Spinward Fringe Broadcast 7: Framework (73 page)

“The Triton never came up on my scanners.
The Sunspire came back, they brought the British, and the first
Lorander warship I’ve ever seen. I’ve had at least three near-death
experiences since I last saw you,” Minh-Chu said, laughing. “Help
is coming.”

“What’s the Warlord doing so far down
range?” Oz asked.

“Alice is alive again, or something like
Alice,” Minh-Chu replied. “Who knows? But she found a great big
escape ship that’s dug into the ground. Jake is going in, he plans
to clear it out and claim it.”

Oz’s heart lightened at reminder that Alice
was alive in one shape or another, and his steady calm was shaken
by the news that Jacob was storming an objective with only the crew
of the Warlord. “Oz to Slick,” he said into his communicator.

“Slick, here.”

“I need you to intensify firepower on
anything our rifles can’t reach in our outer radius. Slag the field
so we can get a team together to take an objective down-field. Put
a rush on it.” He highlighted a ring outside of their firearms’
reach, knowing that frameworks were gathering, heading towards the
Triton settlement.

“One ring of fire coming up. Frameworks
can’t survive if they’re a pile of slag,” Slick replied.

Explosions sounded in the distance, followed
by tall pillars of fire and flying debris.

“We can have another bird ready for you in
twenty minutes, Sir,” said a maintenance worker to Minh-Chu from
behind Oz. He didn’t have time to look. He was too busy watching
for frameworks who were brave enough to poke their heads out from
cover. The constant sounds of firing rifles had changed to quick,
short bursts echoing all across the wall as soldiers got their
ammunition upgrades. “This is turning,” Oz said to himself,
suppressing the surge of hope threatening to break his
concentration.

“I’ll give you a hand,” Minh-Chu told the
maintenance worker. “Be down in a sec.” He turned to Oz. “There’s a
Captain McPatrick commanding the Sunspire, you know him?” he
asked.

Oz thought a moment and realized who it had
to be with a surge of dread. “You had to go and ruin my day,” Oz
said. “He’s my uncle, the asshole of the family. Great commander,
though.”

Oz spotted a framework soldier with a larger
than normal rifle as the muzzle flared when he fired and leapt from
the hover truck. The projectile exploded into the hollow cavity of
the truck and sent him end over end through the air. Nanobots
attended to the weakened portion of his armour, and his personal
shield read at zero, but he rushed to cover unharmed.

“That was close,” he said as Minh-Chu joined
him. He made sure someone else killed that framework on his
tactical system and nodded to himself.

“I guess that’s what happens when they punch
a hole through the wall,” Minh-Chu said.

“Yeah, I’m going to miss that perch, but I
should have known better than to stay up after the wall went down.
Guess I just got complacent.”

“I’ve had more near-misses since this thing
got started,” Minh-Chu said, nodding. “I’ll just be glad when it’s
over.”

“Speaking of which, you have a fighter to
get ready, and I’ve got to find another position,” Oz said. “Good
hunting.”

“Keep your head down,” Minh-Chu replied.

He knew it was Alice. Jake wasn’t one of
those people who were always conscious of how different people made
him feel just by being in the room, but there was no mistaking the
feeling his daughter transmitted to him as anything but what it
felt like to be near her when she was alive as a human. There was a
subtle difference he couldn’t ignore, however. She seemed more
innocent. Jason’s message had come true.

The Warlord had done her job, bombarding the
area then dropping off her full compliment of marines. Joyboy and a
couple of other fighters on loan from The Skyguard meted punishment
out to any enemy soldiers who ran from the crater, or managed to
somehow escape the devastation of the initial bombardment.

“Warlord, head out, assist our air cover
with clearing Port Rush,” Captain Valent said into his comm.

“On our way, we’ve got four more mines
together, so we’re going to take care of a few drop pods,” Frost
said.

“Just watch for survivors, I don’t want the
Warlord to become known for collateral damage.”

“Aye, watch my aim, got it,” Frost replied
as the Warlord’s engines fired, sending the battered ship towards
the Triton settlement.

“Since when do you care about public
opinion?” Stephanie asked, amused. She was supervising her marine
techs as they hacked into one of the installation’s secondary
doors.

“I had a spare second,” Jake replied.

“You know Frost doesn’t want collateral
damage, either. He actually wants to be seen as a hero someday.
He’ll never let on, but I think that’s more important to him than
cash.”

Jake didn’t know how to respond to that, but
his expression of surprise must have spoken volumes.

“Don’t tell him I said anything,” Stephanie
said.

“No problem,” Jake replied. He spotted Alice
running down the inside of the crater, firing several shots behind
her with two pistols. A Ramiel fighter swooped down firing, taking
care of whatever Alice was firing at.

Alice faced forward, and Jake could see her
smile from over fifty metres away as she looked straight at him.
She was all teeth, cheeks, and eyes.

“She’s speeding up,” Stephanie said. “And
I’ve never seen anyone run that fast.”

Jake braced himself and deactivated the
auto-hardening system in his armour.

“You’re sure it’s her?” Stephanie asked.

“Absolutely.”

“She’s not slowing down,” Agameg said, his
eyes widening. “A collision is certain.”

An excited squeal a second before impact was
the only warning. The force of her enthusiastic embrace pressed him
two steps backwards, and he wrapped his arms around her. She was
more than a full head shorter, and seemed so small, disappearing
into his long coat with her arms tightly wrapped around him.

Alice breathed as though she was recovering
from a very long run, and she rested against him. Everyone watched
silently as father and daughter were reunited, until a surprised
Agameg said, “You’ve shrunken. I’ve verified with scans. You are
definitely smaller.”

She laughed and stepped away from Jake,
wiping tears away, still out of breath. “I think the framework
picked up on me wanting to have a childhood, so when I died here
the first time, it made me a lot younger. I’m just glad I didn’t
come back as a five year old.”

Jake looked at her and definitely saw
someone who might be fifteen, perhaps sixteen. She held a pair of
pistols like she was born to them though, and there were so many
things about the way she stood, her general manner, that seemed
familiar. He put his hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry no one got to
you sooner,” he said.

“S’okay,” Alice replied, slipping in under
his arm. “I’ll take a break here and head back out. Maybe not alone
this time, but I know I can help clear up Port Rush and start
rescuing people. There are a lot of trapped folk out there.”

Jake was surprised and irritated at the same
time. “We’ll start arranging teams once we’re finished here,” he
replied.

“That was your ‘and that’s an order’ voice,”
Alice said, crossing her arms, taking a step away and regarding him
defiantly.

“Whoa,” Stephanie said, almost stepping
between them. “Okay, when we’ve cleared this bunker, we’ll get
properly geared up with medical supplies and start clearing out
Port Rush, helping some people. Until then, we’ve got a target in
there.”

“Hampon,” Jake reinforced.

“You’re right, I want a piece of him.
Killing Meunez wasn’t enough,” Alice said. She adjusted her vacsuit
so two flimsy holsters formed and dropped her blade shooters into
them. “Just get those doors open and me and my dad will go get
‘em.”

“We’re doing this carefully,” Jake said.
“There’s no telling how prepared he is.”

Alice nodded and sighed. “As long as I get a
shot in.”

The doors opened, and Jake turned towards
them. “I’ll take point, you fall in with Stephanie and Agameg’s
units,” he said, hoping that he wouldn’t meet more resistance.

To his surprise, she rushed in front of him,
turned, popped up on tip-toes and kissed him on the cheek.
“Aye-aye, Captain!” she chirped before falling in with Agameg’s
unit. He pressed the confusion and surprise at the range of
attitudes Alice displayed in less than three minutes to the side
and activated all the features of his armour. He strode through the
doors, drawing his sidearm and paying close attention to his
tactical system.

No one came up on the scanners - not a
single soldier, framework or crewmember - and his scan results
reached down three hallways, into eight different compartments. The
armoured entrance hatch slammed together, isolating him from
everyone outside. The clank of heavy bolts inside the hull and the
smell of smoke told him something worse was going on. He touched
the door panel and discovered that the bolts securing the doors
were in place, and an emergency security measure welded them
there.

He turned and tried to pry the doors apart
despite the pain of overexertion. His enhanced muscles made the
surrounding flesh feel as though it was ripping. Even with the
addition of the enhancements in his armoured vacsuit, he couldn’t
get the doors to budge.

“Stephanie, check in,” he said over his
comm.

“We’ve got hostiles coming from the other
side of this thing, about two hundred,” she said. “Holding them
off, but they’ve got-“ her communication garbled and the channel
closed.

“They’re dead, Valent,” Hampon’s voice said
over the intercom. “Unless you kill me and take control of the
frameworks outside.”

He used the intercom system through the door
panel to connect to internal security scanners and verified that he
was talking to Lister Hampon. Hampon was standing in the absolute
centre of the drop pod. Rows of crew seating surrounded a command
where he calmly looked up into a security sensor.

Jake removed his hand from the door panel
and whirled around. He set his sidearm to burn through metal and
fired beside the doorway, where there were two thinner sections of
metal to burn through as opposed to the solid door. The thermite
rounds hissed, sparked, and burned.

“You won’t get through for another hour that
way, the outside of this garrison ship is a metre thick,” Hampon
said. “You’re going to have to face me if you want to save your
people.”

“Watch what you wish for,” Jake said. He
knew Hampon was right, and there were no other options. He reset
his Violator Handgun and used his connection to the door panel to
find a map of the installation. As soon as he knew how to get to
Hampon, he rushed down the hallway, watching his corners. There was
no telling how Hampon was manipulating the security systems. Jake
could only see what his opponent wanted him to.

The darkened halls all led to the central
lifts. An emergency shaft running parallel to them would take him
down. He was passing into the central chamber when one of the
bulkhead doors slammed down on top of him, driving him to his
knees. He could feel Hampon in the ship systems, forcing the
computer to override safety systems, and pushing the motors to
press the heavy door down.

He heard his knees pop as the motors worked
harder, his vacsuit warned him that the synthetic muscle built in
was being pushed to near failure as he fought the door. “It’s time
to stop using your body as a blunt instrument, Mister Valent,”
Lister Hampon said. “Or is it Valance? I remember when you were
just a pile of synthetic bones, an experiment waiting to
happen.”

Jake hated the fact that he was right. There
were so many things he could do that he barely understood. The
motors in the door struggled, whining as he pushed back. All he
could physically do was keep the door from crushing him for another
minute at best, and hope the motors burned out.

“Use your comm node, Dad!” he heard his
daughter in his mind.

“Don’t have one,” he replied aloud.

“No cheating!” Hampon said. “No outside
transmissions!”

A mental image of Alice’s communications
node appeared before she was cut off and he realized that it was
the doorway to everything he needed. “Gotcha,” he said as he forced
his framework body to create a node exactly the same as Alice’s. As
soon as it came online he could feel his vacsuit, the systems in
his command and control unit and so much more without any
distraction. He was suddenly living in two worlds at once,
connected to everything electronic and wireless as though they were
nothing more than external appendages.

With a thought, the door stopped pressing
down for a half second, enough time for him to get out from beneath
it. He could feel the lifts ahead, and see a pair of heavily
armoured Order Knights, trained framework soldiers that he’d never
seen before, but he had the details he needed to know they’d slow
him down. They could even kill him if he assaulted them head on.
They had the firepower. He tried to communicate with their control
nodes, but discovered they had the ability to resist him, and they
sensed him trying to assume control.

They were coming.

Jake rushed the lift doors firing all the
way, weakening the metal. The Order Knights surged into the centre
from an adjacent hallway firing high-powered energy rifles that
raised the ambient temperature to over six hundred degrees after
the first volley. Two struck Jake’s shields, reducing them to
twenty percent power.

He didn’t bother firing back, but tossed a
pair of inferno grenades in their direction before bursting through
the red-hot elevator door. Jake fell down the shaft, missing the
car two levels below and falling on top of the car four levels down
to its right. Fire filled the shaft, an aftermath of the primary
explosion that would either completely incinerate the Order Knights
or force them to regenerate for several minutes. At the very least
they’d return to life with no armour or weaponry.