Challenge Met, page 4
Chapter 4
Alarms shattered the night. Amber rolled from Jack’s side to her feet, shaking her head to scatter the last of sleep, even as she cursed the interruption of their rest. Jack sat up.
“What is it?”
He listened, picking up security code signals in the alarm and gave a grunt as he bent to pull on his boots. They’d both slept clothed, uneasy under the protection of Pepys. “Not the emperor’s wing. It’s right here—with us.”
Her brown eyes with their golden flecks widened. “Nobody’s bothering us…”
“Jonathan!”
Storm made the door first, but she was right on his heels.
The breach in the wing that had set off the alarm gaped before them—rank, scoured, and still smoking.
“My God,” Amber said, as she slowed. “They blasted their way through.”
“Stay back.”
She halted behind his warning hand. “Why?”
“That was done by a suit.”
Her response was drowned out by the rattle of Thrakian carapaces on the corridor floor. Instead of talking, she grabbed Jack’s restraining hand but he shook her off.
“Thraks!”
“Answering the alarm. They’re part of the guard now. They’ll be here as soon as they seal off the wing.” Even as he spoke, Jack moved forward into the blasted outer lab that had surrounded Jonathan’s hospital room. Amber followed close behind.
In the shadowy interior, machinery sputtered and sparked. Plastic and metal crunched under his steps. Amber had not pulled on her boots. Biting her lip, she halted, unable to go farther, but past Jack’s frame she could see a tall and darker shadow pulling at leads and machinery with quick, effective rips, freeing Jonathan’s limp body.
“Drop him, Denaro,” Jack said quietly.
The battle armored man turned, the massive Jonathan cradled in one plated arm as though the size of a child. The visor was down, screen darkened.
“He’s mine. You bastards have had him long enough. If you want him, come take him.”
Amber’s breath hissed inward. By that faint sound, Jack placed her location as well behind him and out of the wreckage of the room, and the tension in his shoulders relaxed just a bit. The plastic and glass shards littering the floor kept her out of harm’s way.
His answer was to move against Denaro, fast, quick, unpredictable—the only advantage flesh had against battle armor. He’d trained Denaro—the man had been one of the Knights’ best before he’d gone rogue. Denaro had always been St. Colin’s man, not a soldier of the Triad Throne, and Jack had known it when he took him in. And just as he knew who was in the armor, he knew how Denaro would react to a frontal attack.
Amber screamed then, as if realizing what she saw.
Gauntlet fire turned the dark air orange. Jack tumbled past it, just out of range, feeling the heat of it whistle by. At Denaro’s feet, he crouched, grasped a dagger of jagged glass and stabbed upward, toward a chink in the Flexalink coverage, not where the back of the knee was, but where he knew it would be as Denaro power vaulted to avoid his attack.
The dagger skittered in his hand, made a screeing noise as it connected, then slipped inward. It was torn out of his grasp as the jump carried Denaro away. Jack immediately twisted backward, but he was too late, betrayed by his own body, as the other kicked out.
The heavy boot caught him a glancing blow to the chest—but even an angled blow from a suit was enough to drive him across the room where a wall stopped him the hard way. Jack let himself slide downward, forcing muscles that were convulsed in pain to relax.
Denaro came to ground, and set Jonathan aside. “Don’t do this, Commander,” he said. There was an edge of pain in his voice. He reached down and pulled the glass dagger out, its edges crimson.
Jack rolled over into a ball, legs under him, gathering himself. He looked up and met the charcoal screen of the visor, knowing a human gaze lay behind it.
“I can’t let you do this.”
“You can’t stop me. I’m suited and you—you’re not.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. If you’d stayed in the Knights long enough, you’d have learned your weaknesses.”
The gauntlet fired, but Jack had leapt already, inside and under it. Jonathan’s flaccid bulk protected him from a second spray.
“I thought,” Denaro said, and an aggrieved pant interrupted his words, “I thought you knew who the real enemy was.”
“Never doubt it,” Jack answered, just as he launched himself, and Amber screamed, “Don’t shoot!”
He never knew if she’d meant it for Denaro, or for the hard-bodied aliens that suddenly filled the ruined lab and room. The reek of their excitement filled his nostrils even as the beam caught him twisting and brought him down. The warrior Thraks smelled like hot brass and he hated it worse than the smell of death which washed over him as the floor caught him up with ungentle force.
Amber shrilled, “Stop it! You’ll kill them both!”
Denaro leaned over Jack. He picked him up by the nape of his neck, his gauntlet still warm and stinking. In the other arm, he carried Jonathan and the Walker aide’s slack face stared unseeingly.
“Leave him,” Storm got out. The side of his face was numb, and he tasted the sweet flat iron of his own blood. “Pepys brought me back to find Colin. I swear to you I’m going after him.”
The visor showed him a blurred reflection of himself, but it was Denaro who answered, “Too late. We’ve waited too long.” The armor shuddered and the room shifted. Jack realized he was being carried along, dangling by his neck as Denaro used him as a shield. “You should not have tried to stop me.”
“Try, hell!” Jack twisted in the gauntlet and brought his boot heels up to the neck joint with a snap that forced the helmeted head back. Another snap and the seam began to give way.
Amber put her hands to her mouth, watching Jack retaliate. If there was a man alive who could fight a suit bare-handed, he was that man. But already he’d paid a price too dear. She heard the Flexalinks sing in protest as he kicked up, not once but twice. Denaro rocked back and staggered through the massive hole in the outside wall.
The Thraks could wait no longer. Their quarry was bolting. Even as Jack found the vital weak spot in the helmet to suit seal, they swarmed.
Her throat went raw as she shouted them off. Jack slipped to the floor where he lay, crimson and blistered with laser fire, and the battle armor beat off a last attacker before turning and running, powering out of her sight with a speed she would not have believed except that she knew the suits and what they could do.
A second later, K’rok was there, the massive and furry Milot overwhelming her as he buffeted the Thraks into submission with his bellows. Sarge was there, too, calling for live medics.
Numbly, she stepped aside from the Guard. They’d never catch Denaro. She shoved aside a Thraks standing wobbling on one chitined leg, not caring that he crashed to the floor with a clacking and hissing as she went to Jack.
There was blood everywhere. The air stank of it and Jack’s hand was slippery with it when she grasped it. The flesh she pressed was chill and passive and she looked quickly to see if Jack was still conscious. His eyes flickered and he moaned as the medics reached them and lifted his body off the shattered flooring onto a gurney.
His gaze met hers, but she could see he was having difficulty focusing. She leaned close as the medics locked the gurney into position and began wheeling it toward the operating lab.
His breath tickled her ear. “Get… the observation tape.”
“I will, but why—”
“Get the tape before… Baadluster. It wasn’t necessary…” Jack took a shallow, wheezing breath. “It wasn’t necessary for Denaro to take Jonathan. He did… to make sure I’d follow. The tape will tell me… where. Fair fight… Thraks did the worse damage.” With a trembling effort, he closed his fingers over her hand. “Understand? Nothing’s going to stop us now.”
“Yes.” Amber loped now, to keep pace with the gurney and the medics, unable to bend close enough to talk with Jack. The lab doors opened and the medics tore Jack’s hand away from her. She stood for long minutes as the doors shut in front of her, cradling her right hand until long after Jack’s blood dried on her skin.
Then she realized Jack had given her something to do, and she hurried to take care of it before someone else beat her to the tape. It was nothing to get the tape… it took a few minutes to rig the system as though it had malfunctioned or perhaps Denaro had tampered with it to explain the absence of any recording on the blank tape she substituted.
Seeing him in the healing crèche was little better than being left outside the operating bay. Sealed off, all she could see was his face. The rest of him was swaddled in medical equipment and a reconstruction matrix. A bright flush of fever mottled an otherwise too pale complexion. There was no rise and fall of his chest from breathing, under the matrix and in cold sleep, there could be none. Vandover shadowed her, but she refused to let his presence warn her off. He could be dead, she thought uneasily, and the bastard’s enjoying watching me wait.
Vandover dropped a hand to her shoulder. She squelched the flinch of reaction.
“Because of his injuries,” the man in black said softly, “he’ll be under for two weeks instead of several days. The doctors asked me to tell you.”
Baadluster was used to being the bearer of bad news. She could tell this revelation did not particularly distress him.
“Whatever it takes,” Amber said tonelessly. He stood beside her a few moments longer, then withdrew and went about his imperial business. She waited until she was certain he was gone before she let the tears brimming in her eyes fall upon her face. She wished she could share Jack’s triumph, but Vandover’s continued presence set off the alarms of her faded intuition. The mind-loop was out of her hands and in those of their uneasy allies. Jack had not worried—but she did.
She worried that whatever chance Jack’d had to go through imprint and come back the man she loved grew slimmer by the day.
Chapter 5
He was whole again. Young and eager, though the core of him was ice as if he were chilled down—but he couldn’t be, he had never been, and the army wouldn’t risk cold sleep on a raw recruit… too expensive. He’d gotten here on his own hook, and now he was here, and in, with a spindly, potbellied NCO bellowing at him—
“No suit, no soldier! If you hear it once, you’ll hear it a thousand times. Those of you who made it through Basic to get to us—you ain’t done yet! We’re going to winnow you again because only the best get to wear armor and you don’t look like the best to me. Do you?”
“NO, SIR!”
“But if I make you the best, and the ones of you who make it through my camp are the best, and I do it not because I like you but because it is my job to give the best to the Knights, then you’ll be good enough to wear the armor. And if you’re good enough to wear the armor, then you’ll know you’re the best because there isn’t anybody else on God’s green lands good enough to tell you you’re the best! Your ass is going to depend on that suit once you earn it. I’m going to teach you how to wear it, use it, eat, sleep, and shit in it, and repair it. You will treat nothing as well as you treat your armor, not even your mother! Do you understand, boys?”
“YES, SIR!”
His mother. Jack caught a glimpse of memory, of his brown-haired, freckle-dusted, sad-eyed mother, looking across a field of shadow and sun toward him, waving good-bye… and he remembered. He won the armor and lost Milos… and the Thraks devoured his own planet as they had half a dozen others, and her bones undoubtedly lay covered by Thrakian dust, unmourned until now.
He would have cried, but he was too cold to cry and the tears would have frozen anyway.
Pepys looked up briefly from his web of com links, his red hair drifting in its own cloud of electricity. He damped down the transmit as Vandover shifted impatiently, waiting to claim his attention. “What is it?”
“The lab says Storm will be coming out of imprint shortly.”
“So soon?”
Baadluster controlled his emotions by fisting his hands, nails digging into his sweaty and itchy palms. “It’s been twelve days.”
The emperor leaned back in his chair. He was slight and, as he aged, was becoming wizened. The yellow-white sun of Malthen never tanned but always freckled him, in the garish way given to some redheads, and his emerald eyes contrasted sharply with his complexion as his stare pinioned Vandover. “And what will we have when he re-emerges? Will we have a tool we can use?”
He inclined his head. He would have given his soul to hear the flow of communications Pepys controlled—to be able to manipulate the worlds of the Triad Throne and even the free and far-flung worlds of the Dominion simply through the networks Pepys held contracts on. No communication occurred that did not pass through the filter of the Triad Throne. Emperor Regis, who ruled before Pepys, had been good at wielding these reins, but Pepys was incredible. Vandover contained his fervor. “You will have a loyal fighting machine.”
“Will I? One hopes. And what of Amber?”
“She holds vigil.” Vandover’s face hardened in an expression his emperor could not help but catch—and interpret. The words were forced through pasty-white lips which slowly regained a more natural color.
“There,” Pepys said quietly, abandoning his mocking tone, “is a woman, despite what you think of her.” But he knew well, even better than Vandover himself, what the man thought of her. He paused, listening to something coming in, his thoughts momentarily abstracted. Then he looked back at Vandover.
“If it worked,” he said, “we have saved my throne.”
“May I suggest that we are finished with milady’s value to us?”
“We need her as long as I need Jack.”
“You can tell him you have sent Amber elsewhere. Malthen is, for all purposes, in a state of siege. We have troops keeping the agra lanes open for food transport. Otherwise, the Walkers are doing a good job of pressuring us.”
Pepys blinked, a predatory hooding of his brilliant eyes. “I would not believe us if I were Jack.”
“You’re his emperor.”
“A free man has no emperor. Amber may be the only hostage we have to keep Storm in line.” Pepys stroked one of the fiber leads in his com net. “She’s yours, Vandover—but only after Jack is off-planet. Whatever you do with her, I want nothing traced back to either of us. Understood?”
Vandover fought to contain the fierce heat lancing him. “A wise decision. She is, after all, a common criminal.”
“Common is the last word I’d apply to her.” The emperor shrugged. “Report to me when he’s awakened.” He spun back to his console, listening once again, fingers tapping out judgments, decisions, and notes on the keypad balanced across one thigh.
Vandover bowed himself out of the room. He wondered what Jack Storm was remembering now.
Sand blighted the horizon. As Jack exited staging, a rust and beige swath of hell met his eyes wherever he looked. Equipment racks swayed in the hot summer wind. He let out a pungent curse and the Milot techs working on the repair line looked up, bestial faces wrinkling and looking away. Solder popped and he could smell the flush from armor on the far racks. Only the Milot working lead stayed at attention as Jack walked over.
“I know it’s hot,” he said to the massive alien. “But you’ve got to keep dust out of the circuitry. You’re supposed to be under the domes.” Canopy sheeting overhead snapped in the wind. Its shade striped across the Milot’s face.
“Lieutenant,” the Milot said, his voice rumbling from a cavernous chest. “If you want to take a patrol out today, we must be working wherever we can. Dust is the least of your problems.” And the being waved a probe at the barren horizon where transport ships were supposed to be fielded.
“My concern,” snapped Jack, “is the welfare of my men. I don’t want to hear that the suits aren’t being repaired properly or aren’t fully powered up. I don’t want to hear that any of your crew is siphoning off supplies.”
The Milot grunted. His piglike gaze flicked away and returned. “And I suppose you be believing we grow berserkers out of your men, too. You’ll have your rack ready when you are, Lieutenant.” He spat into the dust at their feet. “And all you have to worry about will be sand.”
In his sleep, memory comes together in a violent clash with dream. He remembers why it is he hates Thraks and sand and doesn’t trust Milots. What it is like to fight long after the suits run low on power, and some of them grind to a halt, too heavy for a man to move on his own, leaving the wearers to die a horrible death, entombed in the battle armor. He tastes the bitter seeds of defeat again, abandoned by superior officers who have decided to cut their losses on Milos. He knows that his emperor, Regis, has been manipulated into this decision by his treacherous nephew Pepys, and that Regis will lose his throne and his life. But this is a nightmare from which he cannot awake. The transport ships will never arrive, except for a few. Recall will not be sounded. The Knights are among those troops deemed to be expendable. And even as he remembers, has the sum total of his life given back to him, childhood, family, adolescence, a shadow follows him. Like a snake of darkness, it swallows up his thoughts even as he’s fully regained them, and he can never go backward, only forward into his mind.
Desperately, he tries to confront the snake which is devouring all that he has been given back. It is hot inside the armor, and his grid is blurred by his own sweat, and the various leads clipped to his torso are more than irritating, they have become painful. The chamois at his back absorbs the salt and water dripping down.
Thraks are attacking, yes, but that is memory and this attack from within—it is reality. He has been betrayed again.
As he reaches out with his thoughts, a spark arcs out. He is trapped by Thraks, his men are down, power going, abandoned to the sand and he feels the new life stirring at his back. It reaches out for him, a white blossoming fire that beats back the dark devouring snake.
