The Subtle Taste of Midnight

Black Snow

A rolling fury of light and ice charges into us before we could even react. The sky above screams. The cold earth beneath opens its hollow maw to devour us.

"Denis?! SILV?!" the last dregs of Captain's cries swirl around in my earpiece before another shockwave gargles his words in its throat and static hungrily swallows them down. And in the absence of a signal from the mother ship, the ComSys sings like a screaming banshee against my eardrums. Shaken and half-deaf, I stumble to my knees, only to fall flat on my ass, toppled over like a turtle on its back because my VacSuit is too heavy beneath the crushing grip of Zui's gravity.

"SILV?!" I scream into the static as my Core® tries to ping SILV's location. She's still here, still registering a ping on our intranet, albeit faint and weak-hearted. "SIL−"

Before the next words even have a chance to rush out of my mouth...

Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat! The rebel guns suddenly bark. Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat! The bass of double-action Winch 333s belching out their rounds. The sharp zing of Cutters spinning up. There's even a Reaper somewhere in that choir, singing its crack and whistle as it unloads its ammo.

I duck down low to the ice, hands flying with ease to the Q-38 in my VacSuit's holster, fingers comfortably heavy on the gun's trigger. The Q-38's targeting mechanism whirs its complaints. A target-lock failure. But who needs mechanical compensation protocols when you're firing blindly into a churning snow drift? Every nano-second counts when you're face to face with the savages of this barren ice-land.

They'd been waiting for us beneath the snow, pale alien skins and lifeless ice fields indistinguishable from one another. They'd probably stripped themselves bare to the basics, as the Zui sometimes do on the battlefield, smug in the knowledge that their shitty, one-pop tech won't register as a threat on Federation scanners. No weapon that pre-dates Quant tech and embedded nanite armor ever does because, in all honesty, Cutters and Winch 333s are like rotten twigs against Q-line weaponry. Yet here we are, the jewels in the Federation's crown, getting our asses handed to us on the turn of a dime by stick-wielding savages.

I scream again for SILV like a man desperate for hope.

"Denis," she finally calls back from beneath a shifting pile of blackening snow. Her voice is hollow, almost too weak to be audible over the spray of Zuian bullets savagely gnawing at her body. She's in bad shape. After all, she's just MRO-class, built for research purposes and light infantry in emergencies. There's no way a SILV could take an EM blast point blank to the chest plate and spring back unfazed.

"Spool up ROVER. Weapons online and active!"

Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!

"...Active..." it's all she manages before her audio cuts out again. But her sudden silence doesn't worry me. Not when ROVER takes up the charge and whirls around to lay its gunners at our attackers.

Click-BOOM-click-BOOM! The chaos around us scatters. Rebel forces scampering off as cockroaches are wont to do when the lights suddenly come on, their screams stabbing at the snow, their blood painting it a bright shade of blue.

Click-BOOM-click-BOOM! The thunder of ROVER's Q-2s hiccupping on the upstroke echoes across the ice, its shots heavy and monstrous like the beast itself. Yet there are rebels still taking up the charge, still desperate in their foolish quest for emancipation, even though their people and their planet had been conquered by the Federation's flag eons ago.

Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat! Bullets and flashes of white-hot light whisper as they whiz past. ROVER's outer hull cries out when plasma burns bite into its armored hide, but nothing can stop those Q-2s. As screams crack the air and more bodies hit the ground, the swirling snow turns a dirty shade of dark blue. There's a hiccup in the rebels' shooting, their guns cool for a moment and panicked voices drift in from the other side of the snow.

But I don't listen to any of that. Now that the rebels' attention is focused on something else, it's SILV who burns in my mind.

"SILV?!"

The snow around her is tar-black from all her oils leaking. Electricity arches across exposed wires, gears whir uselessly because bits of their mechanism have been shot clear of her body. She looks up at me, her eyes the color of quicksilver.

"My battery is low," she whimpers. Her words cut like knives to the heart, for we've been partners through thick and thin ever since she rolled off the assembly line fourteen years ago. She was there with me through the springtime mud-fields of Victoria Crater, had dug phyllosilicates from deep beneath Zui's unforgiving ice and kept them safe in the storage compartment beneath her chest plate. She'd been my constant shadow throughout the Academy, a whisper of courage when I first saw Karen stroll into the freshman bar on that rainy October night, a pillar of strength when Karen and I whispered nervous "I do's", a bubbling pool of happiness when Alice was born. A cold, hard shoulder to cry on when Karen died a year later.

Now here she is, this quirky, silver-eyed hunk of metal and translucent SynthSkin...

Click-BOOM-click-BOOM-click-BOOM!

"My battery is low, Denis..."

"It'll be ok, SILV. I'll fix you when we get back to the mother ship."

My eyes are heavy with tears, my mouth with promises meant to be broken. SILV's network is too far gone for anything other than the scrapyard, too broken to put back together with plasma welds and love.

"...It's getting dark."

Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!

Click-BOOM-click-BOOM-click-BOOM!

SILV's inner mechanisms whimper, chest plate flashing with electricity one last time. Then, slowly, painfully, the memory of her sinks beneath the black snow. Gone, but never forgotten.

Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!

Click-BOOM-click-BOOM-click-BOOM!

My body wobbles, limbs jangling, bones knocking against each other with the fury of anger caged.

My hands find the Q-38 once more, fingers comfortably heavy on the gun's trigger...

Copyright©Evangeline Oxum 2019