Duran Cross - Raddocks Horizon

“How many Suvaco units are there in total?” asks Faraday.

Rennin shrugs. “I don’t know, William didn’t say.”

“Armed with rockets and chain guns and all Godyssey weaponry?” asks Faraday, eyeing Doctor Roths.

“Stolen from the lab, yes,” she answers, meeting the general’s gaze.

“We have only three serviceable gunships and we can’t risk opening the underground train tunnel gates again in case of contaminants getting out and overrunning this position, you must understand that. And three gunships cannot evacuate civilians that number in the thousands.”

“Then call for aid, is it really so hard?” Rennin asks pinching the bridge of his nose hard enough to bruise it.

Faraday takes a breath, returning his regard to Rennin. “Given recent developments that you are as yet unaware of, we should be transiting people back into the fortified zone in Whitechapel.”

Rennin looks at him. “What?”

“There won’t be any help from outside here,” says Faraday slowly.

“Why?” he asks Faraday but the general looks to Roths again. Rennin follows his gaze to Roths. “Why won’t there be help coming?” he asks, finding himself smiling in frustrated disbelief, “ Why won’t there be any help coming?”

“There is no one,” she answers plainly.

Rennin thinks for a moment but it only takes another second for the horrible truth to strike home to him. His face drops to a neutral expression and he doesn’t want to hear any more.

“No…” he breathes, taking a step back, then finding himself leaning against the wall for support.

“No one here knows yet. Faraday and myself were only informed the day you arrived here,” says Roths.

“How far has it spread?” Rennin finds himself asking without wanting to know. Asking is just a reflex.

“Isolated pockets so far in several major cities in this country, heaviest engagement was here. The hotter areas of the country seem to be less affected.”

Rennin remembers that the docks are all automated so crates of goods carrying the infection could have spread from here to hundreds of locations all over the world.

“A global pandemic,” the room spins a little.

Outside the conference room, Carla is waiting for him. When he emerges from the room she takes one look at his ashen face and takes his hand. Rennin is unresponsive, locked in his own thoughts. He paces forwards a few steps shaking his head, glancing at the horizon.

During his time trapped in the city he looked to the horizon as his goal, for safety. It was meant to be an escape. Reaching his goal has just crushed it. So recently that horizon was a hopeful goal, but now all it inspires is cold dread. In every direction there’s a horizon with another Raddocks Horizon happening at every one of them.

A strike to his face snaps him out of his daydreaming to a throbbing pain in his cheek. He comes back to reality to see Carla shaking her right hand and wincing in pain.

“What was that for?” he asks.

“We’re even now,” she says.

Seeing Carla again when he arrived three days ago was the happiest moment of his life, but now it feels tainted. No one is safe anywhere now. “Fifteen all, then.”

“What’s wrong?”

He looks into her eyes and his voice will not let him speak. He scans the perimeter of Raddocks Horizon. “I think the seriousness of all this just hit home,” he says, satisfied that he didn’t technically lie to her.

“It hasn’t ended here, has it?” she asks and his eyes meet hers briefly, long enough to her to read his mind. She reflexively grips his hand tighter. “Everywhere?”

“Not yet.”

“What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know, I have absolutely no idea, but we’re not separating again. I’ll probably shit the bed at some stage, but I’ll never leave you,” he says forcing a smirk.

“Jesus, what an offer…”

He doesn’t know how to really transfer his brutally primal urge to protect her into eloquent words so he goes with something simple. “Just stay close, alright?”

General Faraday bursts out of the cabin, making a beeline for the operations tent. Rennin can’t help but follow as if he is a dog chasing a car. Faraday may be old but at the moment he’s moving like an Olympic sprinter.

He shoves the tent curtain out of the way, storming headlong into the chaos within. The military nerve centre for this outpost is filled with people scrambling to and between instrument panels like hyperactive ants. Faraday bursts in. “Is it confirmed?”

“Yes, sir. The ship has lost control,” says a technician.

Rennin catches the part about a ship out of control. “What’s happening?”

Faraday ignores him. “What is its altitude?”

“Receiving a signal,” says the technician patching it over the speakers.

There’s a scratchy voice over the airways. “I…toya. Iyat…a. Thi…s Res…ue One, th…verest. We… going down!”

Rennin backs out of the tent and looks up to the sky, knowing what he’s about to see. Falling from the sky is a re-entry fuelled fireball that can only be the Everest, shuttle of the Alpha HolinMech strike team.

It is hurtling towards the surface with no sign of slowing, like a flaming meteor. Rennin feels a cold stab of resignation as he watches it come down.

Two weeks after the fall of Raddocks Horizon, William Caufmann is still holed up in the remains of the Godyssey Laboratory. Contact with the Outbound camp has been lost. There has been no word from anyone. Any attempts at communication with the outside world have failed. As far as he can tell he’s alone, again.

He has done his best to track Del’s movements around the dead city but his creation has proven to be quite elusive. Regaining some surveillance around the city by filtering the lab’s emergency power to certain sections should have helped.

It took him a day to find the HolinMech crash site via his rudimentary camera control. By the time he had located it, the ship was empty, with no indication of where they may be headed, or where they are now. Except for one. But it’s no HolinMech.

En route towards him is a warped CryoZaiyon transponder signal. There are significant changes to the system but the transponder is giving off a clear enough signature for him to know what it is. It can only be the repurposed shell of Forgal Lauros.

It is unclear what the intentions of this HolinMech husk might be.

Despite wanting to ask a great many questions of his former Commander, Caufmann knows that, if Lauros is hostile, he cannot hope to subdue him. If he has the element of surprise, he can deal with him in a way that doesn’t require strength.

The night of the Gorai Aurelia Rally, Rennin shot Prototype with an accelerated corroder to slow it down. In Caufmann’s hand, he holds the updated version. Specifically designed to dissolve Thermosteel, its effects will be thorough and final.

In any other circumstance, it is not a weapon he would use. It can just as easily destroy his body if he so much as touches Lauros.

As the distance between him and the distorted reading steadily reduces, he draws the corroding agent into a syringe.

Who are you now?

Before him, he sets out a dozen hollow point bullets. There’s no guarantee they will get past an android’s kinetic barrier, but it’s still the most reliable way to deploy the chemical.

Caufmann holds the tip of the needle over the first of the bullets, squeezing very gently until he can see a bead form at the tip. The doctor knows this simple drop itself is enough to destroy all of them. It will devour the Thermosteel within android and contaminant alike, with no regard, no mercy. This tiny morsel could end it.