Allegiance

TWENTY

Michael hunched behind a concrete wall while Edgar and Alexander waited for his signal. They were a half mile from their drop zone, in a section of the city that had been reduced to mounds of rubble.

If he had to guess, the area had been shaken down by a massive earthquake long after the tsunami washed away the coastline. The flattened buildings and leaning ironwork left little protection for the divers, and plenty of places for an ambush. Sinkholes, deep fissures in the ground, and tunnels in the mounds were all potential nesting spots for mutant beasts or shadowed enclaves for the machines.

Michael slowly rose above the wall to scan the area for signs of life. The infrared sensors came back with multiple contacts, though mostly insects, lizards, and rabbit-sized rodents. Nothing the size of a Siren or a defector.

He still wasn’t sure what the hell he had seen walking upright on the dive in, but he would bet his rank it wasn’t a naked human. No one could survive out here without protective gear and helmets.

The radiation levels were in the yellow range, almost red, and his scans were picking up toxic fumes. The surface and air quality were little better here than at the fuel station where the mammoth snakes ambushed them.

Everything south of the equator seemed different, and they had little intel on what sort of beasts lived in this area. Thinking of all the possibilities brought a chill through his body. He switched his optics over to night vision again and hunkered back down, wishing he had Cricket to help look for threats.

But Les was right to recall the robot to the ship. With all its electronic parts, it was just too big a target for Sirens and defectors.

Michael raised his hand and flashed the “advance” signal to Alexander and Edgar. The two divers dashed to his position. Lightning flashed at the same moment, capturing both men in the blue glow.

They made it to the wall safely and took up positions on his right and left.

Thunder boomed, and Michael waited for the inevitable high-pitched wail. But the electronic cries of the Sirens did not come.

The beasts still didn’t know the divers were here—at least, not his half of the team.

He checked his HUD for Sofia and Arlo, now less than a mile away. Their beacons were still idle, but they were active, which meant they were alive.

They appeared to be hunkered down and waiting, just as Michael had told them to do if they ever got separated. While he was glad they had followed orders, getting to them was going to be a struggle. The hive of Sirens Timothy had marked on their map was right between Michael and the two stranded divers.

Edgar peered over the top of the ledge to check for hostiles, but Michael kept prone, studying his HUD for the best route.

“Looks clear,” Edgar said, bending down.

Michael didn’t know how accurate the map on his HUD was, but it showed a road not far away. He decided the safest route was the one through the ruined structures beyond the wall they now hid behind. It was the long way, but it would avoid the potential Siren hive.

Also, one of the cardinal rules of diving was always to stay off old streets and out of view.

He took point and guided the divers along the foot of the first mountain of debris. Rebar and twisted steel beams stuck out of the fragmented concrete, but he didn’t see any openings or tunnels here that could lead to nests.

He slowed down when they reached the outskirts of the destroyed city blocks. On the other side, several structures were still standing or, at least, hadn’t finished falling down.

Roofs had caved in, windows were shattered, and each building had an apron of scree around its base. Nature had taken over—mutant trees growing through ceilings and vines worming their way out of windows.

A distant animal howl broke the silence.

It wasn’t just flora here.

Michael raised a fist for the divers to hold position. They crouched down, weapons up and roving over the broken structures.

Another noise pierced the night, this one midway between a growl and a wail. He didn’t know the sound—only that it wasn’t human or Siren.

Michael raised the laser rifle scope up to his visor, then saw something on his HUD. One of the beacons was moving.

It was Sofia.

“Stay put, damn it,” he whispered. He wanted to use the comm but couldn’t risk breaking radio silence. Not yet, not for this.

He gave hand signals to Alexander and Edgar, who fanned out in combat intervals. If their HUDs were correct, Sofia and Arlo were just on the other side of the structures ahead. He had to get to them before whatever was making the noise found them first.

Michael kept a brisk but cautious pace to avoid stepping in any holes or snagging his hazard suit on anything sharp. There were plenty of threats. Tendrils grew out of the cracked dirt ahead, and bulb-shaped flowers opened slightly as he approached.

He changed direction and signaled his team to do the same.

Halfway across the stretch between the debris piles and the buildings, he came across another cluster of foliage with the same tentacular limbs that he had seen turn an adult Siren into a deflated sack of mutant skin.

The divers moved around the plants but stopped at a meter-wide crevice in the ground. Vines covered the chasm walls like cobwebs, and he decided to take another route rather than jump across. He could make the easy hop, and so, probably, could the next diver. But after that, the plants would be awake and ready for the last one to jump.

Another eerie call broke the silence, rising into a long, melancholy moan. Sofia’s beacon moved again as if in response.

Michael turned back and made his way around the carnivorous plants. A bug the size of a bread loaf crawled from under an uptilted section of curb in his path. The single eye atop its armored head swiveled back to look at him as it scuttled away.

The insect was small, but life out here was violent, and even the most benign-looking creature might kill a man. He carefully trotted the last stretch to the building.

Alexander and Edgar arrived a moment later and took up position behind a brick wall covered in blue, sticky moss that seemed to riffle in the breeze. But there was no breeze.

“What the fu…” Edgar whispered after almost leaning against the wall.

Michael saw then that the moss wasn’t moving after all. It was the bugs, ants, and flying insects trapped on the surface that created the rustling effect.

The team stepped away from the killing field of bugs, not wanting to be there when something bigger came along for a snack.

A mostly intact street separated them from the next building. Michael stopped at the corner to check his HUD again.

Sofia had stopped moving, and Arlo was still in the same spot, just past the structures across the street.

Crouching, Michael waited for another howl, but nothing broke the dead calm. He held up his wrist computer and tapped the surface to pull up a bigger map. To the south, he saw two new beacons outside the range of the smaller map on his HUD.

He smiled for the first time today.

Magnolia and Rodger had landed and were making their way into the city. That meant he needed to get moving.

“Alexander, you take rear guard; I’m on point,” Michael said. “We need to move fast and stay low.”

Alexander nodded back, and Michael led the way around the corner. The rotted hull of a car remained parked on the broken sidewalk, providing some cover. He decided to risk using the road and took off in a sprint for the vehicle.

Halfway to the first building, he spotted movement on the sidewalk.

With his chin, he bumped the night vision off to look at the blackened concrete with his own eyes. Fire ants the size of his thumb formed a long river of red from their den under the broken street. Several carried insects many times their own mass back to a hungry colony.

Michael decided to stick to his plan and took off running again. Leaping over the line of ants, he continued to the building and hugged the brick wall. Alexander and Edgar quickly joined him.

They stopped at the corner, and Michael looked around the wall. A listing metal fence blocked off a courtyard between the structures.

In the center, thick purple vines grew down the sides of a chipped fountain.

Michael considered crossing the open area, then thought about the hundreds of windows looking down into the courtyard.

Instead, he led the divers past the metal fence, to the next building. Remarkably, the scratched and dented metal door remained intact.

Michael kept low past the row of empty window frames and stopped at the end. Across the road loomed another building. Red vines spilled down from a huge hole in the side, like entrails from a gaping wound.

He did a scan unaided, then again with his infrared. Seeing nothing, he checked around the corner to the left, in the direction Sofia and Arlo were each hunkered down.

The street passed in front of two more buildings, then abruptly disappeared. A few more steps showed him why. A sinkhole had swallowed the entire city block.

He had a bad feeling that Sofia and Arlo had landed inside the cavernous hole.

Another hand signal, and the three divers were moving at double time. They didn’t stop until he got to several overturned vehicles on the buckled pavement.

There were two ways to the sinkhole ahead: straight down the road or through the two high-rise buildings fronting it. Since Arlo and Sofia were not in the same location, he decided to break off.

He sent Alexander to the building on the left before following Edgar to the right. They ran fast and hard on the uneven concrete.

A large stone statue stood in a concrete alcove in front of the building. It reminded Michael of the huge god he had seen on the dive in, though this one still had its head.

Edgar moved behind a sunken stairwell where Michael joined him.

They stopped to listen and check their HUDs. Sofia was somewhere to their left, and Arlo was somewhere right ahead of them.

Michael wasn’t eager to go inside the ruined building, but he wasn’t sure he had a choice.

Thinking over his options, he looked back at the statue and suddenly recognized it.

This wasn’t just an angel or a god. It was a sculptor’s depiction of Jesus.

Edgar crossed himself. Like some sky people, he was a follower of Christianity. Michael had never been religious, but he did hope it would bring them luck. And if someone was watching over them, well, he would take all the help they wanted to give. So, he crossed his chest as Edgar had done, and gave the “advance” signal toward the stairs. The front door was gone, and sections of at least two lower floors had collapsed in a jumble of plasterboard, furniture, and twisted pipes.

Edgar took point, and Michael followed him over the broken tiles.

The first two rooms on the right were filled with debris, and in the second, Michael found skeletal remains. He stopped and angled his tactical light inside, playing it over as many as five scattered sets of bones. They were oddly free of mummified skin or other soft tissue.

A surprised grunt came from down the hall, and Michael turned to see Edgar with his hands in the air as if someone had him at gunpoint.

Shining his light on the unmoving diver, Michael suddenly understood. He slung the laser rifle, unsheathed his knife, and hurried over. Edgar was caught in a thick, translucent spiderweb. Michael sliced through the finer filaments, then sawed through the thicker radial cables. With one arm free, Edgar began pulling the sticky strands away from his armor.

“Thanks,” he said quietly.

“Got to watch where you’re going,” Michael whispered. “And keep an eye out for the thing that made this web.”

Edgar nodded, and the divers pushed on toward the end of the hallway. An opening in the wall gave them a window into the sinkhole. The bowl outside was the size of a large old-world sports stadium.

Five buildings surrounded the rim, and one other had lost the battle with gravity to spill a cataract of debris down the slope, all the way to the bottom.

Detecting movement in his peripheral vision, Michael looked left to find Alexander, waving from a second-floor balcony.

He wasn’t alone.

Michael breathed a sigh of relief when he saw Sofia. She waved, too, and then pointed into the sinkhole. Edgar edged forward to take a look down.

“Not too close,” Michael whispered, stepping up behind him.

They shined their tactical lights into the hole. Michael raked his back and forth, then stopped when the light captured a black canopy of a chute.

Sure enough, Arlo had parachuted into the sinkhole.

Their beams found him perched on a jutting shelf of sidewalk below. He waved at them frantically, and Michael quickly realized why.

“Shut off your light,” he said.

Edgar did as ordered.

Michael turned on his infrared. A section of the pit lit up with red contacts, almost all of them roughly the size and shape of a human.

“Fuck a mutant’s mother-in-law!” he whispered.

The Siren hive Timothy had noted on the map wasn’t the only one. Dozens of bulbous nests lined the sloping walls of the hole. Even more of the beasts slept at the bottom, in a writhing mat of intertwined bodies.

Arlo had fallen right into their lair.

Team Raptor had a major problem on their hands, and Les wasn’t sure how to help them. Standing on the bridge, he watched Cricket’s video feed. Since the entire team seemed to be lying prone, he had decided to deploy the robot for a better look. Now he saw why.

The robot hovered below the clouds, using its advanced optics to see into a sinkhole quite literally crawling with Sirens. The beasts were sleeping right below the area where Arlo had fallen. Somehow, they still hadn’t detected him. But time was running out.

Michael, Edgar, and Alexander had linked up with Sofia, and they were right above the sinkhole, no doubt trying to devise a plan to get Arlo out of there before fifty Sirens tore him to shreds.

“If only I could mount a missile to Cricket,” Les said.

“Sir, that’s actually not a bad idea,” Eevi said. “What if we turn Cricket into a missile and slam it into the bottom of those nests? It could provide a distraction, at least.”

“We also lose our only eye in the sky,” Layla said. “And you destroy Michael’s friend.”

“Timothy, got any bright ideas?” Les asked.

“I have been tinkering with one, Captain.” The AI walked over, scratching his perfect beard as if deep in thought. “Perhaps we could use the drone as a distraction, but not quite in the way that Eevi suggested.”

Les moved closer to the main monitor. “Switch overlay to infrared,” he said.

The screen imagery turned greenish, with red blotches scattered across it.

“Zoom in.”

Timothy tapped into Cricket’s cameras and magnified on the cluster of Siren nests. They formed a sort of honeycomb on the eastern and northern slope of the sinkhole.

At the bottom of the ten-story pit, a group of larger Sirens slept amid a graveyard of bones and carcasses.

Les walked up to the screen for a better look. Arlo was on the southeast side, almost directly above the sleeping beasts on the ground, backed against the wall and looking up at the other divers.

“Switch back to Team Raptor,” Les said.

The camera climbed to the top of the hole, where Michael and the other divers were crouched down, still not doing anything to get Arlo out of there.

“Sir,” Eevi said, “I’ve got movement on the drone’s scanner.”

“Where’s it coming from?” Les asked.

“The bottom of that pit.”

“Show me, Timothy,” Les said.

The video feed returned to the sinkhole. In the mass of limp, slumbering bodies, several Sirens were stirring awake.

“We’re running out of time,” Layla said. “We’ve got to do something.”

“The ones on the ground all seem to be males,” Timothy said.

“What’s your point?”

“They can fly,” Timothy said. “What if we use the drone as a decoy and try luring them away from the sinkhole? That could give Arlo a chance to get away with Team Raptor.”

“Or it wakes all the beasts and they swarm the divers,” Les said.

He looked to Layla and then to Eevi. They both had loved ones on the surface, and he wanted them to weigh in.

“It’s our best shot to save the kid,” Layla said.

Eevi didn’t seem so sure, but she finally nodded.

“Okay, do it, Timothy,” Les said. “And take us down to one thousand feet.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

The airship began lowering toward the ocean. Les returned to the captain’s chair to watch the screen.

“If this doesn’t get their attention, I don’t know what will,” Timothy said.

“If what doesn’t?” Les asked.

Timothy smiled proudly. “I’m going to play some Led Zeppelin. I believe they are one of Xavier’s favorite old-world bands, right?”

“If the defectors are hiding down there, they’ll hear it, too,” Les said. He thought on that for a moment. “Maybe that’s another upside to using Cricket as bait. If it draws out the defectors, we can take ’em out from the air.”

“What about Team Raptor?” Layla said.

Eevi rolled her chair toward Les, waiting to hear his response.

“We won’t put them at risk, don’t worry,” he said. “They are my priority, but if we have a chance to kill the Sirens, and especially the defectors, I’m going to take it.”

He nodded at Timothy. “Proceed.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, may I present ‘Black Dog,’ by the one and only Led Zeppelin,” Timothy said. “I listened to these guys a few times in my day, back at the Hilltop Bastion.”

His mood seemed to brighten at distant memories of his human past as the ancient song thumped over the speakers inside the bridge. Les checked the main screen footage from Cricket’s cameras, which were now focused at the bottom of the pit.

The Sirens all seemed to jerk awake, their eyeless heads looking skyward. Dozens of the beasts stood, and then a flurry of motion filled the bottom of the pit as they took to the sky.

“Oh, shit,” Timothy said. “Please pardon the expletive,” he added, and his hologram vanished.

The feed moved as Cricket fired its thrusters away from the hole.

“Good luck, Commander Everhart,” Les said under his breath.

He looked over to Layla, who watched the screen with wide eyes, one hand on her tummy. This stress wasn’t what she needed, but he knew that she wouldn’t go and rest in her quarters even if he ordered it.

The drone’s camera feed showed a skyline full of flying monsters. More beasts joined them from across the metropolis, taking to the air on leathery wings to pursue the drone.

“Sir, should I find a place to land Cricket?” Timothy asked.

“No,” Les said. “Full speed ahead to our location.”

Both Layla and Eevi looked over, and Timothy’s hologram reemerged. This time, he was right in front of the captain’s chair.

“Captain, you want me to draw them right to us?” asked the AI.

“Yes,” Les replied. “Weapons hot, Lieutenant. I’m heading to the combat information center.”

“On it, Captain,” Layla said.

Les stood and walked across the bridge. “Timothy, you have the helm. If those Sirens make it past my gunfire, get us out of here.”

“The Sirens are gaining, sir,” Timothy said.

“How long until they’re within view?” Les asked.

“Two minutes, sir.”

“Can that tin can fly any faster?” Les asked. “I thought Michael souped up the thrusters.”

“He did, but it still isn’t fast enough,” Timothy said. “I could shed some of the new armor, though; that might help.”

Les thought on it for a moment. Losing the armor would leave the robot vulnerable. Then again, if it got hit by a round from the 20 mm Miniguns, no amount of armor would save it.

“All right, lose the armor.”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” Timothy replied.

Les counted the seconds in his head as he dashed through the passageways. He made it to the launch bay within a minute and punched in his access code to open the hatch to the combat information center on the deck below.

A ladder led him into the operations center, which looked a lot like a large cockpit of an old-world airplane. He pushed a button on the dashboard to open the hatch over the windshield. Lightning forked through the dark, scalloped clouds, but he didn’t see anything moving in the airship’s wake.

“In position,” he said into his headset. “Timothy, use the turbofans to start backing us away, but hold as steady as possible.”

The airship began to reverse.

Les opened the hatches belowdecks to deploy the 20 mm Miniguns and then grabbed the controls. On the dashboard, a screen with crosshairs came online.

Multiple webworks of lightning sizzled downward, capturing motion on the horizon. The bat-like images swarmed behind a blue light, chasing it out over the open water.

Les moved the joysticks and lined up the targets with the two Miniguns.

He had done this only in training, but he had scored high marks. It shouldn’t be that different in real life.

I hope ...

“Timothy, hit them with the lights,” Les said.

Several beams shot out from the ship, lighting up the strange, rubbery skin of the flying abominations. Black maws opened, and claws reached out toward Cricket as it led them on a merry chase toward the airship.

Les squeezed the triggers on the joysticks. Green tracer fire lanced away from the ship, punching holes through mutant flesh. The beasts spun away or simply blew apart in the sky. But those that evaded the first spray of lead dived or tried to climb.

Les went after them. Firing a hundred rounds per second from each weapon, he needed to conserve ammunition as best he could, and he had to be careful not to hit Cricket.

Swooping away from the fountain of tracer fire, a squadron of the beasts formed a V, following a powerful leader.

“Come on,” Les said, taking two more down with short bursts. He aimed one of the weapons at the flock coming toward the airship. This time, even the fastest fliers couldn’t avoid the spray. A one-second burst obliterated almost the entire V formation.

Within minutes, only three Sirens were still in the sky. Two batted their wings for altitude but couldn’t outrun the bullets. The third turned away, flying back toward shore.

The next burst missed, and he considered letting the creature live, to save ammo. It wasn’t a threat now, but it could always come back.

“Timothy, target that last bogey with a sidewinder and fire on my mark,” Les said. He looked at the screen, and when the missile was red, he said, “Mark.”

The projectile arced away from the airship and exploded on impact, blowing the Siren to hunks of meat that fell lazily through the air.

Les leaned back in his chair, watching with satisfaction as Cricket returned to the launch bay, where the techs would intercept it and begin the decontamination protocol.

“Timothy, run a scan for exhaust plumes,” Les said.

“Already complete, sir. I’m not picking up anything on the surface.”

Les was a little surprised to hear that, but also relieved.

“How about our divers?” he asked.

“The beacons appear to be on the move again, sir,” Timothy said. “All five of them are together now.”