Authors: Gavin Smith
‘Morag, cover!’ I shouted. She nodded, loading a grenade into the underslung launcher of her carbine. ‘Pagan, Mudge!’ They didn’t hear; they were both too busy firing. Fucking running without comms. ‘Pagan! Mudge!’ Mudge was used to me shouting at him. He glanced over. ‘To me now!’ I shouted. Mudge nodded and signalled Pagan to follow him. Morag and I leaned around the corner and fired at anything we could see.
Just as Mudge and Pagan broke cover the mouth of the alley exploded, throwing both of them into the air. It had been a missile fired by the remaining Walker. A cloud of dust engulfed them.
Morag burned through a battery with a long burst from the laser carbine, the red light firing in a rapid strobe, superheated air exploding in its wake. I felt a bullet tug at the sleeve of my armoured combat jacket, then something slammed into my shoulder, spinning me around. I felt burning and more warning signs appeared on my IVD.
Mudge and Pagan emerged from the cloud of dust, half running, half staggering. The ground around them seemed to throw itself up into the air as railgun fire from the Walker impacted all around them. I’m not sure if a round glanced against Pagan or he caught a ricochet but his arse disintegrated in a spray of flesh, the impact too quick for much blood. He was thrown into the air and spun around. He landed on his face.
I heard four grenades fired from a launcher explode against the Walker. It had to be Cat on a rooftop. She bought Mudge just enough time to grab Pagan by the scruff of his neck and drag him into our alley. Cat had saved Pagan’s life. I heard another missile hit and a long burst of railgun fire.
Further up the thoroughfare, a lone soldier made a run from the back of the APC for cover. I led him with the shotgun and fired a three-round burst. A spray of red, he staggered and almost lost his balance, but kept running and made it into the alley he was heading for. That wasn’t right. He should have gone down.
‘Jake, move!’ Morag screamed as she pulled me back down the alley after Mudge, who was still dragging a screaming Pagan.
I actually saw the contrail of the missile as it hit where I’d been standing moments ago. I watched the explosion blossom, pushing powdered stone out as razor-sharp fragments. This was the glory of being wired as high as I was. You got to see your own death. You also had the time to do dumb things like move between the blast and Morag. It went black.
My internal medical systems flooded my body with stims, waking me up immediately. I felt something moving under me. I was rolled over onto my face. If I still had one – a face, that is. There was shouting. There nearly always is.
I opened my eyes to pain but a perfectly working IVD, though my vision was full of red warning icons. I was being told electronically what my body already knew. My world was pain. The fact that my IVD was still working so well gave me the clarity to see just how fucked we were. That was once the internal pain management systems and a fuck of a lot of painkillers and stims from my rapidly depleting internal drugs reservoirs made me capable of functioning again.
My entire front was black from scorch marks and high-velocity embedded rock grit. I don’t think I had any skin left on my face. It had effectively been sandblasted off. Diagnostics were showing that shrapnel had pierced my subcutaneous armour in several places. The worst was a stomach wound that would need attention soon. Another piece of stone and metal had gone through my armoured skull and fractured it. That was bleeding badly over my lenses.
Morag was on all fours next to me, having managed to roll me off her. She was gasping for breath like she’d been badly winded. Blood was pissing out of her nose but otherwise she seemed not much worse than she had moments before.
‘C’mon!’ Mudge screamed at me. He was trying to get a screaming Pagan over his shoulder so he could carry him.
Still dazed, I looked up to see Tailgunner and Cat on opposite rooftops firing back towards the main thoroughfare. I looked down the alleyway and saw the remaining Walker limp into the mouth of the alley. The multiple barrels of its rapid-firing railgun were already rotating up to speed. We were dead.
This was what Merle had been waiting for. The building hewn out of the rock on the corner of the alley had been blown open by missile fire. Merle appeared on the first floor, now open to the air, his plasma rifle at his shoulder, and fired it at almost point-blank range. He squeezed the trigger on the semi-automatic weapon again and again, firing the whole magazine into the mech. The plasma gun’s barrel glowed white hot. The front of the mech was wreathed in white fire that ate through armour plate. I think I saw Merle turn and run. I grabbed Morag and forced her to the ground and fell on top of her. Mudge dropped Pagan and threw himself on top of the screaming hacker. The mech blew.
‘That was fucking stupid,’ I heard Mudge say and start coughing. ‘He was in the army. He’s got more armour than me.’
This time I saw all black because we were buried. I felt like all the weight of the planet’s heavy G was bearing down on me. It seemed like the stone ceiling that replaced the sky in the cavern had landed on me. Boosted muscle, metal and a bit of screaming, and I managed to push myself up through the rubble. I saw light again. I spat dirt, blood and gravel out of my mouth and glanced behind me. The mouth of the alleyway was gone.
I reached down and dragged Morag’s limp body out of the debris. She was unconscious. My back felt like a whole load of stone had landed on it. Funny that. I overrode all the warning signs in my IVD so I could see better.
‘Move! We’ll cover you!’ Cat, from the roof. Christ, she was keen. Still she hadn’t just been blown up. She was right. The mechs were gone but the infantry would be in the alleys, trying to flank us.
The trucks were gone. Good, that was what this was about. Still, I didn’t want to die for a bit of food. I put a stim on Morag’s neck. She cried out as she was rudely pulled out of unconsciousness by the drug.
‘On your feet,’ I said.
There was just a little look of resentment from her before she realised where she was.
I retrieved my shotgun. Ejected the magazine, replaced it, ran a quick diagnostic. It was still working.
Morag staggered to her feet. Pagan was unconscious. I looked at Mudge’s blackened face.
‘I had to sedate him,’ he told me.
I helped sling Pagan across his shoulders.
‘C’mon!’ Cat shouted from above. She sounded worried but not rattled.
‘Air force,’ I said to Mudge. Mudge looked at me quizzically. I nodded at Pagan. ‘He was air force, not army.’ I had no idea why it was suddenly important to me.
‘You want to talk about this now?’ Mudge asked.
I shook my head. ‘Let’s go.’
If we were lucky we could get out of here without another contact. We’re never lucky. Even so, this was taking the piss.
Tailgunner took a hit first. A lump of his armoured combat jacket superheated and blew off. He went down, his chest steaming. Cat hit the ground, hiding behind the stone lip of the roof she was on. Morag cried out as she took a hit to the back, knocking her to the ground again. There was a smoking hole in the back of her armour. It had stopped most of the beam but I could see blackened and blistered skin through it. Mudge and Pagan were a two-for-one. Red steam jetted out of Pagan’s leg, the beam almost severing it. The beam then went through Mudge’s shoulder. Mudge cried out and dropped Pagan as he stumbled forward, his shoulder steaming red. The laser took me in the right shoulder, almost severing my cybernetic arm.
Rapid and accurate laser fire. I got a sinking feeling. I managed to bring the shotgun up to my shoulder, though it felt like my arm was about to fall off. There’s nothing like smelling your own cooked flesh. More painkillers, more stims, more red warning icons.
‘Fall back, now!’ I barked.
Morag was helping Mudge get the badly bleeding Pagan up and over his unwounded shoulder.
‘I can’t see them.’ Cat from above.
I was looking down the barrel of the shotgun. Where had the fire come from?
A figure was moving fast and low in the main thoroughfare. I triggered a burst from the shotgun but the figure had gone, disappeared into one of the cave-like buildings next to the ruins of the mouth of the alley. Above me Cat leaped over the alleyway to check on Tailgunner. It had all been going so smoothly. Well, it hadn’t really.
Mudge had Pagan over his shoulder now and was moving as quickly as he could manage. Morag was staying level, covering them. I was backing down the alleyway looking for the figure, knowing who it was but not wanting to admit it to myself. Above us, Cat hefted Tailgunner onto her shoulder and started jogging across the rooftops, easily keeping pace with us. What a fucking mess. How did they get to us so quickly?
The sound of gauss fire from behind. A shout of surprise from Cat. The sound of a body being dropped onto a rooftop. Answering laser fire from Morag. I started to turn.
Someone grabbed my shotgun. I shouldn’t be this easy to sneak up on. Not when I’m operational. The weapon was twisted, then wrenched from my grip and thrown away.
‘Hello, Jakob.’ Josephine, the Grey Lady, still wouldn’t look me in the eye. She was standing in front of me. Small wiry build, nondescript to the point of drabness. She wore an inertial armour suit and had the laser carbine she’d just used on us slung across her back. I just stared at her as I went through the clichés of my blood running cold and my mainly mechanical heart skipping a beat.
‘Run!’ I screamed at the others.
I took a step back and went for the Mastodon and my laser pistol. She moved too fast. Steely fingers hit my right wrist hard enough to affect a nerve point through subcutaneous armour and my laser pistol flew out of my hand as I lost all feeling in my fingers. Then she locked up my right hand, elbowed me in the face and bent the Mastodon out of my grip and threw it away. She chopped my neck with both her hands and kneed me in the chest, knocking me back into a wall.
I clenched my fists and all eight of my knuckle blades slid out of their forearm sheaths.
‘How’d you know?’ I asked, trying to buy time.
She just shook her head as if she was sad that I’d even asked.
I punched at her with the blades. She batted one bladed fist aside. She wasn’t even where I’d aimed the other. I stabbed air.
Fighting other operators, you don’t attempt kicks above knee height. Your legs may have the strongest muscles on your body, but kicks are slow and anyone with decent reactions who knows what they are doing will avoid or counter them. Josephine kicked me in the head, which snapped to the left as I explosively spat blood out. I felt bone and armour crunch and I went down on one knee.
I swung blindly with the claws at where I thought she was. She seemed to roll over my arm. She was now so close it felt intimate as she hit me hard enough to hurt through the armour in the chest, stomach, kidneys and groin. She was moving so fast I could barely register where she was going to hit next.
I tried to hook the blades on my right arm, the cybernetic one, into her kidneys. She stepped back, took my right arm by the elbow and wrist, and used my own momentum to push it up. Then she hooked one of her legs behind mine and stepped forward. I felt myself starting to fall back. She leaped up, adding her weight to my momentum, lodging her leg horizontally across my throat, and rode me to the ground. As I hit the rock, her leg crushed my windpipe. I was now using my internal air supply. My claws, held in place by her seemingly unbreakable grip, were stabbed into the ground with enough force to shatter the carbon-fibre blades.
I stabbed at her with the blades on my left arm. She leaned back, and I missed. Josephine grabbed the arm. I screamed as she struck my elbow, shattering it. My left arm was now useless and limp. Black scalpel-like claws shot from the fingertips of her right hand and she dug them into the wound in my right shoulder. More screaming, mine again. I tried to punch her with the broken blades on my right fist until she’d severed enough connections to the cybernetic arm and it went limp as well.
She was sitting atop me, leg still crossed over my neck. The only real option I had left was to try and buck her off. She was too far forward to hook with my legs, and I knew that would be ineffective and only cause me pain. I knew when I was beat, or maybe I didn’t, but I was beat now. She’d walked all over me. I hadn’t even landed a blow. Being beaten by a better opponent is one thing, but I felt helpless. She still wouldn’t look at me directly.
‘I don’t suppose you’d kill me?’ I managed through blood, grit and broken teeth.
‘I’m sorry, Jakob.’ She sounded like she meant it.
I was peripherally aware of a firefight and managed to turn my head. Further down the alley I could see Cat, Morag and Mudge firing at opponents who were out of view, their lasers and assault rifles being answered by what sounded like gauss carbines. There was the occasional explosion of a grenade. I watched as Morag went down in a hail of fire. The spray of blood told me that her armour was compromised. She hit the ground but I could see she was still moving. I had to help.
When the Grey Lady had hit me in the shoulder with laser fire and then dug her claws in, she’d torn the combat jacket. There was just about enough room to bring my shoulder laser to bear.
I think when the laser slid out on its servos Josephine was surprised enough to almost have a facial expression. For a moment I had her in the laser’s cross hairs superimposed on my IVD. The red beam stabbed out. Superheated air exploded. She grabbed the laser and shifted it slightly as she moved her head to the side. It missed. Then she tore it off my shoulder.