18

  Aeron

  “Fox, do you copy?” Aeron said, reaching the front door to the block. He looked out into the strand beyond. No vehicles. No people. No sound. It wasn’t all that different from the environment when he came in. Except it was completely different. “How are things looking out there?”

  “I copy, General,” Fox replied. “We’re all clear.”

  “I’ll meet you in the split. I’m coming out the emergency exit.”

  “Roger, sir.”

  Aeron moved away from the front, heading through the emergency stairwell door, which connected to another door that led to the cubes on the ground floor. Most of them were silent save for one that was blasting music loud enough the wall around it was shaking. He could feel the bass through his whole body, and a small part of him wanted to kick open the person’s door and shoot up their terminal, but he continued until he reached the emergency exit.

  He pushed the door open, coming out into the split. This one was particularly narrow and had assorted garbage scattered across the ground. The cleaning crews were much more buttoned-up in the A-districts, where the spread of refuse would never fly.

  “General,” Fox said. He was waiting a couple of meters away, gun drawn. But if they were clear, why was his weapon out? “Fox?” Aeron replied.

  “Where’s our backup, sir?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Code Nineteen.”

  Aeron smiled. “Oh. Yes. Right. She’s behind you.”

  Fox spun as quickly as he could. It wasn’t quick enough. Tora was already there, and she slammed a baton into the side of his face, cracking it against his jaw. He stumbled back from the blow but recovered, aiming his gun at her. She spun smoothly around his arm and hit it with the baton, knocking it away. He tried to punch her, but she was still moving, her entire attack fluid and graceful. She grabbed his arm, turning and throwing him into the side of the block. Then she activated the stunning function of the baton and shoved it into his neck below his chin. He shook for a second and collapsed to his knees.

  “I trusted you,” Aeron said, walking calmly over to Fox.

  Fox slowly lifted his head and smiled. “No, you didn’t. You don’t trust anyone.”

  “True. Who’s running the show for the enemy here?”

  “Sir, even if I knew I wouldn’t tell you.”

  “You’re sure?” Aeron asked, leveling his blaster at Fox’s face.

  Fox nodded. “It’s against my encoding. I’m not the Fox you knew. I replaced him a few weeks ago.”

  “They should have encoded you to self-destruct when you got caught.”

  “They aren’t humans. They don’t completely understand how these things are supposed to work. I’m sorry, General. I’m only doing what I was made to do.”

  “I understand. Are there others like you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Aeron, we have to go,” Tora said.

  Aeron looked at Fox. “I’m sorry too.” It was hard to quantify the impact of compromised clones. He had always thought illegally produced clones would be bad. They were worse than bad. He pulled the trigger.

  He turned the weapon on Tora. “What about you?”

  “I’m clean.”

  “How do I know that?”

  “Because I’m probably the only person on the planet who refers to you by your first name. Including your wife.”

  Aeron offered a bittersweet smile. His wife had always called him General. She wouldn’t call him anything ever again. But Tora did, and that was proof enough to him. He glanced down at Fox’s corpse. The clone had told the enemy to find him at Ghost’s and alerted the enemy to come get him here. Accepting the clone’s identity without challenge was a mistake. One he wouldn’t make again.

  Learning that lesson wouldn’t help him in the short term. The enemy knew where he was, and they were on their way. The loop station was offline, meaning there was no easy way out. It was impressive that they would go through so much effort to catch him. Impressive and troubling. It showed growing confidence in their hold on the planet, at least on Praeton. They wouldn’t be able to shut down the loop without a solid reason, even in the middle of the night when the shuttles were almost empty.

  “We can’t stay out in the open,” Tora said.

  “I know. The loop is out of commission. The only ways to Dome One from here are through the tunnels or via sky shuttle.”

  “Shuttle’s a no-go. They’ll shoot us down before we make it to the dome.”

  “Or have us surrounded when we land.”

  “Tunnels will be a challenge too. We can’t take a transport without them knowing.”

  Aeron remained calm, working through the options while the seconds continued to count down until the Judicus Department, the Centurion Military Police, the Peace Office—or maybe all three—closed in on them.Code Nineteen was the lever to pull when the mission reached critical mass. Tora was the lever. One of the most complete clones that had ever been produced. So much so that her entire line had been deemed too dangerous and shut down. She had a similar flaw to the Stackers. For as threatening as she already was, she was even more formidable when she was angry. “Ideas?” he asked.

  “I recommend bypassing Centurion Prime and heading straight to the spaceport. My primary directive is to get you off the planet, not accompany you back into the jaws of the beast.”

  “If Sheriff Duke came to Proxima through a portal, he did it for a good reason. I can almost guarantee he’s here to see me, and he’s probably pretty confused about why I’m not in charge anymore. Whatever he knows is critical to the overall mission. We can’t leave him behind.” Aeron paused, his mind still working. “The Ziyou may be a problem too. Someone hid a portal on one of the gen ships, and I didn’t know about it.” He fell silent, angry with himself for not uncovering the truth. It was his job to know everything.

  Tora was silent for a few seconds. “Understood,” she finally said, flatly. “In that case, we handle the units already en route. We have to get them one hundred percent, and that includes keeping them from reporting back to base.”

  Aeron raised an eyebrow. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Look around, Aeron. The streets are deserted, and trust me, nobody in C-District is going to get involved or say a word to anyone about whatever goes down here. We take out one hundred percent of the responders. We cut off comms in the dome. It’ll take the Peace Office at least twenty minutes to figure out what’s happening, and we’ll be at the target by then.”

  “We’ll have to kill our own people.”

  “Yes.” There was no hint of hesitation in her voice and no remorse. “You killed your wife, didn’t you?”

  He nodded. “Tell me there’s another option.”

  “There is no other option. You called Code Nineteen because you have a problem. This is the solution.”

  19

  Aeron

  Aeron was standing by the window when the knock came, loud and tinny against the metal door of Tora’s apartment. He could see the unit—a squad of MPs in full gear and ready for a fight—in the split below. They had deployed around the emergency exit in ambush position—hiding on both flanks—using the uneven bulges of the blocks and shadows as cover. They would have found Fox’s body if Aeron had left it out there. Instead, it was in the cube next door, where it would stay until the smell drew someone to it. Both he and Tora would either be long gone or dead by then.

  “Rooftop,” Tora said, sending the feed to his Oracle.

  A large, flat drone hovered above the roof of the block, a squad of Centurions detaching from beneath the wings and dropping gracefully to the deck. They weren’t MPs. They probably weren’t Space Force at all. Illegals like he had dealt with in LaMont’s office.

  “Coming up the front,” she said next, switching his feed.

  A pair of armored transports were huddled in the strand, two squads deploying from them. A dark car from the Judicus Department was positioned behind the vehicles.

  “And they brought a Shield,” Aeron said, unhappy to see one of the defense robots moving away from the APCs.

  “Relax, Aeron,” Tora said. “All of my estimates are on the money.”

  Aeron nodded. “I’m not looking forward to killing them.” He paused. “Maybe the Judici, and the unit on the roof. But not the others.”

  “It’s the way it’s gotta be,” she replied.

  “I know. But I don’t have to like it.”

  The knock came again, more forceful this time. Aeron looked over at Tora. “Now?”

  “Not yet,” she replied. “We have to hit them all at once.”

  “And you’re sure it’ll take out the comm lines?”

  “Shit, Aeron, you act like you’ve never worked a job like this before.”

  “And you have?”

  “This is what I was made for. Remember the Epsilon? The mining rig?”

  Aeron nodded. The cons who had been sent there had managed to seize part of the rig and get into a stalemate with the guards, killing six of them in the process. The former Centurions wanted equal rights for their human/civilian counterparts, which wasn’t going to happen. Sharma had sent Tora to the rig to clean things up.

  And she had.

  She was right now too. He was losing his cool. Making more of this than he should.

  He glanced down from the window one more time. The MPs were in position in the split. He looked at his Oracle, switching from the street feed to the rooftop. The clones were near the stairwell. He flipped back to the street. The APCs were almost perfectly placed. He looked across the room at the terminal there, where the camera feed showed three Judici outside Tora’s apartment, about to knock on her door a third time.

  The seconds passed like minutes, time slowing—the calm before the storm. They would only have one shot at this. One chance to take down twenty-six targets in the span of a few seconds. It was already impressive how quickly Tora had pulled a plan together and how efficiently they had both executed it.

  The moment of truth was on their doorstep..

  Aeron counted the number of times he would have put the plan into action while Tora continued to make him wait. The Judici knocked a fourth time, pounding harder on the door. The unit in the split started to move, one of the MPs going up to the door. The rooftop squad entered the stairwell at the top, beginning to descend. The front door units advanced on the entrance, while the pair of Judici with them moved up toward the APCs.

  Aeron glanced at Tora again, raising his eyebrows. He couldn’t help but smile when she again shook her head. Despite his reluctance to kill people who were only doing their job, he saw it now. The full play she had mapped out in her head when he would have failed to follow through to completion.

  “Almost there,” she said. “Get ready.”

  Aeron moved away from the window, to the door.

  “We need to be in the strand in ten seconds or less,” Tora said.

  “What about the Shield?” He hadn’t expected the enemy to have access to one of the robots. It was a complication he could have lived without.

  “That blaster of yours should melt its circuits without too much trouble.”

  “Only if I can get close enough to use it.”

  “Make it to the front in less than ten seconds and you’ll have cover to reach it.”

  She said it like it was a simple task. It was for a clone. But he didn’t have enhanced strength and agility, and he wasn’t a young man. Ten seconds was a stretch.

  It also wasn’t an option.

  The Judici at the door placed a device against it that would blow it open and took a step back.

  “Now,” Tora said, tapping a key on the terminal’s control pad.

  Aeron didn’t wait to see the result. He didn’t have the time, and he didn’t need to, anyway. He felt and heard the entire building rumbling and shaking in response to the multiple detonations happening in and around it. He pushed out the door of the apartment and sprinted down the hall, even as the explosion in the split outside belched fire into the passage ahead.

  He couldn’t see it live, but the charge Tora had set to blow her front door outward detonated, setting off the Judici’s charge with it.

  He didn’t look back. He didn’t have to; he could see it all in his mind. The concussion blowing the Judici back into the wall and riddling them with enough shrapnel to reach the khoron hiding inside them. He heard the explosion on the rooftop too, envisioning the entire top of the building as a massive fireball engulfed not only the illegal clones but the drone that delivered them.

  Aeron reached the corner four seconds later, as the first of the flames subsided. He heard gunfire behind him, Tora shooting one of the MPs in the split from the window. A quick burst and then she was running to catch up.

  He made it to the corner, squinting his eyes to see through the smoke. The stairwell ahead was a mess of debris, and he climbed over it and through the door into the lobby.

  He nearly froze at the scene. The entire face of the building was a mess of twisted steel, broken glass and smoldering textiles. The explosives had blown out the front of the block, throwing even more shrapnel into the approaching MPs and taking them down. Meanwhile, another group of explosives planted almost directly beneath where the APCs had stopped managed to take the Judici out of the picture. That detonation had also been designed to sever the underground lines that provided comms service throughout the city. The Centurions counted on their secure wireless military channels to fall back on, but they were currently offline too—one last hack that Tora had activated with a click.

  He charged through the rubble, using the smoke and fire as cover. Where was the Shield?

  He heard it before he saw it, large metal feet clanging against the ground, servos lifting its bulky shape back from where it had been tossed in the explosion. Eight seconds had passed. He was behind schedule.

  He crossed the mess, the surface below his feet changing to the darker material of the street. Large cracks sounded from his left, and he heard the sound of impacting projectiles behind him, digging into the street. At eleven seconds he dove, coming down behind one of the APCs, which had turned sideways as a result of the blast. It gave him cover from the Shield.

  “Over here!” he heard Tora yell. “Here, you bastard.”

  He straightened up, leaning out from the side of the vehicle. He saw the Shield silhouetted through the smoke. A three-meter tall humanoid made of lightweight but dense composite alloys—bulletproof and strong. Its glowing red eyes menacing in the haze.

  Tora was standing in front of it, trying to keep its attention on her to give Aeron a chance to take it out. He rounded out from behind the APC as the Shield started shooting, nearly clipping Tora before she managed to get behind a piece of rubble. She only stayed a few seconds while the Shield’s machine guns blasted it to pieces.

  Aeron kept running toward the Shield, which either hadn’t noticed him yet or hadn’t recognized him as a secondary threat. Either way, he didn’t get to the robot before it turned on him and redirected its guns.

  He winced as he started shooting, fully expecting the robot’s counter strike to rip into him and cut him to ribbons. But return fire never came. Instead, Aeron’s ion blasts slammed into the robot’s chest—a tight, practiced grouping of hits that punched through the alloy shell—and melted the wiring inside.

  The Shield stumbled forward a step and then lost power, the red eyes fading out before it fell over sideways, unable to maintain its balance.

  “Nice work,” Tora said, running up to him. She pointed in the direction of the Judicus’ car. “We’ve got five minutes before the Peace Office arrives. We need to make Centurion Prime before that happens.”

  Aeron hesitated a moment, looking over the extensive damage they had done in a matter of seconds. Fresh debris floated down from the rooftop and wafted out from the split. He heard sirens in the distance.

  “I’ll drive,” he said.

  20

  Caleb

  Caleb couldn’t do anything to rescue Hayden until he found a way from the Ziyou back to the Judicus Department. He assumed the Department was located closer to Centurion Command, which itself was likely located somewhere that wasn’t close to here. Corporal Dunn wouldn’t have called this place the pimple on Proxima’s ass if it were.

  That meant finding a way from point A to point B, even though he had no reference to where either of those points were in relation to the overall planet or to one another. It was a tricky position to be in, but not one he couldn’t get out of.

  The first step was to assume the Judicus’ identity. He could have projected a scan of the dead man, but he decided there was an added risk to that approach, especially when moving against Vyte. As a hybrid organic-machine, Axon intelligence already knew Caleb possessed an Intellect Skin. Vyte would be on the lookout for false projections, either directly or through evident signatures associated with the technology such as power fluctuations. In that circumstance, it was far safer to come as he was, so to speak.

  He put the Skin into a standby mode, and then removed the cowl from over his head, tucking it behind the collar of the Judicus’ button-down shirt. He added the pants, jacket, and tie, converting himself from Marine to Judicus the old-fashioned way. It was to his benefit that nobody on this planet knew him or could recognize him beyond the way he chose to appear. He was a ghost on Proxima.

  Finished dressing, he set about the more gruesome task of removing the Judicus’ identification chip from his wrist. He used the microspear to good effect for the job, cutting away the flesh and exposing the inner tissue. Rolling up his sleeves, he reached into the open flesh. It took a lot more digging than Caleb wanted to locate the grain-sized implant, but he pulled it out within a few minutes and carried it to the sink, washing both it and his hands clean.

  You can let me do that next time.

  Caleb hoped there wouldn’t be a next time. He straightened out his clothes and went through the door leading to the barracks hallway. The quarters locked behind him, giving him time before anyone would discover the body. There was a chance Vyte could call an attack on him here, but he didn’t get the impression that was the Axon’s style. By going after Hayden, he was walking into a trap. There was no need to try to block him before that.