Coward Page 5

  “Strange!” Mother shouted with all the authority that came of being first a gang leader and then an NCO. Strange looked resentful but stopped moving. Martins sat up. All of the pa’s personnel were now out watching this unfold.

  “All of you are under arrest!” the short man shouted. His voice was as devoid of character as his features.

  “On what charge?!” Mother shouted over the assault shuttle’s engines.

  “Terrorism and treason!” the man answered as he moved towards them, still pointing the carbine between them. Tailgunner was backing towards his pack which he had left lying on the gravel. He had left something lying across it that he felt he needed now. The man’s carbine twitched to cover him.

  “I said freeze!” Tailgunner did so, staring at the man, trying to wish the carbine away so this could be equal. Like warriors. The short man was approaching Mother.

  “Down on your knees!” he ordered.

  “That’s not going to happen,” Mother answered evenly.

  “I will fire!”

  “You’re going to have to,” she answered. He was still moving up on her, one hand held the carbine the other was reaching for restraints. Rookie error, or so Mother thought. As soon as he closed she batted the barrel to one side, stepped into him, spinning round to elbow him in the face. Strange started running.

  The short man ducked under her elbow and swept out her legs. She found herself on the floor with the man’s foot about to stamp on her face. She only just rolled out of the way as he stamped down, causing a small explosion of gravel. Mother managed to roll onto all fours as the man’s foot kicked her in the stomach so hard that, despite her subcutaneous armour, it winded her. The force of the blow picked her up and spun her onto her back. Mother found herself lying on the gravel fighting for breath. The man stood over her, his carbine levelled at her.

  “Roll onto your front and put your hands behind your–” Strange landed on the man’s back. She had a carbon fibre kerambit in each hand. She was screaming and repeatedly stabbing the man in the head with the curved Malaysian blades. The man reached over his back and grabbed her, tearing her off and throwing her to the ground like she was a rag doll.

  Mother forced herself onto all fours.

  Dog Face was on him next, his stainless steel claws tearing at the man’s face. The man clubbed Dog Face in his dog face with his gauss carbine. Dog Face staggered back. The man kicked forward and down, catching Dog Face in the stomach and knocking him off his feet.

  Mother forced herself onto her feet.

  Big Henry swung his club into the back of the man’s legs. The club was made of ghostwood, the dense hard wood of genetically engineered trees that grew in the parts of the Twilight Strip closest to Dayside. The club was studded with hardened Dayside obsidian that had been laser cut into the shape of shark’s teeth. They tore and ripped as they penetrated the man’s skin after puncturing the inertial armour that had hardened under the impact of the club’s kinetic force.

  The man sank to his knees. Big Henry swung again. The man blocked the blow with his own arm. Big Henry felt the impact through the hardwood haft of the club. From the ground the man kicked up hitting Henry in the chin. There was the sickening crunch of armour cracking and bone powdering. Henry was knocked off his feet and landed on his arse.

  Mother ran.

  The Man stood up and winced as he tore the club out of his arm. He started to bring the carbine up to bear on Dog Face who was about to pounce again when the carbine was hit so hard that the weapon cracked and was rendered useless. The man turned to look at Tailgunner. Tailgunner was casually twirling the taiaha from one side to the other. Tailgunner’s eyes widened in surprise as he finally got a chance to have a look at the wounds they had inflicted on the man’s face.

  Where Strange’s kerambit and Dog face’s claws had ripped open the flesh, tendrils of black liquid were knitting it back together and sealing it. It gave the man’s face the disconcerting look of something seething and crawling under the skin. It took a moment to place where he had seen it before.

  “You’re one of Them,” he said. “Some kind of infiltrator.” Dog Face had been on all fours but he straightened up, smiling. Strange was pacing backwards and forwards but made no move to attack. Big Henry retrieved his club with one hand and held the remains of his chin with the other. He stared at the short man with a sense of satisfaction. They all knew Tailgunner would deal with him. Tailgunner had, after all, grown up hard and been fighting all of his life in some of the toughest neighbourhoods in Moa City. No amount of special forces training, so they thought, could match that kind of experience. This would not be the first special forces type who had underestimated the hacker.

  “We’re not Them, you ungrateful bastards, we’re here to save you,” the man said, looking at the taiaha. He laughed humourlessly. “What are you going to do with a wooden club?” He asked. Tailgunner showed him.

  Tailgunner struck with the hard wood blade of the taiaha lightning fast strikes, swung hard and each one punctuated with a scream. He struck each arm and each leg. With each blow came the sound of a sickening crack. The man screamed in pain and collapsed to his knees. Tailgunner screamed again and hit the man in the face with the full force of the taiaha, powdering bone and whipping the head round. The man’s head went limp, sagging forwards. There was a wet gurgling sound. Tailgunner looked down at the man’s eyes wide with anger. It took him a moment to realise that the strange gurgling noise was laughter.

  Tailgunner’s expression changed to one of shock. There were more horrible cracking noises as bones knitted back together. The man stood up, his laughter sounding more human as he healed himself.

  “A club?” Black blades slid out from under each of his fingernails. The looked somehow organic. “You fucking savage.”

  “Now!” Mother’s amplified voice screamed. Tailgunner dived out of the way. To all intents and purposes the short man ceased to exist when the 300mm penetrator round from Apakura’s mass driver hit him centre mass with enough kinetic force to basically cause him to explode. There was an explosion of rock and gravel as the round buried itself deep in the cavern floor, leaving a tube-like furrow of smoking, red-hot rock in its wake.

  * * *

  On her couch in Apakura Mother had triggered three weapon systems simultaneously. As the short man had exploded she had fired four of her long-range missiles at near point-blank range at the assault shuttle. At the same time she had also activated the ball-mounted laser point defence system. As soon as the little man had ceased to exist, perhaps even at the same time, the assault shuttle had launched missiles at the Apakura.

  The duel between the shuttle and the mech was fought in the air between the two vehicles in less than a second. Rounds from the shuttle’s rotary rail guns sparked off the armoured hull of the Apakura as lasers detonated missiles in mid-air. The Apakura won as one of her High Explosive Armour Piercing Missiles made it through the shuttle’s point defence lasers, burrowed into the shuttle’s armour and exploded. Mother shifted the mass driver towards the shuttle and started firing round after round into it. The penetrator rounds flew straight through the shuttle as it tilted and seemingly in slow motion started to fall to the ground.

  People fled as the shuttle hit the ground, a crumpled, tangled mess of armour, engines and ordinance that miraculously did not explode. Mother watched through the mech’s cameras as the rest of whanau emerged from their hiding places.

  “Get in your mechs, now!” she ordered. They ran for their respective mechs. She heard Tailgunner climb in the Apakura behind her as she started to make the mech walk towards the gate. She saw the gates were starting to close so she put a mass driver round into the motor housings of each of them.

  Small-calibre, and some less small-calibre, rounds began to ricochet off the mech’s armoured hull as all the remote drones in the base rose into the air as one and began to fire on the mech, as did the base’s automated defence systems.

  “Tailgunner, are you work
ing today?” Mother enquired as she headed for the gate.

  “They’ve taken over every automated weapon system they can find,” Tailgunner explained as the Apakura’s systems overlaid targeting solutions onto the three dimensional topographical map that was being fed to Tailgunner’s Internal Visual Display.

  “I don’t care,” Mother muttered under her breath. The Apakura’s belly, rotary rail guns started firing, moving from target to target as did the point defence lasers. Tailgunner used them to destroy the remotes and the pa’s internal defence systems in very rapid succession.

  Through the cameras Mother saw the other three mechs come to life and fall in behind her. She also saw Martins still sat on the ground looking frightened, confused and frozen. Most of the other base personnel were still hiding. With a thought, Mother switched on Apakura’s loudspeaker.

  “It looks like these so-called freedom Squadrons are impostors. Them infiltrators of a type we’ve never seen before. There will be more on the way. You need to run. Go to the places you know and we will find you.” The Apakura was nearly at the door now.

  “The external defences,” Tailgunner warned, and then he spoke through the loudspeaker to the base personnel as well. “They control the net. Everything you do is monitored. Do not try and use the net or anything connected to it, or they will be able to track you. All the automated defence systems, remotes and anything controlled through the net can be turned against you.” Then they were at the gate.

  The external defences were straining to get angle on the whanau’s mechs but they could not turn inwards enough. The Apakura, as well as the two Landsknecht class mechs, Dog Face’s Kopuwai and Big Henry’s Whakatau, fired on the automated weapons. Plasma and mass driver rounds turned them to slag and wreckage. Strange’s small Steel Mantis scout mech Atua Kahukahu crouched and ran under Apakura and ahead into the darkness.

  * * *

  Randolph’s Dunny was a vertical crevice about three miles deep. It was used as a dumping ground for non-recyclable waste from the pa. This included at least one of Mother’s previous commanding officers. Little attempt had been made to explore the vast underground tunnel system connected to the base of the crevice. It was uneven, pitted, with lots of handholds, reasonably easy to climb if you were not in a large armoured fighting machine.

  Mother was glad that there was no comms traffic so she could not hear all the complaints for what they were about to do.

  “You sure about this?” Tailgunner asked.

  “Don’t ask stupid questions.”

  “Okay. Do you think there’s any chance we can make it?”

  “I need you to be quiet, Tails,” Mother said. She was studying the topographical rendering with the eyes of an experienced climber. Every Lalande colonist could climb. It was an important survival skill in their subterranean world. Mother decided where the legs where going to go. With all the external lights on she stretched the legs over and used them to wedge the Apakura over the three-mile drop and slowly lowered the mech into the hole. She steadied the mech and then moved the mech’s legs to their next position. To the others watching in their own mechs it looked like the Apakura was sinking into Randolph’s Dunny. As the Apakura sank lower and lower one by one the other three mechs climbed over the edge and followed.

  Epilogue

  His men had the remaining firebase personnel down on their knees, hands secured behind their backs. Major Rolleston watched as Josephine walked up and down the line of prisoners.

  “What happened?” Cronin’s comms icons asked from its window in the Major’s IVD. Rolleston cast his eye on the crumpled wreckage of the assault shuttle. It had been doused in flame-retardant chemicals before they got here.

  “It’s what you saw through the lenses. The mech operators took out the shuttle and the automated defences and then climbed down the crevice, and I don’t have enough people to play hide-and-seek in the cave system down there. It’s enormous,” Rolleston explained in his cultured, educated upper-class English accent.

  “What about the rest of the base personnel?” Cronin asked.

  “Some fled. Most stayed. People are sheep. Of those that fled we’ve recovered maybe a quarter, but this Corporal Ruru warned them about Demiurge and most of them have maintained comms discipline.”

  “Freedom Wave,” Cronin corrected.

  “I appreciate the importance of giving Demiurge a less sinister name but couldn’t your psych ops people come up with something better?”

  “PR, not psych ops. We should have killed them with the firebase’s internal defence systems when we had the chance.”

  “We need to know how they managed to harm Demi…Freedom Wave. Did you ask the Seraphim how that could happen?”

  “Not yet, but something that can harm Freedom Wave is not good unless we can harness it and use it against God.”

  “One of the Aberrations?” Rolleston asked.

  “Probably, what do you want to do?” Cronin asked, changing the subject.

  “Well, Freedom Wave controls all the footage, and we manipulate it. Make the mech pilots out to be responsible. Paint them as a Them fifth column; that should frighten people enough that they will find little succour.”

  “We don’t want a resistance movement.”

  “We control the surveillance infrastructure of the whole planet. All they can do is hide in caves far away from everyone.”

  “The survivors have to die.”

  “I’ll see you when you get back here.” Rolleston cut the link.

  Rolleston nodded to Bran. The Grey Lady lifted the laser carbine to her shoulder and aimed at the back of the head of the first prisoner in line. As the prisoner’s head exploded in superheated red steam, Rolleston wondered why people just would not do what they were told and spare themselves all this suffering.

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