Authors: Rob Ziegler
“Chalk 1,” came Fiorivani’s voice. “Everything okay in there?”
“We’re solid, Lieutenant. Maintain your perimeter.” Doss ordered her Rangers to fan out, and paused, marveling at the delicate ferocity of the advocate’s inert face. “You weren’t all that,” she told it.
“Found her!” came Casanova’s voice a moment later. Doss moved to where the boy stood over a limp form splayed out on the floor—a floor consisting, Doss now saw, of some sort of fish or snake scale. She rolled the body over with her foot, saw the unmistakable symmetry of the Designer’s face. She bent, touched her palm gently to the woman’s throat. An intermittent red dot appeared in her visor. A pulse.
….
“That her?” Fiorivani’s massive drop suit leaned over the Designer, who lay in the dirt trussed, head to toe, in an interrogation net.
“Affirmative,” Doss said. They’d converged at the rally point on the valley’s western rim, beyond a clog of behemoth caravan jerry-rigs. Falcons circled in the long morning sunlight. “We’re good to go, Falcon 1,” Doss told her radio. “What’s the hold up?”
“General Lewis, ma’am,” her pilot said. “He says he has priority to land. He wants to…ah…pick up refugees.” Doss turned, saw Lewis’ zep growing fat as it approached from the east.
“Fuck that. I’ve got mission priority. And I’ve got wounded to evac.” She glanced at the crushed drop suit they’d peeled from the cornfield. Blood leaked from ruptures in the folded metal. Not wounded exactly, but still.
“Ah…” came Falcon 1’s pilot. “Lewis says negative on your mission priority. He says the refugees have priority.” Doss looked down at the valley. It brimmed with irrigation, swelled green and gold in the morning light, its crops bursting for harvest. Nobody would leave this place—not willingly.
“There are no fucking refugees. And why is he not talking to me directly? Tell him to patch his ass directly into my coms. And you land, Falcon 1, I don’t care what he says. Get us the fuck out of here.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The Falcon came around the valley and charged hard for the LZ, but Lewis’ zep had already bulled in too close. It was like watching a hippo outmuscle a humming bird. The Falcon veered away. Doss cursed.
“Boss, this is Falcon 1,” came the pilot. “General Lewis says he can’t patch into your coms. He doesn’t know why. And I…ah…don’t feel comfortable…ah, I mean the space is too tight for me to land, ma’am.”
“Roger that.” Inside her drop suit, Doss seethed. “Falcon 1, tell Lewis to hurry the fuck up. All Falcons, cover the general’s landing. Anything moves near us, kill it.”
“Roger,” came each Falcon pilot in turn.
“Nothing moving down there, Boss,” came Gomez’s voice. “You should be good for a while.”
As he finished speaking, the sonics hovering over the valley abruptly lost their charge. Their props ceased spinning and they crashed one after the other onto the valley floor. Doss eyed her troops, totaling less than thirty on the ground, arrayed around the LZ’s perimeter, fucksticks leveled outwards. Their visors mirrored the reddening dawn.
“Rangers, stay tight,” she ordered. “We have some very unhappy people waking up soon.” She cursed again. Watched the zep slide its fat ass over the LZ, casting her Rangers in shadow. Glaciers moved faster.
“Where’s my sister?”
Doss turned. Fiorivani stood straddling the Designer.
“Armor,” the Designer observed, calmly. Fully awake, blinking up at the big lieutenant. Animated, her features were so righteously proportioned it gave Doss vertigo, as though the whole world was crooked, always had been, and she’d never known it until she’d set eyes on this woman. Fiorivani leveled the muzzle of his M-8 at the Designer’s face.
“Not going to ask you again, freak. Where’s my sister?”
Doss stepped forward. “Lieutenant!” Fiorivani ignored her. The Designer’s wide eyes stared serenely up into the lieutenant’s visor.
“I cannot see you through your armor,” she said. “I do not know who your sister is.”
“She was the pilot on the zep that you took out of Satori.”
The Designer’s face creased momentarily with thought, then turned pleasant, as though she were about to be helpful.
“Yes,” she told Fiorivani. “She is dead. Mercy killed her.”
Doss’ fuckstick cracked. Fiorivani staggered back, blue lightning rippling across the titanium scales covering his chest. He recovered quickly, the drop suit dampening the charge’s effect. He raised the M-8. But Doss was on him. She gripped the rifle’s muzzle and held it low and away. It fired rounds harmlessly into the Kansas dust. She slammed her armored palm into Fiorivani’s visor, shattering it. She hit him again, this time crushing his unprotected nose. He fell. Doss followed him to the ground. Placed her knee in his chest, pressed the muzzle of her M-8 to the center of his broad forehead.
“She’s my sister.” Blood poured from Fiorivani’s nose. His eyes watered.
“Shut up,” Doss spat. “I don’t give one ratshit who’s son you are or who your sister was. You stand in the way of my mission, I’ll kill you deader than shit. Clear?” She leaned on the gun. Fiorivani winced. His eyes crossed, fixing on the black polymer barrel.
“Ma’am,” he whispered.
“You’re relieved, Lieutenant.” Doss grabbed Fiorivani’s rifle by the sling and tossed it into the dust, then did the same with his sidearm. “One and Two,” she commanded Jake and Casanova. “Guard the lieutenant. He tries anything, you shoot him.”
“Ma’am!” Jake picked up Fiorivani’s rifle, Casanova his pistol. They took up position a few paces away and leveled the weapons at the lieutenant.
Lewis’ zep fired four landing harpoons into the brown hardpan nearby. Winches whined, reeling the zep reluctantly groundwards.
“It is not what I thought would happen.”
Doss turned, found the Designer watching her from within the net’s folds, black eyes unblinking. It occurred to Doss that the woman was beautiful, in the way finely balanced things were. Everyone she’d ever met, ever even seen, she now realized as she took in the Designer’s face, was a puzzle with a piece missing. “I thought you would not find us. I thought I would have time to work. It is unfortunate.”
“You’ll have plenty of time to work in D.C.,” Doss told her
“No.” The Designer smiled in a way that made Doss think the woman’s thoughts were as symmetrical and uncomplicated as her face. “No, there is no more time. There is only one harvest remaining.”
“What do you mean?”
The Designer cocked her head slightly. “Open your face armor. Let me see your face.” Doss hesitated. “I would like to know you,” the Designer insisted. Doss pressed a button on her helmet twice and her visor hissed open. The Designer closed her eyes for a moment, breathing, then regarded Doss with a smile. “You are beautiful. Your helix is beautiful. It would have added much to your species. Do you have children?”
“Not exactly the mothering type,” Doss said. The memory of Emerson cut for a bitter second through the Go Pills and adrenaline humming through her system. His laughter had made things seem less serious, made the world seem made of rubber.
The Designer craned her neck against the net, taking in the surrounding Rangers. She laughed, a diamond sound in the Falcons’ ambient throb.
“But you are, child. You exhibit strong parental traits.” She turned suddenly sad. “Perhaps it is for the best.” Doss cocked an eyebrow at the Designer.
“Why’s that?”
“The Fathers seek the completion of their adaptation. They have grown urgent. Before I left Satori, they commanded me to incorporate Crop Graft 3 into all of the seed distributed outside Satori’s walls this spring.”
“Crop Graft 3?” Doss asked. The Designer smiled.
“The Tet. The Fathers will either find their adaptation, or they will not. Either way, your kind will soon cease to be. As will Satori.” Her eyes turned skyward. “I had hoped Sumedha would eventually join me here. We would have continued our work together.” She looked, her face suddenly mournful, at Doss. “Let my children keep this place. Do not destroy it.”
“You’re the only thing I’m after, lady.”
The hatch of Lewis’ zep cracked open with a heavy hydraulic moan and began to lower while the zep still floated ten meters off the ground. Doss saw movement inside. Migrants, dressed in FEMAs.
“What the fuck.” She lowered her visor, chinned her mic. “Falcon 1, ask Lewis what the fuck he’s up to. It looks like he’s already got a load of refugees.”
“Stand by.”
The zep’s hatch yawned wide. The migrants inside were women, all of them. Their FEMAs glowed yellow—clean, fresh out of vacuum packs. They moved towards the edge.
“Oh shit.”
It was the way they moved. Too fluid, too fast. One by one they dropped the last ten meters to the ground, easy as panthers. Doss chinned her mic to fully open coms.
“Rangers! Fire everything you have on the women coming from the zep. Now!” In one smooth motion she jacked a mag grenade into the Mark 30 and fired. It detonated a half-second later with a familiar magnetic crack, shredding the half-dozen advocates who had yet to drop from the zep. Metal keened as the ramp tore loose from its hydraulic hinge. It dangled. The zep listed. “Gomez, I need back up, pronto.”
“Copy that.”
Twenty or more advocates had already hit the ground. With fleet strides they covered the fifty meters to Doss’ Rangers. The Rangers leveled fucksticks.
The women tore into them.
They attacked savagely, leaping, hissing. They peeled drop suits open with clawing fingers. Tore out throats, ripped away limbs. Doss’ Rangers screamed, the sounds of terrified children. The way all soldiers sounded when they died. A few managed to fire their fucksticks. The blue lightning seemed only to enrage the advocates. They howled, leapt upon those who had fired.
Doss sighted her M-8, firing burst after burst. Three advocates disintegrated under her bullets. Jake and Casanova fired their guns wildly beside her.
“Rangers on me!” Doss hollered at her mic. “Drop your fucksticks! Fire your pistols!” They were beyond hearing her. The advocates tore the Rangers apart, hurled their drop suits away like broken toys.
Doss fired, reloaded and fired, reloaded and fired. She fired until she’d used all her ammo, then drew the .45 and kept firing. Beside her, Fiorivani cracked a combat design’s skull with his armored fist. The woman simply smiled needle teeth and drove raptor fingers through his face. He twitched and fell.
“Falcons 1 and 2, I need your guns.” Doss’ voice sounded like someone else’s in her headset. Someone calm, and very far away. “Fire on my position. Repeat. Fire
on my position
.”
She didn’t hear the pilots’ responses. Heard only the echo of her own gunfire, the screams of her Rangers, the advocates’ terrible hissing. One tackled Casanova. Doss gripped its writhing form beneath the shoulders. Hydraulics whined in her suit as she flung it. Casanova, helmetless, stared up at Doss from his back. He tried to speak through the gaping wound in his throat. She spied Jake nearby, swinging his empty pistol wildly before him.
Doss had never seen so much blood. It coated drop suits like so much excess grease, pooled beneath bodies in the dust. Some quiet part of her mind registered the violence as somehow strange, unclean in the clear morning sun.
The advocate she’d thrown leapt back at her, shrieking, its whole body rolling with smooth, malevolent motion. Muscle memory propelled Doss. She stared over the .45’s sights into the creature’s slit irises. Saw its predator’s teeth part, watched its pointed tongue extend with glee. She double-tapped, aiming for the black pit of its mouth. Its head erupted in red mist, then it was gone. Piss ran warm down Doss’ leg, pooled in her boot.
Explosions ripped the air around her. Bodies flew apart, advocates and Rangers alike. Falcon 1 hovered a few hundred meters off, the Gatling in its nose growling, spitting fire, burning a molten trench across the LZ.
It didn’t matter. Her Rangers were already dead. The Falcon’s Gatling went silent, its ammo spent. Doss wondered fleetingly where Falcon 4 had gone. Where was Gomez?
Advocates circled her. She counted seven. She moved forward, straddling the Designer, and raised the .45.
“Kassapa’s children,” the Designer mooned, “are so beautiful.”
“Bitches be bitches,” Doss said.
They came all at once. Doss fired. Felt herself lifted, thrown, then lifted again. Slit irises peered through her visor. She felt the pistol still in her hand, squeezed the trigger again. Heard a hiss. Something impacted her suit, pierced it, dug into her shoulder. She screamed, felt herself lifted again. Her helmet came free. Warm sunlight coursed across her face. She hovered, feet dangling in the air, staring into the face of the advocate who held her aloft, its fingers buried in her shoulder. Doss’ arm went numb. She raised the pistol, but the creature slapped it deftly away.
Doss looked to where the Designer lay. An advocate straddled her. It sank to its haunches. Put its nose close to the Designer’s neck and inhaled deeply. The two of them gazed into each others eyes. They smiled like lovers reunited.
“Mother,” the advocate said. The Designer smiled.
“Beautiful child. Kassapa will be so proud.”
“Kassapa is dead, Mother.”
The Designer’s big eyelids fluttered. Grief twisted her face.
“Was it Sumedha?” she asked. The advocate nodded, once. It raised its hand, fingers extended, then waited. The Designer breathed. Her face calmed. She smiled once more, and nodded. The combat design’s hand thrust forward. Its fingers sank into the Designer’s slim throat.
Doss thought of her father, her sister. She thought of Emerson. Rage burned through her.
She screamed into the face of the advocate who held her—drove her armored fist into the thing’s face. Once. Twice. It hissed at her, showing blood and broken teeth. Doss drew her fist back a third time. The advocate caught it. Doss spit into its face, then slammed her forehead into its nose. It fell backwards, dragging Doss down with it.
Doss landed on top. Her hand came free. She drew the pig sticker from its sheath on her numb forearm. Raised it, hammered down through the creature’s sternum. The advocate regarded her with naked surprise. Doss stabbed again. And again. The creature gripped the blade, holding it fast. Doss let the knife go and grabbed the advocate’s throat. Squeezed with all the hydraulic might her suit could muster. Cartilage compressed. Bone cracked. The creature’s eyes widened. Its slit irises dilated.