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Chapter Twenty-Five

“SSP sent us the flight recorder contents,” Cephalie said.

“And?” Isaac asked, staring out the virtual canopy. The v-wing sped across a jagged labyrinth eroded by methane and ethane precipitation between the teeth of two mountain ranges. A dark brown stormfront loomed in their flight path as they fought through headwinds gusting at eighty kilometers per hour.

“Quang’s v-wing landed at the Kraken Mare facility before heading to Promise City.”

“Not of note by itself,” Isaac said. “She did declare her business trip to Titan.”

“But given what we know now,” Susan added from the seat next to him, “it’s another piece that fits our theory.”

“It does indeed,” Isaac said. “Pass on my thanks to Garnier for the quick turnaround.”

“Will do,” Cephalie said. “Also, the TTV Kleio is about to begin orbiting the moon. They’re on schedule to reach the facility a little after us.”

“Good. Then maybe we’ll finally have some answers,” Isaac said. “Any pushback from Trinh concerning the warrant?”

“No. They seem to be playing it cool, letting things play out. They say no one’s at the facility right now. They’re still in an automated construction phase with on-site inspections every three days.” Cephalie leaned onto her cane. “If you believe them.”

“It’s possible their management doesn’t know what’s going on at the facility,” Susan suggested. “You did mention the syndicates like to compartmentalize.”

“Either way, I’m sure they’re lining up the heads they intend to let roll.” Isaac watched the rough terrain speed past underneath the v-wing. “It’s the syndicate way of life, after all.”

“What state is the facility in?” Susan asked. “Officially, according to Trinh?”

“The building’s structural work is complete,” Cephalie said, “but the exotic printer isn’t finished yet.”

“And the supporting industrial printers?” Susan asked.

“They should be operational. Says here they were flown in seven weeks ago.”

“Then we’re dealing with a lot of unoccupied building space,” Susan noted. “They could be hiding anything in there.”

“We’ll sweep the whole complex,” Isaac said. “And we should have Andover-Chen inspect the exotic printer, too. I have a feeling it’s not as unfinished as they claim.”

The v-wing shuddered as it shot through a fierce downpour. Liquid methane pounded the craft in sheets and ran across the skin in tiny rivulets. The ship rocked as it fought through the storm, and lightning flashed in the distance.

“Let’s wait for Kaminski to arrive before we head in,” Isaac said. “We’ll move in as a unified—”

A two-tone alarm he’d never heard before warbled in his virtual hearing, and virtual displays flashed alive in front of him.

“Cephalie, what’s—”

“Collision alert!” she shouted. “Hold on!”

The v-wing spun onto its side and banked away as restraints dug into Isaac’s shoulder. He gasped at the sudden gee forces and clenched his fingers over the armrests. The two tones of the alarm began switching faster and faster.

“Damn! It’s tracking us!”

“What’s tracking us?!” Isaac wheezed.

“Not sure! Here we go!”

The v-wing corkscrewed through the storm, and the two-tone alarm rattled off so quickly it almost became a single grating noise. A brief flash of orange lit up outside the cockpit, a shock wave smashed into the v-wing, and Isaac’s head thumped against the headrest so hard he saw stars.

A schematic of the v-wing appeared, and damage indicators lit up red across the back half.

“We’re hit!” Cephalie cried. “Thruster’s out! Going down!”

Rough, icy terrain rushed to meet them, and Isaac barely had time to gulp before the v-wing crashed through a jutting spine of ice. The impact tore the left wing off, and the broken plank somersaulted through the air as the fuselage bobsledded forward over the Titanite surface.

The right wing caught against a dark, ragged outcrop, spinning the craft like a sluggish top, and the side of the v-wing crunched against a tall slope of ice. One entire side of the cockpit bulged inward, and escaping air hissed.

The impact threw Isaac to the side. His head struck the bulging wall, hot blood splattered from his temple, and his world turned to black.

* * *

Susan released her seat restraints and executed a quick internal diagnostic. Her synthoid was undamaged, and she twisted around in her seat.

“Isaac!”

His head lolled against the deformed cockpit wall, and blood dribbled down his cheek. His chest heaved as he drew in unconscious breaths, but sensory clusters in her nasal cavity showed the temperature dropping and the air composition turning lethal for baseline humans.

“Cephalie, you still with me?” she shouted.

“Here!” The LENS floated up to her side.

“Quick! The air’s going to kill him! Where are the pressure suits?”

“Stand back. I’ve got something better.”

Susan shifted away until her back pressed against the far wall. The LENS flew up to Isaac and shed its outer layer in a rain of quicksilver. Flexible prog-steel poured over his face and ran down his body until it hardened into a full gunmetal gray cocoon. A tube extended from the mass and connected to the cockpit’s ventilation duct.

“He’s safe for now,” Cephalie said. “The v-wing’s still producing breathable air, but some of the prog-steel power circuits are fried. I can’t close the hole in the cockpit. I’ve configured the suit to form a vacuum insulation layer, which’ll keep him warm once the temperature starts cratering.”

“What do we have left?”

“About two thirds of a v-wing. Our SOS beacon activated, so there’s that. We’re calling for help, but something must be wrong with our data transceiver. I can’t get it to boot up. Infosystem might have been damaged in the blast or the crash. Or both.”

“What the hell hit us?”

“A missile of some kind. Must have been launched from close by. I hardly saw it coming.”

“Stade,” Susan breathed.

“Or an accomplice.”

“He’s going to pay for this.” She drew her sidearm.

“What are you doing?”

“Making sure help has time to arrive.” She swept a finger in a wide circle. “Can you guide me to where you think that missile came from?”

“Sure can.”

“Then give me a nav beacon. I’m heading out.”

She stiffened the fingers of her free hand, jammed them into the cockpit breach, and curled the digits upward. She disabled all performance limiters and clenched the artificial muscles in her arm.

“Hold up,” Cephalie urged. “I’ll try to reroute…and you’ve already ripped it open.”

Susan tore the prog-steel hull upward, and frigid air blasted her in the face. She pounded the jagged edges aside with the flat of her forearm, then climbed out. A torrential downpour of liquid methane beat on her in heavy sheets. Temperatures below negative one hundred eighty degrees Celsius snap-froze her cosmetic layer. Her skin solidified and her sense of touch faulted out, but the artificial muscles underneath pushed through, cracking her skin open with each step, each flex of her limbs.

Warnings lit up in her virtual vision, cautioning her against staying in the cold too long, lest viscosity build up in her joint lubrication. Ice froze over her eyes, and she wiped them clear with her sleeve; they only looked like human eyes, and the complex sensory suite built into each orb continued to function in the piercing cold.

The v-wing was partially imbedded in an icy slope, minus a wing, the vertical stabilizer, and the thruster assembly. The thick seven-barreled tip of the 30mm Gatling gun stuck out from the nose and appeared intact, for all the good that would do, but one of the micro-missile racks had survived mostly intact underneath the right wing. Her busted combat frame and—more importantly—its weapons might have survived the crash, but she’d burn a lot of time trying to dig them out.

Time she likely didn’t have.

<Cephalie?> Susan transmitted over her virtual hearing, her lips frozen shut. <You hear me?>

<Loud and clear.>

<Can you open the way to my combat frame?>

<No can do. Power’s out to that part of the hull.>

<What about the micro-missiles? Do they still work?>

<Don’t know. What are you thinking?>

<Not sure yet. Just see if they’re good to go.>

<On it.>

<Where’s that nav beacon?>

<Coming right up.>

A blue triangle blinked in her periphery.

<Got it. Heading out.>

She took long, bouncy strides in Titan’s gravity and cut across the groove torn by the v-wing’s impact, then hurried through a series of icy dips and rises eroded long ago by the moon’s weather, staying low whenever possible. The storm grew fiercer, pounding her back with fat droplets of liquid methane as she came to a steep, rocky rise.

She scaled the hill, crouching low as she approached the top, and peeked over the rise.

A teeming swarm of industrial drones floated over the drenched terrain with a solid core of disk-shaped conveyors flanked by smaller spherical remotes. The conveyors lumbered toward the crash site, some carrying what looked like heavy rifles or grenade launchers in their malleable arms, and a few of the remotes zipped around with pistols grafted to their bodies. Other drones carried only construction welders, vibro-saws, or other tools that could double as lethal weapons.

<Damn, there are a lot of you.>

<Micro-missiles online,> Cephalie reported. <I can launch them, but that’s about it. Can’t see a damn thing from here.>

<But I can.> Susan permitted herself a vicious grin, even though it tore open the skin around her cheeks. <I have eyes on a mass of converted construction drones. They’re not built for combat, but there are a lot of them. I’d guess someone’s been printing weapons and installing them on the facility’s construction force. About two thirds of them have guns, and they’re heading straight for you.>

<Sounds like you’re right about them being from the factory. Weapons could have been printed out in haste when they realized we were closing in, which is why not all of them are armed.>

<Let’s make it clear SysPol expects better hospitality than this,> Susan sent. <Transmitting coordinates. Hit these bastards with everything you’ve got.>

<Locked. And firing.>

Susan hunkered down behind the rise and glanced back in the direction of the crash. A flurry of tiny lights arced upward, formed a glittering cloud, and then zipped toward her. Dozens of tiny missiles, little larger than guided grenades, flew past her position and onboard systems “saw” the oncoming horde.

SysPol micro-missiles were precision weapons, designed to take down high-threat armored targets with minimal damage to their surroundings. Their infosystems networked in the brief moments after the criminal drones came into direct view, and quick whiskers of data spread target acquisitions and prioritization across the munition cluster.

The micro-missile hive mind selected its targets and assigned them to individual micro-missiles. The collective intelligence locked its final attack plan, tiny thrusters redlined, and the micro-missiles rushed in for the kill.

Shaped charges wracked the construction drones with tongues of flame. Gutted conveyors dropped to the ground or sputtered forward until they buried themselves in ice.

But the drones were not an army made of skin, meat, and bones. They were a collection of nonsentient machines that didn’t care about losses, that didn’t understand hope or shock or resolve. They had a job to do, and they would execute their assigned tasks with the unfeeling calculation of computers following a designated path to completion.

Half of the conveyors fell to the barrage, but the other half pressed on.

Susan steadied her hand cannon over the rise and opened fire. Her first shot punched through the side of a conveyor and blew its arm clean off. Her second shot pierced its graviton thruster, and it teetered to the side before ramming its nose into the earth.

Susan blasted a second conveyor before gunfire chattered against her cover. Icy splinters flew into the air, and she ducked behind the rise and reloaded.

<You okay over there?> Cephalie asked.

<Never better!>

Susan shifted her position and popped up between a narrow V of slick black rock. She sighted down the top of her pistol and blasted another conveyor with a quick, three-shot burst. Smoke poured out of its body, and it settled to the ground.

A conveyor toward the back of the swarm spun to face her and launched a pair of guided grenades. Estimated trajectories played out in her virtual vision, and she pushed off her cover. The grenades cracked against the rocky V, obliterating it in a flash, and smoking pebbles rained down around her.

She sprinted to the side, firing until her pistol was empty, then dove for cover. A lucky bullet grazed her face, tearing frozen flesh from metallic bone at her cheek. Her ear flopped freely, and she reloaded her pistol, numb to the concept of pain.

A trio of remotes crested the rise, and one shot a quick burst at her. Bullets cracked against her face and shoulder, and she swung her aim up and returned fire, obliterating the remote in a single shot. Static danced over the feed from her right eye, but she compensated and blew the second remote to pieces.

The last remote darted in and a pincer latched onto the barrel of her pistol. A blue flame burning bright from the drone’s underslung welder cut into the barrel of her pistol. She grabbed the remote like a baseball, ripped it free of her pistol, and smashed it against the rocks.

More remotes swarmed over the rise, and she slid down the slope, then raced into the eroded labyrinth. Bullets zinged past her, blasting ice into the air, and she kept her head down and quickly inspected the pistol.

The welding flame had melted and warped the barrel. It wouldn’t shoot straight, if it shot at all.

<Damn it!> Susan holstered the pistol and hurried back to the crash site. <Cephalie, we’ve got a problem!>

<Tell me something I don’t know.>

<A drone damaged my pistol! They’ll tear me to pieces without a weapon!>

<Okay. That’s a problem.>

<Is there anything left in the v-wing?>

<Nothing but the Gatling and your weapons in the hold. I used all the micro-missiles.>

<Then I’ll take the Gatling.>

<What? You mean the gun that’s the size of a small car?>

<I can lift it no problem, even in standard gravity. Can you get it free of the nose?>

<I’ll try. The prog-steel in the nose still has an active power circuit.>

<Do it!>

Susan caught sight of the downed v-wing and cleared the space to it in four long, gliding strides. She halted herself with a stiff boot to the side of the nose, which began to flower open around the Gatling gun assembly.

She grabbed the gun by the bracket around the barrel tips and slid it out of the expanding prog-steel. The barrels were over two and half meters long, and the discharge capacitors took up another meter with a feed belt connecting back to the drum-shaped ammo sorter, which gave the whole assembly most of its bulk.

Susan braced the weapon against her hip and shook out the feed belt, which snaked back into the v-wing. She interfaced with the weapon’s manual controls; ballistic trajectory, weapon status, and ammo count lit up in her virtual vision.

She raised the weapon, spun up the barrels, and aimed it toward the hillside blocking her view of the approaching drones. Despite the physical strength that allowed her synthoid body to heft a weapon half again its own height, it had far too little body mass to absorb its mammoth recoil—a problem the low gravity only made worse. But the enemy’s angle of approach would let her keep the muzzles high, directing the recoil energy into the ground. That had plenty of mass.

She lowered her stance and braced one foot against the v-wing wreckage; she’d fought in low gravity before, and her training and field experience were about to pay dividends.

<The gun suits you,> Cephalie said.

<This is what a thug like me is good for,> she quipped, despite the danger. <Blowing shit up.>

<Here they come.>

<I’m ready.>

A pair of conveyors crested the hill, and she lit them up with a stream of sixty-seven bullets per second. The conveyors evaporated under the sleet of metal, but more crested the hill, and Susan hosed them down, too. The drones charged in, unthinking, unfeeling, unable to be broken. They rushed her all at once, and she chewed through them with the constant thunder of metal and fire and death.

<Hell yeah!> Susan cheered.

Her ammo count plummeted. She wouldn’t last long burning through at this rate, but she didn’t let her mind dwell on it. She existed purely in the moment, feet braced, giant weapon in her hands spewing metal as she eliminated threats and moved on in a vicious cycle of roaring death. She would either have enough shots, or she wouldn’t. She would either survive this ambush, or she wouldn’t. She couldn’t put more rounds in the drum, not stuck out here in the freezing rain.

But the one thing she could control—the one thing she’d be damned if she left this mortal coil without doing—was to fight on till the very end. That was the very essence of what it meant to be a STAND, to be a warrior who gave up her flesh to serve the greater good. It didn’t matter where evil lurked. Bad guys were bad guys, whether they melted the flesh off children or crushed women in stackers, and they all deserved her wrath.

Shattered drones toppled over the hill, forming a twisted, sparking, smoking pile at its base, but they kept coming without end. Five guided grenades soared through the air, and she pulled her aim up. One blew apart. Two. Three.

A pair crashed down around her, exploding in spasms of scything shrapnel. A red-hot chunk imbedded itself in her forehead, and more shrapnel slashed across her body. Static fluttered over her right eye’s feed. Her synthoid’s diagnostics pulsed with damage, while the Gatling gun whined from heat and friction where shrapnel caught in its rotary mechanism.

Susan fought on, undeterred, unflinching, holding her ground against the enemy. She selected a target, blew it to hell, then selected another, killed it, then another and another.

A conveyor rose above the hillside and its heavy rifle boomed.

The massive round punched through her knee.

Her joint gave out, and she dropped to one knee and raked the top of the hill with cannon fire. Tiny explosions tore through the conveyor, but more rose to take its place. Drone gunfire blasted her left shoulder to pieces, and the limb dropped away.

She let go of the Gatling gun with her right arm, twisted her wrist for a better angle, and grabbed the weapon again, compensating for the loss of her left arm with one quick, fluid motion. The Gatling never stopped firing, and she adjusted her aim and savaged the drones assaulting her.

More drones crested the hill, and she took aim and triggered her weapon, but all that came out was a quick burp of rounds.

<Shit!> she hissed. A bullet struck her face, and the feed from her right eye flickered out.

She drew her sidearm and squeezed the trigger, but the BARREL OBSTRUCTED fault lit up next to the weapon.

More shots rang out, and damage pulsed across her shoulder, torso, and legs. She collapsed back, and the drones swarmed in around the crashed v-wing. She tried to rise, but the artificial muscles in her legs and remaining arm strained with the effort, and critical faults lit up in her mind.

She dropped back onto the icy ground, liquid methane raining over her ruined face.

The world seemed to slow around her, and a strange sense of contentment draped her mind, almost as if covering her thoughts with a warm blanket. She had fought as hard as she could, had stood between the innocent and the guilty, had defended those who could not fight from the monsters who dared threaten their lives.

Wasn’t this what she’d always wanted? Wasn’t this the end she’d hoped for when she joined STAND and willingly surrendered her blood and bones? If she died here, fighting desperately to save an innocent life—fighting to save Isaac’s life—was it really such a bad way to go?

No.

No, it wasn’t.

Susan rolled onto her stomach and forced herself up just enough to turn her good eye toward the approaching drones. If death truly came for her, she would face it head on, not cowering in the dirt.

A pair of conveyors floated toward her, vibro-saws buzzing in their arms. She pushed herself up higher, rising in defiance of their advance, spitting in the face of her impending death in what little way she still could.

The lead conveyor raised the vibro-saw high overhead—

—and then fire and brimstone and the wrath of Hell itself consumed the world.

Explosions split the conveyor open, threw its ruined carcass back. More explosions blasted ice, rock, and metal high into the air in a rolling pattern that radiated outward from the crash site in expanding arcs. The inferno consumed the closest drones first, then spread, shattering those farther away. The cacophony shuddered through her body, but she braced herself against the ground, refusing to topple over until the worst had passed.

She craned her neck to see a massive gunmetal ellipsoid slide into view overhead, gun pods open, Gatling guns raking the ground with fire. The long spike of a time drive impeller protruded from its back.

The TTV Kleio had finally caught up with them.


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