The walkway wraps around our home base. Him a slender figure in his dark blue Commander uniform with his mop of grey hair and eyes that look like they’re chiselled from salt-weathered rock. Me clad head to toe in bulky armour. He’s the only other person from New Vladivostok I’ve met in the army. The only person from my past. He feeds himself a burner, lights it. Drugs are banned for all Harmony SSC servicemen, but who’s going to tell the man who built Reapers what to do?
I glance around at the secondary home base we’ve established as we’ve ventured further across the planet. Vast swathes of dark green rainforest cover the landscape, sprawling across jagged terrain of squat mountain peaks and deep valleys. Above us, the cloudy sky’s that same bruised colour. The unpleasantly muggy air heaves with shockwaves as interplanetary dropships and troop-transports lift off the landing pads. Below us, armoured Reapers and SSC men carry munitions and supply crates between the assembly of prefab barracks, armouries and hangars that make up our home base.
And looming over it all are these immense, overlapping domed shields. A smoky cyan with a hexagonal pattern, stretching dozens of kilometres across. Without them, the never-ending barrage of Harvest artillery fire and sub-orbital railguns would have smashed us into powder. Through the warbling shields, and through a clear patch in the clouds, there’re squadrons of Harvest combat-ships circling us like vultures. Harmony gunships and countermeasure drones soar up through the shields to meet them. Red and blue streaks of plasma fire and flashing nanogun rounds burst through the clouds like metal thunder.
We walk past overflowing civilian shelters. Most of them missed the narrow evacuation window when Harvest dreadnoughts swarmed the Renchio skies. The ones that weren’t killed in the initial onslaught lost everything. We provided shelter, food. Now they’re trapped here hoping we’ll win, otherwise they’ll be at the mercy of Harvest.
‘It’s good to see you still alive and kicking,’ Sokolav tells me.
‘They haven’t found a way to axe me yet.’
‘Damn right they haven’t. As your Commander, I forbid you to go down without one hell of a fight.’ He grimaces as he tugs at his sweat-stained collar. ‘I miss the cold. A man’s not meant to work in these conditions. The heat melts the brain, turns your muscles soft.’
‘Is that a fact?’ I ask.
‘It is if I say it is.’ He leans towards me, that playful glint in his eye. ‘Maybe we should ask for a couple days leave, steal a chainship and shoot back to New Vladi. What do you say?’
‘Since when did you need permission to do anything?’
‘I don’t call all the shots around here, much to my astonishment. It all has to go up the chain.’
‘Better you than me.’
Sokolav takes a long drag of his burner. ‘Could be we need a change in management around here.’
‘You’ve got my vote.’
‘Wasn’t thinking of anything so democratic, but I’ll count on you all the same. You’ve never let me down, Vak.’
We lapse back into a comfortable silence.
‘We’re going to win this war.’ Sokolav squints up at the sub-orbital dogfight high above us. I imagine the deafening roar of the artillery fire from my shell-cannons. The adrenaline soaring in my gut as I spin into a barrel roll. Detonations rippling around me. Boomboom. Boomboom. Boomboomboom. My hands tighten into fists.
‘Because of the stormtech?’ I ask.
‘Because of you Reapers,’ Sokolav says. ‘Because of Harmony. Because we’re brave enough to use the stormtech to do what needs to be done.’ He raps his knuckles on my chest. ‘I’ve seen you in action, son. I know what you’re capable of. Which is how I know you can do what I’m going to ask.’
‘What do you need?’
‘Two things. I want the Canine King dead. I don’t care how you do it. I won’t have any more Reapers end up in his skinning labs. I won’t have him decorating the landscape with our men.’
‘Understood,’ I say. I roll my burning shoulders, armour plates grinding, watching the dogfight continue. ‘And the second?’
‘That if you’ve got something to say to me, you say it.’
‘About?’
‘Anything. Your fireteam. Your body. Your headspace.’ Sokolav puffs out a stream of smoke. ‘Remember. The stormtech demands respect, Vakov. Fight it, and it’ll fight you. Draw close to it, and it’ll draw close to you.’
I nod. As if we hadn’t heard this half a hundred times already.
‘I’m your Commander, Vakov. Hell, I’m the one who brought you here.’
‘I chose to come.’
‘Doesn’t mean I’m not responsible for you. You know you can talk to me, like you always have. If you need a listening ear, mine’s available.’
Alcatraz’s words come back to me. To Harmony, we’re nothing. A bunch of freak experiments, fighting their war for them. I’d tell my Commander how I’m feeling, like I used to do when I first enlisted. Talk to him about Drummer’s death. The urges fighting through my system. But something holds me back. He’s my Commander, he oversaw my mutation into a Reaper, but there’re subjects I simply can’t talk to him about.
Not like I can talk to my fireteam.
How could he possibly understand? What does he know about what the stormtech wants?
‘I will,’ I say.
Sokolav smiles. He grinds the stub of his burner into the dirt and claps me on the shoulder.
A ground-to-orbit railgun turret rotates upwards. A section of the shielding dilates open as the railgun barks an earth-shattering crack that I feel rattling in my molars. The muzzle flash is so bright my visor polarises. The missile streaks through the clouds and into a Harvest fighter with an electric-blue flash, lighting up the sky. The fighter streaks to earth like an asteroid, smearing a smoke trail across the sky before smashing down in the mountains. Flames go mushrooming up at the crash-site. The shielding irises closed, shrugging off the damage of return fire, a deluge of furious green plasma. Harvest fighter-ships roar away in defeat.
23
Deadlocked
Floating. Spinning. Echoes rattling off metal. Light knifing
