Cold War 2395, page 23
He starts walking again, aiming for the elevators. Against my better judgment, I step forward to follow him.
“Don’t move an inch, Lieutenant.”
I can’t stop them, though; my legs keep moving no matter what my brain tells them to do. My mouth also goes haywire, spouting shit I cannot control.
“What are you going to do up there if you find him?”
“Nothing.”
I’ve almost caught up with Grimm, just as he’s within sight of the elevators linked to the top of the Spire.
“That’s a lie.” I put a hand on his shoulder to stop his march. Big mistake.
His helmet’s visor whips down, and he swings around faster than I can process, smacking my hand off with a force that sends my whole body spinning backward. I crash to the floor. For a few seconds, my aching body refuses to move. When I finally look up, Grimm is approaching me.
“The argument ends here, Lieutenant,” he warns, getting closer as I struggle to lift my upper body off the floor. “Do not stand. As your commanding officer, I order you to stay down.”
For the brief moment I’m able to hold my head up, I look at Grimm, right past his faceplate and into his eyes.
“No,” I declare.
I tense, straining to lift myself with every last bit of energy I have left. I manage to get in a push-up position and start to stand up. Then a big, bulky metal boot presses down on my shoulder.
“Yes,” he says, looking down at me. He applies more pressure, crushing me beneath him. But he doesn’t stop pressing with his boot, even after he flattens me.
“You chose wrong,” he hisses. “I know what you’re up to. I know what you’re all up to.”
I don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about, and more importantly, I don’t care.
“I don’t know shit,” I say, tensing my body once last time, “except you left me to die, and now you’re threatening your best Marine.”
I lift myself up again, overpowering Cap’s boot. Grimm slackens for the briefest moment, caught off guard by the force of my resistance.
“And I ain’t talking about Beecher.”
I push up with all my strength and knock the captain’s leg off me, putting him off balance just long enough for me to spring to my feet. The second I’m upright, Cap’s already regained his footing and has his rifle pointed at my face.
I expect he’s going to give some angry final warning or say a finisher line or something, but he doesn’t. Before I can react, he pulls the trigger.
At the exact same moment, as my captain fires his rifle with every intention of finishing me off for good, an explosion knocks both of us off our feet. Cap’s bullet barely misses my skull, grazing the hair above my ear. A spritz of blood blasts across the side of my head as the bullet wound opens itself, though I’m distracted from the stinging pain when Cap and I fall flat on our asses. What the hell just rocked our floor? Missile fire? I hear something rumbling in the distance, just beyond the Spire. The noise is growing louder very, very quickly.
Behind us, the glass wall that made up the south side of the data archive hall shatters, blasting icicle-sized shards across the room with lethal force. Where Cap and I are, protected behind rows of holo-book racks, none of the incoming debris hits us—but that’s just phase one of the surprise.
An American fighter smashes through the window, coated in glass shards as it continues through the wall it’s just destroyed and smashes through the shelves behind us. Grimm and I dive in opposite directions. The fighter barrels forward, ramming through the remaining racks until it’s leveled the entire center of the room, leaving a thick wall of fire where its thrusters set the floor ablaze. It slows to a crawl on the other side of the room and then stops moving. At the same time, the trail of flames that’s erupted between Grimm and me starts to die down. He’s on the other side, staring in my direction. His visor’s covering his face, but I don’t need to see it to know that there’s blood on his mind.
Thanks to our little shakeup, I’m now closer to the elevator than the captain is. He doesn’t have his rifle anymore; he likely dropped it somewhere in the pool of fire that’s probably melting the thing to scrap right now. If I make a run for it while the flames are still high, maybe I can beat him to—
I make a dash for the elevator, getting a good yard’s worth of a head start before another surprise comes my way. A burst of bullets whip past my face, just an inch away from tearing off my damn nose. That ain’t the sort of aim that happens by accident. Those were warning shots. And they weren’t from Grimm.
I turn to see who the owns the silhouette on my right, the one stowing their rifle and climbing out of the fighter’s cockpit. The person is just a shadow at the current distance, surrounded by the flames of their busted, smoldering ship and hidden under the darkness of a network of smashed shelves twisting and warping above our heads, each one threatening to fall at any moment.
I glance over and see Grimm has his eyes laser-focused on the newcomer. I don’t dare step toward the elevator again, since I know that’s just gonna buy me a face full of bullets. Instead, I join Grimm in waiting for the new guy to step out of the shadows. I also keep an eye on the dissipating fire separating my captain and me. Warm blood drips down the back of my neck. Between the bruises, aches, and gashes scattered across my body, whatever vitality I have left better be enough to get me out of here.
Our mystery guest walks toward us at a leisurely pace, clearly in no rush now that they have our attention. As precious seconds tick by, I can’t help but look back at the elevator, still just a few yards away.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
Why does that voice sound so familiar—
Our third wheel finally steps out of the shadows, and I make the connection. But it’s not possible—it can’t be him. There’s no way he could’ve made it here; there’s no way any friendly forces could’ve made it here. Unless . . .
“You traitorous piece of shit,” Grimm growls, clenching his fists and adopting a fighting stance.
Looks like our new guest may not be so friendly after all.
CHAPTER 20
Gourd
Clad in shimmering blue ACA, complete with custom highlights, plating, and two iconic, wrist-bound retractable metal lassos, is the infamous leader of Virginia’s 2nd Battalion, Colonel Bertram Artemis.
“Howdy there, boys,” he says, his face hidden behind his voice-modulating visor. “What are the odds of seeing you here?” He laughs at his own joke.
Grimm and I don’t move a muscle.
“Pretty high, I’d think,” Captain responds dryly. “Anti-aircraft turrets aren’t going to shoot down one of their own, after all.”
Either Grimm’s gone off his fucking rocker and is just pointing the finger at everyone, or he’s been hiding something from me for way too long.
“So you think it’s me, eh?” the colonel asks.
“I smelled treachery the second you landed on the station,” Grimm answers, choosing to skip the banter and get right to the punching. He runs at Artemis full speed ahead, kicking his boots on to deliver a rocket-powered punch.
Artemis puts him down like a stray dog. With a lightning-fast flick of his wrist, the colonel extends one of his lassos and yanks back at just the right moment, catching Captain’s legs. Grimm misses his punch and goes swirling across the floor as Artemis keeps him tied up, only releasing once the captain’s boots are pointed in the direction of the Virginian’s flaming fighter. With too much momentum to stop, Grimm flies at the burning ship, racing toward it like a giant blue bullet. The last glimpse I get of him is his armored body smashing through the craft, disappearing behind a shower of sparks and flames, eliciting another round of combustion.
My captain is gone. It’s just Artemis and me. And something tells me my dragon skin armor isn’t going to hold up against those lassos as well as Captain’s ACA did.
“You wanna find out how tight these bad boys really are,” Artemis challenges, reading my mind as he flicks the metal cables out of his suit’s wrists, “or you wanna stay where you are and not end up like the sack of shit roasting to death inside my firepit over there?”
I glance down at my body armor, then back at his lassos. Then I lift up my hands.
“Good boy.”
He keeps his distance, eyeballing me to make sure I don’t have any tricks up my sleeve. Once he’s convinced I’m just a battered, bruised warfighter who’s completely out of options, he relaxes a bit.
“Now, you wanna tell me your name, Marine?”
I don’t reply.
“Any day now,” he says, sauntering around, though never straying more than a whip’s length away from my position. After a few seconds, he looks at me. “You know what? Take your time. By my count, we’ve got twenty minutes to kill, anyway.”
My eyes go wide. “You . . . you know? You want to let it happen?”
“Did you ever think, Marine, that maybe your captain was playing tricks on you? I’ve known Grimm a long, long time, and the last time I trusted him . . .” As the colonel speaks, he raises his visor, giving me a clean look at his face. “I got this.”
A scar stretches down the length of his face, all the way from the right tip of his forehead to the edge of his bushy silver mustache.
“He puts on a good show, sure, but when the chips are down, he’d leave you to rot,” he posits, reading my face.
I try not to show what I’m thinking, but the second my lip twitches, he sees it.
“Ah, so you already know,” he continues. “Well, then I can be frank. I care about the people I share my meals, beds, and days with. I do. Do you know how many men I’ve lost on today’s mission?”
“How many . . .” I’m still not sure if I’m allowed to lower my arms. For a guy who claims to care about his fellow Marines so much, he sure likes flicking around those metal ropes of his.
“Zero. Not one. When the fight is over, every man in my battalion is going to go home to his wife and kids in a nice uniform. Not a body bag.” He narrows his eyes at me. “Could Grimm say the same?”
Again, I try not to show any emotion, but my stupid fucking face betrays me.
“So when I tell you we need to let that data wipe happen upstairs,” he says, waving a hand to tell me I can lower my arms, “understand I’m saying it from a place of good intentions. That tech ain’t gonna do nobody any good if it gets out of here.”
“Okay . . .” I inch forward, now that Colonel Mustache thinks he’s disarmed me. “But that still leaves me with a question.”
“Shoot,” he replies, letting me close the gap as I pour on the “dumb giant” act real thick.
I scratch my head, getting within arm’s reach of him. “I’m just wondering . . . how did you know the data wipe is upstairs?”
His expression flips upside down. He realizes I’m still onto him, and before he can slip his visor back down, I land the biggest, hardest fucking punch of all time right on his nose. I pull my hand away and see it’s splattered with blood.
Artemis stumbles backward a bit, his helmet immediately sealing and trapping those bloody, gushing holes of his inside with him. I don’t know if someone can drown inside their own ACA, but I’d love to find out with the colonel. Just not right now.
While he’s still reeling from the punch, I charge toward the elevator—also known as my ticket out of the shitshow—as fast as my feet will take me. Seconds pass, and it gets closer and closer until I’m an arm’s length away, at which point I smash the touchpad with my hand, requesting that the doors please open right fucking now. Just to be safe, I hit the pad again, and again, and again, until the doors start to open, revealing the magic box that can take me to the top. I’m one step from freedom.
Something whistles through the air behind me, and a metal cord wraps around my ankle. It tugs at me, and before I know it I’m on my chest, being pulled across the ground, sliding over the all-but-dead flames still simmering in the center of the room.
The cord drags me until I’m about to slam into the wall on the opposite side of the room, at which point it releases me. I crash hard, and my right arm goes numb while the rest of my body screams in pain.
“Now why the hell would you go and do that?” Artemis asks with that damn acid tongue of his. My eyes are too watery to see him clearly. “I was gonna let you live!”
“Bullshit!” I shout back, still reeling from the hit. “You’re an undercover agent for the Russians. I know whose lives you really care about!”
“Well, if you guessed my own and my family’s, then I admit, you’re on the money.” He steps directly in front of me as I finally manage to open my eyes and see him for the traitor that he is. “But I really do hate unnecessary casualties.”
He pulls out his rifle from the sheath on his back.
“Guess it’s a good thing the next one’s no longer unnecessary.”
For the second time in five minutes, a superior officer points his gun at me, promising that I’m about to meet my maker. But then Grimm bursts out of the wreckage of the fighter behind us, and I know, for the second time, that I’m not ending here.
Artemis doesn’t even have time to twist around before Grimm leaps into the air for a supercharged right hook, flames still rippling off his armor. He descends upon the colonel with all the fire and fury of an avenging angel. I roll out of the way and watch Cap clock Artemis in the face with such force that the traitor goes down in a single hit, smashing to the floor and dropping his rifle. A second after losing it, the colonel tries to grab it back, but Grimm’s one step ahead of him and puts a rocket boot over the gun. He activates his thrusters and heats the firearm to dangerous temperatures, slagging the metal just enough to ruin functionality while using the rest of his body to pin down his opponent.
“You’re done,” Grimm hisses, hammering Artemis with a brutal punch to the back of the head. Then another. And another. At the rate he’s coming down on the guy, even with the ACA, I’d wager the Virginian has another couple of seconds left before his head’s too banged up to work anymore.
Since Grimm’s busy giving the colonel his just desserts, now seems like a perfect time for me to get the fuck out of here and try to get a hold of Beecher—
“Halt, Lieutenant,” the captain barks, spotting me across the room.
In that moment of distraction, Artemis sees his window and flings Grimm off of him. He hops to his feet and, before I can react, swings a lasso at me, catching me by the chest. He pulls me forward with enough force that my feet leave the ground. I hurl through the air until I’m within range of him, at which point he smashes me with a gut punch so strong that I crumple over, paralyzed. The lasso unwraps and slips back around Artemis’s wrist as he goes to block an incoming blow from Grimm, who’s back in action just a few feet away from my winded, floored body.
I stay down, unable to move a muscle as the two men square off. Since I’m cut off from the other side of the room, the best thing I can do is watch as Grimm and Artemis give each other hell, and wait for an opening—if not from them, then from my body telling me it’s willing to get going again.
As I work on relearning how to breathe, Artemis lands a hit on Grimm. Shit, that fire he was cooking in probably toasted his nanogel; now every blow is going to land ten times harder. With the way Grimm reacts to the hit, it looks like he’s realizing the same thing. Recovering remarkably quickly for someone who just got ACA-socked, he gets over the pain and starts slamming the colonel before he can whip out the lassos. Grimm’s arms move faster than I can keep up with, whaling on Artemis as though killing him will single-handedly save the country. Pretty sure Cap thinks it actually will, given how relentlessly he’s going at it. For every punch Artemis blocks, he eats two more, and even in his damaged state, Grimm starts to overpower his opponent, boxing him into a bad position between his fists and one of the crumpling holo-book racks.
Grimm keeps up his flurry of attacks, rocking and socking the colonel at a rate so aggressive it looks like even Artemis’s nanogel is having a hard time blocking the full force of the impacts. One gut-punch in particular sends the Virginian smashing into the shelf Captain has cornered him against, and before either of them know it, the whole thing starts to fall.
Hundreds of pounds of twisting and folding metal groan as the nearly ceiling-high rack tilts downward. Its foundation, already warm and soft from the fires that’ve been blazing for the past few minutes, melts apart like butter on a hot knife. Then the top of the rack breaks free and hurtles toward all three of us below.
I close my eyes, fully prepared for it to smash onto the ground and grind me to dust beneath it. But after a few seconds of ear-splitting noise, I realize none of the incoming debris is on track to hit me. Instead, it’s going to bury Artemis and Grimm alive.
My captain sees the incoming hazard and drags the fallen colonel off the floor, tossing him right beneath the rapidly growing shadow of the largest pile of airborne scraps. Like clockwork, Grimm slips out of the way and earns the pleasure of watching Artemis get crushed by pound after pound of hard metal crashing out of the sky, raining down directly onto the man’s ACA with a force I shudder to imagine.
The biggest piece fails to hit the ground. Instead, it gets wedged between a pair of still-standing shelves. It hangs over the pile that’s buried Artemis, unwilling to drop. Grimm looks at it for a moment, unsure if he should try to shake the nearby racks to make it fall, but then, seeming to realize how much time the whole scuffle has already wasted, decides against it.
Instead, he dashes toward me. Without the nanogel swirling around his suit, I can just barely make out his eyes through his visor. They look angry . . . confused . . . tired . . . but also—God, I hope I’m reading him right—concerned.
“Lieutenant, can you move?”
I simply let out a groan, still not sure I want to voluntarily move any part of my body.
“Come on,” he barks, hand outstretched. “You need to get up.”
Why, why now? Does he . . . he . . . care? . . . I can’t move my chest, or my legs, or arms, or anything else I should normally be able to move, and I can’t feel much of anything . . . but deep down, I do feel one singular thing: a pang of gratitude. And in that moment, I start to regain control over the rest of my body.
