scratched, gouged and leapt my way up the cliff.

Entire sections of the cliff came away, and still more radiated sparks like fireflies as I tore my way upwards, scratching and tearing.

It wouldn’t have been possible without the jump-jets, not even slightly. As it was, every time I slid, I slipped, I missed a handhold or whatever, with my boots practically tearing through the cliff wall, my fingers tearing in and heaving, I’d still have fallen to my gory death.

Instead each time I fucked up a hold, or I didn’t have the grip to climb ‘properly’ I’d trigger the jets, pushing me up and ahead, then cut them.

If they were fully working? I’d have run up it and cursed the sadistic bastard that came up with this all fucking day long. Instead?

By the time I made it, triggering a final burst of power to get me over the edge, I was exhausted. The jump jets were radiating warning signs like crazy about being overstressed to all buggery, and my chest was heaving as I tried to gulp down enough air.

There’d been no chance to rest, to catch my breath nor to slow at all really. If I’d done that I’d have fallen to my gory death at worst, and at best had to have started all over again.

No instead I was broken now, laid here in the swirling snow, blinking up at the howling leaden sky, lit from within by flashes of lightning.

“Wonder if they’re going to be a problem?” I mumbled, thinking about the helo being fried over and over by them, before grunting and rolling onto my stomach, then pushing up, forcing myself to move again.

The landscape was as bland as could be, white snow and shattered rock, ancient wrecked steels and the hulls of war machines—okay, maybe not the standard bland, okay, so sue me—but still bland in that there was nothing but snow in all directions.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Certainly nothing to identify one way as better than another, if I discounted the cliff edge behind me. Setting off with that there, and following the marker on my HUD, I started climbing again, this time up a steep slope on the far side of the narrow little plateau.

I winced as I passed heavily dented armor plating that looked like it’d once belonged to an Osprey attack drone. It was roughly the same size as a small helo, carried enough munitions to level a small city and were armored to hell.

I’d watched vids about them in the great wars, the final RI war machines that were ever produced.

They were designed and built by a combination of rudimentary AI and RI, and piloted by individual RI’s that were created from the base of dead soldier’s brains.

Much as the Archaeon had been utterly insane and terrible ideas, the Osprey had been a boon and a blessing. They were like the old world nukes, where they were supposedly used as a deterrent, because nobody would actually be stupid enough to awaken and deploy them.

Once out, between their gravitation lens, the gamma cannons, the various lasers and their power generation? Where their physical weapons might run dry, their launch cradles were designed to accept almost any munitions, so they’d loot the bodies of the fallen and keep going.

They understood nothing but the slaughter, and they were incapable of mercy.

That they’d been used in the Fingers at some point I vaguely remembered, they’d been talked about after all, but they were almost never seen, so I quickly tagged the wreckage with a marker in my HUD, wondering if I was going to be able to sell the location to some research team.

It'd caught my eye because they were easily identifiable, massive as they were, and almost organic looking in the way they arced here and there.

It also had a massive dent in the side of it that I was fairly sure I remembered making, at high speed, coming down this very mountain.

I couldn’t see, at the time, but I’d damn well felt that fucker.

That I’d hit this hard enough to dent layered titan-weave armor, then I’d slid off the cliff I’d just climbed up?

How fucking far had I ended up away from Richie and Sync by the end of all this shit?

I skirted around the massive hulk, and kept going, feeling the hairs on the back of my neck rising as I did, my innate paranoia from a hundred vids of how damn near impossible to kill these fuckers had been, rising as I presented my back to it.

Nothing happened of course, how could it, the damn thing had been here for hundreds of years, but still. It felt like I was tip-toeing past a sleeping dragon.

The mountain rose on and on ahead of me. I slogged up and on, forcing myself to pick up the speed as I took switchback and battered snow-buried trail after trail.

The only thing that let me know that the boulders were there at all was the slight angle of the protruding edges and the Lidar punching through to flicker over the ground.

I was starting to lose all sense of reality as I went deeper and deeper, paying more and more attention to the Lidar as I climbed.

The snow was building up on my frame by the second as I went, making it impossible to ‘see’ through the cameras, but the Lidar?

It was mapping out more and more, and as I went, diverting more power to it, the mountainside was revealed for what it really was.

It was a graveyard, and one of epic proportions.

Tens of thousands of machines had battled over every square mile of the mountains when they’d been hit by the orbital bombardments.

One of the treatise that we’d been shown in the army when I reached the APS, had argued that some of the old maps didn’t show a mountain range here at all, and that the reason the range was so fucked up?

It’d been created by a gravitational ‘last resort’ weapon. Something that had driven the various automated systems mad, and the war leaders back then had been forced to corral everything in close through magnetics somehow, before bombarding their own armies—both the living and automated—with everything they had left.

They’d then hidden the truth, in their shame.

We were taught about it in the APS as a warning as to why the suits were highly limited in their RI/AI interfaces.

We didn’t know how much was true, how much was bullshit and how much was corpo propaganda lying about the past to try and claim that they were so much better now, while spending as little on us as was possible.

Hell it could all be bullshit.

The mountainside I was climbing up right now though? If not for the insane storms of the area and the even more insane and dangerous beasts lower down, the corpos would have mined this place flat.

Everywhere I looked at least half of everything was wreckage. Armored hulls laid atop remains, sandwiched between overlapping fractured and settled rock, and here and there?

Caves.

Caves that the Lidar picked up as running deep.

I had no idea how they’d have factored into everything, but that they were here just showed how fucked up the place was.

Continuing up the mountainside, I gritted my teeth and pushed harder, following routes that lead upwards back and forth, picking my way over centuries of rusty debris, until at last, I was hit full in the face by the howling wind again, as I came out from the lee of some rocks.

The beacon was throbbing in my vision, as was the timer for pickup, and it was getting scarily close to the time.

How the hell had two miles taken me forty-seven minutes?

I broke into a lumbering run, crossing the last dozen meters, and increasing the power to the Lidar. It pulsed and pounded the mountainside ahead of me, easily finding the entrance to the cave we’d buried, now reburied by a snowdrift.

I set to work, scraping, digging and throwing boulders aside, grabbing them like they were nothing, tossing them here and there, blindly behind me, the crack and distant booms from below telling me that some I’d thrown were bouncing over the edges and probably setting off minor avalanches.

I didn’t care.

In under a minute I had a gap wide enough, and I struggled through it, paint scraping and sparks flying as I shouldered my way inside, until finally I stood there before them.

Two suits the same as my own, still showing the scrapes and battering’s, not to mention the Red Team markers on their shoulders and chest, the occasional flickers of slowly decreasing power markers showing as I pinged them, sharing my ID and reconnecting.

The suits stood side by side, hands entwined as if toddlers seeking reassurance from one another, the horrific cold of the mountain nothing compared to the cold of cryosleep that both bodies radiated, and I stood there, staring at the markers in horror.

They were alive, sure, and thank the gods for that, but?

They were also deeper in cryo than had been the plan. Something must have gone wrong, because there was no way they were moving in the next hour, maybe two or three.

Hell, I’d be lucky if we were moving by morning!

This fucked everything, all our plans were dead in the water, especially the rescue here, the escape by helo and the nest clearance tomorrow.

I briefly contemplated leaving them here, turning around and running for the helo meet, planning on coming back for them later… and I dismissed it before the thought had fully formed. Staring at my two friends, fast asleep in their armor, encased in glittering frost, I knew what I had to do.

Moving over to Richie and Sync, I used my command overrides—thank fuck the systems still accepted my authority on my keystone, and hadn’t been updated that I was no longer part of the APS—to start the ‘defrost’ cycle.

I also plugged into Richie’s suit, set the system, and deployed one of his drones, flying it out of the entrance to the cave and settling it down on the ground atop some scrap metal.

Fortunately, the sheer fucking amount of it that was available here abouts was going to play into my hands for this. Metal, when used right, and with the correct tech, could boost a signal tremendously, and I was going to damn well need it.

Linking the comm gear I had, feeding in the helo details and then routing through Richie’s much more powerful gear, I linked up to the pilot, who was totally not expecting my call.

He was due to collect us, literally any minute, and according to the signal degradation on the meter, and the directional sweep? He was five miles away, and heading in the opposite direction.

He was also singing about ‘easy-come, easy-go’ a recently popular song about losing a job, and finding another and not caring.

The bastard wasn’t even subtle about the fact he’d hung around for a bit and was now fucking off, rather than coming to collect us.

“Helo this is LDS,” I said grimly. “I have you on escape vector, not, repeat, not recovery. Advise.”

“Uh… yeah, ah LDS… right!” He grunted, cut off from his shitty singing as he tried to cover his ass. “Ummm right, you know, this storm, and the fuel…”

“You’re heading back to the city to refuel,” I finished for him. “I understand, don’t worry.”

“You do?” he asked, unsure. “I am? I mean, yeah! Yeah that’s it, but you fuel cost…”

“You got half upfront for the job, and you built the fuel into the deal, so I’ll go to ten percent higher. Considering the amount of fuel you’re saving, you know, with the helo being at a third of the weight on the way out with just me in, and without any of us at all on the way back.”

“Yeah… but you know…”

“Because the other option, if that’s not what’s going on here, is that you’re abandoning us out here. And I know that’s not the case, because then I’d be firing a hellfire at you, to make my displeasure known.”

“Ah…”

“And even if you managed to escape that, you’d be left landing in the city, having only taken half the money, because the other half wouldn’t be paid out. then when I complete the days of walking to get back to the city, with my companions? You’d have three fully armed and armored APS operators visiting to explain why you don’t fuck with us. We’d be getting our money back, from your corpse, after ripping your little helo into shreds.”

“Now wait a fucking…”

“But that’s not the case!” I said firmly. “Because you’ll be back here to meet us at 0400 sharp, and you’ll be monitoring this frequency, in case there are issues, isn’t that right?” I asked bitingly, getting a subdued confirmation from him.

I didn’t have great hopes about his reliability, but that was life. Basically if I pushed too hard at this point, he’d soon find out I didn’t have a hellfire missile, and then my only option was walk back.

I left it at that, and disconnected, ordering the drone back to Richie’s armor, then looked at my two friends, and sighed, shaking my head as I looked over the jobs ahead of me. This wasn’t going to be a fun night.

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