As Zamm sped across the plain, it was clear enough that he was too late. Too late to issue a warning, too late to call in reinforcements, too late to keep people from being taken.
The raid was in full swing. There wasn’t much visible on the ground; the dry earth was kicking up dust in large clouds, but the swooping ships and drones that caused the kicks were plain to see against the midday sky. And up above those, looming like a stormcloud, the big freighter from which they emerged.
He was close enough to hear the blasts up ahead, even through the rushing wind and the hum of his engine. No screams yet, but it wouldn’t be long now. As he watched, one of the freighter’s service ships descended down, into the mass of different dust clouds, and emerged seconds later. Its belly-clamps held a cargo container, and blasted back up into the sky. It passed the other service ship, as that one returned from its latest delivery.
Zamm grit his teeth. How many passes had already been made?
There were other things in the air. His helmet visor tracked and identified them as drones, and they looked very basic. He didn’t notice any weapons on them right away, and his next thoughts were taken up by a call on his helmet’s comm.
“I’m sixteen minutes away!” Lesi told him.
“Too long, Lesi,” he said back. “I can’t afford to wait.”
“Don’t get yourself killed!”
“We’ll just see,” he said, as he arrived at the outskirts.
His bike’s sensors were feeding him the layout. He was guided on by a simple holographic image that showed him the houses, but also the metal containers, irrigation ditches and the shape of the rather uneven landscape. Meanwhile, his visor picked up the little blobs of heat that were human beings, the crude little noisemaker drones, and the shots that were being fired for intimidation.
There was no wall around the village; he had his choice of entrance points, but there was no time to be strategic about any of this. So he did what he did best, picked a target, and went for it.
Zamm steered the bike into a sharp swerve, around a long storage house, and into one of the dust clouds. He throttled down the speed as he found himself in an urban environment, and let the readouts guide him. The heat signatures became plain vision as he emerged from the dust, an instant before impact.
Most of the raiders stood on one side of the group of locals they’d ordered down on the ground, so it only took a modest sideways slide to smash the bike’s body into four of them in one go. A little jet of speed then propelled him over the prone locals, and the triangle-shaped mancatcher on the front rammed the last one before he could react.
There were yelps and cries from the prone group, but there was no time for any kind of exchange. He kept on going, blasting along a dirt street pocked with small blast marks.
There was some damage to the buildings, but it was mostly surface-level, same as how shots were mostly being fired into the ground or the air, and the drones were doing nothing but let out ear-piercing vails. The point was to spread fear and chaos, not to kill off the resource the raiders had come to take.
As Zamm rounded a corner at high speed, he witnessed the halfway point of the process.
A large container had been dropped down in the street, and was under guard by armed raiders. They didn’t wear uniforms or markings; this was far too crude an operation for any such finery. They very much looked like each person had had to supply their own weapons and armour, with often lacklustre results.
Their targets, meanwhile, being herded towards the container by brutes with guns and batons, were clad as hardscrabble farmers usually were on these kinds of worlds; in a combination of crudely printed fibres and real animal hides. Many were bloodied, and all were in some state of panic, as they were pushed towards the container’s ominously dark opening.
Zamm sent the bike into another sideways slide, targeting the group doing the herding, and again the vehicle knocked the scum down like gaming pins. He kept on going, along the length of the container, as behind him the villagers broke away running.
A quick turn around the container’s other end, rough on his internal organs, let him speed along the other side. The two guards hadn’t quite gotten their bearings yet before he came around back to the opening, and to their post. He set the front repulsors to reverse, letting the bike spin around. He didn’t see, but heard, the satisfying smash-crunch of heavy, high-speed metal meeting a human body.
He finished the turn, as the other guard, wide-eyed and wide-mouthed, was raising his gun. Zamm’s right hand drew one of the Twins from its holster, quicker than the guard, and fired. The man wore some sort of black fibre breastplate. It was quite possibly just meant for blades and bullets. It might have been proofed against smaller plasma weapons. But not against a Twin.
The man dropped, with a crater where much of his chest had just been, and Zamm turned to the container opening.
“GO!” he shouted. “RUN! RUN!”
A small screen on the upper-right corner kept track of the people already inside. It was at 56, well below capacity, but in a moment that dropped to 54 as a man with a bleeding scalp ran out with a child in his arms. The flood had started, and Zamm left them to it.
The village streets were wide, and the whole place was dotted with small fields where moisture towers fed root vegetables. It allowed him to risk higher speeds than he normally did in urban areas, and in mere seconds he was at another container.
This one had dropped down in a field, and was surrounded by a splash of dirt thrown by the impact, like water. It stood unguarded, but the door was closed and the little screen read 146.
Zamm brought the bike to a quick, harsh halt in front of the door, put the vehicle on guard mode, and hopped off with one of the twins. There were no sounds from inside. These things were designed for space travel, and so were thoroughly insulated. But the shining number told him plenty. He knew how these raids worked, and the human horror they inflicted.
There was no time to be neat about getting the thing open, so he just detached a breaching charge from his belt, slapped it on the seam, and hit the trigger. It got to work, burning away the metal, and hopefully no one on the inside. Zamm switched his attention to the unnervingly open ground he found himself on, and the shooting range of houses and that boxed it in. Every moment he wasn’t riding and fighting was another moment these bastards had to gather their wits.
The seal gave way, and he gripped one of the handles and flung the door open. The interior was lit only by the sunlight he let in, and it shone on tightly cramped faces of fear.
“GO!” he told them, as he got back on the bike. “Get into cars! Go to the lowlands!”
He drove off the field, and into the nearest dust cloud.
# # #
Qwern kept track of the numbers as they updated, and he liked what he was seeing.
“Sixteen-hundred and fifty,” he said out loud, as the latest container was attached to the ship’s cargo rails. “And we are, what, halfway through?”
Screens and holographic projections were displaying various aspects of the operation as it carried on, on different spots of the bridge.
“Looks like it,” Konno replied. “We estimated this place to contain somewhere north of three thousand materials. And there don’t seem to have been any casualties worth speaking of.”
Qwern crossed his legs in the captain’s chair. He wished it had a footrest, but that probably wasn’t the right look for a boss.
“Good, good,” he said. “If we can hit the next little dirt village before word spreads, we can get a full shipment in two raids. And then we’re off, towards our payment!”
“Payments are good,” Konno replied, half-distracted as he kept track of a particular screen.
“Payments are the best thing,” Qwern corrected him. “Especially the ones that mean future business.”
He looked over the bridge. Most of those present were actually fresh hires, only signed on for this one particular raid, and he hadn’t put any effort into memorising names. But a neatly carried out operation and a good payday was the sort of thing that kept people on for more. Who ever said no to fast and relatively easy money?
Service Ship #1 returned yet again, with another container, and slid it neatly up against the hull. It was firmly clamped into place, the freighter’s life-support systems hooked up to it, and then #1 descended back down.
“Seventeen hundred and ninety!” Qwern exclaimed. “We’re getting there, folks. One… oh, wait, what’s that?”
One of the console drones had zoomed in close to one of the groundside containers. It stood open, with several raiders prone on the ground around it. Some moved slightly, in the manner of the gravely injured. Others didn’t move at all.
“What is going on?” he asked.
“We are getting reports!” another drone replied, holding one hand to a headphone muff. “There is an attack!”
“Well, find it, then!” he ordered.
“Got it!” another console monkey declared, and turned her display into a hologram visible to the whole bridge crew. One of the drones was marked on a target, but having a hard time keeping up.
“I think that’s an Akkian Ranger,” Konno said. “Just… just one, it seems.”
“Well,” Qwern said. “If only our folks down there had guns.”
“He is moving real fast, and all over,” the man with the half-pointless title of raid coordinator said.
“Well, coordinate our teams,” Qwern told him. “Do your job. You, focus all the drones on this, he added, pointing. “You, have engineering get us ready, in case this is just a forward scout. And you, get the standby teams onto dropships. Let’s nip this one in the bud.”
# # #
The pushback was building. The initial shock was passing, and with it came resistance. And gunfire.
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Zamm knew it was his big blessing that this trash hadn’t come for an actual fight, or even to kill at all if it could be helped. Their weapons were light, and the job requirement had been cruelty, rather than skill.
Shots came at him from around corners and out of alleys as he sped by them, and he in turn did the usual erratic weaves; side to side, up and down, corkscrewing, and so far he escaped harm. Staying out of their line of sight remained his best defence, and so he kept low to the ground rather than soar over the rooftops. But the drones were converging on him, like an angry swarm.
He drew one of the twins, took his eyes off the street for the moment it took to draw aim, and took the nearest one out. It didn’t dissuade the rest, of course. Taking him out was far more valuable than cheap drones, and so the raiders continued to have a visual on him.
He passed by another one of those fields, where yet more villagers had been either herded or stopped in their tracks as they tried to flee. A small group of raiders had the forty or so people on their knees at gunpoint. It was all a little blink, before the sight was hidden by a long rowhouse, but he could tell they’d spotted him.
Zamm cut a hard left, went in a circle around a small house to change directions without losing too much speed, then, finally, risked elevation. The repulsors lifted him up above the rowhouse, and Zamm drew both Twins.
“Foot control,” he ordered, and the bike gave him an acknowledging beep.
The raiders had been expecting to blast him as he emerged from behind the other end of the house. They needed a moment to shift their guns. A moment they didn’t have.
As the bike descended, Zamm squeezed the left trigger. The shot hit a raider. He squeezed the right trigger, and hit again. He couldn’t just spray; not with innocent people in the firing line. And so he did as he had trained, shut down his emotions and survival instincts, and took that split-second to aim. The third shot landed, and now the two remaining raiders were shooting back.
They panicked. They sprayed wildly. And so their shots flew off into the sky, and the right-hand Twin took another life.
The bike reached ground-height, and at the speed Zamm was going there was no way for it to not be a bit jarring. That, along with aiming for the bastard’s head to avoid the kneeling villagers, was why Zamm’s fifth shot missed.
The searing plasma went over the man’s head, burning away a piece of his tall hat and causing him to flinch badly. Zamm was most of the way across the field before he could turn, and he found the man running for the nearest door. Zamm zipped by and shot him, and then continued on. He took another shot at the drones, but missed. His second shot hit home, but then plasma was coming his way again, and he had to focus on his riding.
“Fourteen minutes,” Lesi told him.
“Still too long,” he replied, as he went around a circular building he thought might be some sort of temple.
The raiders were no longer intentionally blasting up clouds, and so his cover was gradually dispersing. One of the service ships was making its descent; he could both see and hear the damn thing coming, and it in turn surely knew where he was. No shots came; there was a good chance it wasn’t even armed. The freighter was a different story, but it faced the issue of firing anti-ship weapons down into a village that held both their own men, and the people they were intending to sell.
If he fled the village, or simply got isolated enough within it for someone to risk a shot, he would be annihilated before he knew what hit him. He was committed: It was victory against overwhelming odds, or death.
This would all make a good story, at least. In the mustering halls, and in the homes of retired rangers. Another legend added to the mix that kept more youngsters coming in.
He headed towards the service ship, though he kept up his weaving rather than go the direct route. And then, finally, the bastards showed a spark of cleverness. One of the drones came out of the blue, and both it and he were going too fast for any kind of reaction. The crude little clump of plastic and rotors just smashed into his helmet. It shattered, but the impact was still enough to knock him off the bike.
The whole point of combat training was to turn life-saving measures into reflex, and that was exactly why he tucked his limbs in and ducked his head before the impact. His suit took the hit; the little bags in the lining inflated for a moment, giving him a body-wide cushion until the moment he stopped rolling.
He didn’t allow himself shock or fear or a check for injuries. Not in combat. Training had drilled that into him as well. So he immediately flipped over onto his feet and took to them, as the bike continued straight on down a long road.
The raiders were shouting. He didn’t understand the words, but recognised the tone of angry, frightened people who spotted a chance of victory. They were coming up behind him, and from two directions on his left. And on his right was a small field with a long, single-storey house on the other side of it. It was the nearest cover that didn’t just lead him closer to the incoming raiders.
Zamm drew both Twins. He aimed one to the left, shooting blindly towards the raiders that had been on his tail, while the other one alternated shots between the two other groups.
He wasn’t shooting for accuracy, so much as giving them pause as he started walking backwards, over the tops of half-matured vegetables. His skull rang from the impact and the fall, and he didn’t entirely trust his vision, but his limbs worked and so did his trigger fingers. While he could fight, he would fight.
He kept on going, back, back, back, spewing out plasma, burning away chunks of walls and corners and parked vehicles that the raiders tried to use as cover. It was all going pretty well until his back met a moisture tower he hadn’t accounted for. It caused a stumble, which caused a trip, which caused him to stop shooting for a moment.
One raider rushed out of cover and opened up with a carbine. And with that, the rock slide had started. Some just poked around still-smoking corners, while others leapt out and themselves into prone firing positions. All fired, egged on by the high-strung barks of that first one; a man in a black helmet and breastplate combo.
The shots hit the ground in front of him, near his feet, flew past and into the building, and a couple even went over his head. Zamm did get one precision shot off, and hit the black-clad one in the chest. But he proved to be wearing actual, proper armour, and though he fell to one knee with a pained groaning, he didn’t die. And with that, the right-hand Twin was empty.
Zamm turned and ran. The plasma kept on coming, fast and wildly imprecise, and one streaking bolt singed the arm of his suit. He fired from the left Twin, into the door’s lock, just in case it was engaged, and then threw himself at the door itself.
The impact threw it open. He rolled on the floor, whipped his legs up to kick it closed, then belly-crawled a short distance.
The house was all one big room, divided only by screens and furniture. The lights weren’t on, but all the holes in the walls were letting in the daylight, so that was something. The building was made up of local dirt, mixed with some sort of glue to turn it into clay. The result wasn’t even close to plasma-proof, and the raiders knew it.
They kept on shooting, and each bolt entered by the front wall and exited out the back one. It hadn’t occurred to them yet to fire at ground-level, but that could change in a moment. And their sheer inaccuracy just might do the job for them.
Zamm turned over onto his back, and ejected the spent plasma cells from the Twins. Fresh ones poked out of their pockets on each hip, and he slid the guns over them, reloading both in a moment.
The immediate instinct was to start firing back, but that would clue them in to his actual location. So he did the smart thing instead, holstered the left Twin, and used the free hand to fiddle with the little screen on his suit’s sleeve.
For all that he’d excelled in training, remote-controlling the bike had never been a great skill of his. He belonged on top of it, after all. And all the gunfire wasn’t helping his concentration.
Still, he got it to turn back around. A torso-sized chunk of wall fell down near Zamm, torn loose by its own weight and the ongoing destruction. The bike camera saw the three groups of raiders, slowly advancing in something like a firing line as they kept on pouring fire. He steered it into a slight turn, then hit fire.
The bike’s twin front guns opened up, alternating shots. He didn’t try to aim; just kept the bike moving in a sweep that sprayed the bolts across the field. There were multiple hits, and raiders fell with missing limbs and big, burning craters, but others also escaped, via luck or throwing themselves flat.
Zamm got up and broke into a run, towards the end of the house. He fired a few shots, further damaging a particular section of the wall, before he rammed it. It came apart and he exited. The bike awaited him, and he hopped back on. He twisted around in the seat and aimed a Twin at the raiders. They weren’t too shocked by the pass to raise their guns, but a couple of shots from him got most of them cringe down into the ground.
He blasted off again, trailed by a few shots. He took turns pretty much at random, hoping to sow some confusion as he went around buildings and into dust clouds, and sometimes into dust clouds his own bike had kicked up seconds earlier. But just playing a high-stakes game of hide and chase wasn’t going to cut it. Not with backup that could make any real difference at least an hour away.
And the ship, that thousand-cursed support ship, took off into the sky with another load of human beings that had just become property. It passed by its brother on the way up, but before that there were the three dropships.
The chassis was a familiar old classic; not space-capable, but rugged, built to hold a large group and disgorge it quickly. The official point had probably been emergency teams, or soldiers, but it seemed to see more use by these types.
And these ones were fitted with guns.
The closest ship, one that faced him almost directly, actually slowed its vertical descent a bit, and Zamm understood why.
He wrenched the bike into a turn, and a moment later a heavy blast wrecked the house he’d been passing. A ball of fire and debris bloomed behind him, and Zamm went straight for the tallest, most densely-packed houses around, which were neither tall nor really densely packed. It did break line of sight, but the ship either stopped or greatly slowed its descent, and kept on shooting.
Another building exploded behind him, and then one up ahead, as the gunner tried to flush him out. Zamm drove through a cloud of shattered concrete and dust. His various readouts were drawing a picture, and it wasn’t pretty. The scattered packs of raiders were converging into bigger groups, either abandoning their captives or having finished getting them into the containers. The service ship was still coming down, to pluck more people away. Two of the dropships were disgorging their cargo of killers, and it seemed some of them were on small vehicles of their own. The third one kept angling for a shot, seeking those moments when he couldn’t avoid being seen between two houses.
It was all coming together against him; a small force of evil bastards getting ready to catch him in overlapping fields of fire. And staying on ground level was the only thing keeping him alive. And breaking away still wasn’t an option, because the damned freighter was still up there, with its large-scale guns.
If you’re going to die, die big.
Zamm went into a U-turn, into what wasn’t so much a street as a weird failure of urban planning. The houses were erratically placed, and on his way straight towards the hovering dropship he upped the speed and went around them in a wild pattern. He was at the upper limits of what his reflexes could handle, but this was the big moment. The time for being smart seemed to have passed.
The ship fired at him, of course, but lacklustre stability worked against the gunner. Another fireball bloomed behind Zamm, and seconds later he drove through the outer corona of one. His suit and bike both survived, and he corrected his course in a heartbeat.
Then he reached around and tapped a button. A hatch opened and a grip was pushed up into his waiting hand. As he was almost upon the ship, he raised the bulky, one-handed anti-air gun and fired. The rocket locked on target and flew free. Zamm now passed underneath a fireball, and into a dust cloud caused by the ship’s repulsors. It served as his cover, until yet another quick corner turn did.
The ship didn’t drop down, or start a death sway. Both had been an outside possibility, given the armour. But their gun fell silent, the repulsors stuttered a bit, and the pilot started a rapid descent.
Plasma fire now came at Zamm through nearby buildings, at ground-height. Another one of the dropships was ascending from that direction. The fighters it had brought were out, and they had brought heavier weapons.
He passed by another container; this one filled and closed. But staying to attempt to open it would just get it caught in stray plasma. Zamm grimaced, an unheard apology of sorts, and kept on going.
He let his readouts guide him, to the outskirts of the growing line of guns. He went around several half-destroyed houses, as behind him he heard the loud thump of the damaged dropship setting down, and hit a group from the flank.
They were ready for him; already facing his way, guns drawn, as he came out of a cloud. But their aim hadn’t improved, whereas he could now operate his bike’s guns properly. The rapid fire tore through half the group before he finished his pass. He felt a bolt hit him in the back, as another one scorched his bike, but the suit and bike armour both held.
The dropship gun was a bigger problem.
He didn’t even see where it came from. There was just a blast, a flash, scorching heat, and a force that threw him off the bike for the second time in mere minutes.
The plasma hits had damaged some of the bags in his suit lining, but he still managed another relatively wholesome landing. He drew the Twins, again, and faced raiders coming in from many directions. Again. Except now there were more of them, their guns were better, and the terrain around was even more open.
He recalled the bike even as he raised the guns, but it didn’t look like it would reach him in time.
Well.
As one of the dropships came into view at speed, he drew aim at two separate groups and pulled the triggers.
Nothing happened.
His thumbs double-checked the safeties, and found nothing wrong. Both guns were loaded, and a moment of panic hit as death due to a failure of maintenance loomed. But the raiders didn’t shoot either, and all suddenly checked their guns with shocked expressions.
And then the dropship exploded. Or rather, it was crushed, as if it had suddenly flown into an invisible mountainside. And then it dropped straight down, all its momentum spent.
A woman walked past Zamm and into his view. She had ruby-red hair and wore a mostly black catsuit. It was a Kalero Warden. And she now drew her sword.
“I am here to help.”