I blinked muzzily. The HUD before me flickered unsteadily as it rebooted, for a minute showing me the reflection of the inside of my armor, before it shifted and lit up again, this time bringing me back to the full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree field of vision I was used to.
Not that I could see much of anything. I was pressed into the corner of the deployment pod, literally the corner before me an inch or less away, with more of it fallen atop me.
I shifted. The camera view from the feeds on my shoulders and the back of my head showed me a collapsed stanchion lying across me, having punched through the pod next to me.
“Ferg—” I started to call, before cutting myself off. It’d come straight through his bay. Even if he’d been alive? He’d not be now.
I snarled, reaching out, bracing myself and pushing, tearing sections of fallen helo off me. Sparks flared and cascaded across my armor as I shook myself.
“Red Team!” I bellowed into the local tacnet. “Sound off!”
“Red…Two…” came a weak cry, along with a cough that sounded like he was drowning.
“Fuck!” I snarled, ripping the last of the structural support off and turning to the wall between us. “Scanner!” I barked, falling back on the old “shout it as you want it” that we were taught in training.
It was stupid, I’d not done that in years, but today was just one of those fucking days.
The scanner booted, sending a ping out that gave me first an image of the section I was in and part of the next one, the debris that was through it and more. And a second higher, and then a lower ping sounded, as a dozen different mapping systems activated.
If they’d not had a jammer back there, they’d never have snuck up on us. But that was the joy of war: one side invented something, the other countered it, on and on until the guy with the hammer and knife showed up and fucked everyone’s Tuesday up.
As it was, an image was steadily building of the surrounding bays, and I was damn glad I’d not gone with my first instinct and punched through the wall.
Barnes was laid pressed up against the bulkhead, right where I’d have started punching. And considering the post that was rammed through his stomach, that’d have really ruined his afternoon.
I drew my blade, a vibrating wonder that could carve steel like butter, and I flicked the activation, sinking it into the separating wall a few inches above his head, carving my way upward.
Three slices—up, across, and then looping down to link up with the first one—and I punched it, sending the dividing wall flying away from us.
“Richie…Sync?” I called, as I sheathed the knife and grabbed the cut sections, bending them out even as I looked at Barnes.
“Sync here…” came the crackling connection, dropping in and out. “I have Richie. Unresponsive, injured.”
“Thank fuck.” I groaned, before wincing at the state of Barnes. “Damn, boy, you couldn’t do it by halves, could you?”
“Hey, boss,” Barnes whispered. “H-how do I look?”
“Like a pit beast ate you up and shit you out.” I grunted, shaking my head in the suit. “You able to move?”
“I think my back’s broken. Spinal tap connection feels wrong, like it’s dropping in and out.”
“Remember your training,” I ordered him, while frantically trying to remember mine. “If your spinal tap is damaged, what do we do?”
“Activate medical suite, which I’ve done, then assess location of damage, attempt a reroute,” he quoted.
“So…?” I checked the image of the local area and winced. We were in the remains of the helo all right, but damn.
The rest of the helo was just…gone.
“Sync, where the hell are you?” I asked on directed singular engagement mode, as I scanned the kid.
“Uh…comms work, internal systems work, scanning and linkup…no movement, though,” Barnes interrupted, and I switched back to him.
“That’s good. So the spinal Cs are good. You’re breathing, and your chest works okay, so the early T grades are fine as well. Internals?”
“Numb,” he admitted. “I can move my fingers and arms in the suit, but no response from the suit’s arms.”
“So you’ve got a break in the T5 to T12 range. Solution?”
“Reroute to the higher T?” he asked.
I nodded in approval. A video link to him showed him my face, even as I pretended not to see the paleness of his skin, nor the steadily dropping vital signs.
“That’s it, son. Reroute motor controls to the higher connection. You’re increasing the risk of damage to the nerves and spine, that’s why there’s a set limit on connections at each point, but they can fix that once we’re back at base.”
“Aye, sir,” he breathed, already working to reroute.
“Good man. I need to check on the others. Back soon,” I promised, getting a nod and a wan smile, before I shifted his connection back to verbal only, and reconnected to Sync.
“What was that?” I asked. “Sync? You there?”
Silence.
Utter fucking silence.
I didn’t like that, and I kicked my way out of the remains of the bay, before swearing furiously as I realized where we were.
The impact had come when we were passing through the Fingers.
The Fingers of God was a section of the mountain range to the northwest of Artem, a mass of high, solid rock spires, ranging from a dozen meters to half a kilometer or more thick, and kilometers high.
Nobody knew what kind of weapon had been deployed to shred a mountain range like that, but the fact it wasn’t all radioactive had kept conspiracy theorist nutjobs busy for years.
Some areas were literally glowing, all day and night, and others? Less radiation than I usually got from a soda.
The world around me was aflame while also being seemingly a blizzard of snow and sleet, just to make my life more interesting. The helo had been sheared apart by whatever hit it. The entire back section of the helo was just fucking missing, and the front?
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Helo pilots—probably because they were useless fucks in every other aspect of their lives—always had to fly through the damn Fingers, rather than over, risking everyone’s lives for shits and giggles.
Whatever had happened, had happened as we wove through them, and with the heavy damage to the superstructure, we’d then crashed into a fucking Finger, tearing the rest of the craft apart.
The pilot might have been a useless cowardly fuck, but he, and anyone else aboard and who wasn’t in an APS, was dead now, and it was more by sheer luck that I was alive.
Sync wasn’t responding. Neither was Richie when I tried him. I swore, seeing on my HUD that my long-range comms, usually used to link to a satellite and then onward, were down, with a reading flashing that there’d been damage to the antenna.
I moved on, clambering up and out of the helo wreckage, and moved to the edge, looking over the side.
I was at least half a kilometer up, right on the edge of a cliff, and the wind blasted snow around me, making it damn near impossible to see anything.
What the hell had the helo pilot been thinking, flying in the Fingers in this? He’d probably hit the fucking side himself and…I hesitated, replaying the last seconds. The wonder of the suit’s tech once again made my goddamn life easier.
“Incoming…” he’d screamed, and he’d sounded terrified. Yeah, he could have meant that we were about to crash, and to have used a phrase that he knew we’d respond to instantly, but…
But my gut swore that was bullshit.
“Barnes, you okay?” I was getting a very bad feeling about this.
“I’m here, boss,” he replied.
“How you doing?”
“Medical kit has stopped the bleed. Estimated six hours to full recovery. I…had to use the large medikit. Sorry, boss.”
“It’s fine. I’d rather we had to replace the nanites and lose the bonus than you,” I assured him. “Although, I’m going to higher ground. I lost contact with Sync and Richie. Helo crew is dead.”
“My comms are fucked. Maybe it’s the storm?”
“Maybe,” I agreed grudgingly. “Hold tight, kid. I’m going higher.”
I started up the side, then hesitated, and moved back, reaching one of the recovery sleds. I triggered the open and swallowed hard.
The crash hadn’t been kind to my friends. The blood that coated the inside of the container covered the jack ports as well, and I wiped it clear, before taking Scott’s secondary battery, and ejecting the damaged ammo feed on my right shoulder.
I attached the battery to the hardpoint as I moved back out of the wreckage. The symbols came online as my suit tested the connection integrity and power cycled the battery, confirming its load.
My available power went from thirty-six percent to seventy, and I nodded. Scott would have been furious with me if I’d not taken it, when it could help me stay alive.
The climb across the side of the Finger to the highest point only took a few minutes, but when I got there, I swore.
I was in the middle of them, literally, with at least three days’ run back to Artem by land, and that wasn’t counting going around the fucking cove.
I shook myself, turning back, and froze, dropping down and triggering my stealth systems on instinct.
The standard APS came with a limited stealth suite. It was limited in my model anyway, as a command module took the place of the secondary kit needed, not to mention lacking the full plate upgrade for the photo-reflective panels.
But the kit I had was good enough, considering I was crouching on a mountainside, surrounded by blasted rock and ancient shattered metal and debris, in a snowstorm.
It was only by sheer fucking luck and a break in the clouds that I’d seen the drone at all.
It was a shark—that was what we called them, regardless of their official designation. They were fast, vicious, and used to tear your opponents a new asshole. The shark flitted across the Fingers, moving from one to another, clearly searching for something.
“Hey…oss!” came the sudden relieved voice of Barnes, through a mass of static and dropped words. “I’ve…a conn…on to the…satellite. Uplink’s…stable. Relaying…location and…”
The shark spun, light blazing to life as they locked onto something down the mountainside I couldn’t see, even as I frantically tried to establish a secure link.
“Barnes!” I screamed. “Kill it! Kill the link!”
“You…?” I got through a wall of static, before the night lit up.
Two missiles screamed out of recessed pinions on the shark, slamming into the wreckage I could no longer see below me.
The site exploded, the entire side of the Finger going up, and I threw myself down again. The stealth field I’d not thought to deactivate was all that kept me alive as the shark tore past, vanishing in the storm. I laid there, cursing myself for my cowardice, for my stupidity, for all of it.
I’d not even thought to take my rifle—hell, I didn’t even know where it was—but I’d not looked, and that was unforgivable in an operator. Never mind that it was a fucking shark, never mind that my chances of taking down an armored assassination drone in a snowstorm were less than me going for a random piss and finding I’d magically gained three inches and my balls were now champagne flavored for her pleasure—it was still an unforgivable fuckup.
I hesitated, torn between staying hidden and alive but a fucking coward, or checking on my teammate.
I forced myself to stay still for a few more seconds, before moving, my determination outdoing my fear. I crawled as fast as I could. Losing my antenna suddenly seemed like an insane intervention from one of the gods.
There had to be one whose offering cup I’d not pissed in at some point, and maybe that was what was paying off now.
I kept going, knowing, damn well knowing that there wasn’t a cat in hell’s chance of anyone surviving, but needing to see it for myself.
A minute later, I got my answer. I stared down from a ridge at the devastation. Nothing could have survived it…nothing. The shark had used Hellfires, I guessed.
Insanely hot, high explosive, and monomolecular fléchettes. The same kind that the helo would have been carrying, the same kind that I’d wanted them to use on the factory.
If anyone scanned the debris later on? It’d pass a quick and dirty inspection, written up as a helo pilot error, then a Hellfire detonating on impact.
Full team lost…too bad, so sad.
Well, that was bullshit, because I was still here. I was still fucking alive, and I’d find whoever did this. I’d find them and I’d fucking murder them, each and every one.
For now, though? Sync had cut the connection; she’d been alive, and she had Richie with her. I’d only heard the one strike—two missiles, but that was it.
Knowing that sneaky fuck Sync, she’d have Richie hidden away somewhere safe by now, and no matter what happened, the APS Corps wouldn’t just shrug at the loss of us…Blue Team!
Fuck’s sake, where was Blue?
They’d been with us, hadn’t they? Behind our helo…
No, they’d been ordered off, sent somewhere else. I vaguely remembered a message telling us we’d get a beer later, when they got back. Now it was obvious.
They’d been sent away to separate us. I’d confirmed that all trace of the recordings we had were deleted…a copy was sent to the major, but beyond that there was only one other copy.
Mine, a physical recording locked into my suit.
Was I the target? Clearly someone thought we had something, on the recordings or that I or one of my team had seen personally. Or maybe they’d done it after finding the drone and that we’d been watching the shit found at the site? No. That was ridiculous. Richie had only just been caught and seconds later, we were down.
No, they had to have been ready, waiting and planning to do this already. I stayed there frozen for long minutes, my mind racing, until I swore. The warning on the secondary battery flashed that it was almost depleted.
It was almost dead, and although my own was good still at thirty-six, the additional battery being drained first, it wouldn’t last that long if I kept using it.
The drain from active camo on my shitty systems was too great, and I was in a fucking snowstorm anyway. Our suits were designed to be stealthy, so fuck it. Without the antenna, I’d register as slightly warmer metal than the mountain’s average, sure, but a hundred meters below me was a fire and flaming wreckage.
I’d probably pass a basic scan.
I cut the camo, staying still and letting myself vanish under the snow as my mind raced.
However they spun this, the corps would send a recovery team, usually a few dozen suits plus a couple of helos, as well as grunts to do the actual shlepping around of the crap that needed to be collected.
No chance they’d all be in on it. No, this read like it was a hit, something to shut us down.
Something had been found in the base, and it wasn’t even under lockdown until then. Just a standard recovery situation. Something there had changed everything, and I was going to goddamn find out what. There were too many unknowns, too many assholes, and too little people being shot in the face by me for my tastes.
One of those I could fix sharpish, though, and I’d start with Tyrannus.
I was exhausted, physically from the fight, mentally from all the shit that was going on, and emotionally from…from losing my best friends.
No way I was making good decisions right now, and regardless, there was nothing I could do. Richie and Sync had their nanite medikits, so unless they were dead by drone already, which there was nothing I could do anything about, they’d probably recover.
They’d be doing what I was: hiding and waiting. Best to make the most of it.
I let my head fall into the snow, stretched out as I was, and barely stayed awake long enough to deploy a scanner. It was a low-level one, optical only, but if Richie and Sync came looking, I wanted to know about it.
Then I let the darkness take me, lost on the mountainside, my friends’ remains still glowing hot far below.