Chapter Fifteen
Water.
Mike stared up at the sky, his mouth running sweet, his eyes wet, his face frozen. He knew without scanning that his healswarm was struggling, but his body was driven to fight, an engine of hate. He had been here for six days. He would not see the seventh, because he had finally figured it out. It was easy. So easy. It was the logic he had always hoped was not true. In his heart of hearts, he had always been soft. The God he knew and who hated him was not gentle. The Lord had destroyed Egypt, retaken Israel, nuked Japan, nuked China, and then the old United States with impunity. They were not kind.
Mike remembered the Chaplain, leaning forwards from his station as he surveyed the crowd of awestruck, smooth-skinned faces of the freshly risen Nephilim below him. “You aren’t good when you do good things for bad people, he said. You are an instrument, and a good instrument is made to cut. You are the sword in God’s hand, and you will cut away the darkness or you will join it, and we will cut you away with the rest.”
No, the Host was not merciful. It was angry, and Mike finally felt that madness, their rage, seep into his own blood. He swallowed the dirty water, and with water came fresh clarity. His body began to sluggishly feed off itself to heal. A Nephilim could heal like no human could.
“We’re… punished…? We’re the enemy,” he muttered. “Traitors. Don’t make me say it… let me die before I say it…”
The ultimate blaspheme welled up in him like bile. The Host had lied to them. God was cruel, capricious. Evil. He had become the enemy of the Lord. God hated him… and he finally hated them back.
Mike shuddered as he picked himself up to a crawl, inch by filthy inch. He clutched his gun with manic strength, fingers dug into the mantra engraved along the side. Hate is good, the Chaplain had said. Hate will give you strength. He who hates his enemy and the enemy of his Master… “-who shall destroy his enemy with the strength of his belief, is blessed in the sight of the Lord.”
His eyes narrowed as he lurched forwards and up, one halting, swaying step at a time. He was shouting obscenities by the time he stumbled out into the clearing, dragging boots too heavy for his stone feet, and his scream of hate and rage built long and high and loud as he opened on the Sentry. The bullets ricocheted, sound drowned by the roar of the carbine and the crescendo of Mike’s voice. he emptied his pain into the machine that had killed them all. Burning, roaring, firing, dying…
He ran out of ammunition, heaving for breath.
The Sentry hung silently in its nest. It was wet, rain pouring from its cold, dull carapace. The HEO turbines were not spinning, not even idling. Water ran from the long barrel in streams, pattering to the steaming ground in the eerie, deathly silence. Niner didn’t move, and now that Mike could see him up close, he realized that he had been dead for some time. His bared head was punctured, weirdly deflated, and spattered with gore. Mike’s numb professional self filled in the blanks. Headshot. Days old. He hadn’t been screaming at all. Mike stared at him, finger loose on the trigger as the gun became heavier and heavier. The point dropped. It slowly slid from his hands, and then fell to the mud with a heavy slosh.
The Sentry did not move, as dark and cold and breathless as an empty room.
Mike’s shriek rang through the clearing and sent the birds scattering, rending the air like a bandsaw. He pulled it up from his belly, a raw, cracking scream that tore up his throat and came up with blood. His mouth and nose were full of heavy air, backed up with the smell of cooked iron and dead men. He staggered forwards, throwing his arms towards the motionless tank. “You motherfucker! You cock-sucking, mother-fucking piece of shit! Fuck you! Kill me! Why won’t you fucking kill me!! Why!? Why..!”
Every halting step increased the pressure until his voice broke and he fell, skidding to his knees in the mud with his head in his hands. And still, the Sentry did not move. It was as dead as the squad.
Deliriously, Mike looked up and past it, down the gully, towards the faceless facade of the bunker. It was so close, so… impossible. The airlock was flush with the wall. If he took his laser cutter to it, it wasn’t even going to scratch the self-healing surface. He ran through options, discarding them before they even had time to set. Maybe… maybe if he had an AEGIS, he could blow a hole in the side and see if they were in there, the secret they had all died for. He needed a bigger gun, a better gun, to crack the shell. Like a plasma cannon.
Mike lifted his head, looking up into the flat lens-coated eyes of the Sentry.
Slowly, Mike dragged himself to his feet. Now that he was out in the clearing, he didn’t have to fight the conditioning. It had broken, burst, leaving him free and light-headed on the other side of the glass. He took a step forward, and for the first time since the slaughter, he looked around with real curiosity, a kind of worn, wary alertness. The sentry had no heat signature. Mike moved towards it slowly, empty-handed, and reached up too quickly to grasp one of the drooping muzzles when he got up close. It was chilled, and dripped water down his sleeve. Nothing. But from where he stood, it smelled bad. Real bad.
The Sentry’s body extended back, a low-slung thorax cabin suspended between motor-driven legs. The HEO cannon formed the ‘tail’—its turbines gave the sentry its fearsome broad-shouldered profile. It was the size of a large tank, the kind that crewed five or six men. If it was possible to turn it, he could probably do it himself… and if he couldn’t, then the HEO could probably rotate and fire on the bunker.
Mike shied away as he circled around it, limping, and wiped the mud from his cheeks as he looked up. His gut quivered like taut elastic. One twitch, one shiver, one creak of a leg or hum of a turbine would snap him. It was hard to breathe as he searched for a hatch or an entry, something to indicate it was manned. He found it at the back. It was locked with a print-pad. Mike narrowed his eyes, and went to drag some scrap over to stand on it.
Minute by minute, his training was coming back. He was dizzy, dry-mouthed, wired so tight he thought his guts might tear themselves to pieces, but he could think again. He rigged his harness and wired himself up to get a good look at the hatch. It was protected by cutters that would make short work of intruding hands, if they were powered. He took his last weapon, his combat knife, and waved it in front of the sensor.
The cutters didn’t respond. Nauseous, Mike switched out the mono-filament edge for his own laser cutter, much smaller than the Sentry’s, and got to work. His hands shook so bad that he nearly took off his own thumb as the laser wheedled a thin plume of black smoke from the edge of the lock. The first time he pulled, it didn’t budge. After another ten minutes of cutting, the plug shifted and fell out when he pulled it, ejected in a puff of hot, fetid air.
Mike pushed away, coughing and waving in front of his nose, fumbling for his torch. His stomach turned, but there was euphoria, as well as fresh nausea. There was a pilot after all, and he was dead! The enemy was dead. Dead! There was no mistaking that smell, the sugary-sick reek of decay and the sour smell of old piss. They must have gotten him somehow—shot out the life support, chipped through the Sentry’s armor.
Mike fumbled for his torch, wide-eyed, and hauled himself inside with fresh energy. He’d forgotten about the enemy, about his training, about everything… but there was a mission now, something to work on.
The inside of the Sentry was spartan, efficient. The interface receptor screen took up the inside of the Sentry’s ‘face’, a curved wall of dull, shifting green. The gunner’s seat sat before it like a blocky throne. It encapsulated the dead gunner, covering hands, head and feet. It wasn’t like anything Mike had ever seen before—in person, at least. It reminded him of a Terminal Suite, one of the seats the Watchers used to control multiple computers, but it was far more utilitarian. There was no padding. Terminal chairs didn’t have tubes leading to the wrists or elbows, either. As he circled, he spotted bands—welded bands—clamping the legs to the chair. And then he noticed the screws through the top of the boots, bolting the pilot’s feet to the floor. Through his feet. Lip curled, nose wrinkled, Mike reached out and pushed up the helmet.
It came off with a soft sigh, and fluid, as the motion jostled the pilot’s eyes and ruptured them, sending a spill of brackish liquid down his cheeks. His face was the mirror of Mike’s own, gaping and tear-streaked, the lips chapped and cracked from dehydration. His brand was still visible, punched into the flesh of his forehead. The Mark of the Nephilim, and the soldier’s initials. S-2.
Twofer.
