Dominant Species (7 page)

Briggs opened his eyes and with a wheezy groan leaned across the center console. "Dammit boy, it's just--" Briggs' words trailed into silence. Vibration patterns emanated from inside the tank, distinct patterns. Jenner watched as the computer filtered for echo and reflection, resolving six rough forms in the center of the disturbance. Forms with arms and legs. Jenner saw Briggs' eyes go wide.

"Briggs?" Jenner's voice was hesitant; the warning light in the back of his mind had already kicked into overdrive. "Briggs, what the hell is that?"

Briggs' left hand slammed against the dash and the cab's rear door slid open. "Get in the back!" he shouted as he grappled with his seat restraints. The voice carried a ragged note of terror.

Raw fear burned bright in Brigg's eyes. In the space of a single heartbeat, that fear jumped across the cab and buried its frigid claws along the length of Jenner's spine. The icy touch was numbing. No thought, only the need to move.

Jenner's broken left arm folded back under his weight as he scrambled for the open rear door. He pitched forward and his head crashed with a thud between the seats. For a moment he was wedged in a ridiculous, face-down posture. Panic-driven limbs flailed madly and somersaulted him through the narrow doorway. He hit the base of the gravitic couch with a thud.

"Help me!" The ragged timber of Briggs' voice spiked as he shouted from the cab. "Dammit boy, gimme a hand!"

Jenner flopped to one side and looked through the door, past Briggs. Across the cab a brilliant flash of red pulsed angrily:

WARNING

The dash seemed to draw away as Jenner's world stretched out into an edgeless blur. A hand beckoned with surreal slowness. Eddie's fingers-- no, Jenner shook his head, Briggs, Briggs' fingers dripped with dark blood. The old man's face looked back, eyes wide with terror as the claxon droned.

WARNING WARNING WARNING

Jenner banged the switch and the compartment door slammed shut. Tears ran down his face as he fell back into the darkness, away from the screams and the pounding at the door. When the explosion tore through the heart of the truck, even the screams were lost.

CHAPTER 6

The squeal of failing metal mixed with the moans of the dying. In the darkness overhead, a transformer blew out with a shotgun report and sparks rained down through the catwalks. Somewhere in the distance a siren howled mournfully.

The truck lay dead. Strips of linear shaped charge inside the tank had cut an instant doorway through her side, the edges of the gaping wound curled back like bits of torn paper.

Steam parted as an armored form emerged through the hole, oblivious to the Hex that streamed off of grey armored skin. Dan Ridgeway climbed out of the wreckage and fired a brief glance toward the front of the vehicle. Hex-laden sludge hemorrhaged from buckled seams, thick with dissolving electronics and upholstery. Some of the runny clumps oozing to the floor would doubtlessly be the driver.

Turning quickly, Ridgeway's attention swept the loading bay. Everywhere he looked, walls and equipment were pockmarked with smoking holes. Shrapnel from the blast, every scrap coated with Hex, had riddled the area. Anyone caught in the open was already dead or dying.

A sea of liberated Hex now churned in a knee-deep pool that stretched across the sunken floor. Dark fumes boiled from the surface, forming a brown, corrosive fog that crawled steadily outward. With a loud crackle, power cables dissolved in the caustic haze, spitting blue-white ribbons of voltage. Hissing madly, severed hoses thrashed like beheaded snakes.

But on the fringes of the disaster, Ridgeway could see training take hold. A response team appeared at the far corner of the loading bay. He counted a dozen figures in rubbery suits as they raced across the overhead catwalks, bold Hazmat symbols prominent on their blaze orange helmets.

Almost a hundred yards away, a pair of huge steel doors parted with a pneumatic whine, clearing the way for a bright yellow maglev. HAZMAT-4 appeared along the curved skirt in day-glow lettering. The sled oozed toward the acid lake on a cushion of magnetic force, flanked by yet another column of responders. Twin chrome barrels belched streams of thick white foam.

For a brief moment Ridgeway was impressed. Faced with an immense crisis, the Rimmer responders fought back with courage and discipline.

A good way to die, he thought as his right hand chopped crisply in the direction of the nearest team.

In response, Monster's Gatling gun spun into motion. Flame roared from the muzzle with a howling scream as an incandescent finger reached out to the tightly massed responders. They disintegrated under its deadly touch, bodies churned into bloody bits by a withering hail of ammunition. A helmet burst into fluorescent shards while an air tank skipped across the metal floor, driven angrily by gas venting through its punctured shell.

The fiery stream swept left and came to bear on the maglev. Amid the staccato pang and whine of bullet hits on metal, ragged holes appeared across her hull, widening rapidly. Ridgeway watched the brilliant discharge of covalent ammunition as the onslaught ripped it's way to the vehicle's heart.

The gravitic core breached, incinerating the hapless souls who had scrambled behind the vehicle for cover. The powerful blast filled the air with white-hot frag and vaporized Hex.

Thunder echoed through the cavern as Ridgeway scanned the aftermath. The explosion had gutted an area almost twenty meters in diameter. Behind his impassive mask the marine grinned; gravcore failures were always dramatic.

Sections of catwalk hammered by the blast hung down from the ceiling in broken tatters. Fires burned by the dozen. A broken pressure line hemorrhaged compressed gas that added to the growing cloud of smoke and acid fumes. Nothing human moved amid the carnage. Ridgeway's right fist snapped up.

The spinning barrels of the Gatling stopped with a metallic click and the soft curl of rising smoke. Monster jumped down to the concrete floor and splashed through the acid with evident purpose. The rest of the RATs quickly followed.

Ridgeway cursed inwardly as he checked his mission clock. Behind the pace already. The elevator had descended far slower than projected and any margin for error was now gone. What had been a narrow window from the onset had become a flat-out race against time.

Ridgeway bolted forward, mechanized legs driving him through the knee-deep acid in a blur of acceleration. He hooked past the smoking crater left by the maglev's detonation, confident that nothing in his path had survived the initial room-clearing.

With his head encased in an opaque shell of carbonite, Ridgeway relied on synthetic vision pumped straight to his optic nerves. The days of laser-scorched retinas had long ago made clear visors obsolete. Multi-spectrum data gathered by each suit of armor was transmitted to the others, providing a shared tactical awareness. The TAC system resolved these streams of data into graphic icons and color-coded vectors.

As Ridgeway sprinted, Taz fell in on his heels. Darcy was moving to high ground, climbing a thin tensile grapling line to the catwalks above. Monster had broken right with Merlin and Stitch and now thundered across Cathedral on a direct line to the reactor. Ridgeway watched as the TAC displayed a series of threat indicators in Monster's path. Just as quickly as they appeared, they winked out.

In full stride, Ridgeway hurdled a steel rail. Ahead and to the left, a wide metal staircase led downward. The yellow and black sign on the wall read SECURITY with a prominent arrow pointing down.

Launching himself from the top of the stairs, Ridgeway hurtled through the air and landed with a bone-jarring slam on the grated steel walkway below. His inertia carried him into the midst of a Rimmer response team massing frantically.

Powered forearms hooked viciously to the sound of snapping bones as he drove through the crowd. A second heavy shudder told him that Taz was right on his tail. The two Marines carved into the security team like a pair of chainsaws.

A door slid open on the right side of the wide industrial hallway as a tyvek-clad engineer appeared in the portal. His squad number, 62, gleamed on both helmet and airpack. Ridgeway saw the eyes behind the respirator flash wide with last-second alarm as an armored gauntlet slammed into the facemask with the force of a sledgehammer.

Taz blew by as Ridgeway cut hard and spun through the still-open doorway. Inside, Alliance responders were in chaos. Hands grappled with hazmat suits and snatched at equipment as an orchestra of sirens blared at a deafening level. Reacting to a soundless cue, the Rimmers turned in stunned confusion at the dark metallic form in the doorway. The figure raised its armored hands, palms turned up as if in bloody supplication.

With a practiced mental command that had long become second nature, Ridgeway triggered the weapons mounted in his forearms and a dull roar whooshed from the compact flamethrowers. Twin streams of liquid fire swept across the writhing mass, igniting flesh and clothing alike. Thick with magnesium-phosphorous particles, the incendiary flared many times hotter than conventional fuel. Even the metal bunk frames began to burn.

Seven seconds after entering, Ridgeway backpedaled out of the room. The twin doors slammed shut with a sharp bang. He left the raging firestorm to quell any lingering screams.

Squad 62 will not be participating in the remainder of today's exercise.

Resuming his charge down the hall, Ridgeway scanned the TAC. The mission clock ticked incessantly near the bottom center of his visual field, its numeric display enhanced with a steadily diminishing time bar.

Three minutes, sixteen seconds. The first wave of Marine Firehawks were already burning in through the upper atmosphere.

Just ahead, another set of doors slid open. Smoke and flickering orange light broiled angrily into the corridor, perforated by sporadic gunfire. Taz burst from the inferno and flashed an upraised thumb as the doors slammed shut behind him. The TAC noted scattered damage across the aussie's armor, but nothing of consequence.

Storming down the hall in tandem, Ridgeway called up a tactical map and a crisp wireframe materialized across the upper portion of his visual field. Refined to minimize clutter, the display gave Ridgeway rapid access to the condition and location of each Marine. One floor above, Monster's squad had reclaimed nearly a minute against the clock.

Ridgeway broke into a dead run, electroactive polymer muscles driving his legs like pistons. He broke left at a four-way junction and bolted across a cluttered machinist's bay.

The TAC scoured the path ahead, analyzing not only visual data but heat, acoustics, even the faint fields of myoelectric current generated by living flesh. Translated into a constant stream of EAD, expanded-awareness data, the heightened perception could give the Marines a nearly supernatural sense of a battlefield. Sometimes it simply gave him a split-second edge.

The sudden red bracket framed the corner of a black riot shield wedged hard against an oil-streaked air compressor. A short-barreled carbine rocked up and leveled at Ridgeway's chest.

"Break!" Ridgeway barked, twisting his torso as the carbine fired.

The world slowed as Ridgeway's enhanced nervous system kicked into overdrive. Combat noise pulled back, stretching as it faded into a hollow, cavernous echo. The image before him refined into crystal clarity.

Muzzle flash. White cloud of vented gas as the carbine cycled another round of caseless ammunition. Flash again, angry yellow-orange.

Ridgeway felt a string of impacts pound across his ribs. He felt pain as well-- something better given than received. A snarl boiled in his throat as the space between the combatants evaporated.

At full run, Ridgeway uncoiled with a vengeance and swung at the center of the shield. The smooth kevlar panel shattered like balsa wood. His gauntlet drove the Rimmer's sternum violently against his spine, bursting the organs that lay between. The body dropped to the floor like a stringless marionette.

With elastic suddenness, Ridgeway's perception snapped back to normal. The angry buzz of damage control led the way, shifting from dull to prominent. Points of orange blinked rapidly in a line that angled across his ribs. The shots had been well-aimed, only the severe rotation of his body had caused them to strike at a glancing angle. Still, at point-blank range the heavy rounds had inflicted damage; a cracked rib at the least, and several pitted dents across the armor plating. Durable did not mean indestructible.

Screw it, Ridgeway growled inwardly. In about three minutes a cracked rib would be the least of my problems. He pressed on, driven by mounting urgency.

The two Marines ascended a flight of stairs in powerful strides and cut back towards the reactor, scanning for anything that could pose a threat to Monster's squad. The rapid search produced no candidates. From the looks of things, Rimmer resistance had evaporated. The entire corridor stood empty.

Just as well. The time bar on the TAC was also vanishing, and now stood below three minutes. Monster's team should have the Detonex in place by now. Barely enough time to--

Ridgeway braked hard, his boots skidding on the metal floor as he stopped just short of the huge steel door that slammed down from the ceiling. An oddly flattened shout passed through the wall-mounted intercom. "I got you, motherfucker! Hey guys, I got ‘em. He's stuck behind the--"

The sudden high-pitched whine of the Gatling was unmistakable, even through a foot of steel. The energetic voice cut off abruptly as Ridgeway watched a swath of bulges ripple across the metal door as though someone beat the opposite side with a million ball peen hammers.