'Oh no. Look!'
A whole corner of the hall was covered with rags. But they were moving, mewing, whimpering. Tiny pink fists, clutching at nothing. Babies!
'Go away! You can't have them!' A little girl in a torn dress, enraged, stood amidst the babies. Her arm went back and she hurled something at us. It bounced off my A-suit. And suddenly the air was full of missiles, all sorts of junk, empty ration cans, old shoes, plastic dolls, baby bottles, rattling off our armor. The older children were struggling to their feet, throwing anything they could find, crying and screaming. A gang of dirty-faced girls snatched up the babies, then ran to a corner, clutching the squirming infants to their bosoms. And that one defiant child stood before the remaining babies like a guardian angel, crying and trembling, screaming her rage and frustration and hate, ready to die for her charges.
'Go away! They're only babies! Leave us alone! Go away! Go away! Go away! If I were big, I'd kill you!'
'Somebody take the Systie outside and kill him,' Snow Leopard ordered quietly. Psycho seized the Systie and dragged him out to the corridor. The last I saw of him he was screaming for mercy as Psycho activated his hot knife.
Priestess removed her helmet. The hail of missiles ceased as the children slowly realized she was a female.
'We're here to help the babies,' she said. 'We're here to help you all.' She reached out and the child threw her arms around Priestess's neck and cried a river of tears.
'That kid belongs in the Legion,' I said. I had never seen anything as heroic as that little girl, defying a whole squad of armored killers.
'We need rations—canteens—now,' Priestess ordered. We were ripping open our ratpaks when Sweety interrupted.
'Alert! I detect a full squad of Systies, fully armed and armored, approaching the Mound!' Sweety had nothing but good news for us.
'I have to stay here,' Priestess said immediately.
'Valkyrie, these folks are going to take out the main doors and come in after us. I want you to take an element, go back to Processing—the room where we arrived by elevator. Clear out the civilians—put them in the halls. Then mine the room. I want it to go up as soon as the Systies are inside.' Snow Leopard never hesitated. He always seemed to know exactly what was necessary.
'I'll use displacement triggers and vulcans,' Valkyrie said. 'I want Twelve, Four and Eight. All right?'
'That's fine. When the room goes up, I want you to attack, and finish off any survivors—get them all, then rejoin us.'
'Tenners. Where will you be?'
'We're going after the ship. Keep in touch.'
'Will do.'
###
'He's right up ahead,' I said. Sweety had the Systie zeroed on my tacmod. We had chased two Systies down the corridor, cleaning up the last of the Systies assigned to the Mound, in and out of rooms, while Valkyrie's group was still waiting in ambush to get the new bunch. Now this one was trapped. The bastard had an SG, and wasn't shy about using it—he had almost hit me. I was still twitching, inside my armor.
'Well, shoot him!' Snow Leopard suggested. I raised my E and fired auto xmax. The room exploded and filled with smoke. When the dust settled, Sweety discerned no life signs.
'Keep an eye on the ceiling,' Snow Leopard added. We did not like the ceiling. It was studded with what looked like hatchways or emergency escapes, but Sweety had no further readings for us.
The Systie was torn to shreds, a bloody hunk of meat. He had not been in armor. We had still not heard from Valkyrie about the new squad of Systies. They were in armor, and ready for a fight.
'What the hell is this?' Psycho asked. I suddenly realized that the entire room was ankle-deep in discarded clothing. I picked up one item with the tip of my SG—a child's pink sweater. I let it fall back to the floor. How many hopes and dreams died in this room, I wondered. How many families, delivered up to the O's by the System?
'Look,' Snow Leopard said. He stood before a sealed cenite door. The Systies had sprayed another message, on the surface: LAB—PACKS ONLY.
'I detect faint life readings within,' Sweety reported. 'Humans, unarmored.'
There were only six of us now—Snow Leopard and Psycho and the new girl, Twister, Tara and Gildron and myself. Valkyrie was still at the ambush site with her buddy Scrapper and Merlin and Dragon. Priestess was off by herself, nursing the babies.
'Attention! I have a reading from Reception!' Sweety said. 'The main door has been breached! Repeat, the main door to Reception has been breached! No further readings!'
'Deto,' Psycho said. 'It's the Systies.' The new Systie squad had just blown its way into the Mound.
'Packs only,' Snow Leopard said, ignoring Sweety's report. 'The Systies don't go in here. This is the interior. We're going in.'
We're going in—Beta One was always able to get our attention. He didn't even have to raise his voice. Only a few words, we're going in, and there was so much adrenalin in my system I swear I could taste it in my mouth. Snow Leopard reached for the door panel and pressed it.
A wave of icy air rolled out slowly as the door slid open—the armored skin on my A-suit was suddenly wet. We moved in like jungle cats. It was a large darkened hall full of glass, tall gleaming glassy columns and cubicles wreathed with mist, reaching up to a dark ceiling. A spidery framework of metal wiring ran around the crystal columns.
'Life…' Sweety said. 'Thirteen…the count is unclear. From ten to seventeen humans. Suggest further investigation.'
An icy metal catwalk, a glassy translucent column. Something inside, a lazy movement. I brushed away a coating of frost. There was a body within, a naked human female body, floating in liquid—a headless body. A mass of tubing led from the neck up to the top of the cylinder and I knew instinctively that the body was still alive. I hardly dared look but I could see there were two large glassy globes atop the cylinder. Two heads, my God! The first one, a male, blue-grey skin, clearly dead. The second head, a female—eyes open, staring at me. Below, the arms suddenly moved.
I backed out quickly, terrified, my heart thumping wildly. Our psybloc units cracked on, spitting light.
'Alien life-form readings one level up.'
Snow Leopard tossed a psybloc grenade out ahead of us. It lit up the cylinders until we could see what was in them. There—a man with no limbs. Gasping, helpless, a trunk with a head, floating in his own filth. The bastards were experimenting with us, playing with us!
'Thinker…look at this.' Psycho pointed out something with his Manlink. A grey mass in a frosty globe of bloody liquid. A human brain. I knew it was alive.
'That O was moving fast,' Snow Leopard said. 'Stand by!' Our tacmods suddenly filled with chaff—totally unreadable.
'Enemy deceptors—I have no further readings,' Sweety said. 'Warning! An Omni attack is likely!'
I hurled another psybloc grenade into the dark. It exploded white-hot, burning like a star. The O was using deceptors—we were blind.
'It's got us zeroed,' Snow Leopard said. 'Weapons on canister X. We make our stand here.' A faint shudder ran over our armor. Then a distant, rumbling explosion.
'Element attack!' Valkyrie hissed, springing her ambush on the Systie squad. The mines had gone off.
'Deceptors,' Snow Leopard commanded. Psycho shot them off, and they cracked to life. Now the O would be blind as well—we hoped. There was no way of knowing for sure.
'Movement!' Sweety reported. Our tacmods flashed phospho red to pinpoint the source, at the far end of that nightmare hall. I snapped my E up to my shoulder and fired auto canister X. We all fired, and the darkness erupted, a swirling, dazzling white-hot fireball, spitting hundreds of tracks of glowing hissing shrapnel, the blast and the sound rocking us simultaneously, the air suddenly full of sparkling glassy debris.
The room exploded, a titanic flash and boom and I was down, groveling on my back like an armored bug. I was in the core of a star, blue hot flames consuming me utterly, the skin on my A-suit suddenly glowing cherry-red. The warning indicators on my faceplate lit up like fireworks.
