Ghost Book Two: The Death Machines

– Chapter Seven –

We all jumped like scalded cats as bullets sprayed into the hall, chewing up the marble floor and ricocheting off the gold banisters of the broad stairs. Thrasher and Vargas dove left and Angie, Ace and Hell Razor dove right. I tried to follow them, but a bullet hit my pseudo–chitin shin guard and knocked my feet out from under me. I rolled for the stairs with bullets sparking all around me and bounced down half the flight before I was out of the line of fire. I think more bullets must have glanced off my armor before I got clear, because I left like I’d fallen out of a three story window — onto a rock garden.

“Ghost!” called Angie, as the doors finally recessed into the ceiling. “You okay?”

“I wouldn’t exactly say okay, no.” I checked myself head to toe, all in one piece. “But I don’t have any holes in me.”

“Glad to hear it.” That was Vargas’s voice. “Hell Razor, any grenades left?”

“Sorry, used my last one on those last guys.”

“All right, we’ll do it the hard way then. Ghost, can you get a peek through that door?”

“Can you cover me?”

“Will do,” called Vargas. “On your count.”

I opened my mouth to shout, then realized the Guardians would be listening too. Time for a little syncopation.

“One… two…” I popped my head up and saw a handful of Guardians hiding behind bits of heavy furniture, guns at the ready. They were positioned to give themselves overlapping fields of fire. They saw me and unleashed, but I was already ducking back and thinking fast.

“Three!”

The hammering of their automatic weapons gave way to the rising whine of laser rifles as Angie and Vargas fired blind around the corner. The sound died out.

“Five of ‘em,” I called out. “Entrenched. But I’ve got an idea.”

“Well, keep it to yourself,” said Vargas. “They might be listening.”

“Oh, they are,” I said. “Believe me. Just keep ‘em in there. I’ll be ready in a minute. And hey, Hell Razor, I need your rope!”

“Hang on.”

I slapped a full charge into the meson cannon and few seconds later a neatly coiled length of line arced over the railings and dropped onto the steps beside me. I quickly undid it, then tied one end around the butt stock of the meson cannon. Next came the crazy part. I pulled my kerchief from my pocket and threaded it through the cannon’s trigger guard, then pointed the gun straight up the stairs and tied the kerchief tight around its body so that it depressed the trigger. The purple death light streamed from the muzzle, eating the edges of the marble steps and burning into the ceiling above the open golden doors.

“Jesus, Ghost!” came Angie’s voice. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“Get back from the doors!” I shouted. “Far as you can!”

“You crazy bastard!” called Vargas.

I heard them scrambling back as I heaved the big gun up the stairs so it landed at the top. It bounced as it hit, sending the thick purple beam zigzagging around. Inside the vault, Guardians were screaming and thrashing.

I waggled my end of the rope and the gun swished back and forth on the slick marble like a snake on a leash, sloshing violet death into the vault in lazy arcs.

“Now get ‘em!” I shouted. “While they’re pinned.”

“Tighten up your goddamn fire first!” shouted Angie.

I eased up on the waggling, which I admit had gotten a little wild and was melting the marble on either side of the door. It narrowed to a gentle s–curve.

“Okay, now!”

The others ran back to the edges of the door and leaned in left and right, picking off the last few Guardians as they cowered from the purple snake that had cut their companions off at the knees — literally.

“Clear!” shouted Hell Razor. “Now kill that fucking death ray!”

I crawled up the stairs, pinned the gun with one hand and cut the kerchief free of the trigger. The violet light and the high pitched whine died and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Then we entered the vault.

And stared.

It made no sense, and I could see the same surprised expression on everybody else’s face that I was sure was on my own. The five dead Guardians lay scattered among five hollow glass pillars — with five suits of pristine unused power armor inside of them!

We moved closer. This stuff was the real deal, a giant step up from the pseudo–chitin armor we were wearing. It wasn’t made out of ceramic and kevlar, but from invulnerable plastics and metals I didn’t even know existed. And the proof that they were invulnerable was that, while all our wild fire with our laser rifles and the meson cannon had turned the guardians into so much meat, and had melted through the glass of the display pillars like it was sugar, the armor didn’t have a scratch on it. Not even a smudge. We were in awe. Like our laser rifles and the meson cannon, this was secret stuff from before the bombs fell — from a future our ancestors had never been told had arrived.

I laid a hand on one glass pillar. It slowly rose into the ceiling, freeing the armor. I walked around it, touching it, checking out the way it fit together, as the others did the same at the other pillars. Stuck to the back of the armor with a piece of orange tape was a clear plastic envelope with papers inside. The envelope was labeled INSTRUCTIONS in big bold letters. It had never been opened.

I turned toward the others, dumbfounded. “They never even looked at the manual! If they had been wearing this stuff, they’d be alive and we’d be dead. Is this more of their “Too holy” crap?”

“Yeah,” said Vargas. “I don’t think they thought they were worthy.”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

He frowned, like he was putting it together in his head as he went. “Haven’t you noticed? The whole place is like that. They collect all this crap, but they don’t use any of it. We think of them selfish hoarders who don’t share the tech they use themselves, but that’s not the way it is, is it? They live like cave men in here while all around them is every labor–saving device the ancients ever devised. And why don’t they use it? I think it’s because they believe it’s meant for someone else — for their savior or messiah, or the ancients probably. They’ve spent all this time thinking it was their duty — Ha! Their honor — to keep it all safe until the actual owners came back.”

He looked around at the dead bodies and shook his head. “I’m sure these guys all worked hard to earn the right to protect this armor. And I’m sure they died believing that if they touched it, God would punish them.”

“Then we got here just in time,” said Ace.

“Why’s that?” asked Vargas.

“Because if what that Guardian lady was shouting at us about from the walls is true, then they’ve started believing their messiah is the Base Cochise AI, and it woulda only been a matter of time before the AI told them to put all this stuff on and start using all the big weapons.”

That sobered us up, and we all suddenly looked around like we thought some giant computer was going to jump out at us from behind a dust mote.

Then a noise from somewhere nearby brought our heads around.

“Sounds like there’s still more of ‘em out there,” said Vargas, then nodded toward the power armor suits. “Let’s get our party dresses on. It’s time to finish this.”

It wasn’t until then that we realized there were five suits and six of us. Vargas started to say something about drawing straws but I waved him down.

“Save it,” I said. “I like this fightin’ chitin just fine. I’ll just guard the door while you all get—”

I was cut off by a deep electrical throb from somewhere deep within the base. I felt it in my feet, and so did the others. We all stopped and listened. The throb quickly faded to a background hum, but another sound was growing louder, echoing up the marble steps from the grand hall — a low rumble with high pitched creaks and squeals on top of it.

“Oh, what the fuck now?” groaned Vargas.

“It’s the elevator,” I said. “It wasn’t broken after all.”

I ran down the marble steps to see what was coming, then ran right back up again, twice as quick.

“They must have a big–ass basement in this place,” I said as I stumbled back into the armor vault. “Because there’s another fifty or so Guardians coming our way.” I turned to Ace. “And remember how you said just now that they were gonna start using the ancients’ armor and the weapons any minute now? Well they heard you. They’re all tooled up — pseudo–chitin armor, energy weapons, the works.”

“Fuck!” said Vargas. “We better get this gear on, fast!”

Angie looked up from reading the manual. “Please allow half an hour for arming the first time you put on your power armor,” she read. “A trained and experienced wearer can bring that time down to five minutes, but expect the first time to be an awkward and frustrating experience, particularly without assistance.”

I shook my head. “We don’t have one minute, let alone five.”

Vargas motioned me toward the door. “Drop that portcullis! And make sure they can’t open it again!”

I ran back out and down the marble steps to peek out through the big door. The Guardians had taken cover in the thickets of statues and junk that lined both sides of the grand hall, and were creeping forward through them like ninjas. Their caution would buy us time, but would it be enough?

I looked straight up at the portcullis where it sat raised up into the ceiling. The chains that lifted and lowered it were attached at the top of the metal slab, hidden somewhere in the darkness up there, but the slot that it sat in wasn’t exactly tight. It had a clearance of about five inches on the far side, and ten inches on my side. I pointed the meson cannon up into it and leaned on the trigger.

I didn’t hit anywhere close to the chains, but the violet light showed me where they were, and I shifted my aim to touch the closest one. Molten metal started dripping down and spattering around my boots. I edged back but kept firing. There were three chains, one in the middle and one at each end, and they were massive, with links as thick around as my upper arm. Even the meson cannon was taking its time chewing through them.

I wasn’t halfway through the first one before the Guardians realized what I was doing and started shouting and spilling out from the stands of statues, firing their energy weapons at me as they came.

I stuffed myself in the shallow cover of the doorframe and screamed back over my shoulder. “Hey! Little help!”

Ace, Angie and Thrasher pounded down and joined me, firing from the threshold at the advancing horde, then backed up suddenly as the first chain snapped and there was a groan of shifting metal and a thud that moved the entire base and nearly knocked us and the Guardians off our feet.

“Damn,” said Angie. “Wouldn’t want to be caught under that.”

She and the others recovered a second quicker than the Guardians and started lighting up their front ranks with laser fire as I did the same to the chain on the far end of the portcullis. The Guardians pulled up short and split left and right again, shrieking and looking for cover as our fire cut through them. Unfortunately that didn’t do much to stop them shooting at me, and there was no place I could be except right in the doorway. It was the only way to get an angle on the chains. At least they weren’t trained soldiers, and most of their shots went wide, but the ones that hit were bitin’ my chitin hard. Pretty soon those lasers would be cooking skin instead of ceramic.

Angie saw my predicament and shouted back up the stairs. “Razor! Smoker!”

“Ten four! Incoming!”

Before my head could put together what those five random–seeming words meant, I heard something metallic tinking down the steps behind me, and then a little steel cylinder bounced past my left leg and rolled into the main hall.

“Cover your eyes,” said Angie.

I turned my head just as the cylinder exploded into roiling yellow clouds of smoke that rapidly filled the hall.

Angie slapped my shoulder. “Shift yourself!”

Under cover of the fog I ran across the doorway to other side and started shooting at the right–hand chain from almost directly underneath. It was gratifying to see from the lasers stabbing through the yellow smoke that the Guardians were still blindly shooting where I wasn’t anymore.

Ten seconds later, the second chain snapped and there was another knee–buckling thud as the portcullis fell free in its slot and boomed against the far side. When I’d got my balance back I leaned in to aim at the middle chain, but then I heard a tortured screaming coming from above, like somebody being torn apart. It wasn’t until Vargas jerked me back that I realized that it was the middle chain, unable to take the entire weight of the portcullis on its own. It was stretching like rubber.

“Look out!” Vargas barked. “It’s gonna—”

It did.

Ten tons of steel slab dropped out of the ceiling and hit the floor with a deafening crash less than an arm’s length from where Vargas had me around the neck. It bounced us a yard off the ground and dropped us on our armored behinds, then choked us with the cloud of dust and grit that rose up from the impact.

I sat up shaking with reaction, my heart going a mile a minute. A second slower and I would have been a thin red paste, power armor or no. As the dust cleared we saw that the door had smashed a foot–deep trench in the stone floor and sent cracks all the way up the marble steps.

“Well,” said Hell Razor, when he’d finished coughing. “They’re not getting through that.”

A worried look rumpled Vargas’s brow. “Yeah. And neither are we. We better look for another way out.”

There wasn’t one.

Well, there was, but nobody liked it but me.

We searched the whole of the inner sanctum, found a work bench, an art collection, a sled with the name Rosebud painted on it and, behind a chain–link fence, the weird, looming dragonfly shape of a helicopter — a real one this time, not a simulator, with machine guns and everything.

The others didn’t seem that impressed. They were already turning back to the door as I stepped to the fence and stared through it like a kid looking into a toy shop.

“Come on, Ghost,” called Angie. “We gotta check the other rooms again. Maybe there’s a hidden door somewhere.”

“Wait,” I said. “This is it. This is how we get out.”

Everybody laughed.

“And who’s gonna fly it?” asked Vargas. “You?”

I nodded. “There was a training simulator in Sleeper One. I learned how. We can fly it to Base Cochise.” I pointed up. “Look, the roof opens. It’s perfect.”

Angie came around and looked me in the face, serious as a judge. “Listen, Ghost, your danger meter is broken, you know that. You start shit and charge into situations that any sane person wouldn’t go into with power armor and an army at their back. And it’s only gotten worse with Athalia dead, so maybe you don’t see this the way the rest of us see it — sheer suicide.”

“But—”

She cut me off. “Even if you were the best student in the world, and learned every single thing that simulator could teach you, you still haven’t flown a real one. Do you really expect us to risk our lives climbing into that thing on your first flight? Leave it alone, brother. Leave it alone.”

“Alright, then,” I said. “How about this? If I can fly it up out of that hole in the roof and back down again for a safe landing, will you trust me then?”

Angie looked back at the others.

Vargas shrugged. “If he gets it together before we find another way out of here, we’ll see. If not, we spend shoe leather as usual.”

I gave him a salute. “Thank you, Vargas. Thanks.”

He turned away. “Don’t thank me for givin’ you permission to kill yourself. It’s disturbin’.”

So while the others dug around beneath the mountains of junk the Guardians had accumulated, looking for another exit, I got to play with the best toy I was ever going to have. Amazingly, the chopper was fueled up and in working order. It looked like keeping it that way had been some sort of holy duty, because there was a meticulously kept service log that noted all oil changes, maintenance, and part replacements going back decades — including the maintenance for the hydraulic roof, too. The thing the log didn’t have any entries for, even though there was a space for it, was flights. The crazy bastards had kept the thing ready to fly at a moment’s notice, but had never actually flown it. It made me wonder if they even knew how.

They should have, because there was a flight manual right next to the maintenance manual on the work bench in the corner. As I applied myself to it, I began to realize that this was a considerably different bird than the one Major Taft Beckman had shown me how to fly in the simulator. That had been a tiny little trainer, while this was some kind of combat troop ship, big and bulky, with machine guns and missiles and seating for ten in the back. Maneuvering it was going to require more muscle and concentration, and crashing it was going to be the difference between dropping a pocket watch onto a shag rug and dropping a grandfather clock out of a second story window into an empty swimming pool.

Still, there were enough similarities that I thought I could manage it, and I was just starting to feel like I might be ready to fire up the old eggbeater and see if it still worked, when the others came rushing back into the room and slammed and locked the door behind them. They were all coughing and choking and retching.

I looked around, confused. “What’s going on?”

They hurried towards me, Vargas in the lead.

“Get this thing up in the air,” he said. His eyes were red and running. “We’ve gotta go, now.”

“What? I — I’m not even half ready. Why the change of heart? Does this mean you didn’t find a secret door?”

“Oh no,” said Angie. “We did. But we couldn’t get to it.”

“Huh? Why?”

“Because of the goddamn poison gas, is why!” snarled Hell Razor.

Ace clarified. “The Guardians are pumping the halls full of some kind of toxic fog, and they’ve come at us through a secret panel in full–body hazmat suits underneath their armor.”

“We’re fucked,” said Angie. “We gotta hit the sky.”

“But I haven’t even started it up yet. I haven’t even seen if I can fly it yet. I need to make a test run.”

Vargas looked back at the doors. “Well, you better get a move on then. You’ve got until those motherfuckers find us and break down the door.”

“Well, hell.”

“It’s not all bad news,” said Angie, flashing a map as I turned back to the chopper. “At least we know where we’re going now.”

“You found a map with Base Cochise on it?” I asked.

“It was in a desk,” said Angie. “We already knew Cochise’s general location from Max, but this gives us an exact fix — a hundred and sixty miles northwest of Vegas, just west of the Stonewall Mountains.”

“Great,” I said. “But I hope you’re not expecting me to fly this thing and look at the map at the same time. I’m gonna have a hard enough time just trying not to crash. Somebody’s gonna have to ride shotgun and help me spot these landmarks from the air.”

“Me,” said Thrasher.

Everybody looked at him.

He shrugged. “I like maps.”

Well, who was going to argue with him?

I handed him the map, then started my preflight as the others went back to guard the door.

I was shaking like a leaf. All the things I had wanted to do calmly and methodically suddenly I had to do at a sprint, my palms slick with cold panic sweat. I pushed the button to open the overhead door, then climbed up into the chopper’s cockpit as the roof started folding back on itself. I unlocked the pilot’s seat and set the training manual on the copilot’s seat so I could read it as I worked, then hit the ignition switch and fired her up.

The noise, even with the roof open, was deafening, and the others huddled by the door, hats in their hands and the wind from my rotors whipping their hair around as they watched me run through all the controls, making sure they moved what they were supposed to move. Finally I was ready to get her off the ground and gave them all nervous thumbs up.

They gave me the “hurry it up” rolling hand sign in return, so I turned back to the controls and took a deep breath. Concentration time.

I pulled up on the collective control and increased the engine speed. For a second the chopper just shivered and shimmied, but then I felt it leave the ground and weave around a little in the air. It was a sphincter–tightening sensation, but also a thrilling one, completely different from the simulation. I was floating!

Unfortunately I was also edging sideways toward the wall. Panicking, I tugged at the cyclic control and veered the other way, but too far and too fast. The chain–link fence zoomed up at me on my right. I corrected left again and the rotor blades nearly chopped into the stone wall.

“Shit! Shit! Shit! Calm the fuck down, boy!”

It took a conscious effort of will to move the stick gently, but I managed it and the chopper eased away from the wall instead of zigging. My heart was beating so fast I could hardly breathe. I depressed the collective and throttled down on the engine until the runners touched the ground again, then sat there and sucked in some deep breaths. Who knew that simulation and reality would be so different?

Before I could get my heart under control again, Angie jogged over and shouted up at me.

“So, are you ready?”

“Are you kidding? Didn’t you see? I nearly smashed into the wall!”

“Well, the Guardians are pounding on the door now, and that lock isn’t gonna last two minutes, so…”

“Christ, now who’s the one with a broken danger meter? Until I get this thing under control, flying with me is suicide!”

“It’s suicide either way, Ghost. At least with you, there’s a chance.”

I groaned. Talk about performance anxiety. “Okay. Fine. Poison gas. Ball of fire. Who cares. If you’re ready, I’m ready.”

“Great,” said Angie, then turned and waved to the others.

They backed away from the door, then ran over and clambered into the chopper, Thrasher taking the co–pilot’s seat and the others heading for the back.

Vargas clapped me on the shoulder as he passed me. “Make it good, brother.”

“Just strap in and shut up,” I said. “I need to concentrate.”

Not a chance. Just as I got the runners off the ground, I saw the hangar door fly off its hinges. A gang of guardians in gas masks and pseudo–chitin armor poured through the door in a cloud of green fog.