Deathwatch (The Faded Earth Book 1)(16)
Eshton nodded back up the hill. “The suit Beck was controlling is still standing up there. Take Perkins and take it. Green and I will help the others.”
Stein’s glare settled on him, then softened a little. “Giving me orders, Brogan?”
“Only when the situation demands it, ma’am,” Eshton said. “We have to go.”
She nodded and slapped the side of his helmet, sending him off.
He and Green lumbered toward the beacon just as a third dot began blinking red. The location was inside a building. Wonderful. The good news came just as they were about to enter the shadowed doorway; the other teams were converging.
“No time to waste, sir,” Green prompted.
Eshton responded by breaking into a run and nearly diving inside.
Two Pales waited on either side of it, grabbing at him as he blew past. Eshton reacted on instinct, throwing one leg forward and sliding, transferring his momentum into his arms to sling the heavy bodies away. The reaction saved him from the same fate as the other Watchmen; his slide brought him to the edge of a hole in the floor. Beneath lay a basement where eight suits of armor struggled against a mass of white bodies tearing at them. One of Eshton’s attackers flew into the press, crashing into a pair of Pales.
He spotted the three compromised suits at once. Readouts showed him wildly fluctuating vital signs. Green stepped in behind him covered in blood.
“Took care of the other one you tossed away,” he said. Then he got a look in the pit. “Shit. What do we do?”
Eshton barely hesitated. There were measures only available to the Guard rank and above. With a whispered command, he overrode the lock on the compartment at his waist. It opened with a hiss and he raised the weapon inside.
“Targeting solution,” he told the suit’s AI. It complied in seconds. “Automate.”
The suit moved on its own. Though it wasn’t officially among the canon, an unwritten tenet among the Watch was to learn to trust the technology. The armor, the weapons, all of it was required to do the work. Eshton ordered the computer to work out enemy locations and find the best shots, then told it to take those shots.
With no direction from him, the arm of the suit moved so rapidly it brushed against the limits of what Eshton’s body could manage. In the space of five seconds, thirty-six rounds thundered from the gun. Thirty-six Pales jerked in spasmodic wave of severed spines, shattered skulls, and pierced hearts.
As fast as that, the crisis was over. Tending to the wounded would be the critical next step.
He took command of the scene and ignored the subtle body language of the suits around him displaying shock and amazement. He doubted most of them had ever seen a gun before, much less heard one fire.
He was going to catch no end of shit for it.
8
Going back into the mine was something of a revelation. Beck suffered through bouts of anxiety over it, unsure of how she would feel trying to reclaim normality given all that had changed for her.
Over the ten days following the ride along, she had given up her family’s home. Fisher helped sort through its contents, more emotional support than anything else. The sense of loss reared up often and sharply during the process, but to her surprise, so had wonderful memories. A drive full of old photos from Aaron’s birthday celebrations over the years brought the first smile to her face while thinking about her family since their passing.
For all the buildup and worry, once she entered the mine itself everything began to feel remarkably normal. Beck greeted other workers, and if they were stiff and hesitant, unsure how to treat her and wondering how fragile she was, it was nothing she hadn’t learned to deal with over the last two weeks.
She walked into the foreman’s office at her usual time, about twenty minutes before the shift. Carl was seated at his desk, swiping through screens full of schedules and itineraries, tapping out the occasional change. He looked up, his eyes widening slightly. “Beck, hey. I wasn’t sure you’d really be coming back.”
“Told you I was,” Beck said. “Got to work somewhere. What do you have for me?”
Carl knew her well enough to understand this phrase as the request to get down to business—and only business—that it was. He momentarily chewed the inside of his lip before pawing the large terminal again and pulling up an assignment. “Here, look at this. I figure you might want to ease back in, yeah?”
Beck nodded. “People are going to have questions and constantly tell me how sorry they are. I’d really rather not.”
“Sure, I get that,” Carl said, gently tapping the assignment. “This one is solo. Normally I don’t like putting any of you alone on a job, but this is closer to the surface than most of the others. It’s a straight horizontal shaft a hundred yards long, depth of fifty feet.”
Beck frowned. “What? Why would we do that? Is there a vein of gold or something? There’s no metal that shallow.”
“Know that,” Carl said. “Commissioned by the Watch. Runs straight toward the hill. Drones have been chewing it out since the day before you...uh, went off duty. Work order says their science division is looking for a rare set of minerals known to sit between twenty and a hundred feet below ground level in this area. I looked it up, apparently it’s for the power source they use in that armor as well as the armor itself. Comes with a bunch of protocols and requirements, one of which is a single operator to oversee the drones. You want it?”