I’d done jumps before, in training. We were taught to improvise, to always succeed, and basically to slaughter the fuck out of any problem we had. But where the night had been silent before? Now it was anything but.
I fell into a fucking war zone!
A second armored Cryson security vehicle, similar to the one I’d told the girls to take, had crashed into a barrier and had rolled onto its side. Currently, it was being stitched with heavy machine gun fire while its onboard cannons returned fire. But, honestly, it was a fuckin’ sideshow compared to the real fight.
The road in and out of the tower had security barriers raised here and there, bollards more than anything else, and clearly designed to stop charging vehicles.
One of those had been hit by a truck that had apparently been transporting a full goddamn team of APS operators. The massive machines shredded the back of the truck to get out when the transport was trashed, and now four of them were staggered around the outermost edge of the compound in cover, firing great blasts at the defenders.
Six APS units, all in blacks and greys, faced off against the four blacks assaulting the tower. Despite the number difference, the sides seemed roughly equal, thanks to the firepower and skill levels.
The six were standing about, half in and out of cover, clearly used to being the biggest bastards on the battlefield and making use of that. The four they faced?
They advanced through cover, using the various barriers and low walls to absorb their enemies’ incoming fire.
I scanned both sides quickly, looking at their loadouts, and triggered my comm to Reign and the others.
“Where the hell are you?”
“Parking garage. Pinned down by security, fucking heavily armed security! The APS all left and—”
“Get out!” I ordered. “Drop whatever the fuck you’re doing and get the fuck out!”
“But—”
“NOW!” I sent her a link to my visuals, letting her see not only the two sides facing off against each other, but that the incoming side was loaded for fucking bear, and I was down to one percent of my stealth suit’s battery. I set it to a strobe. Sections of the suit vanished intermittently to break up my outline. It wouldn’t save much power, but it would a little, and anything that made it harder to get hit was worth it.
The defenders were using heavy machine guns, mainly. One had a pair of plasma casters, like a bombardment version of the standard plasma cannon, capable of firing a sustained barrage at a target until it was melted into slag, and his casters were warming up, ready to fire.
The attacking side, though…well, they were pros. Moving from cover to cover, they returned fire with the bare minimum of wasted shots, and from above, I could see the pincer as it was laid out.
I’d be sending the squad leader my fucking approval, if not for three minor details.
First, I was out of the loop, and didn’t have access to the squad.
Secondly, I was approaching fast from above, and although I might like to stop and watch, it wasn’t going to happen. The emergency unspooling of the drag line was slow enough that I’d land more or less intact, but it wasn’t going to be fun, and it was going to be in the middle of the deployed enemy.
Third, and slightly more concerning…this wasn’t Blue Team. In fact, they were showing absolutely none of the required identification. And the weapons?
I damn well knew that at least one of them wasn’t permitted inside the city boundaries. I also saw what looked to be a transport helo moving into place in the distance, either ready to deploy another team, or ready to extract this one at high speed once they’d fired that missile on a timed fuse.
The incoming team deployed their shoulder-mounted rail cannons to suppress the locals; then the one loaded with the special weapon stood up and fucking sighted in on the building.
The missile he fired was a one-off. Nobody carried a reload for that kind of a weapon, not in a firefight. It was literally a level below a minimum-yield tactical nuke, designed to take out hardened bunkers in war zones.
That it was used by an unmarked APS team against another unmarked APS team, in the middle of the fucking city?
It was doing all sorts of terrible things to my asshole right now, not least that I was still rappelling down the outside of the target building.
As soon as the shot was away, the rest of the team were up and backing away, rail guns and grazers firing constantly to keep the defenders down.
I saw two of the suits taken out, high-power hits that pierced straight through the armor, and I screamed as the missile flashed past overhead, hitting the glass and punching through.
I released the cable, dropping two stories to the floor, landing hard and rolling to absorb the impact. The APS on either side of me turned to track the motion.
A massive foot came down next to my head, and I rolled behind another. The live plasma sword carved a trail of sparks and spit melted stone from the ground, as I came to my feet.
Stolen story; please report.
“Kabutt, we’re pinned down—”
“REIGN!” I roared, cutting her off. “MISSILE!” I tagged the image and sent it, the RI responding to my unspoken wishes. I swung the sword across the back of the leg before me, spinning to the left and dragging the blade behind me.
“Fucking move!” she screamed at someone, before swearing again. “Kabutt, are you fucking insane?!”
“I’m a little busy right now!” I snapped back. The massive APS before me twisted, trying to rotate to the right and swinging an enormous arm out, before the right leg froze up.
I dragged the sword free. The spitting, flaring molten metal ran like butter as the torn section buckled. More of the leg collapsed and sent the inexperienced operator to the floor.
He tried to catch himself with his hands out before him, an instinctual thing, and one that was beaten out of us in training, making it even clearer that these were corpo goons.
In a suit that weighs multiple tons, trying to catch yourself with your hands would work fine, if your hands were free. If instead they’re filled with weapons?
No.
His gun crumpled under the impact, sending him rolling in the other direction onto his back. A turtled APS was a fucked APS.
A supersonic rail gun round smashed through the armor before me, one of the attackers clearly seeing an opportunity for an easy kill. And if I’d not dragged my sword free and been moving already?
He’d have gotten two.
The defender with the plasma casters stood up and extended both barrels forward. His armored feet locked into place, the side flaps clanging down and firing as they drove stabilizing pins into the ground. The legs now secured, his shield crackled as it was hit repeatedly.
I ran, headed very much in the opposite direction from him, as the casters clanked up from their “rest” position on the back, pointing straight up, into “ready” position, extending over each shoulder and forward at a forty-five-degree angle.
The back of his armor opened in a dozen places as the emergency vents locked into place, ready to dissipate the horrific heat, and a dozen corpo-sec goons ran out of the building to my left, racing toward me and to presumably get into place to defend against the attack.
I didn’t slow.
I fucking knew what was coming.
Running, blade crackling and lighting the way, I drew the eye, no doubt. But the plasma casters, behind me and so close to them? That was the issue.
The operator fired.
A full bombard, a full fucking bombard.
Ten shots from either caster were launched, literally emptying the plasma tanks as twenty miniature suns flashed forward. The retreating attackers pulling back hammered the shields, but they didn’t take them down in time.
The rear plasma dissipation vents unleashed hell, literally roasting the corpo-sec idiots where they stood. It was like someone had opened the door to the deepest pit of hell, and it was confined into a single jet of discharge.
The majority were killed instantly, even as the plasma shots were still streaking toward their target. The rail gun rounds finally punched through the shields, killing the operator of the heavy APS. Holes were liberally punching through from front to back and kept going for the heavy sniper I knew was out there, hidden somewhere.
The smaller, dual shoulder-mounted projectiles hit a quarter second later—pockmarking, denting, then tearing through the titanium to shred the soft flesh inside.
Even as the heavy jerked back and forth, the legs locked into place and holding his shredded corpse in place, the plasma screamed through the air, landing in a concentrated area saturation that caught two of the retreating APS.
One was hit full-on, staggering as his shields overloaded. The plasma containment sphere dissolved and released temperatures as close to the surface of the sun as it was possible to get while planet bound.
He didn’t even manage to scream. The shield popped like a soap bubble, the plasma eating into his armor, as other impacts landed all around him. The horrific heat rendered the armor to wisps of contaminated gasses.
The sidewalk ran, holes eating into the road and the sodden earth around it.
Moisture from the soaked ground was flash converted into a thick fog that rolled out. Flares of fire and glowing plasma lit it and turned the fog into a nightmare scene.
The second APS was on the outer ring of the impact. The nearest plasma landed a meter to the left and detonated. The explosion lifted the armored figure and sent them flying, burning, one leg and that side of the APS a literal melting wreck.
The others were far enough outside of the blast radius that they’d survive, merely being toasted—which again pointed to the amateur level of the operators in the defending suits—but they were still staggering here and there, lost in the sudden fog.
The temperature of that fog, which was even now rolling out on all sides, was high enough to cook an unarmored man, meaning that it was as good as a damn steel wall at blocking most of the visual systems on either side of the impact zone from seeing each other.
I saw a security transport rocket out of an entrance on the far side of the grassy area. The armored car I assumed held Reign and the others raced full bore away toward a second exit, presumably the employees’ one, as the area I was in was far too nice to be the commoners’ entrance.
The rest of the defenders should have been racing forward to counterattack, capitalizing on the situation and taking down the other side as they retreated. Instead, half stood around, waiting for orders; others stared in horrified amazement at the dozen flash-fried assholes. And the last few?
I dove to the right as a rifle swept me, a three-round burst punching through the wall of the tower as he missed. I rolled, popping to my feet. The movements of the kata were instinctive as I rotated my wrists, the flare of pain from my still healing right ignored as the blade flashed in an arc, severing the massive rifle halfway down the barrel.
I dropped one knee, the punch that flashed overhead easily enough to behead me…had it landed.
Instead, I rose again into “Kingfisher Launches”, a form I’d hated when I first learned it, believing that I’d never be reduced to fighting on the ground, without my suit.
Now, the blade rose almost vertical, the tip punching through the elbow joint as I rose behind it. I swung my right foot around behind me, pivoting on the left, sliding the sword free of the suit; the burning, melted joint gave way as the forearm and hand fell free.
The sword came in closer to my chest, held at ninety degrees, as I flowed around, then swung to my right, still spinning.
“Holy fuck…” I distantly heard on the comm channel as the world around me vanished.
In my mind, nothing existed save the three figures: the wounded, staggering APS I fought, the second APS on the far side of him, turning to face us, and the sword.
I was the blade, and I danced through the forms like I’d never done in my life.
The blade slid into the small of the back of the APS, and I dragged it sideways, carving a shallow trench out of the sensitive systems below the armor, knowing, even as I came to a stop, facing the other APS, that the one behind me? That I’d just hit?
He was dead. All that was left was for his body to accept it.
The APS before me paused, his gun rising then hesitating as I ran at him, giving him the option of firing—and probably hitting his friend behind me—or holding fire to fight a lunatic with a stolen plasma sword.
I made it three steps. The barrel of the massive rifle right before me seemed to grow larger by the second. Determination filled me that I’d carve my way through him…until the building behind me exploded.