30. SHADOW AND LIGHT
The exhaust tunnels were massive, perhaps two dozen meters in diameter. A metal grill stretched across the surface of each one to keep people and animals out. The upward draft caused the planet’s orange dust to dance in twisting cyclones above each tunnel.
Nix stood at the edge, gripped the bars of the grill directly in front of him, and then and fired three short, controlled blasts from the arm-mounted laser, cutting free a roughly circular slice of metal. He tossed it away into the sand, looking down at the drop beneath his feet. The massive carbon-fiber blades of a double fan spun at the bottom of the shaft, 80 meters below, creating an intricate play of shadow and light. The suit’s sensors registered a strong updraft.
He watched a countdown in the corner of his HUD tick down to zero, and stepped off the edge into space.
The Purifier suit plunged down the shaft, buffeted by the rising currents. Nix flared the jets, keeping the battle armor vertical, feet down. He sighted at the conical hub at the center of the whirling fan blades and fired. Suit and hub were joined by a line of red fire, then the hub’s casing blew outwards in superheated shards.
The blades, now rushing up towards Nix’s feet with alarming speed, kept spinning.
“Shiiii—” Nix pumped the suit’s jump jets to slow his fall, aimed and fired again. The fan motor detonated like a grenade, fragments thrown clear by centrifugal force to ricochet like ball bearings off the walls of the tunnel. The blades started to slow. Not slow enough.
Time for one last shot, carving through the fan blades, snapping them free from the hub, creating a brief gap—and he was through, landing with a crash on the floor beneath the fan. The tunnel formed an L-bend, curving sharply, causing Nix to slip and skid, tumbling down the tunnel with a banshee screech until he made his left hand into a claw and dug it into the tunnel floor, slowing himself to a stop.
His taccom beeped for attention. He chinned the mike. Heard Euphoria’s voice. “Nix, you in?”
Nix looked up at the crippled fan, still slowing, half its teeth missing. Small debris tumbled down like intermittent rain. “Oh yeah,” he replied. “I’m in. Textbook landing.” Euphoria snorted skeptically, and clicked off.
Nix glanced at the HUD timer, and set off at a jog down the tunnel, footsteps echoing.
The server farm was cold, a few degrees above freezing. Four-meter high pillars of stacked black computer units marched in regularly-spaced rows down the length of the room like the columns of a Roman temple, ice-blue LED lights winking in thought, ropy tentacles of insulated wiring coiling down their length to disappear into the floor.
Nix advanced cautiously down the center aisle between two columns. Cold mist swirled about the room, curling into random, chaotic shapes.
And some not so random.
There, an unnaturally straight line, as though the mist was flowing along the lines of a—
Nix ducked just as a red beam lanced out from the shadows. He snapped a quick blast in the direction of the beam, and then dropped, rolling along the ground. Two more lasers, eye-blinks of brilliant light, cut into the floor where he’d stood, each coming from a different direction.
Surrounded. At least three, then. They were aiming at the energy flare of his gun, Nix realized. He feinted left, triggered a blast from his laser, then rolled right, coming to his feet. Four lasers fired back, probing the darkness for him, slagging the floor and blasting into a stack of processors, setting them ablaze. Okay, more than three of them.
A smoke alarm began to honk. A shadow flickered in the light of the blazing computer stacks. He fired, rolled, fired again.
A blurry outline seemed to rock back, then slid down, growing more substantial as it fell, chameleon disguise derezzing in shimmering hexagonal patterns as the suit’s power failed, until its solid black carapace lay face-down on the floor, head smoking and shattered.
Answering laser fire stabbed through the air. Nix was on his feet, ducking around the back of the closest stack. He watched the mist for signs of movement. There. He dashed behind the next stack, putting himself behind them. Then spun around the opposite side of the stack, firing. Three blinding flashes of red light, right into the center of the moving mist. Another suit stuttered into view, its back arched, poised for a moment before it toppled over backwards.
Nix ducked back behind the pillar as return fire blazed, the whole stack of processors shuddering and swaying under the impact. He braced his legs against the wall, put his back to the nearest stack, and heaved. The pillar swayed, groaning, then toppled directly into its neighbor, setting off a cascade as the columns smashed together like monolithic dominos, blocky processors spilling from the racks in a slate-tip avalanche.
A humanoid figure was briefly visible, memetic coating scrambled as it tried to keep up with the shower of plastic and metal parts falling about it. Nix hit the figure once, twice in the center, watched it go down.
“Nix,” an urgent voice on his taccom.
“Wait one.” He rolled across the gap between two pillars, found his feet and dashed back across to the other side of the room, laser blasts now nipping at his heels as they learned to look for movement. He threw the suit into a forward roll as a blue particle bolt screamed inches behind him and impacted into the wall in a burst of lightning.
“Kind of busy here.”
He crouched, fired, ducked down again.
Some instinct, something seen out of the corner of his eye made him duck just as a fist smashed into the server he’d been crouching behind, scattering a jagged rain of plastic shards and wiring. He jumped over the next blow, hit a micro-burst of his jump jets, spinning the suit into a backflip, blinding the other with his exhaust. Nix landed facing the suit, brought up his right arm and pressed it against something solid. Fired. The blast punched straight through the abdomen of the other Purifier, folding it in half as it was thrown back off its feet, landing with a crash.
Nix’s shoulder was rammed back against the wall in a searing burst of light. Red lights winked in his HUD as he gasped in pain. He twisted away as two more shots slammed into the wall. Then he was up and sprinting, straight for the source of the closest beam, by the near wall. Lashed out blindly with his left arm, head-height, felt it connect. Nix’s suit shuddered from a glancing blow to the shoulder as the other flailed back. Nix grabbed for the head, brought it smashing into ferrocrete wall, creating a fist-sized crater. The other suit lashed out again, a lucky blow that caught Nix under the armpit, throwing him to the ground.
He aimed a kick where the thought the other thing’s leg was, cracking his foot into leg armor just as it fired, laser bolt going wide, the server stack behind him exploding in a shower of sparks. Laser bolts blazed out of the darkness, the other Purifier homing in on the shot, not realizing it was their own squad mate. Nix had the brief impression of a silhouette looming over him, caught like the after-image of a strobe light, its arms thrown up in agony.
There was a howl of anger, then a rush of footsteps, the last suit charging straight towards him, puffs of frost thrown up from where its feet pounded the floor. Nix bounced up, fired a burst of his jump jets to launch himself forward into a flying tackle. His injured shoulder slammed into armor, and pain exploded in nova-white light behind his eyes.
Both Purifier suits crashed to the ground. Nix rolled, heard a foot come down where his head had been. Kicked back, a glancing blow, metal squealing on metal. On his feet. A punch caught the side of his helmet. He reeled back. Another punch to the suit’s abdomen left him winded, breathless. Nix felt his suit crash against the wall. A kick landed on his knee and he fell sideways, landing heavily on one hip.
The enemy suit’s camouflage faded, deliberately switched off. It brought its gun up, pointing down at Nix, paused deliberately, then fired.
Nix twisted on the ground, brought his left arm up to shield his head. The beam sliced through armor, the prosthetic arm within, spending its fury on myomer muscle and titanium bone. Leaving Nix alive.
“My turn,” he growled, raising his own laser and firing.
A brilliant flare of light illuminated the room, blinding, searing. The other suit looked down, its left hand felt blindly at its chest, and found the smoking hole there. Then it fell to its knees, tried to lift its right arm. The head drooped and it toppled forward, sprawled across Nix’s legs.
Nix pushed himself up, panting heavily. He looked down at the stump of his left arm, the ragged hole of white-hot armor and melted polymer muscles. “Oh frack,” he muttered. “Not again.”
Euphoria again, voice that could cut glass: “Nix, we need the power off now.”
“The what? Oh, right, sure.” On the far wall was the power junction box. “No problem.” He leveled his laser without looking, still examining the smoking ruin of his left arm, and blasted the box to pieces. He let his laser fall. “Nothing easier.”
He struggled to his feet, and began to limp back towards the exhaust tunnel.
Now, it was up to them.