Heaven's Queen (39 page)

Unsurprisingly, considering the power had gone out less than thirty minutes ago, the pipe was burning hot. So much so that I could feel it radiating up even through my suit’s thermal shielding. I paused just long enough to make sure I wasn’t going to get burned before I swung myself into the pipe, which now felt much smaller than it had looked from the floor. There was room for my suit lying down, but just barely, and though I could pull myself forward on my forearms, I couldn’t turn around.

The combination was close enough to the mines that my heart started pounding. Fortunately, my panic was staved off by the fact that I wasn’t underwater and, more importantly, I could
see
this time. That might not sound like much since there wasn’t anything to look at other than the pipe going off into the distance, but seeing all that open space in front of me helped me get over the heat and the terrible closeness of the walls, and I was able to pull myself forward after only a few seconds of hesitation.

Rupert came up next, then Brenton, who closed up the pipe behind him, blocking off the light and hopefully any chance of us being followed. I set my timer and focused on moving as quickly and quietly as possible, but even with my suit’s coolers, the residual heat from the metal quickly grew intolerable. I was sweating buckets before we cleared the first hundred feet, and I had no idea how Brenton and Rupert kept going, though I was sure the promise of impending death was a motivating factor.

All things considered, we made excellent time. Eight minutes and fifty-seven seconds later, my floodlights hit the coil-covered wall of the shield projector. We’d made it to the end of the line; now we just had to get out.

As we’d been crawling, I’d seen several more emergency hatches like the one Brenton had pulled down, spaced at regular intervals. Sure enough, there was one at the tunnel’s end. I broke the latch as quietly as I could and lifted the panel, and then let out a relieved breath when I saw it let out into a crawl space and not, say, a gun emplacement. Even so, the power was almost completely restored now, which meant I could see the people gathered through the cracks in the drop ceiling.

I motioned for Rupert and Brenton to be silent and crawled out, using my suit’s stabilizer to make sure I made no sound as I let myself down onto the metal grate that shielded the pipes and wires from view. Rupert came down next, followed by Brenton, who quickly replaced the panel. Not a second too soon, either. I could already feel the pipe vibrating as the shield prepared to come back online. Without that panel, we would have gotten covered in molten shield sludge. With it, though, we were safe for the moment, giving me time to examine our enemies.

Symbionts don’t show up on density sensors, and the hot pipe beside us blinded my thermo, so I couldn’t count how many people were in the room below. Going by the muffled voices that drifted up through the drop ceiling, however, I was guessing quite a few. My density scanner picked up the rest of the room just fine, drawing me a picture of a single room twice as long as it was wide with a door at either end. Thick walls, too, nice and defensible. Unless, of course, your enemy came from above.

I grinned and turned my attention to my suit, arming all of my grenades and setting the variable payloads. When everything was ready, I shot Rupert and Brenton a pointed look and raised three fingers. Two fingers. One finger.

When I had nothing left but a fist, I slammed it down on the metal ceiling panel beside me. The drop ceiling crumpled like cardboard under the blow, and I leaned forward, letting my ordnance payload fall. The
ting ting
of grenades hitting the metal floor was almost musical, and I was treated to a collective gasp as everyone in the room below simultaneously realized what that sound meant. By that point, though, it was too late.

Before they could run, before I could even pull my arms back to cover my head, the whole room exploded in a flash of light that whited out my cameras. As soon as it faded, I shoved myself forward, rolling headfirst through the hole I’d made in the ceiling.

Because I mostly worked ships and compounds, my ordnance was ship-safe. Even when I dumped my full payload like I just had, the combined explosions wouldn’t do more than throw a symbiont around. They did, however, make a hell of a lot of smoke, and smoke was what I was after.

I plummeted silently through the billowing clouds that filled the room, my suit flipping me automatically to land neatly on my feet with Sasha ready in my hand. Rupert dropped down next, almost landing on top of me. He fell into a crouch at once, peering around blindly into the smoke before he pulled his scales over his head.

I had no such problems.
I
had thermal scanners, and now that we were away from that damn pipe, they painted a crystal-clear picture of the room, the cool furniture, and the bright shapes of the warm symbionts around us. My computer marked them as I watched, painting a target at the center of each glowing figure’s head, and I couldn’t help a smug smile. “Bet you wish you had armor right now.”

“What?” Rupert said almost in my ear.

My answer was a gunshot followed by the solid
thunk
as the first symbiont hit the far wall, thrown across the room by Sasha’s perfectly aimed blast to its head.

I didn’t wait to see if he’d get up. I was already on to the next target, my suit moving my pistol into place with millimeter precision. I’d marked Rupert and Brenton as friendlies so my Lady wouldn’t let me shoot them, but every other glowing heat shadow on my sensors was fair game as I hopped up on a metal lab table and got to work.

With the thick smoke, surprise, and my thermographics, the fight didn’t even deserve the name. This was a slaughter. I normally prefer to do my shooting myself, but this was the sort of situation my Lady was made for, and I didn’t dare stand in her way. Letting my suit guide me, we moved together like a turret, firing perfect shot after perfect shot as my firing system unfailingly guided my gun right to the target painted on each symbiont’s head. Even though Sasha’s bullets couldn’t puncture their scales, she was still accurate as hell and hit like a truck, and now that Rupert had revealed the symbiont’s weak spot, I was merciless. Every shot I fired sent a scaled body careening into the wall before collapsing in a heap, just like the one I’d shot back on Kessel. It was brutal, unfair, and deeply satisfying. It was also not enough.

I hadn’t actually realized until my suit counted them up for me just how full the room had been. At least now I knew why we hadn’t run into anyone out in the halls. There must have been thirty symbionts waiting here for us. I’d shot a good fifteen of them by the time someone thought to turn on the lab’s ventilation system and suck out the smoke, but as soon as the air began to clear, the tide began to turn.

I’d just finished taking out my sixteenth symbiont when I saw a glowing blur pop up behind me on my thermals. That was all the warning I got before a claw caught my arm, wrenching me back hard enough to overpower my stabilizer. Since not falling was no longer an option, I kicked off the table instead, slamming my body back into my attacker. But symbionts are tough bastards, and heavy as I was, I didn’t manage to knock him down. He did stumble, though, and I seized my opening, shoving Sasha back and under the arm he’d grab to plug a shot into his chest. The anti-armor round wasn’t enough to really hurt him, but it did blast him back, and when his hand opened on instinct, letting me go to catch himself, I kicked off, jumping clear of his reach to the other side of the table I’d been standing on.

I landed less gracefully than I would have liked, but my suit righted me soon enough, slamming me back against the lab table’s built-in cabinet. My smoke was almost completely gone now, and though several symbionts were down, plenty were still up. Worse, when I’d broken line of sight on Rupert, my suit had lost his friendly fire tag, which meant I was no longer sure which of the black-scaled figures was him.

There were four in front of me right now, actually, closing in fast. None of them were tall enough to be Rupert, so I cleared my suit to fire, shooting the first one square in the head before I could blink. Two of the remaining three jumped back at the shot, but the fourth didn’t even flinch, and I knew at once that this was my real enemy. The other two were civilians, likely scientists or engineers given symbionts to survive living near Maat, but this man was a soldier like me, and my gunshot had barely finished echoing before he lunged for my throat.

I threw my arm up, ejecting Elsie as I did, but this was a real symbiont, a trained Eye, and I was too slow. His claws shot through my guard to dig into my chest, slicing deep gouges in the Lady’s mist-silver plating above my ribs before I could roll away. I came up furious, swiping my now-burning plasma blade across his calves as I rose.

The man fell with a yelp as I cut his legs out from under him. Even if he hadn’t, my next punch to his jaw would have knocked him flat. I was burning with anger over the damage to my suit, so much that I felt the first tingles of the virus on my fingers. That snuffed my rage like a candle in a vacuum, but not before I’d sliced the symbiont’s neck open.

I kicked his body for good measure and turned, blade ready, only to find I had no more opponents. My anger-fueled execution must have looked even worse than I’d thought, because the remaining two symbionts backed off at once, their hands up in surrender. I switched Sasha to my left hand and kept her trained on them just in case while my cameras scanned the room, looking for the next real threat.

I found it on the other side. Whereas I’d pulled the coward symbionts, Rupert was facing off against four opponents who looked like they knew exactly what they were doing. Brenton was over there, too, holding his own in the back corner against two more, though not nearly as well as he should have been considering how I’d seen him fight before. I hopped up on the table to go help, but as I jumped over the symbiont with the slashed neck, his hand shot out and grabbed my ankle to yank me back down.

I gasped and fell, landing flat on the table before my suit pushed me back up, but I couldn’t break the bleeding symbiont’s hold as he jumped on top of me. I had no idea where he was getting his strength from; he should have been half bled out by now, not to mention unable to breathe thanks to a filleted windpipe. But I must not have hit him as well as I’d thought, because he was gasping in my ear as he held me down, throwing up his hand to catch something one of the other symbionts tossed. I was still trying to shove him off me, which meant I didn’t see what he’d caught until it was too late.

The bolt of lightning crashed into my suit like a spear, and then everything went dark as my Lady overloaded. I went limp a second later, landing hard on the table’s edge as my suit’s weight crushed me. I didn’t even try to catch myself. First, I’d only break my arms without my suit’s motors to help with the weight, and second, I was too busy frantically trying to get my Lady back online.

After what felt like an eternity of darkness, my cameras flickered back to life, giving me a clear view of the bastard who’d shot me. He was still leaning into me where I was doubled over the table, resting his weight on my back to avoid putting it on his injured legs. His chest was soaked with blood from what I’d done to his neck and he seemed to be barely holding on. Despite all that, though, he was still up, pressing a clunky anti-armor charge thrower pistol into the back of my neck, the same goddamn gun Brenton’s team had used on me on Ample.

“Target secure,” he panted. “Call the commander. Tell him we’ve got—”

I had Sasha down and pressed against his knee before he could finish. I fired three shots in rapid succession, and while the first two only slammed him around, I felt the third one crack bone. The symbiont lurched back a second later, clutching his knee with a pained cry. The second his weight was off me, I whirled and shot him in the head, blasting him into the door that led back to the kill box.

He hit the blast door like a cannon shot, knocking it half off its track. I kept my gun on his limp body, but it wasn’t necessary. This time, he wasn’t getting up again.

The symbiont had dropped the charge thrower when I’d shot his knee. I stomped on it with all my weight, cracking the plastic casing to tiny bits. Threat eliminated, I turned back to my cowering enemies, Elsie shining like a star on my right and Sasha ready on my left. My targeting system was already lining up the shots for their miserable heads when I heard the unmistakable blast of a disrupter pistol behind me.

Before I could think better of it, I glanced at my rear cameras. I was too late to see who’d fired, but they must not have hit, because a second later, the knot of symbionts surrounding Rupert blew open as he grabbed one of his attackers around the throat and hurled him as hard as he could. I ducked as the man flew over my head to slam into the door I’d just broken with his buddy, taking it clean off its railings this time.

The first man hadn’t even landed before Rupert kicked the next one, slamming him into a metal specimen refrigerator hard enough to dent the wall behind it. He slammed the third symbiont into the ground with his heel, stomping the man’s chest so hard I heard his ribs crack under his scales.

The snapping sound made me want to cheer. Every other time we’d fought symbionts, with the exception of Brenton’s first invasion of the
Fool
, I’d felt that Rupert was holding back. In a way, I couldn’t blame him. These were his former teammates; for him, fighting them would be like me attacking Blackbirds. I didn’t know what had finally pushed Rupert over the edge—getting locked up maybe, or perhaps it was getting shot. Now that he’d thinned the herd a bit, I could see that his side was burned where the earlier disrupter blast had grazed him. The wound looked painful, but Rupert didn’t even seem to feel it as he reached out and crushed the disrupter pistol in the final symbiont’s hand.

I wasn’t the only one watching, either. Back on my side of the room, the symbionts I’d been preparing to fight were breaking. They turned as I watched, abandoning their fallen comrades as they fled back through the kill box into the station proper, and they weren’t alone. The room that had been packed full of symbionts was now nearly empty as the remaining combatants turned and ran for the door.