Hard Drop (31 page)

“Sorry about this.” He said, steadying himself against the table as he ripped open yet another pack. Slowly, carefully, he reached towards the wound at her side with the gauze pad, swabbing the dried blood from its edge.
 

She groaned quietly at first, as he worked away the grime from the edges of the wound. He moved the swab quickly and nimbly, trying to press as lightly as possible, but when the cloth reached the open wound, she cried out, and her eyes fluttered open.
 

“Sorry…” he said again, his hand pausing over the wound, pulling back for fear of hurting her.
 

She breathed deeply, steadying herself until the pain subsided. “It’s alright.” She groaned, letting herself slide back onto the desk. “I can take it.”
 

Tyco handed her the flask and continued, pausing only to open fresh gauze pads when the old ones became clogged and laden with dirt and blood.

“Thank you.” She said, later, when he had finished taping the gauze to her side. He leaned back against the table behind him, tipping the flask up to his mouth, finally allowing himself a healthy sip of what remained. He met her eyes silently, nodding and looking away, the question on his tongue weighing
 
heavily on his mind. He looked back to find Flip staring back at him expectantly, a knowing smile on her lips.

"Why did you kill him?" He said, at last, steadily holding her gaze.

"Why do you ask,
Cap
?" She answered coolly, and it seemed to Tyco that she was almost amused in spite of her injuries. It infuriated him. "Do you think he didn’t deserve it?"

"No." Tyco said, his voice growing calm as the words came out. "I want to know if you killed him because of what he made here." He nodded towards the dark, looming visor of MAP-11 that stared at both of them from the far end of the room. "Did you kill the doctor because he created him?"

Flip followed his gaze to the creature. She thought carefully before answering, weighing the security implications over in her head. "No." She said, quietly. "He’s exactly what they ordered.”

Tyco nodded, the words sounding heavy and grim in his ears. “And the implants? The chips they put into the soldiers?”
 

“Those too.” Flip shrugged. “They were the primary project here. The file says partial success.”
 

“Then why…?” Tyco asked, his voice trailing off in confusion. The question hung in the air. Flip stared back at Tyco, her eyes sparkling as she watched the uncertainty play across his face.
 

“He was stealing.” She said, at last. “Misappropriating funds. They were going to send someone before the rebellion, but then, well...” She glanced at MAP-11 easily, putting one hand against her side as she turned her head. “They sent me to see what happened to the doctor. No one thought that the creature would work. No one thought he’d actually create it.”

“So that’s what we came for?” Tyco asked, his heart catching in his throat. “For a fraud investigation?”

“Don’t, Commander.” Flip answered coolly, her voice razor-sharp. “We both know what we signed up for here.”
 

Tyco stared at her, wondering how he’d mistaken her for the green and unassuming recruit he’d seen in the launch bay. The woman before him now was hard-boiled and cynical, as much a part of the Admiralty elite as Lieutenant Sorenson before her. She turned away from Tyco, dismissing him wordlessly with a nod of her head, treating him like a junior officer.
 

But there was something else, too, something he’d forgotten until now, something he’d noticed on this mission. Something he’d forgotten until now. And the memory of it sparked a thought in his head, an answer for her cocky self-assurance. Evidence that she wasn’t quite as secure in her answers as she was letting on.

“Did you call in our position?” She asked, glancing at the communications portal that dominated one side of the control room.

“No.” He answered, absently. “Not yet.”
 

“You should’ve done that first.”
 

Tyco didn’t answer that, letting the silence hang heavy in the room.
 

“What will you do with him?” He asked, a last. It was obvious who he meant, and Flip answered without meeting his eyes.
 

“That’s up to the Admiralty.” She sighed shortly. The pain had made her drowsy and irritable. “We’ll be up for medals.” She offered. “Or promotion. Try to focus on that.”
 

“Is that why you backed up his project files down there?” He asked, casually broaching the question that had risen to his mind.

That did get her attention, and she stared at him across the room, unspeaking.

“We weren’t sent for that, so either they already knew about it or didn’t care. Which makes me think you wanted evidence. Just in case.”

“Just in case?” She asked, steadily holding his gaze.

“In case that promotions didn’t come through.” He answered, directly and sweetly.

Flip clenched her jaw and stared back at him with a grin playing about her mouth. “You have your job, Commander.” She answered. “I have mine.”
 

“And when I get you home, you can tell them that.” Tyco answered, rising from his chair. Without another glance back, he stepped from the room, out through the door and onto the blistering tarmac.

A warm breeze washed over him from behind, carrying pieces of ash with it. One fell in Tyco’s hair, and he picked it out with his fingers. Pausing before he dropped it, he recognized the veiny imprint of a leaf in the ash. The bombardment had been so heavy, and the fire so hot, that it had not had time to lose its shape before it was reduced to embers and flung up into the clouds.
 

He dropped it again, letting it flutter to the ground intact. He turned, raising his eyes to face the gates and the desert beyond them. He stared out along the road into the distance, watching as the dust settled slowly before his eyes.
 

Behind it, far away now, the ugly dark fires stretched along the horizon, marking the limits of the city they had left behind them. The sky overhead rippled outwards, the ash cloud spreading until it obliterated what little blue remained, turning the horizon a deep, macabre red.
 

Tyco sat, staring upwards at it, holding his gun in hand. There was nothing to do, now; both Flip and Chip were stable, and there was no one left to fight. MAP-11 had been silent as ever as he had left the room, staring blankly back at him through his tinted visor, his breathing deep, but uneven, hinting at the pain he felt. Tyco sat outside on the slope, fingers turning over the dogtags of the soldiers he had lost, eyes open and unblinking. He alone had come through the day with little more than a scratch. In other circumstances, in the company of his soldiers, it might have felt like a miracle, a blessing. But now, alone on the concrete runway, there was no joy, no celebration. Only the emptiness of soldiers lost.
 

The legion had casualties, of course; they were a fact of life. You might even get used to them, little by little. Sometimes a third, sometimes even half of the unit might be dead or missing after a mission, but the Legion went on.
 

But this – a near-complete loss – this was too much. It had never been like this. They were too good, too precise, too well-trained for this to happen. No matter how badly command fouled it up, they always had options. They always had outs. They always had each other.
 

Tyco had learned long ago not to second-guess the decisions he made, not on the day, not in the field, but there was little to stop him now. Because that was the truth of it: there was nothing to do, nothing but wait for the cloud to blow over and the rescue ships to pick up their signal.
 

More than once, he eyed the mountains beyond them, the brown and yellow hills, parched by the desert dryness, rolling away under the red sky. His throat was parched and his rifle was heavy in his hands, but still they beckoned him, promising an exit, a retreat, a new road away from the brutal negligence of the Admiralty’s interference.
 

More than once he decided to rise and answer their call, but found himself, long minutes after, still sitting in the same spot, held in place by a memory and an obligation.
 

There, in the quiet moment after the storm had passed, Tyco remembered.

The assault on the
Portnow's
bridge had lasted a brutal 15 minutes. Tyco and the Captain had arrived near its end, even as the marines surged up through the maintenance corridor, flanking the remaining handful of defenders and opening fire. They had wilted, the wild men, falling to the ground as the unit cut through them with precise, direct gunfire. Not one of them had even attempted to surrender. One by one, the soldiers exposed their distended forms, tearing through their blood-soaked layers until the skin showed through and they stared into the horrible, snarling faces of the men who had murdered and brutalized two crews.

The silence that followed was total. The troopers advanced slowly, some double-checking their rifle displays for heat signatures, others staring around into the darkness of the bridge, on edge and wary of another ambush.
 

But none came. The small group of defenders now lying half-naked in the frigid air of the bridge had been enough to take the ships, it seems, and hold them. Their stench was unbearable, permeating the thin air all around. A thin layer of dust and filth coated everything, making the ground slick beneath Tyco’s feet.
 

“Captain - !” A voice called in the silence, troubled and angry. The Captain’s head swung around, and he led the way forwards, following it.
 

At the far end of the bridge, a soldier stood staring, pointing down towards the ground. He was staring at a small pile of whitewashed bones, picked clean of their meat and laid out in a grotesque pattern on the ground. One, snapped in half, bore a distinct resemblance to a human femur.
 

They led the way directly up to a large metal door at the far end of the bridge, its lock blinking a deep red. Jagged, bloody scratch marks covered its surface, trailing angularly down, the metal flaking in thin, parallel strips, five lines at a time.
 

“They were trying to get in.” Tyco said quietly. The Captain turned and nodded curtly.
 

“Get it open.” He said, his tone grim and pointed. A veteran stepped forward through the ranks with a pressure torch and went to work.

Ten long minutes later, the last bolt stripped and the door fell away, clattering loudly to the floor. Third in the row of soldiers, Tyco stood with his rifle ready, staring into the dark as the heavy dust settled. He felt a heaviness in his stomach as he stared expectantly towards the darkness. The flashlights fixed to the front of the troopers’ rifles circled nervously, peering inside the chamber, flickering across its thick metal walls.
 

They had rushed into the darkness, senses tingling and fingers tensed on their rifles, staring into the darkness beyond. The bright lights of the bridge had melted quickly into darkness, and the metal walls, cascading onwards like so many metal ribs glinted dully in the darkness.

"Where are we?" One of the veterans breathed, his voice hushed, betraying just an edge of tension.

"Fuel compartments." A voice behind Tyco replied, and in that instant he recognized the faintest glow of active fuel rods, the unblinking eyes of active fission reactors, staring back at the group through the open portals marking the edges of the open circle like predators waiting to strike. Only then did he register the rapid ticking sound that filled the passage: the rattling tachometer on the veterans’ rifle. They had reached the source of the radiation leak.

"We've got fifteen minutes." The veteran nodded. "Let's sweep it and seal it. Don't hang around."

With that, without another look back he had disappeared into the darkness, whistling thinly as he did.

Tyco eyed the open reactors and the silvery darkness lying ahead. He shifted his grip on his rifle and went, wading out into the blackness to search the cavernous dark.

He found the man with three minutes to spare, lying in a crumpled heap over the mechanical override mechanism, his body limp from the exhaustion of fighting the radiation that filled the chamber. His uniform marked him a marine engineer, and the caked bloodstains surrounding the holes in the fabric said all that was needed about his experience in the battle for the ship. One hand was badly burned, still clutching the torch that he had used to melt the door override and reduce the reactor control computer's receiver to a molten, ragged lump of metal, cutting the reactors off from all shipboard communication.

He had come to as Tyco reached for him, his eyes adjusting slowly in his skull-like, sunken face, alarmed at first, and then relieved, his lips shifting slightly across yellowed teeth into a leering smile.

"Thank god." He said, and then added, vengefully, "Are they dead?"
 

Tyco nodded. The man smiled again and raised himself slowly, bracing his frail body against the hard metal console, and stared into the darkness around him, as if seeing it for the first time. "Let's get out of here."

Tyco had called for backup and a stretcher, studying the man carefully. He had little to fear from him, so thin and ravaged was his body. His time in this cell must have been terrible, he thought, imagining the cruelty of those who had locked him in an open reactor pit.

"I don’t understand.” Tyco said at last, staring at the man’s thin frame before him. "Why didn’t they kill you, like the others?"

"They thought they had." The man answered stiffly, his voice scratchy in his dry throat, but not without a touch of pride. "They left me for dead. Covered in bodies. Took me two hours to crawl out.”

“So they chased you in here.” Tyco nodded, shaking his head pityingly. “And locked the doors behind you.”

“No.” The man answered, shaking his head. “They didn’t know I was in here until it was too late.” He held up his torch proudly. “By the time they figured it out, there was nothing they could do about it.”