The bomb that Gessh had attached to the drone, and had then had a fuckload of the high explosive shit that we’d stolen from Sirisena’s place added to it, was right where we wanted it by that point.
As soon as Lucky had kicked off his little speech, and Luna and Gessh had got safely out of sight, Gessh had started to control the little drone.
It was old, like seriously old, some kind of a pipe-cleaning model, with six legs, each with a cushioned magnet at the end that left it more or less silent—a must in the sewers, or it’d be eaten by something—and it’d crawled along the pipes until it was almost directly above the group.
When Lucky detonated the bomb, small as the original had been, it in turn triggered the rest of the high ex. The fragments of metal and more that went flying from the remnants of the pipes it’d been atop of, were, in my opinion, overkill.
As soon as Lucky had gestured, we’d dove out of sight, more or less, hiding behind the barriers as the explosion scythed through Lucky’s team.
Five were killed outright. Lucky himself, by dint of being directly underneath the largest of the pipes, was shielded from some of the explosion, and was merely smashed to the ground and pinned there, as half the section of roof collapsed on him. Those around him were blasted from their feet, shredded by sections of destroyed pipe, and, in one unlucky fucker’s case, steam-broiled by a damaged coolant pipe that had apparently been in mid-vent.
Most of the gangers, though, were both armored and had been expecting trouble. That didn’t mean to say they reacted well, but they also weren’t taken down easily.
Of the nineteen who walked in, including Lucky and Irena, ten were still combat capable, against our four, and the air was thick with flying slugs, flames, coherent light, and worse.
I hit the inside of the barrier I was hiding behind, whipped my rifle over the top and opened fire, the optics relaying the sight as gangers sprinted for cover.
People were running in all directions, and as two of the fuckers actually ran directly at us, Luna stood, firing off a half dozen rounds from her shotgun on full auto.
The closest figure to her was picked up as if by a giant hand and thrown backward. Slugs punched through him and out the far side, even as she switched aim to the second, then hammered a handful of shots directly into one of the barriers opposite us as idiots dove behind it.
Gessh had rolled to the side and was sighting down the room, grazer assault rifle humming and crackling as she sprayed the room with destructive energies.
Reign had dived behind her own barrier, and then leaned around it, aiming carefully, before letting loose a single dart from Stinger’s gun.
It hurtled downrange, hitting the barrier and punching straight through it. The scream that rose on the far side made it clear that someone had been highly unfortunate.
I jerked my gun back down, dumping the depleted mag as slugs hit the barrier where my gun had been. I slotted a second mag with speed born of practice, then sighted carefully around the edge, firing three shots into an ankle and foot I could see peeking out from cover on the far side.
There was a scream, and the figure jerked up…only to take another hit to the face as Gessh ended her target’s issues.
I grinned…until a well-placed smoke grenade exploded nearby, and the room vanished. Sneering, I flicked to heat vision, then moved on, the still-venting steam pipe making that useless. Two more modes activated then vanished, before I got a grainy motion tracker working, and I swore, bursting from behind cover to vault to the far side, as a frag landed next to me.
It went off as I cleared the barrier. A single shard caught my boot and tugged me into a roll. And then I started to really swear, as I slid out of the smoke and into the main room again.
I shifted, firing, then rolled to my right as a figure sprinted at me, gun swinging around. I fired again, taking him in the knee, then hip, and then the upper chest and head, sending him tumbling past, reduced to sliding meat.
A blur appeared to my left, and I was rolling again. The world spun as someone hit me with something from stealth; a hand yanked my rifle aside, as another grabbed onto my throat, squeezing hard.
“Call them off!” I heard Irena’s voice demanding, and I grabbed her wrist with my left, squeezing with all the augmented strength that hand could bring to bear.
I heard creaks, but it was me who was up shit creek. My armoring for my throat, being dragon scale, resisted blunt-force impacts, like fucking bullets, not enhanced fingers!
I gasped as she squeezed harder. My armor held her at bay for a second or two, then started to compress and added to the pain.
“Last chance!” she snarled, twisting my rifle and forcing me to release it, or have my fingers, and probably my right arm, broken. Then she rolled free, blood and some kind of augmentation fluid spraying across my helmet.
Luna was there, sword blurring as Irena leapt backward. Her right arm now ended in a stump at the elbow, even as augments cut in, sealing the wound and tamping down on the blood loss.
“Bitch!” Irena snarled, the party girl and druggie that I’d seen draped across Lucky no longer anywhere in evidence as she flipped my rifle around, catching it in her left hand and opening fire on Luna.
Luna was fast, though, and fucking hell she was good. The flat of her blade slapped the rifle aside—bullets hammered into the floor near my head as I cursed and coughed, rolling to my knees—and then she was in close.
Her blade sliced the inside of Irena’s left thigh on the downswing; then, a roll of her wrist and the blade rose again, hacking through the back of the right knee and out.
Irena screamed, crashing to the ground, and a second figure hit Luna from the side. The pair of them fell and rolled, blades flashing as they fought.
Bullets flew overhead, as well as the crackles and ear-tearing screams of grazer beams. I snarled, shoving myself to my feet, yanking the shotgun off my shoulder and firing three fast shots into Irena, who’d been bringing my rifle to bear on me.
Stolen story; please report.
The first hit, a solid slug, hit her in the chest, slamming her back into the ground. The slug punched through her cleanly, hitting the metal floor and ricocheting back up, tearing a second wound in her shoulder blade.
My second and third shots were to the upper chest and her chin. Honestly, they were probably overkill, but that bitch deserved it. I could barely breathe, and I coughed and hacked as I struggled back into cover, dragging a medikit from my belt. I grabbed the covering and yanked it off, only to have someone rip it from my hand, claws leaving deep gashes in my hand.
I hissed in pain, then grunted. The world exploded in stars as someone hit me in the side of the head next, sending me to the floor, spitting blood through a broken jaw and cheek, my helmet dented and cracked.
They clearly thought they’d killed me, turning their back and running.
I grabbed the shotgun and dragged it around, aiming for a second blur in the air, noticeable only by the way the smoke eddied and swirled.
I fired, three shots, then switched to full auto, spraying and praying. One of the last shots hit a sprinting figure in the back as they dove from sight around a fallen pipe, even as a hit to the barrel smashed my shotgun out of my injured hand.
The shotgun hit the floor and I abandoned it, instead yanking the next medikit out, a medium, and tore the plugs free, stabbing it into my throat and discarding it as soon as it hissed empty.
I clawed at my helmet, crying out in pain as the dented-in metal took skin and hair with it as I tore it free, and then again as the nanites got to work, repairing and restructuring my throat and cheek. My hand itched like crazy as a veritable stream was redirected to focus on the gouges suffered.
I was up and moving, though. Gunfire still rang out, and I could see Luna and someone fighting nearby, rolling over and over, blades glinting in the light.
I dragged my hatchet free. It was nothing special, no vibrating wonder of modern technology. No, it was a fucking short axe with a wicked edge, and I hammered it into the back of the figure atop Luna, as they tried to drive a blade into her throat.
They screamed, and I dragged the axe free, as Luna shoved the dagger to the side and grabbed her foe’s chin, yanking it sideways and filling the air with the snap of breaking bone.
“Behind you!” Luna shouted, and I spun, axe whipping sideways to take a ganger in the chest as he launched himself at me. The two of us staggered as he coughed blood all over.
His eyes widened, my axe buried up to the head in his side. A cascade of blood fountained out of his mouth, as I got a sudden connection request.
“What!” I snarled into the commlink.
“Five more figures have entered the room. Assumedly, they were alerted by another. They’re in full stealth gear, and are clearly here for me. Take them down in the next thirty seconds, or I activate the gas,” Stinger said.
“Fuck’s sake!” I snarled. “You’re a dick, Stinger!” I roared, reaching into my pocket and dragging the MADD free, depressing the trigger and underarm flinging it toward the entrance, before grabbing Luna and dragging her to her feet.
“MADD OUT!” I bellowed into the commlink. “Get down!”
We hobbled and staggered; bullets hit our armor as we ran, counting down the steps.
We almost didn’t make it, diving behind a barrier and crashing to the ground, Luna’s breathing loud in my ear as she spoke.
“What the hell was—”
The MADD exploded. Hundreds of tiny monomolecular wires burst free in all directions. The explosive charge sent them rocketing outward. Their anchors punched holes into everything around them, then fired the second phase. Tiny posts drove out, securing the anchors to whatever they’d hammered into.
Two hundred and thirty monomolecular wires, literally finer than a hair and sharper than a scalpel, deployed to convert the fair end of the chamber into a spider’s web of fucking terror.
The wires could cut steel like butter, and as for flesh?
The five stealthed assassins who had been sneaking through the room, presumably intent on making sure Stinger was dead and then claiming the bounty—or, for all I knew, intent on making me dinner and giving me the best blowjob of my life—were rendered down to collapsing threads of meat and technology. Blood sprayed from their severed remains like a giant’s hand had crushed an invisible cranberry juice container.
The remainder of Lucky’s forces at that end of the room were reduced to cascading kibble. The single fighter still standing—a ganger of surprisingly little situational awareness—screamed “Follow me!” and raced out of cover, running toward our end of the room and the dissipating smoke.
He managed a half dozen steps, before the sudden silence, as all his allies stopped firing, reduced as they were, finally got through to him.
There was a confused call of “Uh…guys?”
Then Reign shot him in the chest. The dart lifted him from his feet and sent him flying backward in a mist of blood.
Silence fell, broken only by our heavy breathing as we peered over the barriers at the drifting smoke, the devastation, and the glittering strands that dripped blood.
“You didn’t tell me you had a MADD grenade,” came the complaint from Stinger.
“You didn’t tell me there were so fucking many of them, or that there were five fucking stealth assholes,” I countered.
“There were nine,” he admitted after a second. “Four were with your friends. The other five were more professional.”
“How’d you know they were there?”
“A scanner on the hatch and pressure plates on the floor. Any movement alerted me.”
“And you didn’t think to fucking share that?” I growled, sagging back down and pressing my back to the barrier, glaring at the locked door at the far end of the room. “So…you gonna try to kill us, or you gonna stick to your word?”
“Try?” Stinger said, as if amused.
“You’ve seen four of us take out what, twenty?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“Fuck’s sake. So, you gonna honor the deal?”
“I will,” Stinger said after a few seconds, having clearly thought about fucking us over. “But only once the deal is done. You have two survivors.”
“Fucking hell, really?” I looked over the top of the barrier. “Who?”
“Lucky and a companion.”
“Heh. Maybe there are gods after all.” I grunted, pushing to my feet and looking the others over.
We were all injured, I saw straightaway, scratching at the itching on the back of my right hand as the nanites worked to seal the wound fully.
“Are you okay?” I asked the others, glancing from Luna with her cuts—the blade fight at close quarters had left a pair of long cuts that exposed bone on the right side of her face—and a bullet wound to her right leg, to Gessh who, frankly, looked awful.
“Contagion grenade,” she said. “Fuck. I didn’t know anyone still used them.”
I winced, taking an automatic step back, despite the obvious fact that she was still breathing making it clear the grenade hadn’t been a powerful one.
They ranged in strength from a plague-like effect, covering anyone who breathed in the spores in painful lesions and coughing blood, to essentially the flu, all aches and pains.
The spores were time sensitive, though—something about the deployment, activation, and the original loading of the grenades meant that the most powerful and virial pathogen they carried might give you a weak cold when it was finally used. As such, the contagion grenades were scrapped from military use, and then from corpo officially.
I’d heard that the last supplies of them were being used to clear areas out for urban redevelopment, but that might have just been a rumor.
Either way, Gessh was injecting herself with a small medikit and waving to us all that she’d be fine in a few minutes.
Reign was rubbing at her tit, and we all spent a few seconds watching, before Luna spoke up.
“Look, if you want some private time to take care of your needs, we can respect that. Just, you know, warn us next time. Poor Kabutt here is drooling.”
“No I’m not!” I snapped.
“Touched a nerve there.” Luna laughed, and I growled at her, before looking back at Reign.
“You okay?”
“Crowd-suppressant round,” she explained. “Direct hit to my goddamn nipple.”
Crowd-suppressant rounds dealt with rioters in basic body armor but without killing them. Simply put, they were a kind of rubber round that expanded on impact, then released a flash electrical charge.
We all winced, knowing that right now, her tit was literally turning black and blue with bruises. For the next few days, she was going to be insanely sore, but equally, it’d be a hell of a waste to use a medikit on it.
“Besides that and this…” She indicated a small chunk taken out of her upper left shoulder and shrugged. “I’m good.”
“Then let’s go fucking kill Lucky,” I suggested, getting smiles and nods from the others.