Meet me on the battlefield
Even on the darkest night.
I will be your sword and shield, your camouflage
And you will be mine.
Echoes and the shots ring out;
We may be the first to fall.
Everything can stay the same, or we could change it all.
Meet me on the battlefield.
~Svrcina "Meet Me on the Battlefield"
CHAPTER NINETEEN
More Big Damn Heroing
Click. Click. Click.
Katie entered the cockpit to find Lance flicking at the status screen. "Stop it," she growled, snatching his hand. He ignored her and flicked with his other hand. "Why are you doing that?"
"It's a distress call, I think. Weak."
She snagged his other hand, the action putting her face in distractingly close proximity to his. "This is a Zephyr, not a Troika. She doesn't respond to brute force."
His face inches from hers, he grinned. "Sorry. Force of habit."
She freed his hands and focused on the screen. The signal was weak. With a glance at him, she flicked the screen.
"Hypocrite," he muttered.
The com responded with a stronger version of the signal. "Athena needs a woman's touch," she proclaimed smugly.
He chuckled. "What's the order, Captain?"
"You know it could be a trap, right?"
"Yeah." His expression was somehow pained and eager. "But what if it isn't? We'll be heroes."
"We already are heroes," she said dryly. "Any other ships in this sector?"
"The nearest is about three hours out."
Lance watched her, his posture vibrating with the energy of a dog waiting for its person to throw a ball. Her self-preservation and conscience engaged in a brief skirmish, ending with self-preservation skulking off, tail between its legs. As usual. Damn! She puffed a gusty sigh upwards, blowing her fringe out of her eyes. Their Lions were gone, but they were both still burdened with that pesky need to save the universe.
"Okay. We'll go in, but not too close."
Calling this kind of ship an Ox, was, in Lance's opinion, an insult to oxen, who possessed more grace than the slate gray, lumpen ship hanging in space before them.
At his side, Pidge leaned over and let her fingers dance over the controls, scanning for life signs and the ship's registration. "Ox class tugboat, XXP45, registered to a Martin Taylor, last departure ten sols ago from Mars, Carver spaceport. One, maybe two, life signs."
"I'm not picking up any ships nearby. Unless they're cloaked." The Shrike could still be out there.
"Athena's sensors can crack through any cloaking."
Lance tapped a finger on her head. "Thanks to this big brain, I bet."
"Yep."
"That's my girl."
"Basic systems are nominal." Her brown eyes blinked, the focus now on her glasses' HUD. "Hull is intact. Artificial gravity, life support, all nominal. Engines are online, but coms are offline." She blinked again. "According to the ship's schematics, life signs are in med bay, and in the hallway behind the cockpit."
They had hailed the ship repeatedly, but received no response. Just the constant pinging of the distress signal.
"You wouldn't happen to have packed a tacsuit?" Pidge asked, her tone flat.
"Always." His gaze travelled back to the ship. "You getting a bad vibe?"
"I don't do vibes. I do data." She ruffled his hair. "Suit up."
Pidge in a tacsuit, looking very mercenary-like, was excessively sexy. Hers was gray to Lance's black, and her goggles a very Paladin shade of green. The lightweight, comfortably-fitting armor accentuated her sleek curves and on her petite frame, announced, definitively that she was a bad-ass. He turned away from her, making a show of stretching, but really trying to tactfully deal with the inappropriate tightness in his groin.
"Goggles," she said. He turned and handed her his goggles, and she immediately got to synching them with hers and Athena's coms. She handed back the goggles, then pulled her hair back into a short pony tail, before sliding her own tac goggles on her head, leaving them, for the time being, on her forehead. Lifting her left arm, she brushed fingers over a built-in wrist com in her suit, bringing up a larger screen. Green light reflected in her eyes.
"So, what else does that suit do?" he asked. "Make toast? Coffee?"
"It summons legions of the undead." She switched off the screen. Catching him watching her, she grumbled cheerfully, "What are you smiling about?"
His face warm, he turned and picked up his bayard. "This is gonna be fun."
"Lance McClain, adrenaline junkie."
Projection, thy name is Katie Holt.
Lance McClain wasn't the only addict, jonesing for some excitement.
Science's infinite puzzles were like oxygen for Katie, but adventure, admittedly, was an essential vitamin, and lately she'd been deficient. Which was why she was about to step into a strange ship, in a sich that proclaimed itself a "Trap!" in a billion lumen brightness that could be seen by any reasonable idiot several light years away.
She shoved another knife in her boot and straightened. Lance was standing by the hatch, the two ships already docked. Besides brown, the other color she most associated with Lance was blue. (But to date, she'd yet to see him wearing anything blue. It was like he actively avoided the color.) Clad in black—black tacsuit, boots, and black googles on his forehead—he was transformed into a familiar stranger.
This is Lance for the last decade. Or most of it, anyway.
Arguably, he was working the black. Embarrassed to find herself ogling him, she found something on her suit that needed adjusting.
"Maybe, they'll have real wheat flour, too," he said.
When she looked up, Lance stared at her, blue eyes glazed in shock, brown skin ashen, the lower left side of his torso and abdomen cherry red, gray shirt destroyed. A crimson beard, his own blood, clung to his lower face. An involuntary, pained gasp escaped Katie's lips and her vision swam.
"Is there something on my face?" Lance quipped, once again whole, tac suit intact, blue eyes amused.
"A smart ass, flirty grin," she stammered. What the Hel was that? Her heart began pounding, a delayed reaction to the vision. Katie hated this part of the flow; sometimes predictive, often not. And that image, right before blundering into an admittedly stupid bit of heroism, was the last thing she needed her freaky brain function to upload to her eyeballs.
Lance, entirely too perceptive, tilted his head, studying her. "You good?"
"The best." Striding up to the hatch, she gestured forward. "Open this door, ensign."
"Hic sunt palatini," he said.
"Hic sunt palatini."
The Ox's outer door shuddered as locks unclasped and then retracted silently, revealing a cargo bay, piled high with crates, only a small path leading to a ladder to the upper levels. A lonely light, the only illumination, broke the ladder into pale rungs against darkness. Behind them, Athena's door slid shut and Lance's goggles automatically adjusted to the Ox's gloom.
He sniffed. Typical ship smell, metallic with an undertone of stale, recirculated air; the chemical tang of plasticene crates. Nothing unusual; no reek of rotten flesh. Which was too be expected. Pidge, it turned out, wasn't entirely without robot pals; she'd sent a small robot probe in before to scan for pathogens, other airborne hazards and check rad levels.
Lance moved forward, bayard ready, taking point. He paused before taking the final step into the ship, sweeping a look up and then turning right, checking the room's corners. Pidge automatically did the same on the left.
They paused, listening, and then Lance moved through the canyon between the crates, still checking gaps, toward the ladder. Shooting a quick glance back at Pidge, he climbed the ladder to a hatch. "Locked?" ask Pidge in a quiet voice, heard mostly through the goggles' coms.
"Nope." Keeping out of the line of sight, he pressed the open switch with the bayard and the hatch swooshed open.
"Life signs haven't moved. I don't read any security, no bots. Be careful, though," Pidge added, unnecessarily. Did he detect a funny little waver in her voice?
Lance poked his head through the hatch, and Pidge spoke his thoughts aloud, "Is that…music?"
"Yeah." He listened. "Bach, I think." The sound of a solo unaccompanied violin echoed hollowly through the dim hallway. "Allemande, Partita No. 2 in D-minor, I think."
"How in the quiznak do you know that?"
Seeing nothing worrisome, he climbed out of the hatch. "Music appreciation in college." He'd also noodled around with the transcription for classical guitar.
Pidge emerged from the hatch seconds later and after a beat, spoke, louder, to the darkness. "Hello? This is the crew of the Athena. We got your distress call? Hello?"
The violin continued, notes floating against the backdrop of mechanical hum, arpeggios descending and ascending, broken by the skipping of triplets.
"Music to set a trap to," said Lance. Pidge shot him a glance, and he detected worry in her eyes. Weird. Pidge was typically unflappable. He continued into the ship's interior, sliding his eyes over the ceiling and back to the floor.
The main lights were out in the corridor, with just a few emergency lights winking sporadically from niches low on the walls. Gun metal gray was the predominant color, the ceiling arched, the walls a juxtaposition of venting, mechanical systems and sheet metal. Their footfalls rang hollowly on metal grating; typical for a ship of this type as it was lighter and allowed access to mechanical systems. Ahead the hall met a wider junction, another hall opening to the right and straight ahead, another doorway. A second, larger ladder stood in the center of the junction. This, according the schematics, led to the cockpit.
Before entering the junction, Pidge whispered, "Wait," and stopped to examine a control panel that managed two barrel-shaped air scrubbers in the wall. Her wrist com bled green light and he watched as she hacked into the system further—real hacking, not the app-assisted data tweaking he usual did. A tightness built in his chest, brought on by a melancholy for all the times he had watched a smaller, younger Pidge do this.
"Mechanical systems are nominal."
"You check right." He pointed at the junction. "I take the med bay?" He noted the door straight ahead. "Then the upper level?"
Again, that odd bit of hesitation. "Let's stick together." She gave him a small smile. "The plot of every bad vid has the heroes splitting up."
The door opened revealing a med bay. Again, no one responded to Pidge's calls and they entered. The Allemande ended, moving to the bouncy Courante. The room was reasonably clean, the air as stale as elsewhere, but with an antiseptic tinge. Both med-beds were empty, the sheets clean. A large bank of surgical lockers took up most of the room. The only lighting glowed from a smattering of yellowy emergency lights. Lance snapped his bayard back in its holster. Scanning the room, he found a light panel. "Lights," he warned, and switched on the bright surgery lights in the room's center.
The goggles flickered for a millisecond, adjusting to the brighter light. Pidge put away her bayard and her nimble fingers began snooping through the med lab's coms. "Last person treated was two days ago. Head trauma. There are records for a crew of seven. All human." Her pretty face lost in concentration, a furrow between her brow, she scanned the data. "Huh."
"What?"
"There's something," she frowned, "like a fingerprint on the data. This isn't a real record; just a shell."
"Maybe we should just leave."
She wasn't listening, her big brain stuck on a challenge. Lance left her to it, and wandered around the room. No blood stains. Nothing ominous.
"Nothing" was ominous. There should be more evidence, artifacts of a life. Stuff like a cup of coffee on a table. Or the brown ring left by a coffee cup. Photos of the doc's family and friends. He pulled his focus close, studying his goggles' HUD, and checked the life signs. The life sign in med bay, where they were now, had vanished. "Do you think they're real?" When she didn't answer, he edged toward the door.
"Galra," she said. "The trace code is Galra. But not entirely. It's a weird hodgepodge of code. Human. Galra, some Altean."
The next movement in the partita began, the Sarabande with its chord-heavy introduction. Lance listened, her observations setting a memory tickling the back of his mind. "We should check the other life sign and get out of here."
"Why go to this much effort?" she muttered. "Even for a trap, this is a lot of trouble. Most people who'd stop probably wouldn't have my skills." She gestured at the com. "Somebody went to a lot of trouble to hide something under layers of junk code."
For us? Lance's brain skipped. "Pidge, let's go." He reached back and yanked the bayard from its holster.
"Yeah," she said, still distracted. Damn. He loved her brilliant mind, but right now, her inquisitive nature was irritating as HeleHelHj.
Outside med bay, the junction was still empty. They stared at the dark opening at the ladder's top. "Should we?" he said. "That life sign is probably another decoy."
"If it isn't? If someone is really up there. Injured? Dying?"
Together they eyed the hallway to the right instead and the numerous small hatches leading to crew quarters. The Sarabande ended and Gigue started, a ripple of quick, dance step music. Pidge opened her wrist com and began analyzing again. Lance spread the fingers of his left hand, then made a fist; the cold tingle of his numb pinky, and electric bite of the damaged ulnar nerve misfiring were welcomed distractions.
Pidge, eyes still on her com, pulled her bayard from the holster, taking a few steps down the hallway. The music recording made an odd little jarring skip, and the next movement, the Chaconne, with its dramatic sweep of double, triple and quadruple stops, began.
"More life signs," she whispered. Keeping a wary eye on the opening above them, he followed. The music settled into a sweetly melodic passage, and Lance decided that Bach would hereafter be "The Music of Doom," especially as the tune transitioned to broad interval leaps, the bow make big skips over the strings.
She gestured at a door, taking position at its side. He took the opposite, ready as she opened it. Just as he moved, she raised the hand with the bayard, signaling Wait. Gloved fingers yellowed in the light, she rearranged something on the holoscreen, then signaled: Go.
No emergency lights lit the room, but the goggles adjusted, pulling details from darkness: typical crew quarters. Tight space taken up largely by two stacked bunks, a narrow access on one side, with multiple storage lockers on the walls and under the lower bunk. Lance switched on the lights further revealing the same sich as the med bay. No photos on the wall, no spent snack wrappers on the floors. Not even a porn sheet on the bed. No signs of habitation.
Pidge had joined him in the small space, her attention still commanded by the screen. "Pidge, we need to go."
"This is amazing," she said, eyes dreamy. In his head, he swore. Holy crow! She was lost to the mysteries of science and tech.
"What's amazing?" he asked, resigned.
"It's a digi-simulacrum. The best I've seen, ever. I'm green with envy." She grinned up at him. "Get it? Green?"
"Leave the jokes to me, Pidge."
"Yeah." She nodded absently. "It's an exquisite approximation of life, Altean alchemy layered onto plain old fashion binary, but with Galra syntax. The resulting structure—hyper-dendroidal—is organic and breathtaking."
"Uh, okay?"
Her demeanor utterly Pidge, her expression suggested that an intoxicated, rabid, space weasel should understand the technical jargon. "It has thousands of potential applications, military, even agricultural. I have to get this to Matt."
"Matt?"
"Over the past six months, they've lost four people on missions chasing ghost signals. This…, this is why." Her face scrunched up. "But who developed it?"
"Xiphoid," he said, the fragments of an intoxicated memory assembling roughly, the details still not quite fitting.
"Xiphoid? They don't have the resources for something this magnificent."
"They have corporate backers. Rumored to…" The Chaconne came to an end and the silence felt even more ominous than Bach's complex musical architecture. "Back to Athena, right?"
"In a minute. I'm downloading it."
He edged by her, hands moving her gently aside and looked warily out the door. "Pidge, you know I love you and your big brain, but I've got a bad feeling about this. Look, I remembered something, I need to tell—"
"Almost done."
The simulacrum's structure, though ornate and branching, collapse easily when she found the key, compressing neatly. Entranced, she watched it fold and settle onto her com like a dog circling and snuggling into a round bed.
Wait? What did he say? Love?
"Pidge, wrap it up." This time, his tone had the bite of real urgency. She eyed goggles' HUD, finding no life signs.
He stepped into the hallway as she switched off the holoscreen. The blat-blat-blat of fire followed, and something sizzled on the doorframe and at his feet. His body jerked, taking fire. "Lance, no," she whispered, the bloodstained image seizing her memory.
"I'm fine," he said as she rushed to the door. A fallen sentry bot lay a few steps from the cockpit's ladder. She met his eyes, and even through the goggles she saw the ghost of his dead Balmoran friend.
Something pinged: once, twice, through the ship's speakers.
Lance cocked his head to the side. "What now? Wagner? Flight of the Valkyries?"
"Uh-oh," Katie said, understanding the sound too late. The third ping turned into a long tone, then a chorus of tones, layered in a literal, earsplitting sonic sandwich.
Aural bomb. Used in crowd control. Made to induce nausea and dizziness. This one cranked up to levels outlawed by most interplanetary treaties.
Pummeled by the sound, her mouth opened, but nothing came out. She stumbled back into the room, her feet tangled and she landed on her ass. Something clattered. The bayard, falling from her hands onto the floor. Sound waves pulsed through her skull, vibrating every cell in her body. Her hands clawed feebly at her ears, where the pressure turned to pain, spreading into her jaw, forcing itself into her sinuses.
Cold, the thin plasti-steel floor against her cheek, on her skin. She'd fallen onto her side and was curled in a fetal position. More blat-blat of a blaster. The pressure moved into her brain and her thoughts splintered; dumb, animal panic took control. Her legs twitched and kicked, mindlessly scrabbling. She came undone, dissolved into nothing but a creature in pain, all sense of direction gone.
Blat-blat-blat.
Lance. The name cut through the suffocating terror.
Helpless in the aural assault, she reached, fumbling for anything in her brain, a lifeline. She hated this, feeling useless. And with hate, she found anger, her useful partner.
Lance. His name now a purpose, she took on the rage at being reduced to weakness and kindled a fire in her belly. And anger awoke the other. Not a slow awakening, but white-blue hot power flooding her body. She grabbed it, devoured it like a starving person gulping down scalding hot soup. It burned going down, but she embraced the damage as a necessary sacrifice.
Hands on the floor, she pushed herself up and dug her heels into the floor, scooting away from the doorway, away from the worst of the noise.
Lance. Icy fear elbowed aside anger; fear for him. Don't think about it. Focus.
In the room, away from the speakers, her sinuses ached, but she got her brain online again. I can fix this! Pulling her datapen from her front pocket, she thumbed the security pad and spoke: "E-protocol 5." The pen instantly emitted a bone-throbbing tone. Her teeth rattled as if standing next to a bass speaker at a concert. But the resonance cancelled out the Aural bomb, creating a bubble of peace around her head.
Snatching up the bayard, she scrambled to her feet and rushed toward Lance, who'd slumped in the doorway. Still upright; still alive. Relief swept through her so hard, her legs wobbled. Pulling him into the room, she shoved his lanky, swaying body against the wall. She found his datapen and uploaded her countermeasure. In seconds it added a deep bass throb to hers.
As she shoved his pen halfway in his pocket, leaving it partially exposed for better sound production, something wet splashed on her arm. A red drop jiggled on the gray tac suit material and then, pulled by artificial gravity, elongated into a thin river, drawing crimson on gray.
"Y-you alright?" she said. His nose was bleeding. Aside from a few scorch marks on the suit, he seemed otherwise unharmed.
"I'm fine." He swiped at the rivulet of red on his lip. "Just an Aural bomb side effect." Noting her horror, he grinned. "Really. I'm good. And you're prepared for everything, aren't you?"
A hard splat of plasma fire on the doorframe interrupted her response. "More bots," he said. "We need to get out of here."
She nodded, knowing his concern was immediate: they needed to get out of the room before it became a kill box. "On three. One, two, three!"
They burst into the hallway just as two doors down the corridor whooshed open, revealing two more sentry bots.
"They're using the simulacrum as cloaking," she said, unable to hide her admiration.
"Hurrah for them." Two more dropped from the cockpit, skipping the ladder.
Instinctively, Katie and Lance moved back-to-back. Katie's warrior brain took over, a touch of the flow in her every shot. Trusting that Lance had her back, she picked a target, choosing the bot that pointed its blaster with a high trajectory angle. An angle that could hit Lance, the taller target. Aim true, she fired again, taking out the second bot, as four more erupted from a door.
Behind her, she heard the thump of more bots dropping from the cockpit. Metallic crashes erupted in stereo as she and Lance hit both their targets. More thumps, and a blast dropped sizzling plasma inches from her feet.
Most of the fire was leveled too high; the bots' aim total shit. No, not shit. That wasn't possible. The stupid robots' risk assessment code was dismissing her as a threat. Indignant, she blasted fire into a downed sentry bot.
"Clear for now," said Lance. "Let's move."
They were a few feet from the first hatch, the one that dropped down to the cargo bay, when two more bots appeared behind them. Lance began firing. "I've got it." The bots jerked and fell. Three more slid from the crew quarters, and he muttered, "Must've had a fire sale at Sec Bots 'R Us." A hot blast hit the floor between him and Katie.
"Go, Pidge!"
"No." The gory image still fresh in her mind, she lifted her bayard and fired, standing with him. "Clear." She jerked her head at the hatch. "You're still on point."
Chain-of-command obviously being something he'd inconveniently decided to unlink, he said, "You're the one with the important code."
"It's on your com, too. You're my redundancy." Gesturing at the hallway, she said. "It's clear. Just go."
She almost sighed in relief when he complied, heading down the ladder to the level below. She followed. Her head had just cleared the hatch, when a blast dropped hot plasma inches from her face. Annoyed, she lifted the bayard up and fired blindly back into the hallway. She reached with her other hand, and fumbled for the latch, intending to close the hatch behind her.
Hearing the blaster fire, Lance's attention was drawn to her. Movement caught her eye. Two bots dropped out of cloaked positions onto the crates above Lance. "Above and to your six," she said. With cocky insouciance he reduced both to scrap. Still the sharpshooter.
Four more sentry bots, however, replace the fallen. He spun, taking out one bot immediately. The other three fired, and he staggered, hit.
A fifth bot dropped onto a crate, and then hopped down into the narrow path between her and Lance. It leveled its weapon on her. A blast hit her leg, the suit dulling the impact to a hard blow. Aside from that shot, this sentry's targeting algorithms were borked, its blasts hitting everywhere but on her.
Ignoring the two bots firing on him, Lance set his focus on the bot firing at Katie. He wavered, unsteady, taking more fire. His tacsuit held; for now.
I can take care of myself, you idiot!
Blinding pain erupted from her left hand, the hand she thought was on the ladder's top rung. Distracted by Lance's situation, she'd left her hand on the hatch's lip, just after flipping the switch to closed it. The metal lid had her hand in a vise-like grip, crushing more bones every second. The only thing saving her hand was her glove.
"Fuck!" Biting back a scream, she fired, her second shot getting one bot above Lance. Awkwardly, impeded by the bayard in her hand, she hit the switch again. As the hatch reversed, she yanked back her hand, and flipped the switch again. Hand useless, she hooked her elbow over the ladder's rungs. Tapping the bayard into knife mode, she stabbed the hatch switch, tearing apart the mechanism so it couldn't be opened.
Just in time, as more blaster fire sprayed on the closing hatch from the hallway above. Lance, meanwhile, had taken out the remaining bots. He scanned the area.
Katie, her head muzzy with pain, snapped the bayard in its holster, hoping no bots arrived, and she struggled, one-handed, down the ladder. Once down, she unholstered the bayard and hurried to join him at the Ox's hatch.
It was still open on this side. They entered the short docking airlock, closed the hatch behind them, then unlocked Athena's.
Back in the safety of Athena, Katie waved vaguely at the hatch mechanism. "Undock," she said, terse with pain. "Get us out of here." As he walked away, she raked her gaze up and down his body, assuring herself he was alright.
Good thing one of us is. Hand shaking, she fumbled, thumb on her pen and gritted out, "Cancel protocol." The countermeasure's powerful vibrations were driving spikes of pain into her hand. Her stance wide, she stared as a bright red drop was joined by another on Athena's pretty hardwood floor, and tried not to pass out.