“I’ll stay behind,” said Thrasher, as Ace finished tying off his leg just above the knee. “Prop me up and I’ll hold them off for as long as I can.”
“Which will be about all of five seconds,” I said. “No. I’ll be the one. Me and Vax, right Vax?
“I am yours to command, sir,” said Vax.
The others looked at me, thankful and embarrassed at the same time. I could see it didn’t sit well with their consciences to be glad it was me who was volunteering. But they weren’t going to contradict me either.
“You… you sure, Ghost?” asked Angie, which was nice of her.
“Oh yeah,” I said. “For a minute there it looked like I might have a future worth livin’ for, but really, ever since I woke up on that slab the world has been tellin’ me that I shoulda stayed dead. I’m the echo of an echo. Time to let it fade.”
Vargas gripped my shoulder. “You’re doin’ his memory proud. A ranger to the end.”
“Beyond the end,” said Angie.
“If he can hold ‘em up,” said Hell Razor.
I shrugged. “We’ll manage. There’s good cover behind all these machines. Leave us all the laser rifles and charge packs and hand grenades you can spare, and they won’t get past us.”
“They’ll be through the door any moment, sir,” said Vax.
“Right,” I said. “You all better move.”
Vargas nodded. “I guess we better.”
Angie gave me a hug. Hell Razor and Ace shook my hand, then helped Thrasher up. He did the same. Vargas saluted. Then they handed me and Vax all the gear they could spare, wished us luck, and crossed the room to the air vent while we found the best cover we could. I checked the door. It was practically bent in half. It wouldn’t last thirty seconds.
I looked back. Angie and Ace were already gone, and Vargas and Hell Razor were stuffing Thrasher into the duct like they were trying to plug it. He was so big he nearly didn’t fit.
For some reason my throat closed up as I watched them. I shouted to clear it. “Get going, assholes!”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Vargas. “We’re gone.”
He climbed into the duct, pushing Thrasher ahead of him, then Hell Razor shoved in after him. Vax had been right. If the robots caught them in there they’d die like rats in a drainpipe.
A deafening clang brought my head around. The door was flying across the room and the robots were streaming in after it. I heaved a hand grenade into the first ones in, then shouldered the meson cannon as it blew them to bits.
“Get ready, Vax,” I shouted. “Here they come!”
“Just as you say, sir,” Vax called back. “Here they do indeed come.”
I laughed. Holding off an onslaught of death machines with a robot who had better manners than any human I’d ever met.
What a life.
A joke from start to finish.
– Chapter Eleven –
High on a neighboring hilltop, shielded from the explosion’s full fury, the rangers watched as fire and ruin claimed Base Cochise. The blast hadn’t just blown up the facility, it had vaporized the entire top of the plateau. The trees on the surrounding hills had been blown flat and burned like matchsticks before they vanished in the billowing cloud of dust that rapidly expanded to cloak the whole area. Soon, all that could be seen of the facility was a boiling brown fog with a white–hot glow at its center.
“No way Ghost survived that,” said Angie as she bandaged Thrasher’s leg.
“No,” said Vargas. “I’m sorry.”
Angie shrugged, then wiped her nose. Then her eyes.
“He was wrong about himself though,” said Ace. “He wasn’t just an echo of an echo. He was a good man in his own right.”
“And a hell of a ranger,” said Hell Razor. “Right to the end.”
“Just not the ranger we knew,” said Thrasher.
“We oughta give him a proper retirement party this time,” said Angie. “That last one he had kinda kicked him in the teeth I think.”
“Good idea,” said Vargas. He squinted into the still–expanding cloud. “I just hope that malignant motherfucker AI died with him. Fucking thing almost ended all life on earth.”
“Don’t worry,” said Hell Razor. “Unless it somehow slipped out the back door when we weren’t lookin’, that mainframe is as dead as week–old road kill. Looks like we saved the world.”
“For now,” said Thrasher.
Vargas laughed. “Always the optimist, ain’t you, Beto?”
He tucked his shoulder under Thrasher’s arm to support him. “Fall in, rangers,” he said. “Long walk back to Ranger Center.”
“And a shit–ton of paperwork when we get there,” said Angie.
The rangers turned and started south, with the black column of smoke rising from base Cochise like a funeral pyre behind them.
– ABOUT THE AUTHORS –
Michael A. Stackpole is a an award–winning game designer, computer game designer and novelist in the science fiction and fantasy field. He is best known for his work in FASA’s BattleTech® universe and for his Star Wars® X–wing comics (from Dark Horse Comics) and bestselling Star Wars® novels from Bantam Books.
Nathan Long is a screen and prose writer, with two movies, One Saturday–Morning Adventure series, and a handful of live–action and animated TV episodes to his name, as well as eleven fantasy novels and several award–winning short stories. He hails from Pennsylvania, where he grew up, went to school, and played in various punk and rock–a–billy bands, before following his writing dreams to Hollywood, where he now writes full time — and still occasionally plays in bands.
Copyright
GHOST BOOK TWO: The Death Machines
Mike Stackpole and Nathan Long
Copyright inXile entertainment inc. 2014
Published by inXile entertainment inc.
Publishing at Smashwords