Fallen Earth: Official Fiction #14: A Gathering Storm Ch. 2: Too Close to the Sun

Fallen Earth team released their first official fiction of the year continuing the epic "Gathering Storm" story revolving around a Tech named Seth McCutcheon and his survival adventures in the wasteland:

Seth McCutcheon stretched and sighed and tried his best to memorize the feel and scent of Donya's sheets.

She'd patched them together expertly, and in daylight they were a bright hodge-podge of greens and blues and pinks. In the dark they were simply smooth and clean, and smelled of soap and Donya's skin. Seth allowed himself a smile and ran one hand down the curve of Donya's side, across her hip, then curled one arm around her and pulled her to him. She made a small, contented sound and wriggled against him, pressing her back to his chest.

"I'm glad you could make it," she said softly. "Last word I heard from Bountiful, they didn't know if you'd be free or not."

"For you?" He breathed the words in her ear. "I make the time."

She sighed. "It's been hard, you know...out here, just the four of us."

Seth nodded against her shoulder. Donya, her father, and her two brothers had settled into this place six weeks earlier. Seth had never liked the idea. They'd made the place as secure as they could; the tiny house backed up to a sheer cliff, and a sturdy fence curved in a half-circle around it. Still, more than once they'd had to fight off raiders, and a small pile of bodies now lay at the base of the cliff a quarter mile to the north.

Donya rolled over and kissed Seth's neck. "I feel safe when you're here, though."

He brushed her lips with his, and frowned. "I wish you'd come back with me."

She closed her eyes, pained, and he regretted the words. Seth knew Donya's independent streak ran just as deeply as her father's. Establishing this place-making a home-meant the world to her. For the thousandth time Seth cursed the obligations that kept him in Bountiful and away from her. His eyes darted over to the heavy metallic case resting on the floor in the far corner of the room, narrowing as he glared at it.

Seth stroked Donya's cheek and drew a breath to say something, but cut himself off abruptly. Donya noticed it at once and sat up, drawing the sheets around her chest. "What's wrong?"

Seth stood. "Thought I heard something." He took one step toward the metallic case, and the entire house shook with the thudding force of an explosion, knocking Seth's feet out from under him. Before he could regain his balance, the bedroom door split in half, and a man in Enforcer power armor stepped through it. Two more followed on his heels. All three held assault rifles leveled at Seth and Donya...

...and they stood between Seth and the case.

He gritted his teeth and raised his hands. "What do you want?"

One of the men said, "What do Enforcers always want?" but before anyone could respond, a fourth armored figure came through the doorway. He was bigger than the other three, and his black, lacquered armor gleamed in the lamplight. Seth could feel the man's stare from behind the featureless helmet.

"Are you the courier?"

The man's voice was modulated, lower and more gravelly than natural. Seth had no idea what he was talking about.

"We don't want any trouble. We're just farmers." Seth shot a glance at Donya. She sat rock-still, scared but calm, her clear green eyes dry and focused.

The man in black armor turned his head, surveying the room slowly, until his eyes lit on the case in the corner. Seth groaned inwardly.

"You don't look like a farmer," the low voice intoned. "Too small. Too scrawny. Not like those big, strapping gents we left lying in a heap outside."

Donya let out a tiny sound from her throat. The gleaming black head swiveled between her and Seth. "No, you look like a courier. And that big box on the floor there looks like what we're after."

Seth read the other men's body language and knew they didn't have much time. "Who are you? You're not Enforcers. What are you after? Maybe I can help."

None of the armored men answered him for long seconds. Then the leader said, "It doesn't matter whether we're Enforcers or not, I suppose..."

...and shot Donya through the head.

Her body crumpled to the mattress, the beautiful sheets staining dark, dark red, and Seth screamed, mind gone blank, and launched himself at the leader.

Everyone opened fire.

They weren't good shots, but they were good enough. The first bullet took him through the thigh, the impact spinning him around in mid-air, and the second punched a hole through his shoulder. Seth slammed against the wall and dropped to the floor, his vision dimming with shock and pain.

The black-armored leader stepped closer to him. "Won't be too long before you bleed out." Behind him, one of the other men picked up the case and tucked it under one arm. "But since you were an annoying little ****, I'll make your last few minutes more interesting." He aimed his rifle carefully and fired a single shot into Seth's abdomen, and the world sharded into red and black and blinding pain.

# # #

The first thing Seth saw when he forced his eyes back open were Donya's eyes, dead, staring into his own. He moaned and ground his teeth.

If I'd only been faster...

Seth forced his thoughts into order. It took so much effort that he nearly passed out again, but slowly, steadily, he aligned the proper nerve impulses.

If only the case had been closer...

Inside Seth's body, the host of nano-machines sprang to life, rushing through his bloodstream, microscopic electrical storms playing over each molecule-sized surface. As he lay there, slumped against the wall, they zoomed in on the three gaping bullet wounds and began rebuilding the damaged tissue. Seth was too weak to move at that point, so he couldn't force-feed himself anything to supply the needed nutrition. Consequently, as the machines repaired his body, Seth's face diminished and hollowed, his cheeks and eyes grew sunken, and the skin all over his frame drew tight against the wiry muscles underneath.

Fifteen minutes later, their work complete, the nanomachines went dormant again. Seth crawled into the little house's kitchen and gorged himself on salted meat and hard-tack, draining a canteen full of tepid water as he chewed. When at last he felt full, Seth pulled on his clothes and gathered up a few small, specific items from the house.

Soon, with the house blazing behind him, Seth McCutcheon began walking. A few nanomachines swam through the fluid inside his eyeballs, reinforcing the cones there; Seth's eyes glimmered a brilliant green in the darkness as they took in and amplified every scintilla of light available.

The Enforcer impostors' footprints, clearly visible in the dusty earth, led west.

# # #

Seth had stopped at a tiny spring to refill his canteen, just before dawn, when the two dust-colored raiders tried to jump him.
They moved quietly, he had to give them that. The first one slipped up behind him almost before he could react, and the second one moved in on his left just as silently as the first. Seth pivoted to his right, swung around to face both of them, and feinted with an empty hand. The movement was meant to startle, and had the desired effect: the two sand rats paused, just long enough for him to get a good look at them.

Neither of them could have been older than twenty. Dressed in rags, their skin smeared with dirt, both of them held long, jagged knives, the blades stained dark so as not to give up any tell-tale shine. One of them grimaced, his lips skinning back from toothless gums.

"What can I do for you, fellas?" Seth asked, the words non-threatening but the tone icy.

"That's a nice-lookin' canteen you got there," Gums said. "Not bad boots, neither." The other sand rat flicked his long knife side to side and moved a step closer.

Seth narrowed his eyes. "Boys, I am short on both time and patience. Turn around and be on your way."

Gums laughed. "Two o' us. One o' you. You don't even got weapons. Whatcha gonna do, unarmed?"

Tiny charges of electricity crackled in Seth's eyes and along the hair of one arm-drawing Gums' eyes to Seth's hand, which seemed to be closed around something small. With a bitter note in his voice, Seth said, "It's very rare that I'm completely unarmed." Then he flipped the tiny object he'd been holding straight at Gums' face, much too quickly for the dirt-smeared man to get out of the way.

The projectile was a tiny bottle of glue, the kind once used to build model cars. Both the sand rats recognized it for what it was: a strange, innocuous little thing that should have posed no threat whatsoever. Neither of them was prepared for what happened when the bottle touched Gums' skin.

The glue exploded out of the bottle, moving as if it were a living thing, a creature made of long, ribbon-thin tentacles that wrapped themselves around Gums and pinned his arms and legs tight. Suddenly off-balance, Gums toppled over like a felled tree, and when he hit the ground, the glue-tendrils branched off of his body and anchored themselves to the rocks and earth. Gums tried to scream, but the web-like substance slid over his mouth and gagged him tight.

The other sand rat might as well have been webbed himself, for all his ability to move. He turned his head and stared at Seth, his eyes huge and bloodshot. He started to say, "What the hell did you do?" but only got as far as "What the hell d-" before Seth kicked him square in the balls as hard as he could. Seth McCutcheon was not a big man, but every ounce of him was muscle, and the force of the blow lifted the sand rat several inches off the ground.

Seth left the two of them in the dirt, finished filling his canteen, and continued on his way. He figured the web would dissolve around the time the other man's jewels stopped hurting.

# # #

Seth caught up with the men in Enforcer armor just past noon, but he stayed far back and tailed them discreetly until after dark. It was just as well, since it took them that long to get back to their main camp anyway.

Whoever they were, they had set up a decent-sized base of operations in the bottom of a shallow valley, centering around a cluster of pre-Fall army-surplus tents with a big campfire in the middle. Seth speculated that the tents must have been held together with, as his father might have said, "spit and baling twine," to have lasted this long. The impostors had regular perimeter guards and a couple of other rifle-toting goons on patrol. Seth crept up on one pair, circling around behind them, until he came within earshot. The two men spoke softly, but even without any nanite enhancements, Seth's hearing was phenomenal.

"Don't know where the real courier got off to," one guard said.

The other grunted. "So? What was in the case?"

The first guard looked left and right, clearly not wanting anyone from his own camp to overhear. "Andreyevich can't get it open. They stopped short o' shootin' the lock off, 'cause they don't wanna damage what's inside, y'know? Whatever it is. Could be worth somethin'. But damned if that lock didn't just beat him up."

"They still workin' on it?"

Faintly, from the direction of the main camp, came the sound of frustrated swearing. The first guard chuckled. "Reckon so."

Seth backed off, curling up inconspicuously in the lee of a rotting tree stump, and weighed his options. From what he had seen and heard, the nearby camp contained at least fifteen armed men, maybe as many as twenty-five. The very thought of a frontal assault was ludicrous, and he abandoned it as soon as it popped into his head. He couldn't pull any kind of fast one by wearing some of their armor, either; to a man, they outweighed him by at least forty pounds. He'd look like a child playing dress-up.

Time for a diversion.

Seth pulled one of Donya's father's most prized possessions out of his pocket: an ancient, battered, but still functional Zippo lighter. He couldn't tell how many more seconds of precious flame it could generate. He hoped for three, maybe four.

Seth's hair stirred and stiffened briefly as he charged the lighter. Moving to a better vantage point-almost flat on his belly in a small depression in the earth-Seth made sure no one was looking in his direction, reared up, struck the lighter aflame, and threw it to a spot thirty yards south of the main camp.

As soon as the lighter struck the ground, the minuscule flame erupted into a massive, white-hot column with a sound like a bomb going off. The hellish fire immediately began to spread, consuming the tall, dry grass of the Grainway, and a chorus of shouts from the camp rang out as armored men and women rushed toward the conflagration, emptying the camp.

Seth had started moving to the north as soon as he threw the lighter, and twenty seconds after the fire strike went off he crept past a line of lean-to's and began systematically searching the tents. He didn't have to spend more than three seconds on each one, since his case would be hard to miss.

Along the way he picked up a rusted, discarded dagger that looked as if the only thing it had been used for in recent months was poking at logs in a campfire. Tiny blue arcs crawled across the blade's surface, and the rust fell away, revealing a new, scalpel-sharp edge.

One man had been left in the tent with his case, and Seth caught him utterly flat-footed. With the shouts and the roar of the flames outside, Seth felt no need to be subtle. Rushing forward, he slashed the man's wrist-forcing the sub-machine gun to drop from the man's suddenly nerveless fingers-then carved a channel up the man's arm and across his throat, severing both the jugular and the windpipe. Seth stepped back and out of the way as most of the man's blood supply splashed onto the floor.

The wave of red flowed around Seth's feet as he crouched in front of the metallic case, its lock opening readily at his touch. Inside, nestled in carefully-packed cotton, lay the objects that defined most of who and what Seth McCutcheon was. He lifted out the two nickel-plated revolvers-matched High-Roller Hand Cannons, the finest weapon Funderburk Arms ever made-checked to make sure they were loaded, and sighed as he lightly kissed both barrels. Setting both guns aside, he took out the next layer of cotton padding and gave a ghastly wolf's grin to the streamlined helmet staring up at him.

The armor was a custom job. Not like the bulky, walking-tank equipment favored by Enforcers; this was a sleeker design, and while it might not have had the stopping power of an Enforcer battle suit, Seth figured he could move at least as fast and twice as quietly in it.

Fitting the helmet over his head felt like pulling on an old, comfortable pair of shoes.

Seth McCutcheon straightened up, the last piece of armor in place, and cracked his gloved knuckles. "To hell with subtlety," he said, his voice echoing hollowly in his own ears. Concentrating briefly, Seth canceled the raging fire outside and stepped out of the tent.

It didn't take long for the impostors to figure out what was going on-or at least, to understand that they'd been duped. Armored men and women came pouring back into the camp, and at the far edge of the approaching cluster, Seth spotted the black-lacquered shape of their leader.

He opened fire with the Hand Cannons at not quite point-blank range.

Enforcer armor was good, but the particular models these people were wearing had a relatively weak point in the upper third of their helmet-plates. Seth put bullets through that weak point, one after the other, until both revolvers were empty.

"Fall back!" their leader bellowed. "Fall back and spread out! I want that son of a ***** surrounded!"

Seth moved calmly toward the campfire in the middle of the tent cluster. He knew they'd take one of two tacks: either they'd open fire on him from a safe distance, or they'd try to dog-pile him so they could take his armor. He felt prepared for either situation, but put his money on the second one.

The impostors didn't disappoint. There were eight of them left, aside from the man in black armor, and they came at him from every point of the compass, moving in slowly, carefully. It might have worked. If they'd been facing anyone else.

Their deliberation gave Seth all the time he needed to send surge after surge of nanites along the ground and into the campfire. The earth around the fire jumped and danced with tiny electrical arcs, but in the glare of the flames no one notice. Seth holstered both his revolvers and raised his arms, as if in surrender...

...and just as the leader shouted "Now!" and the armored figures darted toward him, the campfire roared like a dragon and sprayed white-hot fury in every direction. The wave of fire scorched the earth bare and seemed to cling to the impostors' bodies, turning their armor a bright cherry red in less than one second.

Seth stood among the flames, untouched. He stared at the black-armored leader, who hovered at the edge of the camp, his expression hidden behind the lacquered helmet. Seth damped his sound input so that he didn't have to hear the full volume of the screams around him as the impostors baked inside their armor.

A few seconds later, Seth stepped around the smoking corpses and walked calmly toward the man who, hours earlier, had killed Donya in the coldest of blood. When he got within arm's reach, the leader said, "Now, there's no reason to kill me. I'm sure we can-" but Seth didn't let him finish the sentence. Instead he channeled every unit of power his armor had into a single punch straight to the man's face.

The blow knocked the man end over end, shattered his helmet completely, and might have broken his neck. He came to rest in an oddly-angled pile, as if he were a marionette with abruptly cut strings. Seth moved over to him, knelt, and took off his own helmet.

The leader was an older man, with leathery dark skin and gray hair. He looked up at Seth with pained but lucid eyes-eyes that grew wider with sudden recognition.

"I...thought for sure I'd...killed you."

Seth's face could have been made of stone. "In all the important ways, you did. Tell me who you are."

The gray-haired man tried to swallow, and couldn't. "We're...White Crow. Looking for a...courier...carrying important...information. Had to...find him..."

Seth's voice grew colder. "And so, on the off-chance that I might have been that courier, you slaughtered an entire family."

The man attempted a shrug with his eyebrows. "Make the...Enforcers look...bad...that's just a bonus."

"And what information was this courier supposed to be carrying?"

"Don't...don't know...exactly. Just something about...something big, just...something big. That's all I knew. Big, and out of...control." He tried to swallow again, managed it this time. "Who're...you?"

Seth stared down at the man. He thought about his position among the Daedalans, the mercenary branch of Techs who'd finally decided to learn to use all the armor and weapons they'd been building for the Enforcers for so long. He thought about his long-term security contract in Bountiful, the Tech town in the Grainway. He thought about all the assignments he'd taken over the years, all the threats he'd eliminated, all the people he'd protected.

Then he thought about Donya. And how letting himself get caught off-guard once-once-had ruined everything he truly cared about. For the first time since her death, he let the pain through. The awful, crushing agony that slammed into his gut and twisted its way up through his heart and into his brain. She was gone. Forever, gone, because he couldn't protect her...

...and because the man lying broken in front of him had killed her.

Seth raised one gauntleted hand and spread the fingers. The gray-haired man's eyes twitched to the glove, as Seth wanted them to. "I built this gauntlet with a very specific purpose in mind," he said, and the sound of his voice made the gray-haired man whimper. "Each of the fingers has a small metal canister affixed along the middle joint, and each of those canisters contains a different substance. It only takes a little, you see. Only a little bit to have a big, some might say a profound effect."

He folded all of his fingers closed except the index one, which he pointed at the gray-haired man's face. Tiny blue arcs crackled around the glove. "This one contains a tiny sample of scorpion venom."

"No..." the man whispered. "No, please...please, don't..."

Seconds later, Seth stood, put his helmet back on, and turned to walk away.

He didn't bother damping the sound this time, and the gray-haired man's raw, tortured, dying screams rang in his ears as he left the camp behind him.