Ninefox Gambit

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

LIEUTENANT KEL MIKEV hated his assignment, but it could have been worse. Sure, his eyes hurt, and even through the suits’ filters some of his soldiers had fetched up with nasty nosebleeds and soft tissue damage, but he preferred a little honest smoke in a contained environment to planetside missions where you had to watch every fucking square centimeter for things that bit or oozed or crooned at you in your childhood sweetheart’s voice.

Mikev’s platoon was responsible for the forward section near Gate 3-12, where the Kel had established a toehold in the Umbrella Ward. The heretics had sucked out the atmosphere while the Kel spent a hair-raising several hours blowing down walls in some places and blocking off passages in others, building a fortress in the Fortress. One of the company’s other platoons had had to herd the unhappy civilians to a holding area. Not all the civilians had gotten suited in time.

Mikev was glad he hadn’t been assigned that duty. He felt terrible when the fragile ones blubbered. But he reminded himself not to get distracted by irrelevancies.

Eggshell was whining about grit in his eyes that he couldn’t unsuit to get at. Trigger was obsessively checking her weapons. One of these days Trigger was going to be so caught up making sure every component fit just right that she’d stand there as the heretics punched her full of holes. Mikev had a lot of theories about how his soldiers would die. It was one of the ways, like giving them nicknames, that he kept from getting too attached to them.

The attack came as the warning did, sudden pulse of heat in his forearm to indicate incoming. Incoming from where? And what? Poison gas? Surely they would have done it earlier, and it’d be easy enough to pump it out after all the Kel were dead. He didn’t hear guns, didn’t see wildfire flashes or smoke –

“Everyone stay under cover,” Mikev said, which he wished was an unnecessary order.

Trigger, who had been half out of position, was slow to respond. Mikev groaned. She was a great shot, but not very bright. He couldn’t tell what she thought she saw, but she brought her scattergun up and fired through the loophole.

Or would have fired, if the gun were working.

Mikev thought at first that the crawling sensation was horror. It couldn’t be some local parasite, not here, they’d never allow such a thing through the Fortress’s ecoscrubbers. Then he realized that the sensation came from his belt, his pack, the pistol in his hand, a disgusting itch that started to hurt in earnest.

Trigger had cast down her scattergun. There was a bizarre streaky speckiness in the air, suggesting a field effect just outside human visual range, which in turn suggested a heretical exotic.

“Everyone get rid of your weapons. Get away from them,” Mikev snapped. This was sufficiently novel that he added, “That’s a direct order.”

The crawling sensation weakened away from the guns, although Mikev wasn’t sure they wouldn’t explode messily. No, that didn’t seem to be the case. The fuck? The gun was fossilizing as he watched, making tiny shrieking sounds. It made him want to put the thing out of its misery and it wasn’t even alive.

More interesting was the fact that the grenades and power tools were unaffected. So this corrosion field was keyed to specific weapon archetypes.

Mikev had just opened the link to inform the captain when she said, before he could get anything out, “I know, Lieutenant, I’m not stupid. Keep your eyes peeled in case the heretics get it into their heads that they can beat Kel knives. We have orders from the colonel to hold. Out.”

Trigger looked distressed. Mikev yelled at her to get away from the corroding guns. She looked for all the world like she wanted to hug them better. Honestly, she was a full-grown Kel.

In the back of his head, he was convinced that the field was rotting his cells from the inside. Sometimes the universe was determined to send creeping things after you no matter how far away you stayed from planets.