The Black Garden: Chapter 23

The combined force of Hellions and Nu-suht drones were dug in like ticks. There were only two visible Nu-suht on patrol, easily recognizable by their towering height and elegant, horse-like heads. One carried a pulse rifle perfectly capable of turning me into a fine red mist. The other carried a square antennae-festooned pack similar to Gaius’s, except I had a feeling the Nu-suht’s wasn’t specced for calling orbital support, but rather controlling the many, many drones that patrolled the encampment.

The encamp-ees had bulldozed about half an acre, creating a large, mostly round clearing served by a narrow dirt road that likely connected to the one where the Blind Mice hit-squad had ditched Mert and his car. Trees had been cleared to create a clear, flat barrier of space between the forest and the fort, perfect for gunning down anyone trying to overcome the ten-foot dirt ramparts built up around the perimeter of the encampment. Old growth logs had been repurposed into buildings, stakes, buildings and watchtowers. From my position, I could zoom in on the tops of six large, jungle-green barrel-frame shelters, arranged in a semi-circle around a graveled parade ground. On the south side was a boom gate ahead of an old-fashioned chain link and barbed wire entry. Left of that was a parking lot containing several vehicles.

The pair of Nu-suht wore the angular black-and-red armor I associated with Republic corporate militaries. But as with the Blind Mice, there was no obvious branding on their gear. That was definitely weird. The Eighty always branded their soldiers out in the field, not least because many Nu-suht soldiers livestreamed their activities to their sponsors. For the core of the Republic, war was a spectator sport, and the reverence the Nu-suht held for the Innovators and the family lineages that controlled the corporations that ruled them was something close to ancestor worship. Nu-suht skin and armor were typically covered in light tattoos of brand insignia and even advertisements, if they didn’t need concealment. Being uncommitted to one of the Innovators and their brands was cause for derision or even discipline in their military. But the pair prowling the encampment had no visible symbols our night-vision cameras could pick up. Neither did the drone army.

Flying assault drones encircled the camp in two patrol rings, one around the perimeter, one that ranged about two thousand feet out into the jungle. The Taga were very familiar with their patrol patterns by now, and we were staging the assault in one of the few blind spots. Dog-like robots prowled the interior of the encampment in packs, railguns mounted on their straight, low-slung backs. Bipedal drones the approximate size of a large human but with the long muzzle and recurved, hoofed legs of a Nu-suht held post at every entry point. Spy drones the size of dragonflies hummed through the trees.

“Final PCC, last BUB call Roach Actual, Pred-5 Actual.” Gaius switched to the operational channel, making the call for us to make one last check on our gear and ammo. He was concealed in the understory in his suit of powered armor, tagging every drone we could spot with holographic markers. Large and small, swarms of little red arrows now flittered around in the near-pitch darkness.

“No updates from CENTNEX, all Roaches confirm final PCC,” Lilia replied.

One by one, we all confirmed we were good to go.

“Roger that, stand by.” Gaius switched to our unit’s aside channel for a moment. “Goddamn, that’s a lot of firepower for a random little outpost in the middle of nowhere.”

“Sure is,” I replied. "I assume it's manpower to make up for their dinky little gate."

"It really is a dinky little gate, isn't it? Whole thing is weird as hell. Might look rudimentary, but those shelters they’re using can take anything short of a bunker buster from the top, and the Nu-Suht don't hand them out for free. Guess they spent their budget on the shelters and decided a boom gate was all they needed. You know, other than the demons.”

There were a lot of those, too. Even from here, Tsariel could sense the latent Abyss presence radiating from the place. Gaius, the other angelhost on the team, was almost certainly experiencing the same heavy, dreary sensation that I was. The corrupted energy ghosted through my body and mind like the caress of a cold rotted hand. It made the high-calorie gel I was gulping down taste strange and oily. I was just about done with the pack when the team channel purred and opened again.

“Pred-5 Actual to CENTNEX, we have tagged all visible hostiles.” The Taga Matriarch’s voice clicked and squeaked over the line, auto-translated on every open channel. “Engagement authorization requested.”

A terse, deep female Axuma growled back. "CENTNEX copy, green light Pred-5. To a glorious hunt.”

Digger followed immediately after her. "Green light copy, thank you CENTNEX: DWO-6 Roaches, the Government Special is enroute, engage at will.”

I shoved the crumpled gel pack into one of my pouches, then locked and sealed the visor for my helmet as the team ran cross-checks to ensure everyone was in position. Days of observation, hours of setup… it all came down to a fast and dirty twenty minutes against a force roughly ten times larger than we were. Average odds for a DWO team.

“Bomb incoming. Swarm hack is underway,” Lilia said crisply. “Preds are moving in. Ratty, Z, hold until I say go.”

“Ratcatcher copy.”

“Black copy.”

“Copy, DWO-6-3 Zealot,” I said.

Distant headlights came into view from the south: Mert’s car, crawling up the dirt toward the first checkpoint. The headlights bobbed as it navigated potholes and bumps, lighting up the boom gate and the guardhouse it connected to.  We had delicately breached the casing of the car’s massive lithium battery and clamped a wad of plastic explosive, a grenade, and several gallon-bottles of water to it. The cabin was a nest of explosives and loose nails. I tuned my binocular magnification up to watch, locking my teeth and rocking them to vent the tension in my jaws.

The car slowed, like it normally would. I saw the drone guards advance into the cone of light, rifles set in position against their shoulders. Two of them hung by the watchtower while the others went around the front of the car on their way to the driver's side. And once it was in front of the grille... Digger remotely overclocked the vehicle and gunned it, ragdolling one of the drones over the hood and up over the roof. The engine’s coolers roared as the remaining guards opened fire, strafing the doors with AP rounds that punched through the titanium paneling with dull WHUMP WHUMP WHUMP explosions of metal penetrating metal. The car swung crazily on the dirt, spinning into the boom gate - but Digger was a hell of a driver. Guards scattered like ants as an alarm went off, and then a HIMARS array... but there was no driver to target, and no electric hooks to stall the car between the boom gate and the steel fence behind it. The car plowed through both of them, tore into the dirt courtyard, and accelerated at the central shelter at a hundred miles an hour.

BOOOOM.

A small sun erupted in the darkness as the car slammed into one of the shelters and sent a star-shaped plume of scarlet and orange fire, shrapnel, and nails toward the sky. Alarms began to blare: every human inside the blast zone was shredded, armor or no armor. Others ran out, staring stupidly as the car belched gouts of lithium fire in all directions.

“Go, go, go. Perimeter drones are under control,” Lilia ordered.

Gwan-eum, forgive me for the violence I am about to commit. I dampened my nerves until I felt an eerie, almost meditative sense of calm, leaping from the tree. Tsariel caught me on the way down, scythe-like manifolds clutching the surrounding trunks like giant claws to catch my fall and fling me forward. The Taga marines charged through the foliage beneath me like a pack of velociraptors, headed straight for the ten-foot berms. I sailed over their heads as the manifolds flung me up and over like an acrobat, landing lightly on one of the berms, then kicking off again toward my designated target: the Nu-suht drone controller.

The two-man fireteam swung their rifles toward me with reflexes too fast to be natural, clamping the triggers - and letting out honking bellows of frustration and confusion as both guns misfired. Moments later, the drone controller sunk to one knee as his powered armor failed on one side. My sword took his head before he could even feel it, hands clutching up at the stump of his neck as I ducked under a burst from the other Nu-suht. He’d cleared his gun and got it to work, and it was his neural wetwear versus mine as he tracked and fired - only to stumble as Ratcatcher slammed into him from behind. Tsariel and I seized the moment: I flung a wafer-thin blade that spun end over end and punctured his helmet, hitting him right between the eyes. He swayed down to his knees, arms spasming, then toppled limply to the ground.

“CC’s down,” I fired off to the others, giving Ratcatcher a thumbs-up - then got away from her and toward cover before her unfiltered entropic aura wrecked my armor and cybernetics the same way it had done to the Nu-suht’s.

Drones were battling in the air overhead, the ones under Lilia’s control harrying the enemy drones like crows hounding hawks. The three Khem and the Axuma Marines were up over the berm - one of the smaller males had fallen under fire, but the others waded in, carbines barking with short, controlled bursts that dropped humans and robot dogs alike. Khemmemu, unaffected by bullets or flechettes, surged up into their bestial and humanoid warforms as they closed in on the soldiers and drones in a line. I glimpsed Hura simply engulf one of the smaller Hellions as he fired point-blank into his mass, tackling him to the ground to wrap and crush him while the others did the same for two or three at a time. A second later, a 60mm mortar round streaked in from the forest, smashing one of the shelter doors in a violent eruption of metal and smoke that kettled the enemy infantry toward the Khem assault. Blackie at work.

Angel or no angel, it was all I could do to skid for cover and get my head low as the cross-fire peaked. But there was always something to do - and in my case, that was to check the vitals of everyone in my extended team. I quickly triaged the people in the firefight: the Axuma male I’d seen go down was still alive, but his charts were trending down. His armor registered sixteen different impacts, taken before Lilia’s borrowed drones had thinned out the ranks inside the encampment. My pulse throbbed in my temples when I noticed that Ratcatcher was also down - injuries to her legs, inclusive of broken bones. Something had caught her low and given her multiple fractures below the knees. She had to be in agony, but the Axuma was in worse shape.

I tagged him for medical aid and hit my camo, waited for a reload lull, and scrambled: from behind a truck to behind a concrete rail now full of holes, then along the back of the berm to the spot the Axuma had fallen. He was face-down in the dirt, breath rasping through his helmet. The helmet had been shattered, flechette shrapnel still caught in the transparent visor. Chalky pink blood leaking from his gills and mouth. His armor had plugged up the entry wounds and saved his life, but as I tuned into his body, I saw them: three tungsten spikes buried in his lungs in a vertical stack, unlucky massed hits just beside the edge of his hard shell chestplate.

Drone fire kept me flat to the ground as I rolled him onto his side, opened his mouth, and used my fingers to clear his airway of clotted blood and mud. Unlike humans, Axuma didn’t have much in the way of a trachea - anything he was inhaling was going straight into his chest, worsening the pain and panic. Axuma gills were mostly vestigial, but also prone to getting clogged. He wheezed with alarm - then with relief as I blocked the sodium channels and the pain and urge to cough switched off.

“Not much I can do for you here with those damn things still stuck in your chest, but I can keep you breathing.” I opened a channel with him, lying on my side in front of him. “You MUST lay here for the rest of the fight. If you try to run or even breathe too hard, you’ll rip yourself up. STAY HERE.”

“... Affirmative.” The Axuma’s mouth gaped and popped as he thought the message back, milky white eyes huge in his face.

I lay my hands on him and concentrated, flinching slightly as a high-powered shell burst against the inside of the berm about fifty feet to our right. His body unfolded for my Lifesight, and once I was sure I knew where the tungsten slivers were buried, I worked to make his lungs absorb the fluid that was slowly suffocating him to death. Once he could properly suck in air, I guided the tissue to grow and extrude sterile cysts over the shrapnel. They were effectively benign tumors, but they plugged the exit wounds: it would be uncomfortable, but uncomfortable lungs were better than leaky lungs.

“We’ll be back for you. Burst your camo but keep 30% of your batteries in reserve - and stay low. If you have to shoot, shoot from the ground.” I checked behind me to make sure that he at least had some kind of concealment before I began to crawl toward Ratcatcher’s position, cursing as a stray round hit my only-recently healed leg and glanced off without penetrating.

Ratcatcher was holed up in a storage area behind a tower of wrapped pallets, stacks of soup cans that didn’t provide any serious cover. The ground was covered in a spreading pool of beef stew and spent casings, while Ratty took shots around the crumbling stack. Her head swiveled toward me as I seal-flopped from the last bit of real cover and behind the pallets.

“Bad spot,” she said, even as she bent around to provide a moment of cover for the Axuma as they advanced into the first of the shelters. “One of those dog-bots was flailing around on its back while the drones took it out, let off a burst of thumpers as it died. Striped me right across the shins.”

“Don’t worry, I got it.” Unlike flechettes, which were made for small-area penetration, thumpers were heavy rounds expressly made to damage personal armor. Your Z-suit or C-shell could catch them, but if enough of them hit you in the wrong place - head, shins, kidneys - the concussive impact alone was enough to wound or kill.

Ratty was in a C-shell, combat armor, and the suit had dosed her with drugs to take the edge off the pain. And just as well. Her tibias were split with vertical hairline fractures from where the thumpers had hit. It was an easy job in any other circumstance, but no one ever said combat medicine was easy. Or glamorous, as I lay on my belly in a swamp of mud, stew, and canned ravioli, trusting my angel to knock back bullets or grenades. I was nearly done with the heal when I noticed that the encampment had fallen silent - not the eerie silence of a gaussian field suppressor, but the ringing echo of a spent battlefield, punctured only by the continuous crumpling roar of multiple fires.

Somehow, it was already over. It felt like only minutes had passed, but when I checked my ATLAS HUD, I saw it had been nearly half an hour.

The radio lit up as the Taga unit checked in, one by one. One KIA, while the guy I’d patched up was still alive but down. When I peeked out, the Khem were busily spitting out spent rounds like sunflower seeds in the middle of the compound. Broken drones and corpses were strewn everywhere.

“Contact lost. Pred-5 all able Call Signs, moving to clear tagged structure.” Hura’s voice rolled over the line as one of the more intact buildings lit up with a holographic green label in my HUD.

“10-4, Roach Actual. All Roach callsigns, SITREP,” Lilia followed up, a tinge of worry in her cool voice.

“Ratcatcher, contact has ceased. No issues. Awaiting further orders.” Ratty reached out to me and clapped my shoulder as I crawled out of the mud and crouched to her other side as one by one, the others in our team checked in.

“Blackie, A.F.O, no issues,” Blackie reported. “And I gotta say, this Taga 60-mil shoulder runs works like a dream.”

“Zealot. A.F.O, no issues,” I added, when my time came around to report. “Other than nearly getting shot in the ass again.”

“Hammer-CC copy; all callsigns to FRP Alpha. Good job, everyone.” Gaius was strictly professional on the radio now that we were in hostile territory, but I knew he would be chortling to himself as he marked our Forward Rally Point.

I warily rose to my feet, then offered a hand to Ratty. She clapped her hand into mine and staggered up to her feet, the hydraulics in her armor whining in protest. It sounded ten years older than it was: even with her aura suppressed, she was hard on her gear.

“I know it is your instinct to push your butt out when anyone’s looking, but you should not do this during contact,” Ratty remarked, her accent curling dryly around each word.

“Blehhhhh.” I cleared my visor to transparent, stuck my tongue out at her, then re-enabled the tint. Her armored bulk somehow radiated a silent mirth as we broke out from behind the mauled stack of cans and limped off to join the survivors.