"What the hell happened?" Vincent snapped. He would have yelled the question at significantly more volume if Harry weren't taking a nap in the main house. "You were supposed to take care of her!"
Ayers laid the unconscious Lizzie down on the infirmary's operating table, carefully sliding his arms out from beneath her. They were both covered in dirt and powdery dust except for her damaged face and Ayers's bare head.
"Mech," Ayers said with difficulty. He made a swiping motion. "Building fell." He had a look on his face that Vincent couldn't put into words because of the complexity, like trying to describe the emotions of an alien creature.
"A wall falling over explains the dirt," Vincent said through gritted teeth. "But a building didn't do that to her face." With the hand that wasn't clipping a pulse oximeter onto her finger, he pointed to the livid scratches that ran from Lizzie's hairline to her eyebrows and continued from cheekbones to jaw.
Ayers made the gesture for a narrow space and said, "Panic."
"She had a flashback?"
Yes.
"Would have to be a doozy to make her claw her own face like this. She usually just finds a hiding place and freezes up."
"Hugh," Ayers said, his voice getting rougher.
"Oh." That did explain a lot. Lizzie must have cried out Hugh's name during her flashback. She did that sometimes, usually in her sleep.
Ayers tilted his head. Who is he?
Vincent sighed. The merc had carried Lizzie's 130-plus pounds of limp weight all the way back here. Even if the power armor had done most of the work, he deserved an answer. "Hugh Martinez. He was in the car accident with her."
"Husband?" The word sounded like a truck driving over gravel.
"Her lawyer." That was really all Vincent should say without her permission.
Lizzie's brow furrowed, and the rhythm of her breath jerked and stuttered.
Ayers touched her temple with the index and middle finger of his right hand. The worry drained from the battered woman's face, and she stilled.
Vincent frowned, watching her peaceful expression as he unwrapped a small-bore needle. 'Strange way to caress someone's face,' he thought. 'Like pushing a button.'
Ayers noticed Vincent's frown, and jerked his hand away. Two lines appeared between Lizzie's brows as they drew together again.
Vincent pulled a vial of sedative from a drawer. "Don't worry," he assured Ayers, "she's agreed to a sedative beforehand. Sometimes after a big one like this, she needs to sleep it off. Reset, you know?"
"Denver," Ayers said in a low rumble, and moved to pick her up.
"No!" Vincent surprised himself with how loudly he protested.
Ayers halted to give him a quizzical look. The marine had his arms halfway around her already, hunched over her sleeping form like a body shield.
Vincent said more calmly, "She doesn't want to go to the hospital and have strangers ask her a bunch of questions about how she ended up with such severe PTSD."
"Trauma Machine," the big man protested, straightening up.
Vincent's face went rigid with anger just thinking about that program.
"Mixon's goddamned Trauma Machine is why Lizzie moved to Denver in the first place. But as soon as she got settled, they changed the parameters for the experiment. Suddenly they weren't accepting non-combat PTSD patients anymore." Vincent slapped the needle's empty wrapper into the recycling bin. "Uprooted her whole life to get here, get treatment, get better, and they changed their minds." He made himself breathe out his tension so that he could give Lizzie the injection with steady hands. He did allow himself to mutter, "Selfish bastards," while loading the syringe. The anxiety and fear faded once more from her face as the sedative took effect, and Vincent brushed bits of perma-crete from her dusty curls.
Turning back from discarding the used needle, he found Ayers employing a pair of stainless steel tweezers to remove the gravel embedded in Lizzie's palms. Vincent watched the pair for a few moments, debating how much to say.
Finally he said, "I'll be honest with you, son: if you want to take care of her, Hugh Martinez left some pretty big shoes to fill."
Ayers paused in his delicate procedure to stare at Vincent.
Vincent tapped the chestplate of Ayers's bomb-proof armor. "It's easy to be brave when nothing can hurt you."
The marine frowned.
"It's a whole different ball game when you're looking at a painful death with no reward."
Ayers stared down at his armored limbs, seeming to ponder this information. Then he went back to repairing Lizzie. Vincent began applying ointment to her facial wounds.
When Ayers reached the task of strapping gauze around her wounded hands, Vincent said with some reluctance, "She won't want you here when she wakes up." He gestured at her marred face. "She doesn't want anyone seeing her like this. Not much we can do about me and Harry, but you … you'll have to go soon."
He hadn't realized how much more expressive Ayers had become until the merc's face relaxed into that blank mask he'd worn when they first met. He looked like a different person. A stranger. Vincent was surprised by the sense of loss he felt.
"Just for today," he heard himself say before he'd had a chance to think about it. "Come back tomorrow morning. She should be okay by then."
Ayers nodded briskly, but the life did not return to his face as he finished doctoring Lizzie's hands.
Ross was bored.
He hadn't completed formal study beyond his bachelor degree in science, and The Slayer was off doing God-knows-what, so he was very little help to Philips as the physicist buzzed around the Gate like a gleeful honeybee.
"Ross!" Philips called from another table. "How's it coming with those samples?"
"Almost done, John." Ross's irritation came across clearly in his use of Philips's first name. Affixing Petri dishes full of live cells to a drone was not his idea of maximizing one's potential. But if Oppenheim wanted him to fly two hours each way to White Sands to be Philips's research assistant, and The Slayer wasn't around to "liaise" for, Ross supposed this was as good as today was going to get.
"Hey, now." Philips came closer, where Bailey and the four military police guarding the Gate couldn't easily overhear them. "Only my dad calls me 'John', you know that." He prodded Ross's shoulder with a pipette. "What's up?"
Philips's compassionate face immediately melted Ross's resolve to stoically play the part of Lab Assistant One.
"I feel useless," Ross confessed, hoping Tucker wasn't paying too close attention via the Forge's microphones and cameras. "Anybody could be helping you out with this stuff, and I guess I … don't like the feeling of being 'anybody'."
Philips smiled kindly, patting Ross's upper arm. "Oppenheim offered me 'anybody', and I told him I wanted you. Nobody can learn on the fly like you can. Remember how mad Darren got when you picked up his controls while he was in the bathroom and taught yourself to fly one of the drones?"
Ross grimaced. "I remember I barely got it off the ground."
"Not the point. The point is that it takes an average pilot several hours of instruction and a skilled teacher to get a drone to fly a straight line, and you did it in two minutes all by yourself. You'd be a better pilot than even Darren if you kept at it."
"I'm not sure I want to be a drone pilot. Your instincts have to be really, really good to be better than a computer. Hell, the only reason Darren flies the important drones instead of MESA is that cheeseburgers are a cheaper fuel source than Argent." The ARC's project to streamline the facility's virtual intelligence had been fast-tracked when the Mars Incident cut off Earth's supply of Argent, but since half of the programmers had been killed in the first demon attacks, getting MESA to run on less power was slow going. Martin was good, but he could only do one thing at a time.
"Your choice," the physicist said amiably. "Which is kind of the problem, isn't it?"
"Huh?"
"You've got so much potential. Too much, actually. You could be so many things, you're paralyzed by indecision. Because if you choose one, a hundred other possibilities are now no longer an option."
Ross's mouth hung open. He'd never thought about it like that before.
With far too much cheer for the serious topic, Philips clapped Ross on the shoulder and said, "There are billions, if not trillions, of parallel universes. In one of them you're the best drone pilot on the planet. In another, you run circles around me at physics. Don't worry about all the things you'll never be; they're already happening somewhere." Philips's grin grew even wider as he squeezed Ross's shoulder and then released him. "Enjoy whatever path you choose in our universe. The others will take care of themselves."
Ross narrowed his eyes. "This pep talk is actually a nice way of telling me to hurry up, isn't it?"
Philips shrugged. "Why can't it be both?"
Catherine pinged them on their augmented reality glasses. "Heads up. Lieutenant Cody's about to get chewed out by Oppenheim. I think you'll want to see this." Ross and Philips both used their special-access privileges to pull up security footage of Oppenheim striding through a corridor in the ARC. "Cody brought Juggernaut back in quite a state," Catherine continued. "Doc Opp's already furious."
"Yeah, you can tell by the walk," Ross remarked. The director's stiff back and lightly clenched hands gave it away. "What's wrong with Juggernaut?"
"The arm cannon's all messed up."
"It backfired?"
"Nope. Looks like our hot-shot pilot used it as a battering ram."
Philips shushed them into silence as the director strode through Fabrication and into the connected mega-mech hangar bay. Most mechs were run constantly with rotating shifts of pilots, only coming back to the Bay to refuel and repair. Two half-built mechs stood in the enormous seven-story bays, and a third held Juggernaut, its scratched and warped arm cannon sparking intermittently. A pilot in a tan jumpsuit stood nearby, casually chatting with a technician.
"Cody!" barked Oppenheim.
The pilot turned halfway toward the director with crossed arms and a lifted brow. Ross didn't like his failure to salute. Even though Oppenheim wasn't military and the soldiers assigned to the ARC were technically under someone else's command, respect was due.
Oppenheim stopped with his hands braced on his hips. "What have you done to my machine?"
"You asked me to find good locations for Wall pylons, remember?"
"I have not forgotten," Oppenheim said in clipped syllables. "How does patrolling and mapping result in a damaged cannon?"
"I got about a mile out and couldn't find a good flat spot for the next pylon, so I made one."
"What do you mean you 'made one'?"
"I mean I found a nice tall building that didn't need to be there anymore and I knocked it down." He spread his hands wide like a chef presenting a dish. "Ta-da. Instant pylon construction platform."
Oppenheim's fingers on his hips began tapping an impatient rhythm. "What kind of building?"
Cody's face twisted in annoyance at the question. "I don't know. One of those cheap old apartment blocks they slapped together in the mid-2080s for poor people."
"You knocked down a public housing project?"
"Yeah. We needed space and it was in my way. Relax, I scanned it for inhabitants first. Nobody was in there, not even a field mouse."
"Just because they weren't physically present at the time doesn't mean it wasn't someone's home you demolished," Oppenheim said testily.
Cody made another face. "Nobody worthwhile lives out there. It's all criminals and looters and crabby anti-government types who –"
Oppenheim turned his head suddenly, his eyes going unfocused in the way that users of augmented-reality glasses did when they received an alert. "Incoming," he said simply.
Ross's own AR glasses pinged him a moment later. Slayer on approach, the tiny text declared, providing a miniature camera view of the marine sprinting full-speed down a city street. More text provided by MESA estimated he'd be at the ARC in less than a minute.
A pleasant four-toned alert played over the ARC's loudspeakers, letting the facility's staff know The Slayer was inbound, and to stay out of the way of doors and remove large objects from the corridors so they didn't get run over.
The ARC personnel hustled to clear paths for The Slayer, except for Lieutenant Cody, who sauntered over to a water cooler and poured himself a cup.
"What's he doing?" Philips asked when The Slayer vaulted the wall around the ARC complex at full speed and sprinted for the mega-mech bay.
Ross shook his head. "Dunno. He usually comes in the entrance closest to the Wall."
He thought he was imagining anger in the jerky motions of The Slayer's arms and the way sunlight glinted off his visor, but there was no doubt the big guy was pissed when he smashed his way through two forklifts blocking his path. The crash and squeal of twisting metal caught the attention of the few people who hadn't been watching him approach the open bay doors.
Cody dropped his cup, looking like urine might soon join his spilled water on the floor. The Slayer leapt over a tool chest with a burst of tiny flames and went straight for him.
"Hold fire!" Oppenheim barked at the military police who had unslung their rifles. No bullets could harm The Slayer, so the only thing gunfire would do was endanger non-combatants.
The Slayer grabbed the center line of Cody's jumpsuit and slammed him up against the wall next to Juggernaut. Most people in Denver had some level of war trauma, so it was no surprise when several men and women screamed.
"Oh, crap," Ross heard himself say.
The Slayer pinned Cody's wrist to the wall with one hand and stiffly lifted his sword arm. Cody was petrified with fear, his face whiter than the wall behind him.
Ross's mouth went dry.
The blade extended.
"Wait!" pleaded a deep voice.
There was movement in the corner of the screen. Bruce, the gigantic electrician, made a grab for The Slayer's arm.
"Don't!" Ross shouted uselessly, scrambling with his AR glasses' settings to find a public-announcement channel in the Bay. There were more shouts, screams, Oppenheim yelling to hold fire, the crashing of equipment as panicked humans tried to shove their way out of the Bay and to safety.
A bellow of pain refocused Ross's attention on the video. Bruce was stumbling back with a hand clamped around his forearm. Bright crimson blood streamed from between his fingers. There were more screams, laced with real fear instead of merely shock.
The bottom dropped out of Ross's stomach.
The Slayer had cut Bruce. He'd hurt someone. He'd drawn a weapon on an unarmed human being, and now someone was seriously wounded.
In spite of Oppenheim's shouted commands, the military police in the ARC raised their weapons reflexively.
Ross turned, gave the four MPs guarding the Gate a desperate look, and they stepped aside without him having to ask.
Ross went through.
Philips had been right; traveling through a space-time portal tickled. Ross had to restrain himself from doing a shiver-y little dance when he finished stepping through to the maintenance closet in Fabrication. Other than the tingle, it was so uneventful that Ross could hardly believe he'd just traversed a wormhole. Maybe it would have been weirder if he'd been going to a parallel universe, rather than a different spot in the same one.
His first thought, shoving his way through the panicked staff flowing away from the Bay, was confusion that Oppenheim hadn't ordered an evacuation, like the day they'd seen The Slayer obliterating enemy forces at NORAD. Was he dead? Had the director been killed by The Slayer before he'd had a chance to give the evacuation order? But why wouldn't someone else have done it? Surely Catherine was still watching. She was Oppenheim's right hand; couldn't she have given the order?
It was a very different scene when Ross arrived at a run. Skidding through the archway connecting Fabrication to the Bay, Ross almost slammed into a line of observers who were watching Bruce get patched up.
The crowd stayed around the perimeter of the Bay, leaving The Slayer, Bruce, Sandeep and the ARC's medical physician alone in the center where the wounded electrician was seated on a metal crate, eyeing the supersoldier with suspicion but no fear. Next to Juggernaut, Lieutenant Cody, still very pale, was flanked by two MPs. Ross couldn't easily tell from body language whether he was being protected from The Slayer, or prevented from running away. Oppenheim's stony face and crossed arms gave no indication of his thoughts.
There was an awful lot of blood being mopped up by a couple of maintenance personnel. That blade must have cut deep.
The Slayer himself was keeping pressure on the cut while Sandeep and the ARC's medical physician, Dr. Mulgrew, applied various substances on top of his fresh stitches.
"See, this one we developed at the Swiss ARC," Sandeep bragged, lifting a small gray canister from Dr. Mulgrew's toolbox, "vastly improves the healing of superficial skin wounds. We'll be using it when the underlying stitches have dissolved and the final stages of epidermis reconstruction are – hey!" The R&D specialist protested when The Slayer snatched the tiny can of salve from his hand. Sandeep looked at Oppenheim with astonishment, but the hard-faced director shook his head in a Let him keep it gesture, and The Slayer returned to clamping Bruce's flesh together.
"Can't you put him through the Machine?" asked a timid technician. "They say it can heal almost anything."
The Slayer tilted his helmet like he, too, wanted to know the answer.
"There's a waiting list about two weeks long," Dr. Mulgrew explained, working her needle deftly into Bruce's incision on either side of The Slayer's armored fingers. "You want to tell a four-year-old with a broken femur that they have to suffer six more hours so a guy who happens to work here doesn't get a scar?"
The technician shook her head. Mulgrew grunted in agreement.
Cody made a break for it.
Before the MPs had even started to turn in the fleeing pilot's direction, The Slayer took one hand off Bruce's forearm, produced a nail gun from thin air, and shot a bolt through Cody's boot heel. Pinned to the floor in mid-stride, Cody face-planted onto the perma-crete floor, barely managing to turn his head in time so he didn't break his nose.
The nail gun vanished and The Slayer returned to keeping pressure on Bruce's wound.
Ah. That was why Oppenheim hadn't ordered an evacuation. Whatever The Slayer's intentions for Cody had been, it wasn't murder, and even Sandeep and Dr. Mulgrew were treating Bruce's injury like an industrial accident, not an assault.
Ross shifted uneasily from foot to foot. He couldn't complain that he hadn't stumbled into a bloodbath, but the video had made it look like The Slayer was going to slice off the reckless pilot's fingers, if not his entire hand.
"Done. Don't get that bandage wet. Come see me tomorrow morning for a change of dressings," Mulgrew pronounced joylessly. Ross supposed she had patched up so many people over the years, particularly during this war, that nothing short of bringing someone back from the dead moved the needle on her job satisfaction meter. "Director, I recommend this man take the rest of the day off, if you can spare him."
"Go home, Bruce," Oppenheim said kindly. "We'll see you tomorrow."
"Thanks, Docs," Bruce said to both of them. His tone was guarded, and he kept a wary eye on The Slayer and a protective hand on his bandage-wrapped forearm. It made something in Ross's chest ache to hear Bruce so reserved; the man was usually a boundless source of energy and positivity.
The MPs had un-stapled Cody from the floor and brought him over for Dr. Mulgrew to examine after his abrupt tumble. She brusquely checked his pupils, ran her hands over his forearms and chest and declared him no worse for wear except a scrape along his jaw.
The Slayer turned deliberately toward the mech pilot and curled the fingers of his extended hand in a Come here motion. The leather creaked.
When Cody didn't move, one of the MPs exerted steady pressure on the back of his shoulder. "You've been summoned."
Cody shuffled forward until he was just out of arm's reach. The Slayer rotated his still-extended hand to point at the floor.
The pilot looked desperately at Ross. "What … what's he saying?"
" 'Kneel', I think," Ross guessed.
"Doctor Oppenheim," Cody asked huskily, "you're not going to let him execute me, are you?"
"No," said Oppenheim. "But there should be some consequences for damaging an expensive machine and destroying civilian housing, plus whatever damage your impromptu demolition has done to The Slayer's secondary project in Aurora." The director lifted an eyebrow. "I gather there has been a setback as a result of your unauthorized actions."
Cody knelt hesitantly. The crowd lining the Bay walls shifted, some drifting closer, others sidling toward the exits.
The mech pilot's eyes were as wide as saucers as The Slayer extended the wickedly sharp blade with a soft, spine-tingling noise. It was still wet and shiny with Bruce's blood. Not breaking eye contact, The Slayer slipped the blade's chiseled tip under the edge of a patch on Cody's uniform that said Juggernaut in bold letters. It came off clean, but Cody's lieutenant designation was not so lucky, having been sewn on with a more permanent thread. When The Slayer cut his rank off, it left a large rip in his jumpsuit.
The super-marine stabbed both fallen patches like a groundskeeper collecting leaves, and plucked them off the end of the blade to put in his belt.
Ross almost sat down on the floor in relief.
"What does that mean?" Cody asked, quivering with residual fear.
"I think you've been fired," Ross answered.
"Demoted," Oppenheim said with narrowed eyes. The Slayer did not move to correct him, so the director continued, "He's proven he's not responsible with a giant mech suit, but we don't have enough soldiers to get casual with dishonorable discharges." The director tapped his lips thoughtfully, then announced, "Wall duty. Yes. In-processing those 'undesirables' who he thinks don't deserve decent shelter ought to teach him some discipline and compassion."
"Wall duty? You want me to be a glorified door guard?" Cody said, forgetting his precarious situation and beginning to stand. "I am a decorated –"
The Slayer pushed Cody back to a kneeling position with the flat of his blade, and sliced off the patch for Cody's pilot wings in less than a second.
Pale again, the soldier ducked his head.
"You are a decorated 'door guard' now," Oppenheim said flatly, "and you'll be grateful for it." The director jerked his chin at one of the MPs. "Corporal. Get Private Cody's things and escort him to the East Gate within the hour."
"Yes, sir."
The Slayer slowly retracted his blade, his hard gaze boring into Cody's forehead. The ex-pilot avoided the marine's eyes.
" 'Dismissed'," Ross guessed again.
"Yes. And that goes for anyone else who'd like to take the afternoon off," Oppenheim said in a louder voice.
The MPs escorted Cody away. Looking around, Ross found that half of their audience had taken the opportunity to vanish. He wondered how many of them would return in the morning.
The Slayer turned his head toward Ross and tilted it as if the big man would like an explanation.
"Cody was marking out the pylons for an extension to the Wall," Ross offered. "We know you have some sort of interest in Aurora, so we were going to fence that in next instead of doing Lakewood. But without knowing what – or where – you want protection, we have to guess. And you can see what happens when we're making blind guesses." He made a rueful face. "I know you're here to help. I believe it. But we could be more helpful if we knew what was going on."
The Slayer's impassive expression gave away nothing.
"Look, I realize what you're doing is so far beyond top-secret that there isn't even a designation for it, but you gotta give us something. Anything, so we can at least stop blundering across your science projects and messing things up in our clumsy attempts to help."
The Slayer's eyes fell on the half-cleaned smears and splatters of Bruce's blood on the perma-crete. His dark brows draw together for a moment. Was that tiny expression just now … regret?
Suddenly, The Slayer stomped over to a digital display set into the wall and placed his palm against it. There was a surge in the brightness of the Bay's lighting. Right before it became necessary to squint against the increased luminosity, the light faded back to normal. A smooth male voice issued from the room's speakers.
"Hello. I am VEGA, the sentient intelligence assigned to The Slayer. How may I assist you?"
Yes, Hugh Martinez's name is an ode to Doom Eternal's game director Hugo Martin, without whose full-game playthrough on Twitch/YouTube I wouldn't know half as much Doom lore. Thanks, Hugo!