CROSS FIRE Read online

  Donovan didn’t understand at first. “What do you mean?”

  “She didn’t get an evacuation notice.” Leon spoke up from where he’d slumped into a chair at the table. It was a jarring shock to hear him so angry; Leon rarely raised his voice even when bullets were flying and things were exploding. Now his normally mild expression was warped with distress.

  Donovan turned to Cass with alarm. She held up her right arm. “I’m damaged goods, remember? Only perfectly fit and healthy exos are being evacuated.”

  Cass had been injured last year in a grenade explosion during the raid on the Warren. After a lot of surgery and physiotherapy, she’d regained use of her right shoulder and arm and had been cleared to return to duty, but her exocel was permanently damaged; she couldn’t armor the limb at all and wore a protective sleeve over the scarred tissue and misaligned nodes.

  “You can’t be serious,” Donovan exclaimed, his voice mirroring Leon’s dismay. “They disqualified you because of your arm?”

  Cass emerged from the fridge with three bottles of beer and sat down at the table across from Leon. Leaning back, she propped her booted feet noisily onto the seat of an empty chair. “Honestly,” she said, opening a bottle and taking a generous swig, “it’s okay.”

  “It’s not okay,” Leon insisted. “You’re still combat-rated. There’s no reason—”

  “There’s nothing else to talk about,” Cass said with finality, opening another bottle and pushing it toward her partner. “Let’s not make D listen to a depressing bitch fest about what we can’t change.” She nudged an empty chair in Donovan’s direction, inviting him to sit with them. “They had to set the criteria somehow. And like D said, the world’s going to need good stripes to stay behind and deal with the fallout. I might as well be one of them.”

  This pronouncement made Leon look more unhappy than ever. He downed half his bottle of beer in a couple of forceful swallows. “I have to evacuate,” he explained to Donovan. “My little brother’s an exo in the erze, in his second year of SecPac training. My parents would never forgive me if I didn’t go and use the family allowance to take him with me.”

  Donovan sat down, his heart aching. It was happening just as he’d imagined. Families were being torn apart. Close erze mates were being separated. It was all wrong. Jet and Vic were supposed to have a future together. Leon and Cass had started out as a bit of an odd pairing, but over the past year they’d grown nearly as close as Jet and Donovan. For Leon to be forced to leave his partner behind …

  Donovan took the bottle Cass offered him, but his throat felt too closed up to drink it. The front door opened again. Donovan thought that perhaps Jet and Vic were coming back inside, but it turned out to be a whole group of people: Thad, Tennyson, Lucius, Ariadne, and Katerina. All of them crowded into the kitchen. “Are Vic and Jet still out there?” Cass asked Thad.

  Thad nodded. He looked sad; Thad and Vic worked well together, but they’d never been particularly close as partners when not on duty. “I knew Vic would go out of erze on this.”

  The five new arrivals had been given evacuation notices, but they all had friends or family members whom they would have to leave behind as a result. Everyone felt even worse when they learned that Cass had not been selected. “This whole thing sucks,” Katerina said.

  “I think Donovan was onto something.” Lucius nodded in Donovan’s direction. “What if none of us agree to go? If the shrooms won’t evacuate all of us, then we tell ’em to scorch off.”

  “If we go out of erze,” Thad said, “we endanger the entire evacuation plan. There’re a lot of other civilian exos who are relying on it.” The lieutenant’s expression was troubled, and when he spoke again, he sounded much older than his twenty-two years. “When there are no good choices, you need to put your faith somewhere. I have to believe Soldier Werth and Commander Tate have considered all the options and wouldn’t issue erze orders unless it was the right decision. I’ll keep doing what I know how to do, and that’s trust in the erze.”

  Lucius looked back to Donovan. “What about you, D? You weren’t this quiet at Commander Tate’s briefing.”

  Donovan avoided the gazes of his erze mates. The Rii Galaxysweeper and the barren world of Bithis revolved in his mind as he tried to moisten his throat. “Erze orders are erze orders,” he said, and from across the kitchen, Thad nodded.

  “What am I going to do?” Jet moaned, pacing the living room while Donovan sat on the bottom step of the stairs and watched helplessly. “I told her what you told me—that Earth and everyone on it might end up scorched. She said she’d made her choice already and nothing would change her mind.”

  It was the evening before the deadline and Jet seemed no closer to a decision. He groaned and fell onto the sofa. “My mom and dad had a big fight. They never fight. My dad pretty much told me to save myself and petition to take my mom with me. He trotted out a bunch of examples from history where people who stayed behind when things started going south ended up dead, but those who left went on to shape the world in new ways. My mom said she wasn’t going to leave him, but he argued that since we’re both exos, we’d need each other more than him in the long run. They both ended up crying. It was the worst thing ever.”

  A long silence followed, during which Donovan picked at a frayed edge of carpet, unable to think of what to say. He’d lived in Jet’s house for nearly two months after his father’s death. As a kid, he’d probably spent as much time in Jet’s place as he had in his own house, and lacking his own mother while growing up, Jet’s mom had been the next best thing to him. The thought of the Mathews family in such distress was awful, and he was sure it was only one case in thousands.

  Jet suddenly turned to Donovan. “You’ve accepted already, right?”

  “Um. Not yet.”

  Jet sat up. “But you have to. Soldier Werth ordered you to help make sure people cooperate with the evacuation.”

  “You’re under erze orders too,” Donovan reminded him.

  “And if I go against them and stay?”

  Donovan tried to force a smile. “You’re not going to get rid of me that easily.”

  Jet’s expression crumpled further; he dropped his head in his hands. “This is unreal. I can’t believe any of this is happening,” he muttered at the ground. A long silence followed before he spoke again. “I must really love her.”

  Donovan ached for him. “We shouldn’t have to choose between erze duty and the people we love,” he said quietly. He understood that better than anyone.

  Jet did nothing but breathe harshly for a minute. When he spoke again, his voice was a dull whisper. “I don’t know what’s the right thing to do. All I know is that it’s wrong to put my own feelings ahead of everything else. That’s not what being a stripe is about.” His shoulders rose and fell. “I can’t stand the idea of leaving Vic. It makes me feel sick to my stomach, D. Like I’m going to throw up.” Jet raised his face at last, his expression utterly wretched but resolute. “But if I go against erze, I won’t even know who I am anymore.”

  With the leadenness of a man condemned to the atomizer, Jet picked up his screen, already displaying the evacuation notice. He stared down at it in reluctant anguish for two final seconds, then pressed his thumb to the sensor to confirm his acceptance.

  Jet sagged. He got up slowly, picked up Donovan’s screen, and offered it to him without speaking. Donovan raised his eyes to his partner’s face. Jet’s expression was stoic and expectant and pleading, maybe even just a touch threatening. Stay with me on this.

  Seven years ago, Donovan had told Soldier Werth that he wanted to be a soldier-in-erze because of his best friend. That fact had not, he realized now, changed all that much. Donovan took the proffered screen and thought, for an instant, of the business card in his pocket, of Anya’s lips, her fingers on his neck—then he pressed his thumb down. The screen flashed a confirmation—oddly simple for something so momentous—and Donovan thought, We’re really going to do this. We’re going to l
eave Earth.

  What have we done?

  A loud booming began thudding overhead. Fast, deep, and vibratory, a frantic drumbeat. He and Jet stared upward in confusion and disbelief. They’d never heard this particular zhree emergency siren deployed except in military drills, but they understood the meaning in an instant.

  The Round was under attack.

  For a second, Donovan entertained the possibility that this might be some drill he hadn’t known about. But then Jet looked at him, his face mirroring Donovan’s alarm, and they sprang into motion. Neither of them was in uniform; Donovan was in jeans and an old shirt, Jet in cargo shorts and a tee. Donovan shoved on his boots; Jet grabbed their holstered duty guns. He passed Donovan’s sidearm to him as they bolted from the house, running for the parked skimmercar. Once they were in their seats, Jet grabbed the controls and spun the vehicle out into the street as Donovan punched open the dashboard comm. “Command, what’s going on?” he demanded.

  “The Towers are under attack. M-multiple locations—the upper landing fields, th-the eastern and western entrances, the central—” The SecPac dispatcher, Liz, sounded uncharacteristically flustered and they could barely make out her words over the continued rapid booming of the emergency alarms, but it hardly mattered. Jet took the turn onto the first spoke road at a speed that made Donovan brace himself against the side of the skimmercar, digging armored fingers into the seat. Several other SecPac vehicles were already racing toward the shadowy spires of the Towers. Jet sped up and fell in behind them. As they neared the vast complex of alien skyscrapers, Donovan’s gaze was pulled upward. “What in all erze is that?”

  There was something attached to the Towers—a strange, blood-colored bulbous structure that marred the familiar outline of the tallest spire. It looked like a large fungal growth that had ballooned without warning, or a sticky ball of goo that had been thrown at the side of the structure and stuck, deforming and wrapping around the metal.

  Jet said in a disbelieving voice, “I think it’s a ship.”

  As Donovan stared, he saw movement pouring around, on, and inside the Towers. In the dark, it was hard to see exactly what was happening. The flexible, deformed red glob that had stuck to the side of the spire appeared to be opening—not from a single door but from numerous dilating pores, like a piece of rotten fruit developing worm-eaten tunnels through time-lapse footage. Dark shapes with many legs were clambering out of the alien structure, dropping to the ground or onto the Towers’ causeways or open landings. So horribly mesmerizing was the sight that Donovan wasn’t paying attention to where the skimmercar was going and was roughly thrown against the safety restraints when Jet spun the vehicle to a stop behind three other SecPac cruisers clustered at the foot of the Towers near one of the entrances.

  Donovan knew the Towers as well as he knew anything in the Round. He’d been here countless times in his life. Now the incongruity of the deeply familiar with the utterly unbelievable stalled his mind for a moment as panotin erupted from every node in his body, bringing him instantly to full armor.

  Jet sucked in a sharp breath. “Erze almighty.”

  Two Soldiers were lying on the ground beside the entrance. Donovan had never actually seen a zhree corpse before, but he was certain that these two zhree were dead. One was rolled over on his domed body, the six limbs sprawled limply; the other was in a half-upright, kneeling position, two legs bent as if still trying to push himself up, but he was motionless. The most vulnerable parts of a zhree were the eyes and the orifices on the underside of the torso; both the Soldiers had more than one eye shattered. Viscous liquid seeped out of the gaping holes of their fractured amber lenses.

  Scrambling past the bodies and into the Towers were human-sized, six-limbed figures that Donovan recognized, after a second of confusion, from that day he’d been summoned to Soldier Werth’s quarters. A cold rush of fear bathed him. Mottled hulls, reddish eyes, thick fins.

  Rii Hunters.

  Most of the Hunters continued rushing into the Towers, but at the sudden arrival of the SecPac vehicles, a handful of them paused, their many dusky, gleaming eyes taking in the appearance of the humans who advanced, weapons drawn, bristling with armor but silent with astonishment. Donovan threw open the skimmercar door. He and Jet ran toward the scene. Cass and Leon were already ahead of them, along with Tennyson, Lucius, and several others; Donovan didn’t get the chance to see who else, because at that moment, everything around him erupted in a frenzy of violence.

  There was no way to tell who fired first; it might have been one of the humans, it might have been the Hunters. It didn’t matter; in an instant, the blast of electripulse weapons rent the air. Donovan and Jet had nothing more powerful on them than their handguns. As the night exploded with noise, Donovan threw himself behind the nearest skimmercar, tabbed the coil charger, and swung his weapon up toward the first alien figure he could see, trying frantically to aim for one of its eyes. It was near impossible—like shooting a spinning, leaping bull’s-eye in the dark. The intruders were coming at them so fast that their many limbs blurred. Adrenaline flooded into Donovan’s body and he opened fire. He got off two, perhaps three shots before his exocel fell—from full armor to nothing but soft, bare skin, pricked with sudden cold.

  No. Understanding and panic rose together in a wave. Sweet erze, no.

  Donovan grasped desperately for his armor, like a man feeling around a stump for his missing limb, knowing even as he kept trying that it would be in vain. The trip wire in his brain, present in every Hardened human, was triggered by aggression toward any zhree. And though they were different from the Mur colonists, the Rii Hunters—with their six limbs, domed and patterned torsos, flashing fins, and many eyes—were still zhree. By attacking them, he’d rendered himself defenseless.

  The horrible truth hit him: He was facing death as a squishy.

  As were all of his erze mates. Less than twenty feet in front of him, he glimpsed Tennyson stumbling back in alarm, staring down in shock at his unarmored hands. Donovan watched in horror as one of the Hunters leapt onto the roof of the first parked skimmercar, rocking it with its weight, a stocky weapon cradled in two of its limbs. It fired a blast that blew a hole in Tennyson’s chest the size of a baseball. The exo’s blood sprayed across Lucius’s arms and face. Lucius stared uncomprehendingly at his partner’s body as Tennyson collapsed. Donovan screamed, “Get away from there!” as another Hunter leapt over the first one, cleared the skimmercar, and drove an armored, serrated limb straight into Lucius’s midsection, piercing it clean through.

  The first Hunter swung his weapon around and Donovan threw himself on Jet, tackling his partner to the ground as the blast went through one side of their skimmercar and out the other with a metallic bang. Donovan’s knees and hands struck the concrete; his breath left him in a whoosh as he and Jet landed hard. From somewhere, he heard a human scream—whose, he could not tell—and then a couple of the Rii Hunters began shouting to each other in a language that Donovan had never heard. Not Mur, with its lilting, musical trilling, but a rapid chirping, clicking language that sounded at once sinister and gleeful. They were exclaiming with delight, Donovan suspected, at the ease with which these Earth creatures died.

  Donovan pushed up and grabbed his partner by the shoulders, bare fingers digging against bone, not so much as a thread of panotin to protect either of them. Jet lay still and staring, seemingly paralyzed, and Donovan remembered what it had been like when it had happened to him the first time—the feeling of complete and utter helplessness, the humiliation, the terror of losing control of one’s body. It had paralyzed him too, at the time, but that had not been a life-or-death situation. “Jet!” Donovan shook his erze mate roughly, forcing him to focus. “We can still fight without our armor. We have to or we’re all dead. Don’t freeze up on me!”

  Jet blinked, his gaze focusing, understanding registering behind the shock. He nodded, resolute, but with more fear in his eyes than Donovan had ever seen in any combat situation the
y had been in together. This was not something they’d trained for; they had never been taught how to fight zhree—why would they?—and though they had drilled to perform through hunger, thirst, pain, and fatigue, they had never, ever imagined having to go into battle without their exocels. They might as well have attempted to learn how to fight without arms.

  Donovan rolled off Jet, grabbing the handgun that he’d dropped and scrambling back onto his feet in a crouch. The 9mm electripulse pistol in his hands seemed a weak, feeble toy, woefully inadequate against these monsters. On the other side of the skimmercar he could hear more gunfire, tearing metal, thuds, shouting. Over the commotion, he heard Cass’s voice clearly over the others, yelling, “Don’t just stand there, move, dammit! And aim for the eyes! You don’t need your armor to spray some lead into these things!” and someone else howling—Ariadne, he thought—“They killed Tenny and Lucius! Those scorching shrooms killed them!” Mingled with the voices of the desperate humans rang the menacing chirping speech of the Hunters, like some birdsong from hell. Blood thundered in Donovan’s ears. He had one thing on his mind now: survive. Drive these Hunters back long enough to allow him, Jet, and their erze mates to get away alive and warn the rest of the Round.

  Tennyson and Lucius lay not far away from him, their torn bodies in the center of an expanding pool of blood. Donovan choked down fear and fury and focused on the two E201 electripulse rifles that had fallen to the ground from the men’s hands as they had died. He grabbed Jet’s arm and pointed, and they ran, hunched over between the skimmercars, toward the weapons. A loud chirrup, another metallic crunch, and then two blasts gouged the ground next to them like miniature asteroid impacts. Donovan dived for the E201 as he saw the shadow coming for him. Rolling onto his back in a puddle of Tennyson’s blood, he slammed the rifle to full auto and blasted the Hunter on top of the car with a noisy volley of bullets. The Hunter gave a loud whistle of pain and anger and toppled off the roof of the vehicle, its damaged armor rippling as it disappeared from sight. Donovan kicked the other rifle toward Jet, who grabbed it and brought it up just as the other Hunter, its serrated limbs gleaming and slicked with bits of Lucius’s flesh, spun toward Donovan and stabbed its deadly limbs down at him.