Deathwatch (The Faded Earth Book 1)(23)

Stein took her helmet off and swiped hair back from her face. “Yeah, that’s the guy. Eventually he’ll wake up and we’ll get a name. Eshton said you’d probably have questions. I’ve got a few minutes before it’s likely anyone will call me.” She tapped the helmet. “I’ll hear them even without this on, but you’ll have to be quiet if they do, okay?”

Beck nodded. “The only thing I want to know is where we’re going and why I need to go. Eshton told me it was better for me to know enough details to make the stakes clear, but it seems like you two could just lie to whoever you answer to. They don’t have to know I even exist.”

“Well, here’s the thing,” Stein said, scratching her chin. “Our superior is a hard man. Not cruel, but he’s Deathwatch through and through. His goals are...I guess you’d call them noble, but he won’t tolerate the slightest threat to them. He might decide that you just being in proximity to the stasis chamber was too risky. After all, you never know when some smart kid will fool everyone by taking control of the whole system, right?”

Beck had the decency to blush, but she nodded in agreement.

Stein continued. “Truth is, Eshton read you in because telling you the facts ties your hands. You know enough that only one of two possibilities can happen. You’re either dead, or you become an asset. The other option, not telling you the details, had a much higher chance of you getting dead. Just so our boss could cover his ass. Eshton is betting everything on convincing the man you’ll be going to see that you’re more useful as part of the team, since you’re already aware of what we’re doing even if you don’t know why we’re doing it.”

“Oh, that son of a bitch,” Beck said, realization dawning. “He’s been pestering me to join up for weeks. I’m going to punch him in the face so hard. Should’ve done that to start with.”

Stein grinned for some reason. “Give him a good slug in the head, sure, but don’t break his jaw. Brogan is looking out for you. He’s one of the fairest people I’ve ever met, and he’d have respected whatever choice you made. Still, you’re not wrong. You let your curiosity override your self-control, and there are consequences for that. Which means in the next day, you’ll either be accepted into the Deathwatch or you’ll be a corpse.”





11


With the storm, they came. Not clusters of five or six. Not a swarm of a few dozen. Hundreds. The dry gale blew dust against Eshton’s armor hard enough to rock him on his feet, obscuring his sight completely. The particles blocked infrared as well, so he and every other member of the Watch worked by thermal imaging alone. The press of bodies moved in a wall. The Pales below burned hot, a sign they had all eaten well lately. Not surprising; Pales nested and shared resources exactly for assaults like this, though Eshton had never seen one so large or coordinated.

“Holy shit,” someone said over the command channel. “Brogan, are you seeing this?”

“I see it, Gomez,” Eshton said. “Don’t let your people hear that tone of voice.”

Gomez scoffed. “Just us Guards on this channel. They outnumber us.”

“They always outnumber us,” Eshton said. “World is full of them. We’ll manage. Now switch to unit channels. Here they come.”

The Pales covered the last fifty feet to the wall at a dead run, but still clustered together. Eshton frowned at the oddity. Staying packed tightly was a deliberate act. Almost as soon as he could wonder why they would give up the advantage spreading along the wall would give them, the answer became clear.

Rather than the usual tactic of several Pales trying to climb atop their brothers to breach the ring of Sentinels on the wall, they brought tools. A dozen ladders, dragged out of sight on the ground obscured by the mass of bodies, suddenly rose up in the night to slam against the ramparts.

Eshton didn’t shout orders. There was no need. No one in his unit squawked incredulous questions, asking where the Pales could have found ladders of all things.

Instead they moved forward as one and fought.

White bodies ascended even as the ladders swung through the air, the flood of Pales moving in smooth unison to overwhelm the defenders. It nearly worked; the first few enemies to crest the wall rocketed into the Watchmen there, knocking them back. The battle was truly begun, then, the line of black-clad protectors letting instinct and training take over for rational thought.

Eshton was right in the middle of it, grabbing one of the naked Pales by the throat and groin and hurling it from the wall. He had to do the same for two more before he could get close enough to the ladder to do anything about it, but by then it was so full of Pales that pushing it backward wasn’t an option. Not that it would have done much good since the enemy could just raise them again.

“One of you on either side of the ladder, ready to pull it up,” Eshton roared over the channel. “Another in the middle to keep any more from getting to the wall. I’m going to clear them off.”

There was no hesitation. The three closest Watchmen pushed forward, bringing weapons to bear. They cut a path through the small crowd of Pales to reach the ladder, each taking hard hits to their helmets and one nearly getting an armor panel ripped off. Eshton sent a command to his suit and a small panel at his waist opened, a length of sturdy cable spooling out. He tossed the end to another pair of Sentinels. “Belay me. Don’t drop me.”