20. SOMETHING ELSE ENTIRELY
She was awoken by an earthquake. Disoriented. The bed was shaking, and she blearily clung to the frame to stop from falling. Another tremor, this time joined by thunder. Louder, somewhere above. A third, and now there was a massive crashing, tearing noise. Shouting outside, then the high-pitched scream of a laser and the shouting cut short.
Footsteps, thunderous as those of a titan. They halted outside her cell.
“Theresa?” A voice, distorted through speakers and the cell’s doors, but recognizably Nix’s. “Theresa, get under the bed. I’m blowing the door in three.” Theresa rolled off the bed, then crabbed sideways underneath it. “Three, two…” The door came flying into the room in a blur of ferrocrete dust, bounced off the opposite wall, before smacking to the ground.
There was a bowl-shaped dent in it, almost dead center.
Theresa hauled herself out from under the bed and looked out the doorway, cratered where the door had been hinged, small landslides of dust trickling to the floor. Beyond, a hulking dark grey monster, with megalithic shoulders, a narrow blue visor, the hungry maw of a laser cannon under one arm, a short-barreled submachinegun under the other. An Achileus battle armor suit.
“Nix?” She tottered unsteadily forward, brushing the dust from her clothes and hair. Took a deep breath. “Jonas is dead, Creed’s a traitor, get me the hell out of here.”
“Figured.” The suit waved for her to come out of the cell. “My thoughts exactly on the second part. Let’s go.”
There was a hole in the ceiling of the corridor outside, a cone of rubble beneath it, and what looked like two smoldering, shattered skeletons.
“Back this way,” said Nix, pointed toward the hole.
Two small, black pineapples came tumbling from the hole, bouncing off the rubble to land spinning on the ground.
“Down,” yelled Nix, his suit crouching over her, tree-trunk arms making a circle over her head. She clapped her hands over her ears and opened her mouth. There air pulsed as the grenades detonated, shrapnel pinging off the suit’s armor.
The Achileus straightened, just as two thin nylon cords snaked from the hole, a red-clad man at the end of each. Even as they touched the ground the Achileus’s left arm was up, the submachinegun stuttering, orange-yellow flame belching from its barrel. The two men jerked like marionettes at the end of their cords, blood and viscera spraying out across the corridor before they fell slackly to the ground.
“Okay, maybe not that way,” said Nix, turning, setting off in a ground-shaking run down the corridor. “Follow me.”
He didn’t slow down when he reached the door at the end, just raised an arm and plowed into it, through it, ripping it from its hinges and flinging it aside without effort. Two more guards stood, open-mouthed, in the corridor beyond and then the suit’s laser fired. Their upper bodies dissolved in the consuming torrent of fire, which blasted through them, through the door behind them, and left a gaping hole in a wall 90 meters down the corridor.
They rounded a corner, coming out into the detention center’s entrance hall. White security desks, the black arches of metal scanners, a long entrance hall lined with thick grey columns. Reinforced steel double doors at the far end. And in front of them, two dozen red-and-white uniformed guards, laser rifles, automatic grenade launchers and two tripod-mounted machineguns pointed in their direction.
“Back,” he shouted, an arm sweeping out to throw her back around the corner. She landed with a thud, rolled and curled into a ball. From around the corner came an ear-splitting metallic wail like a buzzsaw. Stray bullets stitched into the wall by the corner, throwing up puffs of paint and ferrocrete. Someone seemed to be setting off a holiday’s worth of fireworks, too, filling the dusty air and illuminating the walls with searing flashes of white, yellow and reddish light. Lightning-storm bursts of it, blinding even when seen in reflection. Then hammering detonations followed by blast waves that made the floor jump. Hot fragments of metal ricocheting off the wall and around the corner.
The noise stopped, the sudden silence roaring in her ears like the ocean.
She waited, unmoving. It wouldn’t be long now. Silent tears trickling down her cheeks. They’d come so close.
“Clear,” Nix called.
Theresa wobbled to disbelieving feet. Slowly inched out around the corner.
The hall had been repainted in thick, lumpy red that dripped from the walls and ceiling. The desks and scanners were gone, leaving only smoking, flaming stumps on the floor as proof they’d ever been there. The columns looked like they’d been turned into cheese graters, pitted from floor to ceiling. The steel doors had vanished, too, as had a sizable portion of the far wall, replaced with a sagging, ragged arch of glowing metal.
In the middle, Nix’s Achileus stood watching the burning archway, its grey surface soot-stained and scratched, but otherwise intact. Smoke curled from the muzzle of the submachinegun on the left arm. The blunt, visored head turned in her direction.
“Sorry about the mess.”
Theresa was a MechWarrior, and she’d been in battle before. In a BattleMech. Cocooned from the combat by 80 tons of crystalline armor, myomer and titanium. Dealing death from ten meters up, like a valkyrie, riding high over the battle. This was. This was something else. Entirely.
Like, she and the other MechWarriors were playing a game. Nix played it for real.
Her foot slipped on something wet and yielding, and she very much did not want to look down and see what it was.
The corridor outside ended in a bank of four elevator doors. Nix’s Achileus wedged its fingers into the crack between one set of doors, and forced them open with a nail-on-blackboard screech. The elevator shaft was crisscrossed around the edges with latticework of rails and guides, the outer walls veined with cables and wiring, plunging down into darkness far below. The far wall of the column was broken up every twenty meters by the smooth rectangles of doors on the opposite side. The elevator car was barely visible, halted at the top of the shaft far above their heads.
“Close your eyes,” Nix advised, bringing up his right-arm laser. Theresa squeezed them shut and averted her face for good measure. There was a distant boom and clang of metal that echoed and re-echoed in the shaft, followed by a blast of hot air. When she turned back, she saw a pair of doors on the opposite side of the shaft about 40 meters up were gone, leaving only a smoking hole.
“Need you in front,” Nix’s voice crackled. “Arms around my neck. Legs around the waist, if you can manage.”
Theresa looked up at the hole, down the echoing shaft, then back at Nix. “But what if you—”
“I won’t.”
Thing was, she couldn’t see any alternative. She stepped in front of the Achileus, and had to jump up so her arms would reach around the suit’s head. His left arm caught her waist, stopped her from slipping down. “Ready?”
“Frack no.”
He jumped.
Jets built into the suit’s shoulder and back roared to life, catapulting them through the air. With her face pressed against the Achileus’s chest, all Theresa could see were the shaft’s walls passing in a scribbled blur, all she could feel was the sudden, frenzied gale tearing at her face and back. Until the shuddering jar of impact. She waited for him to topple, to fall. Instead his knees flexed, suit cushioning the impact, and then his hand let go her waist and she slid limply to the ground, muscles turned to jelly.
“There,” Nix said. “That wasn’t so bad.”
A bolt of nova-bright red light slammed into the back of the Achileus. The suit toppled forward, straight towards Theresa. She scrabbled backwards frantically, trying to keep from being crushed underneath. Nix managed to get one hand up, brace it against the wall, so that the suit fell sideways, twisted onto its back, crashing down just short of Theresa’s feet.
“That,” gasped Nix, “was bad.”
“What was that?”
“Anti-armor laser,” he hissed. “Another suit, back down there. Must have been a Purifier, why I didn’t spot it behind us.” The legs of the Achileus twitched slightly. “Damn, motive systems are shot. This thing’s not going anywhere.”
“Nix?” a loudspeaker voice called from down the shaft.
“Creed,” he said to Theresa. “Probably going to offer me some bullshit way of dying ‘honorably’.”
“Nix? Giving you one chance to come out and fight like a true warrior.”
“Bingo.” The right arm of the Achileus moved, laboriously slow, half-dragged across the floor of the corridor until it was pointing back out the shaft, at a nexus of wiring and cables on the far wall. “Fracking Clanner.”
“What’s he waiting for?” Theresa whispered.
“Either trying to decide if I’m dead or not, or else waiting for a backup team to cut off our escape.”
“Alright Nix,” called Creed. “If that is the way you want it.”
“Anything you can do?” she asked.
“Maybe yes,” Nix sighed. “But probably no. Ah, here we go.”
She heard the boom of jump jets. The laser on the arm of the Achileus spat a beam of brilliant light, blowing apart the cluster of wiring on the far wall. A split second later, the blurred shape of a Purifier battle armor appeared in front of the hole to the elevator shaft, just cutting its jets to bring itself arcing down—
Nix missed, she thought, despairing.
—And then the elevator, brakes released when Nix destroyed the wiring in the shaft control system, came plunging down, smashing into the Purifier like a freight train. One second, the suit was there, the next there was a blur of grey metal, and both were gone.
She listened for the impact, with growing horror as she ticked off the seconds. When it came, it was like distant thunder.
“That had to hurt,” Nix said dryly, as the back plate of the Achileus slowly hinged open. “So, for that matter, does this.” He hauled himself out of the suit, teeth gritted. Theresa saw he was dressed only in a black, one-piece bodyglove that ended above the knees and elbow. Blood ran down one leg.
He reached back into the suit and pulled out a pistol, then tossed her something, a square plastic-wrapped package the size of a small briefcase. “Dust suit,” he said, and started limping up the tunnel, pistol held in both hands. “Put it on as we go, you’ll need it.”
Theresa tore through the plastic as they walked, hauled the drawstringed-trousers over her legs one at a time, hopping as she went, then pulling the hooded jacket down over her head. Breather went around her neck, goggles sat on her forehead. “Where’s yours?”
Nix jerked a thumb back at the Achileus. “That was mine.”
“You going to be okay?”
“Sure, fine, no problem,” he said. “Got somewhere we can hide. Just have to walk for a couple of hours.”