Inherited War 3: Retaliation (30 page)

Snow moved backwards and rolled onto her back once more. She was panting from the effort and a wave of dizziness swept over her mind. She had to get through soon. Her mind raced with everything from making the building collapse on her, to turning the suit’s external speaker up to full blast and shouting for help. She wasn’t about to give up yet, though. She looked down at herself. It was her chest. It was in the way. She placed both hands on her breasts and smashed down as hard as she could. There was still some give there, and so she pushed harder. At the same time as she was smashing her breasts down, she breathed out as far as she could go and held it. Thirty seconds was all she could manage, but hope suddenly flared inside of her.

Accessing her suit’s systems, she looked at everything that still functioned from just a little to one hundred percent. She saw that her medical functions were still operational and went deeper into the system. Tourniquet function, now that was interesting. She spent the next hour fine-tuning what she wanted the suit to do, and with a little help from her nanites, she found herself hyperventilating as fast as she could. The moment she started to become dizzy, she squeezed every bit of air out of her lungs and activated her suit. The torso of her suit constricted around her upper chest. Her breasts were squashed painfully flat and her rib cage was squeezed to the point of breaking ribs.

She never hesitated as she thrust her hands back behind her and latched on to the backside of the hole. She pulled with her hands and pushed hard with her feet. Her head and shoulders slid into the hole as before, but this time her chest followed suit. She yanked and pulled with all her might and managed to get her head and shoulders out the other side. She placed her hands flat on either side of the hole and with her last remaining strength, pushed with all of her will. She was stuck fast. She reflexively tried to breathe in and couldn’t. Even if the suit wasn’t constricting her, the roof of the hole was now. In silent rage, she attempted to scream and thrash her body violently against the roof of the hole.

Starbursts started exploding in front of her eyes as her brain began to feel the effects of the oxygen deprivation. She was losing the feeling of being connected to her body. Then her final program kicked in and the suit constricted even more. She felt the pain of ribs compacted to the breaking point and blood rushing to her head. She gave one last push and felt herself break free of the hole. Instantly her suit released its death grip on her chest and she sucked in a lungful of air. She lay gasping and panting for a few minutes with half of her body still under the steel beam.

With wet noodle strong arms, she managed to drag her stomach and feet out after her. She collapsed and lay unmoving for what seemed like days but in reality, it was only a few hours. Her nanites worked hard to get strength to her muscles so she could move on. Wearily she sat up and looked around. A crisscrossing of beams had fallen in such a way to make a small bubble of open space inside the ruins. She stood and luxuriated in the room she was now afforded, but didn’t waste time. First, she found where the dripping was coming from. A pipe was steadily dripping a liquid from a jagged end that had broken off. She let a few drops fall into her hand and as the suit absorbed them, it reported that it was indeed water and easily rendered drinkable by the suits systems.

She placed both hands into the puddle underneath the open pipe and nearly drooled as her suit absorbed the standing water. More dripped onto her hands as she waited.  It was agonizingly slow, but finally the sweet filtered water was flowing into her mouth and she drank her fill. Not wanting to waste precious energy, she collapsed onto her back and let the suit do its work as it got every last drop from the wet ground.

Right now she was grateful for her nanites. She knew she had to be in pain; her nanites were reporting that she had indeed suffered two cracked ribs. Not broken, just bent too far and with micro fractures in a few spots. Painful but not worth using limited resources to heal. They just blocked the pain so she could move on.

The water had helped bring her around and once again, hope surged in her mind. She explored her new surroundings and was buoyed up by the presence of exterior light. She made her way over to the source and tripped over something she hadn’t noticed. An outstretched hand of a fellow Nixa reached out from the rubble to her left. She crawled over to where it was and shifted some of the smaller chunks out of the way.

She got about half the body uncovered before she could no longer continue. The pieces were just too heavy in her weary state. The head was gone; completely pulverized by a block of cement, and the chest was caved in. She tried to move more of the rubble but only managed to shift the body around slightly and that caused a giant tear in his skin suit to open wider and spill entrails and other bodily fluids out onto the floor. It splashed up against her hands and legs. The humidity and heat trapped under the collapsed building had begun to liquefy the body, and the pressure from the pieces that had collapsed his chest had sent his innards gushing out through the hole in the suit.

To her utter shock and total horror, her suit began absorbing the disgusting stuff and filtering it. There was nothing she could do to stop it, and she couldn’t even get out of the suit because that function was one of the broken ones. She tried to stand and get away from the stuff, but when she placed all of her weight on her hands, they shot out to either side and she collapsed face first into the offal. She screamed and tried to back away from the mess, but all she managed was to cover herself more completely in the decayed remains.

Then she saw it, her H²O monitor was changing. Vitamins, minerals, and proteins were flooding into her drinking water. She nearly vomited but her nanites turned off her gag reflex. Her suit was turning the remains of the dead Nixa into a nutrient solution for her to consume. There was no way she could drink this. She accessed her water purge function and went to turn it on. She was suddenly doubled-over by the pain of starvation. Her nanites knew what was in the water and they wanted it. They knew nothing of cannibalism or disgust, but only of keeping her alive.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, they began to activate memories of smells in her brain. Her mouth watered at the smell of her favorite foods. She stopped thinking and drank. She sat on her behind, scooted back into the pool of dead Nixa, and locked this memory up tight in her subconscious. No one would ever find out about this, no one needed to know. But damn it, she wanted to live and if doing this would help her get out alive and back to Jeth, then she would eat a hundred of her kin.

An hour later, she wasn’t full by any means, but she was not nearly as malnourished and dehydrated as she had been. She got up and walked as far as she could from what was left of the body. She had at one point thrust her hands into his corpse to get every last bit of nutrients out of him she could. She had been thankful that she couldn’t get her suit off because she was afraid the nanites would somehow get her to actually eat the body, not just absorb it and drink it in with her water. She sat on the far wall and cried.

Her suit absorbed the tears and recycled them back into her water. She knew that and cried some more. She had heard stories of war and battle when she was growing up. Nixa forced to do horrible things to survive unimaginable situations. She was now one of them. But this would be a story that no one ever heard.

She drifted off to sleep in her small corner of the world and woke up several hours later. Her clock was reporting that it was almost true sunset. Both suns would be on the backside of the planet and it would be getting dark soon. She rose and walked toward the small tunnel through the ruble she had seen earlier. She ignored the mess on the opposite side of the room.

The tunnel was small and about five feet off the ground. It was the light source in the room. Cracks in the ceiling were letting the fading rays of the setting suns in, and it filtered its way into her room. She lowered her head and leaned into the tunnel to see if it was passable. It was larger than the one she had crawled through earlier but much longer. She leaned in a little further and craned her head around to see deeper in. She froze in place as her suit’s systems came back online. Her body went ridged and she held her breath. There must be a break in the line somewhere and she had just touched two ends together. She turned on her suit’s sonar and pinged the tunnel in front of her. Her HUD began to turn the bouncing sound waves into a 3D image. Her coms were back up as well but she didn’t dare use them. If she was detected, they could trace the signal back. Besides, the whole Roche army was between her and the city now. She couldn’t go back that way. Her vital monitor did send a quick burst transmission so they would at least know she was still alive.

Slowly she moved her head and got a different angle on the tunnel. She pinged her sonar again. Twice more she managed to move slightly and send out a ping but that was the last. Just as she was shifting again, a chunk of something broke free and crashed into her shoulder, causing her to jump slightly and break whatever connection she had been making. Most of her systems died away again, but she had a fairly good map of the small tunnel through the ruble. It was passable and it worked its way up and away from the city.

She spent a few moments trying to resume her previous position and get her systems working again to no avail. Abandoning her contortions, she entered the tunnel headfirst and started her slow crawl to freedom. She passed several small fissures that were allowing light to penetrate the mound, but none were big enough to allow her egress.

Finally, after an agonizing hour of crawling through tight spaces and over jagged pieces of concrete, she reached the end of the tunnel and found herself looking out the smashed frame of a window. The window was sitting at an angle to the ground and looked directly up into the rapidly darkening sky. There was a jagged piece of steel protruding halfway into the window, but it would be easily passable for her. She waited until true night had fallen before poking her head slowly out of the opening.

It was a wasteland. Collapsed buildings, smoldering fires, and Roche everywhere. They were all headed towards the city—a city still under siege. Mass amounts of fire were being poured into the shield dome protecting the Nixa capitol. The roads between buildings had been plowed clear of rubble for the Roche to move swiftly to the front. The detritus of the fallen city was piled high on either side of the road. The Roche, it seemed, preferred the easy cleared paths as opposed to the rubble heaped mounds on either side.

That was good news for Snow. If she could stick to the ruins, she may have a chance of sneaking out of the city. Suddenly there was a commotion in the direction of the shield dome and the massed fire from the invaders suddenly ceased. The silence that followed almost made her ears ring. She had been listening to the drone of the attack for so long that its absence was palpable.

An echoing roar split the night as the massed Roche forces let out a mighty cheer. The roads quickly drained of their occupants as the reinforcements hurried to the front to see what was transpiring. Snow didn’t know what was going on, but she took advantage of whatever it was to begin making her way out of the city. She crept along the edges of the piles between the buildings and the plowed wreckage of the streets. She drifted from shadow to shadow and in and out of pockets in the rubble to hide from Roche eyes. She wished fervently that no Esii would come her way and find her with their minds. It took nearly an hour of skulking and hiding to finally get to the outer ring of the ruins and face the plain north of the city.

Lights covered the plain like reflected stars on a still ocean. They were everywhere. Hundreds of thousands—no, she corrected herself, there had to be millions of lights covering the plains to the north. Snow should have supposed the area around the city would be packed with invaders. She plopped down on a hunk of steel and contemplated her surroundings. She decided on a course of action and was off running. To the west of the city was a more inhospitable area. Lowland swamps and marshes. A place she was never supposed to go as a child but one that had drawn her with its mysteries and dangers.

She hoped that there would only be a token force between the city and the lowlands. Anything was better than the planes, she reasoned, and she was right. It took most of the rest of the night to make her way to the western edge of the city. She still had to hide from patrols and bands of reinforcements heading to the city. Halfway there the firing had commenced on the city shield once more. The distraction, whatever it had been was over and the Roche were once again assaulting the city in earnest.

She looked out to the west of the capitol and saw only a smattering of lights with huge gaps between them. The grass was tall this time of year, and as quick as she could, she darted from the city and into the small strip of grassland that separated the beginnings of the lowlands from the city. She crouched as she ran, angling towards the area in-between the nearest set of lights. Moments later, she was out of the grass and sprinting down a hill into the swamp. She hit the first of the swamp giants—trees that lived for thousands of years and grew hundreds of feet high and tens of feet around. So massive they can’t live in anything but the constant standing water of the lowlands.

She was a half a mile deep into the swamp and churning through the water deeper when she finally ran out of energy. She slogged to the nearest giant and climbed up one of its exposed roots. She collapsed into the crook made by the root and its trunk. She lay there with her audio turned way up, listening for any sounds of pursuit while trying to catch her breath. She had done it—escaped the city into the swamp. She lay for a few moments before scanning her surroundings. Quiet and empty. Nothing really dangerous had lived in the swamp for centuries. In fact, the only hazard were the quick pits. Not quite solid and not really liquid, they still managed to trap a few unwary Nixa every year.