Apocalypse Unseen

Kane ducked back behind the pillar, pressing himself and Mariah against it as another jarring scatter of bullets rattled against its edge.

“You okay?” he asked, watching the scene playing out all around them.

“Fine,” Mariah said, her voice high and breathless. “What about you? That bullet—”

“Shadow suit,” Kane said by way of explanation.

Although she didn’t consider herself a field agent, Mariah knew what Kane meant. While Kane might be sporting a bruise for the next few days where the bullet had struck against his arm in a hammer blow, it was a preferable alternative to what would have happened had he not been wearing the miraculous armor weave.

Kane remained tense, watching as the two armies—if indeed it was only two, it was hard to tell—exchanged fire, striking down unfortunate soldiers in sudden spills of red blood. It looked a lot like chaos, but then, in Kane’s experience, when it came down to it most ground wars did. “They’re not moving in unison,” he muttered, making a conscious effort to focus on a specific group—platoon or squadron, maybe?—who were all dressed in similar dirty white robes.

“What?” Mariah asked, confused and feeling woefully out of her depth.

Kane ignored her query, instead engaging his Commtact and hailing his partners, who had taken cover less than twenty feet away. “They’re not moving in unison, have you noticed?” he asked.

Brigid’s voice came back first, the confusion evident. She was crouched on her haunches beside a mangled column of stonework whose top had been sheared through as if bitten away by some gigantic monster, trying to piece the broken interphaser unit back together. “They’re not what?” she asked.

“Moving,” Kane said, “in unison. They’re shooting and they’re kind of moving forward in one direction, but there’s no strategy between the players.”

“Inexperienced, maybe?” Grant asked, chipping in on their shared frequency. He was standing close to Brigid’s hiding place, his shoulder pressed to another of the mangled stone columns, using a scope to watch the turret gun that had been set up on the upper level of the aged fort.

“Inexperienced could be it,” Kane agreed doubtfully, “but usually that brings out two styles of fighting—the gung ho who gets shot the moment he breaks cover and—”

Boom!

A shell struck near the cluster of ruined pillars, kicking up dirt and curtailing Kane’s speech for a moment.

“And?” Brigid prompted, glancing up from her work on the busted interphaser to make sure Kane was okay.

“And the coward,” Kane averred, “who hangs back and lets the others get shot. But I’m not really seeing those patterns, are you?”

“Uh-uh,” Grant confirmed after a few seconds’ observation of the running battle. “You might be onto something.” He brought the scope away from his eye, glancing across at Kane. “I don’t think the tripod cannon’s choosing targets. Its operators are firing wild.”

Kane nodded, considering what Grant had said. It wasn’t unusual for rookies to get behind a big cannon like that and shoot wild, figuring that something with such destructive power would just seek out and obliterate any target. But it was a fool’s game operating it like that—you went through ammo much quicker than you went through targets, and could often be caught with your metaphorical pants down when an armed enemy came close. Which wasn’t to underestimate the sheer destructive power of the cannon itself—CAT Alpha would do well to take it out of action if they wanted to survive the mess they had walked into.

“Think you can take out the cannon?” Kane asked Grant over the Commtact.

Grant smiled. “It would be my pleasure,” he said, edging out from behind the protective pillar.

“I’ll cover you,” Kane promised, stroking the Sin Eater pistol already clutched in his hand, “and keep an eye on the girls here.”

Sharing the Commtact frequency, Brigid glared at Kane with an annoyed “Hey!” before turning her attention back to her work.

* * *

GRANT WOVE OUT INTO the melee, ducking his head and scrambling as bullets zipped through the air less than a dozen feet away. His shadow suit and Kevlar coat would give him some protection, but it didn’t pay to get slack in a battle zone like this.

Grant ran, muscles moving with the fluidity of a jungle cat, hurrying across the sand-covered ground in short, fast bursts, using every hunk of broken stone and every fallen body as cover while he constantly updated his best route to the tripod cannon. The cannon was located on a second-story balustrade, its two young operators feeding a belt of bullets into its side as they swung the nose back and forth on its counterweights. Grant estimated that the cannon spit its 24 mm slugs at a rate of three or four per second, kicking up dirt and striking down the occasional solider too dumb or rattled to get out of its path in time. The army was moving away from the fort, so targets were becoming more spread out.

Grant crouched behind a truncated pillar resting on its side in pieces, searching the second story for a way up. The level was broken haphazardly, great chunks of the walkway missing. Can’t have made it easy to get that beast up there, Grant thought dourly.

A flight of steps caught his attention, winding up behind a masking wall and leading to the upper level of the ancient fort. It was open ground between Grant and the steps, just twenty feet but more than enough to take a bullet and end it all.

Grant glanced around, scouring the combat zone as a group of bloodstained soldiers came rushing past in a flurry of bullets. As Grant watched, one of the soldiers—little more than a kid, skinny and narrow shouldered, wearing camos stained with sweat and dirt—took a bullet to the back from the tripod cannon and went down on his knees, his face slamming into the dirt a moment later. His colleagues shouted something incomprehensible, shooting back at the cannon and all around them in a wild assault before vacating the area.

Suddenly, the cannon stopped firing, and the whole scene was beset with an eerie moment of calm amid the carnage. Grant took that moment to run, ducking low and keeping his head down, closing the twenty-foot gap between his hiding place and the stairwell that led to the second story.

* * *

FROM HIS OWN hiding place, Kane watched Grant make a run for it in the momentary quiet between cannon blasts. Come on, Grant, he mouthed, his eyes scouring the terrain all around his partner for any signs of a hidden ambush.

For a moment it looked as though Grant’s path would remain clear. Then, with no warning, a figure emerged from the shadows of a toppled pillar, holding an AK-47 rifle with a wide bandage wrapped low over his forehead. He had Grant in his sights, Kane could tell. Kane gently let out the breath he was holding, squeezing the trigger of his Sin Eater on the exhale.

* * *

GRANT WAS ALMOST at the stairwell entry when the soldier came bungling out from the shadow of a pillar. The man looked unsteady on his feet, and he was dressed in dirty fatigues with the brutal tool of an AK-47 clutched in his hands. There was something else, too, that Grant registered in the first instant he saw the man—he was wearing a white bandage across the top of his head, and the bandage came down to the level of his nostrils, entirely covering his eyes.

“What th—?” Grant asked even as the stranger turned his AK-47 on him.

Before he could fire, however, the bandaged soldier dropped to the ground, the distinctive recoil of a Sin Eater being discharged echoing amid the chaos of battle, a bloom of ghastly red materializing on the man’s fatigues where they covered his chest.

Kane!

Grant kept running. He would thank his partner later; right now he needed to get himself behind that wall and up those stairs to knock out the cannon that had already recommenced its incessant song of destruction from above him.

An instant later Grant was past the stone arch of the doorway and scrambling, blaster in hand, up the steep steps that led to the fort’s second level.

The archway was made from sand-colored stone, as were the steps. As Grant stepped into the shadows, he felt the heat of the burning sun on his face drop away, a relief of sudden coolness from the shade. In that instant, however, he was momentarily blind, his vision flickering in extremes of green as it tried to adjust after the brilliance of the direct sunlight. He took a moment, just a moment, to blink back his sun blindness, taking a pace forward onto the first stone step. The staircase curved around, winding up on itself as it ascended to the second story.

Two more steps and his vision was still restricted by the aftereffects of the sun...and Grant was in the sights of an attacker. He felt the movement of the breeze as the man stepped forward, lunging downward with the long blade of the knife he held, driving it toward Grant’s face.

Grant reared back, sweeping his left arm up to knock the blade aside by instinct alone. He still couldn’t see, not fully, his eyes rendering the figure attacking him from the shadows as a kind of dark blur of limbs and torso.

The man—and it was a man—spit something in a tongue Grant didn’t recognize. His Commtact tried to translate, came up with a phrase that was doubtless a curse, but sounded somehow ludicrous to his ears.

“Goat of a mother!”

But with the insult came something else—a gunshot, loud in the confines of the stone stairwell, the blast accompanied by the acrid smell of cordite. Something raced past Grant in that instant, and he heard the wall behind him give up a chunk of rock with a sound like walking on gravel.

Grant did not hesitate. Even through the retreating green mire of his eyesight, he brought his Sin Eater to bear, blasting his opponent in the left kneecap, hobbling the guy in an instant.

Grant’s attacker cried out in sudden shock and pain, stumbling forward, losing his balance on the steps above Grant. His blaster—a handheld pistol of unknown manufacture—spit again, sending a 9 mm slug at Grant in a roar of explosive propellant. The bullet struck Grant in the same instant, slamming high on his left biceps before reeling away with the impact. Grant grunted, stumbling against the wall to his right. It had been a glancing blow, clipping him below the shoulder with a lot of force but no penetration—his double layer of Kevlar and shadow suit had ensured that. But it still stung like something out of a blacksmith’s forge.

Grant raised his pistol and blasted again, sending a second shot into his opponent—now visible as the green wash across his vision retreated to a handful of spots when he blinked. The man was unshaved with an unruly mop of dark, curly hair held in place with a olive-green cap. His uniform—if you could call it that—was too tight across the chest and too large in the pants, and it looked as if it had been sewn together from scraps, albeit in a way that made for effective camouflage.

Grant stepped aside as his attacker sunk down the steps, blood seeping from his open mouth. Dead.

* * *