Chapter 22

  “Alright, 2 Delta, listen up!” Major Goeth drawled over the engine noise and the rattle of kits, a great feat of volume considering how all the hard surfaces and the enclosed nature of the dropship amplified even the smallest motion of your body and bounced it around the hold for everyone to hear. The men near to me stopped what they were doing and turned to regard their commander, one of them even pausing in the middle of wrestling the remaining yellowed plastic frame of his las-rifle back into place. I guessed having a functioning weapon when we landed was of secondary in importance to listening to the man in charge talk.

  Goeth, a sharp whip of a man in flaking red lacquered ballistic armor, addressed the ship from the mouth of the ramp. He hovered over the rest of us, dangling from bright yellow loops that hung at strategic parts of the ship for zero g situations, his body rigidly still. The man had a sour look on his face, just this side of an open snarl, and his reedy forearms strained at how tightly he was holding onto his anchor.

  “News from on high,” he continued. “Our dropsite’s too hot. Scans showed too much activity near our payday, and the number crunchers don’t think you can handle all the heat.”

  There was a smattering of muttered curses and at least one disappointed groan from somewhere I couldn’t see. The dropship was packed to the gills with people strapped into lines of harnesses, back to back in rows where you were always staring into the face of another person wherever you looked. Most of these divers were young, some even considered children back on Proxis, but no one looked soft. Everyone had sharp eyes and stern faces with a collection of scars earned during a rough life. The divers around me had already been a standoffish bunch when I’d met them, but as they looked now, I didn’t think anyone would be down for smalltalk with the revelation of the bad news.

  The Major let the divers get their remarks in but took back control before it got too disorderly. “I know you were looking forward to a good score, but there wasn’t much command could do without an orbital bombardment, and that would have made for a terrible dive anyway. The site will still be there in a month or two, and we’ll go back.” Goeth paused as the gathered company took his words in and processed them.

  Then, he bared his teeth in a fiendish grin. “You also might have noticed, we’re not turning around. For those of you that were counting on that payday, I got you a consolation prize. When I told command I had a whole belly full of gassed up Demon Dogs hungry for a good score, they folded us into a deep urban drop with two other dives. Resource dense. Free for all style.”

  This got a more positive reaction out of the men. The mood shifted again, the divers exchanging quiet remarks and wolfish grins. There were some barks of animalistic fervor scattered around as well.

  The Major’s toothy smile broadened even further. “Oh, did I forget to mention, I’m also in command of said drop now.”

  More barks and howls. Fists were raised in the air as far as the harnesses we were strapped into allowed.

  “So, when we land, don’t be surprised when you come face to face with the competition. Do your jobs. Maximum aggression. Take them for all they’ve got. I’ll make sure you get what’s yours,” the Major said.

  Then the man looked directly at me. His smile evaporated instantly.

  “One more thing, boys. This here is Mr. Kotes, the first Exotic to grace us with his presence in a long while. You may think he doesn’t belong here. Maybe you even think the law that dictates we give him a perfectly good spot on our ship just because he’s got magic powers isn’t fair.”

  I waited for him to say more, to finish that particular sentence with something like ‘but we’re lucky to have him’ or even a ‘welcome aboard’... but the ‘two’ of that one-two punch never came. He just let the statement hang there. I could feel other eyes moving over me, sizing me up for Constance knew what.

  Awkward.

  I kept my face neutral, unbothered, but, internally, I was readying myself, poking around my spatial storage, making sure my weapons were there and my science projects were ready to be deployed. If I was going to get the cold shoulder I could at least make sure I accomplished my own objectives.

  “Breaching atmo in five,” a garbled voice squawked over the intercom, saving me from further awkward staring.

  “Button up and get ready! We’ve got half an hour tops before first contact! I want everyone up and moving the second we touch down, and if you slow us down I will leave your ass there and let the scourge use you as a marital device!” the Major bellowed, finishing with an impressive flip down from his loops to his harness in Seat number 1 near the ramp. The men around me tore into rust red pouches on their armor and pulled out facemasks of snarling dogs, affixing them to their faces before ratcheting them tight and sealing them with a tiny hiss. Each mask was a different variation of a monstrous dog with long fangs and yellow eyes. Some of those snarling faces were turned my way.

  I tossed them a friendly half-wave, which they didn’t return.

  Slowly, I felt the microgravity shift. The ship began to vibrate, and the roar of wind started to dominate all other sound in the hold. Then, suddenly, my stomach lurched, and the ship shook like it was in the grip of an angry giant. Without a helmet as I was, my head bounced around the supports at the top of my seat, not hard enough to do damage but enough to disorient. The temperature rose a few degrees as well, until the smell of sweat joined that of gear lubricant and stale liquid fuel. Gloved hands gripped their las-rifles firmly.

  *WOOSH*

  Someone in the pilot’s cabin opened the throttle all the way, burning off momentum with a quickness, and I felt the skin on my face pulled toward the floor.

  *CLUNK* *CLUNK*

  The landing gear met hard terra firma. Not a second later the ramp popped open with a hiss, the seals disengaging and allowing just the tiniest bit of daylight shine in through the crack at the top. Then the ramp fell away, slamming down gong-like on what sounded like rock. Light, blindingly bright, assaulted my eyes. The smell of ionized air, hot dust, and an undefinable strangeness blew into the hold, and I had to blink tears out of my eyes and actively try not to sneeze. It would have been nice to have one of those Demon Dog masks just now.

  I was barely able to get out of my seat and to my feet before the whole of the company surged forward, down the ramp, and onto the actual surface of Sabium.

  What greeted me when my eyes adjusted was a ruined metropolis or what used to be one. The skeletons of titanic skyscrapers towered overhead, their windows smashed, their once detailed edifices cracked and falling away. Rusted out husks of what were once vehicles laid on their backs, their wheels having rotted away along with a good portion of their frames. To our immediate right was a bowl-shaped depression, too perfect to be natural, about 50 feet in diameter and as deep as I was tall. Inside was a putrid soup of vaguely organic matter suspended in stagnant water.

  Pulverized concrete crunched under my boots as I jogged over a paved street with the rest of 2 Delta, the road no longer smooth but pockmarked and split grotesquely by gnarled, grasping roots that tore out of the surface of the planet like worms from a corpse. The smell was… a lot, a strange mix of decay and sterility. Even the sparse clouds in the sky felt dirty, grungy brown-ish smudges on an otherwise blue sky.

  Dust and yellowish pollen collected in the low areas, swirling around one another in equal measure, meaning we were probably spitting distance from one of the oceans if my research on the local net hadn’t steered me wrong. The air felt too humid, too heavy to be one of the few cities in the massive desert that made up a large part of the Sabium’s landmass.

  To our left and right, other drop ships were emptying their holds of people as well, more divers charging out, weapons up. Others carried heavy equipment in crates or rolled their cargo in wagons at a careful jog. One company had an actual walking cargo hauler carrying heavy equipment and setting it gently down a safe distance away from the ships’ engine wash.

  I’d need to go take a look at that when I got a chance. I’d pay actual money to play with the robotic parts for a while to see how they worked. Even more if they let me saturate it with my mana.

  All the companies, once they were off their ships, collected in the center of the park on the lip of the concrete bowl, and a command was given over the radio. The dropships’ engines raised in pitch until my ears started to ring painfully. Then they took off as one, their blocky frames rocketing into the sky until they disappeared from sight.

  Quiet settled over the ruined city quickly, though no one treated it as peaceful. Everyone’s guns were up and scanning the surroundings diligently. Countless empty windows stared back at us, but nothing else living or dead made itself known.

  The other two companies produced their captains, one of them a woman that felt no need to wear a helmet, instead sporting a short mohawk and tribal tattoos on her scalp. Her divers that stood behind here were more practically dressed, though their helmets had similar mohawks made out of some kind of synthetic fiber glued on top to mimic their captain. They would be easy to recognize at least.

  The other leader, I recognized him immediately by his tall, broad figure and neatly messy facial hair. This was the guy that had tried to stop me from interfering with the Novas and their spat with security, the one who gave me advice that I promptly ignored to my own detriment. I saw his eyes flick over to me with recognition, but he didn’t break stride, instead offering up a loose salute to Major Goeth.

  The three commanders conferred quietly, the two Captains obviously deferring to the Major, but I got the impression there wasn’t a lot of love lost between them either.

  Then the Major raised his hand and pointed to the concrete bowl that I was just going to call a fountain from now on. It looked like it had been a fountain at one time, and it held water. Why not?

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  The Major raised his voice for all to hear. “There’s your collection point, people. Mark your bags. Your commander’s got the sector you’ll be assigned to. One platoon from each company for security. The rest of you are outriders. Good hunting. Two Delta, rally up over there.”

  With that, the divers got moving, separating into groups, one of every two shrugging off their oversized rucksacks and letting them drop to the ground on the lip of the fountain.

  With no other guidance, I approached the three commanders.

  They turned to me as one, faces made of stone… the Major’s was made of painted metal, though, obviously..

  “Where you want me, Major?” I asked.

  He raised his mask slightly and spat something brown onto the pavement. “I don’t. Want you, that is. Law says I gotta get you here and make a good faith effort to bring you back. What you do now is on you. You bring down trouble on us, though, and I’m gonna be really upset.” He turned back to the other divers and started pointing at particular bits on a data pad he was showing the others.

  “Fair enough,” I replied diplomatically. “Still, I want to help.” I figured a little good will wouldn’t go amiss out here, since the Dean had plans for me to do this a bunch of times to train before my fights. Maybe I could earn a little trust by showing some humility and willingness to take orders.

  “Mr. Kotes,” the Major growled, rounding on me. “You are outside my chain of command by design. You are an outsider, a hanger on, a painful wart on the bottom of my heel. My people rely on what we get down here, and you are taking a double share of our pay already. I suggest you don’t compound this problem by wasting even more of my time and brain space. If you want to go look for trouble, look for it somewhere outside of my perimeter. Get your experience or your loot or whatever it is you came down here to get, and don’t make it my problem.”

  I held up my hands in surrender. “Fine. Fine. I’ll just go then.”

  The Major nodded, spat in the dirt again, and stormed off, tossing the data pad over his shoulder for the mohawked woman to catch. I guessed the confab was over.

  I was just about to turn away and go looking for something to do when my old friend from the docking bay got my attention. The captain gestured with his chin to my left, the corner of his mouth turning up into a sly smirk. I followed his gaze until my eyes alighted on another familiar face, a gray skinned woman with geometric tattoos running down her exposed arms. She stood out among everyone else, seemingly underdressed with no armor or weapons to speak of. She was currently crouched beneath the bipedal loader and unpacking an armored box, putting components on the ground and typing something on a keypad.

  I nodded to the captain in thanks then jogged over to the woman, but she held up a hand before I could speak, the other currently fiddling with a dial on a terminal with antennas sprouting from its top.

  “How about now? Any noise?” she asked in her clear soprano.

  I glanced around. No one else was here. Was she talking to me?

  The hauler that she was sitting beneath stamped its hydraulic legs back and forth heavily with a *CLUNK* *CLUNK* sound, then shook its… head? The boxy protrusion between the hauler’s shoulders waggled back and forth.

  “Signal degradation’s gone. Thanks, Dev,” a robotic voice boomed.

  The gray woman smiled up at the machine and gave it a tiny salute. “Anytime.”

  The hauler straightened to its full height and spread its arms in an almost human gesture. “I’m off to take care of the kids. Penny’s boyfriend is acting a fool again, and she could use a little girl time,” the hauler said, before turning, ponderously, with its torso until it faced me. I noticed then that it was armed… heavily. Its robotic limbs were fitted with wide vented cannons that pointed wherever it happened to be facing, which was me at that very moment.

  “Oh. Hello,” the hauler said cheerily.

  Dev, the gray woman finally acknowledged me as well. “What do you need?” she asked.

  “Uh. Hi,” I replied lamely, unable to quite take my eyes off the barrels of the hauler’s guns long enough to really give the woman respectful eye contact. The hauler stood about eight feet high, and the arms were at just the right height where I could stare right into the barrels.

  Where was the pilot? The frame of the hauler wasn’t that large, maybe half a ton? Maybe three quarters of a ton? I didn't see where-

  “I’m Mo,” the hauler said. “You don’t have to worry about staring. I’m used to it.” Its voice was vaguely feminine now that I was listening closely, deep and obviously digitally generated but feminine.

  “Mo,” I repeated.

  “That’s right. Can we help you?” Dev asked again. Her patience appeared to be waning, her long fingers twitching over the dials of her control panel.

  I tore my eyes away from the hauler… uh… Mo, and I focused on my objective for the day.

  “I was wondering if I could be part of security,” I said. “Everything I know about Sabium is from reading the net, but I’m good at this kind of thing.”

  “Huh,” Dev grunted. “That’s novel. An Exotic that wants to work with the mortals. Way I saw you fight before, I figured you were a brawler. Thought you’d be out there challenging the nearest scourge to a fist fight for experience and glory and all that.”

  “That happen a lot?” I asked.

  “No. Usually, you guys don’t bother coming down here at all,” she stated flatly.

  I shrugged, not really sure where to go with that. I settled for: “Well, I guess since I am here, and I’m not interested in picking a fight with anything, I should make myself useful.”

  Mo the Hauler leaned closer. “Maybe you should start with what you can do. Dev loves the direct approach,” she suggested.

  That was… oddly phrased but okay..

  I took a quick glance around. There were about six approaches to the park area where we were set up, and the divers that were part of the perimeter were setting up makeshift barricades and pointing rifles down each one. A major street, wide with rows and rows of dilapidated vehicles, ran alongside our little park.

  “I could lock down that street over there,” I said.

  “Oooh. There you go! He’s ambitious, isn’t he, Dev?” Mo, the hauler said, leaning back and putting her cannons up to her mouth almost daintily. That was a lot of expression for a mechanical suit.

  “That’s a lot of street,” Dev agreed. She looked over at my hip then craned her neck to look over my shoulder. “And you don’t have a weapon.”

  I made my arm cannon appear in my hand, slapping it onto my prosthetic and engaging the fastening clamps. Then I held it out for her to see.

  Dev raised an eyebrow, but that was all the emotion I got out of her. “Magic?” She asked, pointing at the barrel.

  “Ballistic,” I replied.

  “Oh my God, it’s adorable. Baby’s first Uri cannon! I should set this one up with Penny. Her boyfriend doesn’t deserve her, if you ask me,” Mo squealed, reaching out with one of her fork hands to touch my arm. Our metal limbs clanked together as she turned it this way and that.

  Dev rolled her eyes. “You don’t even know her boyfriend, Mo, and you know this one’s an Exotic.”

  “So what? Look me in the eye and tell me our Penny doesn’t deserve a man with a cannon on his arm,” Mo argued.

  The gray woman didn’t rise to the bait, however. Instead, she addressed me with an apologetic look.

  “Don’t mind her. I’ll take one of our rifles off the line and put you there. Don’t make me regret it. First scourge I see you try to punch with that arm of yours, and I’m putting a real diver back in your place.”

  “If I resort to punching, things will have gone to shit way before that point, I think,” I replied.

  Dev nodded then turned her attention back to her work. She put another line of commands into her terminal and flexed her fingers in a strange way.

  I noticed, just then, that she was wearing some kind of specialized glove, one with intricate wiring spiderwebbing up from the wrist to the tips of her fingers. She rose to her feet and raised her hands like a conductor at a symphony, and out of the box came a gray blur that launched itself into the sky. It flew faster than my eyes could track and disappeared into the city.

  “Eyes are up. You still linked?” Dev asked Mo.

  Mo bowed with her whole upper half. “Thank you, great oracle of the sky. I go to tend my flock,” she mocked in a cheesy falsetto. Her hydraulics whirred, and her heavy footfalls crushed rocks underneath her as she stomped off toward the edge of our perimeter.

  Dev had a far away look in her eye, and I could see a slight glow near her tear ducts, a tiny projection of… something over the rest of her eye. Cool. I leaned in, flipping through Detect to see if I could-

  “It’s an implant, friend,” Dev declared suddenly. “For the drone. You have a spot on the line to man, right?”

  I seized up and stood ramrod straight, thoroughly chastised. “Oh. Yeah. Sorry. I’m out. Sorry.” I cleared my throat and thought about saying more, but I’d done enough damage. Eventually, I forced my legs to move, taking me to my post far away from the mysterious gray lady with the cool gadgets.

  I came up to the line of divers who’d taken cover behind an overturned cargo truck of some kind. They’d dragged the husk of another vehicle over to stand on so that they could lean over the broad side of the truck and rest their las-rifles on the hard surface. It was a good spot, raised and stable with good cover. I approved.

  “You the Exotic?” one of them asked.

  I looked around and shrugged. “Probably?”

  One of the divers slung his weapon over his shoulder and hopped down from their perch. “Guess that’s my cue. Later, suckers. I’ll let you know if I find your great-granny’s spicy holo collection.”

  “I’ll do my best not to shoot you,” one of the others quipped back.

  “You got a rifle?” the diver asked once his friend had gone.

  “Not exactly but I can shoot,” I grinned. “Mind if I take up some real estate?”

  The diver gestured to the rusty truck’s carcass beneath him. “You’ll find real estate’s cheap down here. Shame about the neighbor’s, though. I’m Hall.”

  He reached down to shake my hand. We shook.

  “Kotes,” I said. Then I climbed up where he was and got my whole body on top of the cargo truck’s frame, my hand hovering over the surface. Then, I started to summon.

  Hey. Thanks for giving In my Defense a chance. New chapters will be posted Tuesdays and Thursdays, eventually ramping up depending on the amount of interest we can generate here.

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