The Reservoir, The Carver Institute
Krandermore, Survivor’s Refuge
4453.3.4 Interstellar
The seemingly endless stream of machine gun fire swept toward the two sprinting rangers, and Janus yelled, “Koni, Lira, shoot her! Mick, bump up!”
Lira and Koni popped out of cover, firing at the coldsider machine gunner. They didn’t hit anything, but they drew her attention from Mick and the rangers.
Janus dumped a whole packet of clotting powder into the wounded ranger’s wound. He pushed his medical pack into Ryler’s hand. “Get a sterile bandage on that. Keep pressure on it.”
Ryler hesitated.
“Just do it,” Janus said as the machine gunner swung her weapon around. “Mick, fire! Vincent, move up!”
Ryler pushed the compress into the moaning ranger’s side.
Vincent and the ranger with him reached the next point of cover, which was a stack of steel I-beams, and they started laying down fire. Several of their rounds hit the coldsider, but they either sparked off or flattened against her suit.
“She’s armored!” Vincent said, ducking down.
The machine gun finally stopped firing, and Janus popped up to look.
The machine gunner reached behind her, pulled another belt of bullets around, and laid it on the gun’s feed tray.
“Armor this!” Mick said, aiming the grenade launcher and firing.
The grenade flew across the space and tagged the machine gunner in the chest. She staggered, reached up, and ripped the grenade off, tossing it aside just before it exploded.
“Damn it!” Mick said.
The blast wasn’t completely wasted. The cables snapped on that side of the catwalk, causing the whole thing to lurch and fall.
Janus held his breath as the coldsider started to fall, and then she bounced back, held up by cables attached to her backpack.
“Are you kidding me?” Mick said.
“Shoot her down!” Vincent said.
The coldsider machine gunner jerked around on the cables like a ghost from a bad holo-flick as she tried to reload her weapon, making her as hard to shoot as a balloon in a fairground shooting gallery.
Still, Janus had now packed the ranger’s wound and tied a compress bandage in place. They had the coldsider pinned in from three sides, and eventually, she was going to have to stop gyrating if she wanted to hit anything herself.
“Screw this,” the coldsider said. She activated her wrist comm.
Two objects the size of filing cabinets detached from the cave ceiling and dropped twenty meters before unfurling four ailerons and two sets of fans.
Crack! One of the drones fired a single shot that drilled through the crates and passed through Janus’s patient, this time through the center of his chest.
Oh void, we’re dead, Janus thought, the outside of his visor smattered in blood.
“I’m moving up!” one of the rangers said, sprinting forward only to get cut down by the coldsider machine gunner.
Pop! Mick sent another grenade arcing through the air, and he detonated it just before it hit. Janus’s heart rose, then fell as he saw a shimmer in the smoke: a barrier, just like the one in the Eastern Labs hangar.
Crack! One of the drones shot, and this time, it was Mick who was hit, his arm torn off above the elbow.
“Mick!” Lira said, getting up to run.
Janus saw it all in slow motion—Mick clutching his stump as the aspirant suit clamped down around it, Lira running in the open, the drones repositioning to hit his team and Vincent’s, and then Brago taking three running steps down the sloping, half-broken catwalk before leaping through the air.
The coldsider twisted toward her erstwhile teammate, but she couldn’t twist suspended from cables, and Brago slammed into her from the side, grabbing hold of her back unit and punching her in the visor.
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Janus didn’t hear a shot, but one of the drones was hit by something and was jerked sideways and down, crashing into one of the reservoirs.
Crack! The remaining drone fired, and Vincent fell down behind his stack of I beams, clutching a bloody hand.
Janus reacted without thinking. He snatched up his dead patient’s rifle, took sight, and fired, pulling the trigger as fast as he could. The first two shots hit; the next were completely off, but they managed to draw the drone’s attention. It whirred, spinning around and pointing its underslung rifle at him.
There was a pop, and a weighted net wrapped itself around the drone.
Snap! The drone’s shot barely missed Janus’s head, and he fell to the ground in shock, slamming down on his tailbone.
Brago punched and tore at the coldsider’s suit. One of her cables tore free, and the two of them went swinging across the cavern until Brago slammed her into the side of a container box.
Brago let her go, and she swung back to the point of equilibrium, where she hung limp and unconscious.
The fight for the reservoir was over.
***
Janus, Fury, Lira, Mick, Ryler, Koni, Vincent, and two of the rangers boarded the elevator, accompanied by Brago, the Pugarian trapper, and the Motragi sniper. They brought the coldsider machine gunner with them, cuffed and unmasked. She didn’t seem as formidable with her helmet off and the exoskeleton built into her suit disabled. She was an older woman with a recently broken nose who could barely move with all the weight she was carrying.
Mick was paler than usual and on a mix of localized painkillers and stimulants to keep him on his feet. He’d lost the arm; there was nothing Janus could do about that.
“If we make it to Lumiara,” Ryler said, “I can get the Cult cyber techs to replace it.”
“It won’t be a replacement, Ryler,” Lira growled. “It will just be a mechanical substitute.”
“Might be better than the old one, mate,” Mick joked, but Janus could tell the loss had shocked the Hunter. Fury seemed to sense it, too, and curled up by Mick’s side, crooning to him while Janus patched up Vincent’s hand.
“What do we do now?” Brago asked. “She’s going to be waiting for us up there, with all her corpo-sec cannon fodder and the other aspirant teams.”
“I am surprised you aren’t turning us over to her,” Koni said.
Brago shook his head. “Donnika broke her word to me. Also,” he said, clasping his hands behind his back, “I heard a high judge passed through a border town and showed mercy to those who didn’t deserve it.”
“She did,” Koni agreed, “Although you stretch the bounds of what can be forgiven, Uncle.”
“Can we do this later?” Janus asked. “Brago’s right. Red Donnika is going to be waiting for us up there, and dome-sec will have breached the door by now, so there’s no going back.”
“We fight our way through,” Brago said, squaring his shoulders. “It would be my honor—”
“It will not be your honor,” Janus said, and anyone who hadn’t been looking at him before was now. “I’m not a soldier. I’m an engineer and a biologist. Lira is a trader. Ryler is a data specialist, and Vincent, while a formidable fighter, is a Motragi ranger. Have you ever accomplished anything by going straight at it?”
“Once or twice,” Vincent said, holding his bandaged hand. “Only when I had to.”
“So, we give up?” Koni asked.
“Of course we don’t,” Janus said. “But we don’t fight someone who’s waiting for us. We use systems. We leverage what we know. We trade things we don’t need for things we can’t live without. The Trials started as settlements helping each other when everything told them to bunker down and help themselves. I’m done playing by the Cult’s rules; let’s use what we know and what we have to make them play by ours.”
Ryler cleared his throat. “That sounds good, Emissary, but what did you have in mind?”
Janus told them, and wicked grins lit most of their faces.
Ryler shook his head. “That might just work.”
***
Architect Donnika frowned as she looked at her display. “You!” she said, snapping her fingers at a corporate security sergeant. “Why aren’t the aspirant teams returning to guard the pedestal? Invarian will be here at any moment!”
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the sergeant said, interfacing with her terminal. “I’ll get on the comm and ask what’s taking so long.”
“That won’t be necessary, sergeant,” an imperious, nasal voice said, and Donnika turned to see the CEO of the Carver Institute, accompanied by several board members and a dozen of her elite corporate troopers. “They won’t be coming.”
“What’s the meaning of this?” Donnika asked, standing up as the troopers fanned out, pointing their rifles at her.
“It’s quite simple,” the CEO said with a smugness that made Donnika want to pull her apart limb from limb. “Ultra-low frequency network. Bless the Motragi for their inventiveness. I understand that, on the sun-side, they can bounce the beams off the clouds.” She interfaced with a nearby operations terminal, and a broadcast appeared on the main screen.
“—is Janus Invarian and Brago Tlali-Acamatl, transmitting from the Carver Institute. A Cult Architect has seized control of the settlement and is actively interfering with the Trials. We understand that she does not represent the Cult as a whole but is a fugitive from the Cult leaders. If that’s the case, why have they not called her to account?”
That little bastard, Donnika said to herself. “Where is this being broadcast?”
“Everywhere,” the CEO said simply. “The Motragi apparently built a radio network that reaches all the major settlements across the region without any of us finding out. I’d love to know what Invarian offered them so they’d be willing to reveal it. It’s broadcasting inside the city as well, in case you’re wondering. My stakeholders are in an uproar.”
Donnika narrowed her eyes. “What did he offer you?”
The CEO of the Carver Institute smirked. “You can ask him yourself. Cuff her.”
“Ask your local Cult representative if Architect Donnika represents the Cult’s stance toward our planet!” Invarian said on the screen. “Either they condemn her, or they are complicit! We will not be governed by tyrants from the skies!”
Donnika’s mind raced as a trooper tightened cuffs around her wrists. She could feel the chain reaction Invarian had just initiated, rippling across the region, spreading across the planet like a new plague. Unlike Irkalla, the Cult could not afford to “contain” Krandermore. The planet supported too much of the system’s human population—even more, considering how many marginal settlements depended on biomass from the Twilight Valley’s jungles.
The troopers escorted her out of dome security, presumably bringing her to Invarian and Brago.
She allowed it. This wasn’t over. Donnika could stop the disease if she stopped the vector, and she had one card left to play.