“Three minutes to drop.”
I blinked, shocked out of my post-fight adrenaline crash. The messages I’d been scrolling mindlessly through froze as I tried to make sense of the words.
“Repeat?” I snapped, banishing the messages plugin and bringing up my full HUD, the titan that was my APS suit surrounding me.
“Two minutes fifty to drop,” the uncaring voice of the distant helo pilot came back, and I snarled.
“You fucking said that! We’re on RTB. What the fuck do you mean, ‘drop’?”
“Return to base has been canceled. Rerouting to new target. Retrieval mission,” the voice came back. “Now, I’m actually busy, grunt, so if that’s all?”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I growled as the commlink closed without waiting for a response, and I quickly pulled up the team tacnet. “Red Team, sound off!”
“Red Two.” Barnes in the deployment bay to my left responded hesitantly, new to the team, and the limited expected life span of an APS operator.
“Red Three.” Fergie to my right responded flatly. The wall of the deployment container between us creaked as he shifted his massive armored bulk.
“Red Four.” Scott yawned, sounding like he’d just woken up, and was still trying to figure out what planet he was on.
“Red Five,” Richie called out, the comm tech already sounding distracted as he no doubt searched for data.
“Red Six,” Sync, our sharpshooter, behind and to my left called.
“We’re being dropped in…T-minus two-thirty. No clue where, no clue why, just got that it’s a retrieval mission. Richie?”
“Working, boss,” he replied, and I nodded, unseen, in my suit.
“Right. Check your ammo, people. Check your batteries. We’ve got two minutes. If you didn’t plug in on pickup, do it now. Even a single point might make the difference. No need to spend our creds on fresh backup cells.”
“Working on it, but…” Barnes growled.
“Boss, we’ve got Blue Team incoming as well. They set off an hour ago,” Richie interrupted, the annoyance clear in his voice.
An hour ago. A fucking hour.
“What’s the op?” I stifled my need to comm Captain Tyrannus and call him a shit-useless pig-fucker. He’d no doubt forgotten to hit us about the change because he was too busy ass-tonguing some corpo.
There was no point. All that would happen was Tyrannus would lie that he’d sent us the deets, blame it on us, and I’d get another fine for fucking up his Zen or some shit.
“Corpo retrieval job. Satellite crashed near here…and then the signal moved to an old factory complex. Looks like specters or scavs.”
“Let’s hope it’s scavengers.” I sighed. “Okay, people, you know what to do. Break the drain at T-minus thirty seconds. Lock in and get ready. We got maps of the target?”
“Here.” Richie grunted, as we all received a datapacket, team comms allowing the image through automatically.
This time, it wasn’t some busty hooker or similar, instead being a fairly recent aerial shot of the site.
We were originally somewhere far to the west of Artem. Hell, I’d not even paid attention beyond that we were far enough out that backup beyond the onboard drones we had was fuckin’ unlikely, making it possible that the enemy weren’t raiding, but were instead setting up a trap to capture us for our suits.
It’d not been the case, thank the gods. Instead, some damn tech had been found, some remnant of the old world, buried in a forgotten lab. We’d caught them as they left, taking down their transport and retrieving their kit, not to mention a few nice bits of loot.
We were in line for a bonus, a nice one, despite Tyrannus’s attempts to divert most of it to himself for his “leadership.”
That was the way life was for an APS operator. Out here, in the lawless lands between the cities, we brought order. Sometimes we’d be dropped to retrieve old world tech; sometimes it’d be a security gig, or a counter to another city. Sometimes we were deployed as judge, jury, and executioners, taking down scavs that hit merchants and more.
This time hadn’t been a bad one, thankfully.
There’d still been a nasty firefight, and Richie in Red Five had serious damage to his left leg’s servos, as well as most of us being at less than half ammo. Energy weapons were low as well. Typical.
Goddamn flyboys didn’t like the team recharging our batteries from their toys, so we’d gotten into the habit of not even asking to plug them in.
Now we’d pay for it, with only a few minutes’ additional charge on the suits.
The site was a few miles into the no-man’s-zone of the southwestern plains, dry and dusty, about as lifeless as everywhere else these days. The old factories were built around a vast collection of the old solar cells, long since trashed by the frequent storms.
The buildings were grey stone, dusty, dark inside, and looped on all sides by shattered windows. It looked utterly dead, like there’d not been another soul here for at least a century. So, yeah, perfect for scavs or specters.
“We need a scan of the site,” I told Richie, who clicked his mike, letting me know he was already talking. “Right. While he sorts that, people, we’ve got a retrieval mission. No clue what yet, but someone wants it badly enough to ‘encourage’ the army to send us and Blue Team. That means it’s expensive. It’s probably more valuable than all of us put together, and therefore breakable. No heavy weapons, no EMP, no frags, not till we know what we’re hunting.”
“You take all the fun out of life, you know that?” Sync, Red Six, sighed, and I snorted.
“Nope. Just means we get to watch Scott dance again,” I corrected.
“Ah, man, bait again?” Scott groaned.
“Hey, you chose a melee specialist’s role. What the hell did you think was going to happen?” Fergie—Red Three—responded, clearly amused. “At least you get to fuck shit up. I’m heavy weapons on an op with no heavy shit allowed.”
“No scans allowed either.” Richie came back, dropping into the chat to the sound of groaning and swearing from the rest of the team. “Corpo’s worried we’ll warn someone, and they’ll damage the target.”
“Any ID on it yet?”
“Classified.”
“Well, that’s just great,” Scott grumbled. “We’re risking our lives for something, but we can’t be trusted to know what it is—how the fuck does that work?”
“It’s a black cylinder about eight inches across, twenty long. It’ll fuck up our comms when we get too close, due to the retrieval signal it gives off,” Richie told us all seriously. “That’s the official line. Which smells to me. It sounds like a Black Corium Rod to me, which is all sorts of bad news.”
“Starting with radioactive.” I growled. “Any gear to contain it?”
“Blue Team is bringing it,” he confirmed, and I groaned under my breath.
“Be right back. One minute to drop,” I snapped into the tacnet, before changing the channel and routing through Richie’s gear, rather than the helo’s, requesting a link with the base. I knew this was pointless, I knew it, but I couldn’t help myself.
It connected after a few seconds, defensive AIs approving me and passing the commlink through to Tyrannus’s office, where it was refused.
“Motherfucker!” I snarled, pinging him again and again, until he answered.
“What is it?” Tyrannous sneered eventually. “I’m busy here, Red. You need your hand holding again?”
“What the hell is this op?” I asked through gritted teeth, knowing damn well this was going to cost me. But sending a half-kitted team after a radioactive bounty in the badlands was fucking insane.
“Retrieval,” he replied unconcernedly. “I take it you didn’t bother to read the mission report?”
“I did,” I growled, flicking the “disengage” for the physical connections to the helo on autopilot as I spoke. Data cables, power connections, and more clicked and slid free, retreating into the rear wall of the deployment container as I stood, facing the bay wall before me. “There was fuck all about this mission on it. ‘Counter Raider,’ it said, and it’s date- and time-stamped.”
I made that last bit clear, a bit unsubtle to point out that I had a copy of the mission report that hadn’t been updated, and that if we were fucked on this mission, I’d make sure it stuck to him too. The floor gave its warning shudder, by now so familiar it barely registered as I lifted my feet from it; the restraint harness held me in place and took my armored weight.
“There was an update sent,” he replied after a few seconds. “Maybe you didn’t get it. You need to connect to your own comms, not use the helo-net. You know what they’re…”
“I am.” The bay doors before me opened outward, retracting up and into the helo walls even as the section under me slid back, and the wall across from me lifted up and out. “I’m on full comms right goddamn now.”
Night air flashed past beneath me, empty, and far below, I could make out the blur of dead ground and cracked asphalt. Rusting hulks of cars tore past, long dead on the old highways, passed now only by tumbleweed and the ghosts of the past.
“Well…maybe it got delayed?” Tyrannus tried again.
I snorted as the helo banked suddenly, killing its forward momentum, flaring its engines and rearing back. My team and I triggered the release as one, restraining bolts in the harness not just releasing us, but adding a pressurized jet of gas to literally shove us out of the bay.
“I need to know what we’re grabbing!” I shouted into the commlink, plunging through the air, rifle held close to my chest, even as I triggered the secondary systems of the suit automatically. “Is it dangerous?”
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
The air whipped past me. Green and amber lights around the inside of my HUD made the condition of my suit clear. My secondaries—the hardpoints on either shoulder of my suit—were showing as amber for the right arm, and green for the left.
My ammunition reserve was at half, triggering the amber warning, but the connection was stable and no kinks in the delivery system. The shield on the left upper arm showed green, at seventy-two percent battery capacity.
The remaining two backplate hardpoints were set for mission critical gear on my model, so after retrieving the tech from the last job, and having that removed on return to the helo, I felt a little weird, the usual storage mass removed and my balance subtly off.
“It’s fine, just a container,” Tyrannus lied.
I barely heard him over the boom as I crashed into the ground, knees bending as I took the impact in my three-meter-tall war machine. We set off running. The rest of the squad fell in around me, even as Scott picked up speed, taking the lead.
“Fast in, fast out!” I snapped through the tacnet, switching channels. “Richie, get us a scan going and a target!”
“As you’re busy…” I heard, as I switched back to the secure line. As I opened my mouth to reply, the commlink disconnected.
“MOTHERFUCKER!” I roared, realizing he’d been waiting for the opportunity.
“Tacnet,” Richie warned me, the commlink returning automatically to the open connection.
“I’m gonna…” I growled, shaking my head as I muted myself, swallowing what I was going to say. They’d keep a transcript of this, like they did everything else. A recording of me screaming about how I was going to ram my rifle up Tyrannus’s ass and pull the trigger as I used it to fuck him into the next life possibly wouldn’t help my career.
I’d been scanning the area on autopilot. Radar pings drew sections clearly and others…Well.
The results weren’t good. That, as much as the fear of what the hell that desk jockey asshole had gotten us into, forced me into professional mode at a sobering speed.
“I’m getting blank returns,” I said grimly. The walls of the factory reflected the scans straight back, revealing nothing of the interior.
“Same.”
“I’ve got Blue Team incoming. Ninety seconds and they’ll be here. But the dead zone is blocking my scans as well,” Richie said.
“What’s causing it?” I asked.
“Most likely a jammer. High-powered and recent tech, or we’d have cut through it, combined with solid steel and lead mix in the walls.”
“Steel?”
“Reinforcement. Probably why the building’s still standing.”
“Scavs?”
“Possible. No specters, that’s for sure. Any specter finding something like this would have tried to integrate it, breaking it, or would have ran outta juice feeding on it.”
“What?” Barnes asked, making me snort and shake my head. “Seriously, guys, come on!” he begged.
“Goddamn noob.” Scott snorted, even as Richie started to explain.
“Scavs, or scavengers, loot the old world—and the new when they can. They’re always on the search for tech they can sell, so if this is a scav base? They might have a signal jammer to help hide them. It’d take a lot of power, though, so they’d have to run it sparingly, or it’d not be worth it. Cost as much as they could possibly save.”
“If it was scavs? We’d be on a judgment run, check for crimes they’re committing and execute as needed. This isn’t that…or not as far as we know,” Fergie rumbled.
“Or it’s specters,” Sync added. “They’d not care about the power cost. Not like they’re going to be selling it. All specters care about is adding more powerful mods into their rotting bodies.”
“Could a specter do this?” Barnes asked. “I mean, they’re dead, right? Brain-dead bodies that are being puppeted around by their mods, viruses and more running them?”
“Survive a month with the team, and you’ll know the answer,” Scott said laconically. “We hit them at least once a week these days.”
“Red Actual, this is Blue Actual, incoming on your nine.”
A fresh connection popped up, and I accepted it, nodding in relief, even though he couldn’t see me.
“Good to have you, Blue,” I replied. “You know more than us about this clusterfuck, I hope?”
“Retrieval,” Blue One, Jon, said. “Something from an old spy satellite. It’s radioactive as fuck, so we’re stuck with these…Wait, where’s your retrieval sleeve?”
“You got me on visual?” I asked.
“Yeah, we’re closing in. Got a good helo team—they jacked me to their kit. You got some kind of new retrieval system?”
“Try again.” I snorted, my disgust evident.
“They didn’t give you a sleeve for it?” He groaned, clearly not surprised.
“Bingo bongo. Five minutes ago, I was falling asleep on my way back to base, no clue we were even being dropped,” I growled. “We hit a raider team, got minor damage, and we’re low on ammo. Nobody even told us we were coming here until we hit the three-minute marker.”
“Fuck. To think we thought we had it bad. Okay, you secure, we’ll retrieve. Fifty-fifty?”
“Argh…fuck it. Deal,” I agreed, sighing, then switching the channel. “Okay, people, we’re switching roles. We’ll secure the zone. Blue retrieves it; we split the bonus fifty-fifty.”
“What?” Fergie groaned. “We do all the work and…”
“It’s radioactive as fuck. We carry it, we’re spending the next week on anti-radiation meds and scrubbing our suits. You want that?”
“So they get half our bonus for landing and picking it up?”
“Yeah, basically,” I snapped. “Unless you want to spend the week shitting through the eye of a needle and scrubbing?”
“Not to mention losing our active-duty bonus and any other missions,” Richie pointed out. “Because surely you don’t think that ‘someone’ is going to admit they fucked up and take the hit for us not being active in their paycheck instead?”
“Not a chance,” Sync growled. A chorus of assent echoed around as we all reflected that there was no chance Tyrannus would own up to his fuckup.
“Movement!” Fergie called, cutting off the chatter. He picked up speed, as a pair of specters staggered out of the broken factory doors ahead.
“Tracking movement,” Sync replied, sending an image of the second factory upper floors on the tacnet. There’d been definite heads moving there, but too fast and blurred to make out more than humanoid.
“In and secure the area,” I ordered after a second’s hesitation. “Scott, take them down, full speed.”
“Oh, yeah!” Scott whooped, his “blitzkrieg” build picking up speed as he powered ahead. The rest of us fell in behind him. Blue Team’s helo flared to the left in a small space between several buildings, rather than on the outskirts and making them run in, as ours had.
“Damn.” Fergie grunted into the tacnet, aware that Blue would be able to hear us now, deploying as they were. “How’d you guys get a flyboy who actually helps?”
“Just lucky!” came a laugh from Blue Two.
“Yeah, well, breaching!” Scott laughed. The pair of specters finally staggered toward him, arms grasping.
They looked like stick men, or the zombies I’d seen on old entertainment reels: Bones stuck out everywhere. Hollow eyes, long since blind to all, but hunger-locked onto us.
They were a mess, clothes reduced to rags, stumbling through the dust and debris of the old world. Their mods whirred and creaked, optical mods locked onto the fast approaching-Scott, teeth clacking in terrible hunger at the leaking light of electromagnetism that we all emitted.
I’d seen the world through their eyes once. We all had. A hacker a few years back had somehow remoted into a specter—nobody knew how—and recorded it, controlling it as he guided it along corridors deep in the undercity, surrounded by similar shuffling monstrosities.
Corpos had labeled it propaganda, but the only one who was surprised when the hacker puppeted it out into the street to stand with him, as he tried to show it was mindless and safe…was him.
It’d hesitated only a second before falling on him and ripping his ocular implant free. It tried to replace its desiccated old fleshy system with it, before trying for another local, one of the crowd who had been watching.
The one good thing about Artem came out then, and it was basically that its citizens were not to be fucked with. Everything from a bright-pink custom handbag-sized grazer to a cannon that should have been used for orbital clearance was pulled out and discharged.
The fucker had no chance.
Neither, now, did these two.
Scott didn’t use his rifle or plasma blade, not his cluster bombs nor his shield and electro-discharge knuckles. He’d slapped his rifle to his back, the mag-plates locking it down, and simply reached out, grabbing them both by the head.
Twisting and pulling, he ran in the opposite direction to the one they’d been headed in; they fell like stick figures, heads torn free with mechanized strength. What was left collapsed to the ground as he crushed, then tossed the heads away. For a few seconds, leg mods kicked where flesh laid still, and cybernetic hands opened and closed. Their fucked-up nanites had no clue that it was all over, but for them, at least, the fight certainly was.
We raced into the building behind Scott. The clatter of our boots crashing on the steel rang out. The whoosh of Blue’s transport helo flashed overhead as it took off, and the instant cutoff of Blue Team from the tacnet made me snarl.
Definitely something in the walls. Then: “Richie!”
“Yeah, boss?”
“Relay drone out. I want to be able to call for backup.”
“Done,” he agreed, skidding to a halt, lifting his left arm and firing one of his precious relay drones.
It was small, barely four centimeters on a side, and square, but when it hit the ceiling by the open door, the monomolecular bonding field powered up, sealing it into the frame. Camo blended it in, just in case.
It’d take some serious effort to remove that now, and as soon as the link was established, Blue was back in the tacnet, closing on the entrance.
“Helo, you read me?” I asked, pinging the circling bugger high overhead.
“This is Helo-7. Confirm readiness for extraction. Over.”
“Negative,” I replied. “Comm check.”
“Comms good,” came the uninterested reply. “Be aware, Red Team, we have fuel for forty-seven minutes on station, then we bug out.”
“That better be a bad joke, Helo-7.”
“Not smiling here, Red Team. Forty-six minutes and counting.”
I cut the line, growling as I directed my attention back to the crumbling building around us. We ran past rusting hulks of ancient mechanisms and vast towers of scaffolding, most long since collapsed and laid shattered across the ground, still surrounded with abandoned machines.
“Mech assembly,” Richie said in recognition and wonder. “It’s an old mech assembly plant. Has to be!”
“What?” I gestured to the team to hold up, ducking down around a series of fallen frames, as we scanned the interior for movement.
“Old world mechs were like ours, but they used them for everything from construction to mining, not just war. They were all constantly trying to steal each other’s secrets. That’s why the damn walls are like they are!”
“And the roof?” I asked, squinting up.
“Reinforced and probably lead-lined to stop signals…Damn,” Richie said, sending us all a close-up shot of a section of sagging roof where the water had been getting in. “Keep shots clear of there, people. That starts coming down and we’re all fucked. It’ll take a week to dig you out.”
“That means you, Three,” I said.
“Hey!” Fergie responded, pretending to be hurt, although we could all hear the smile in his voice. Not only was he physically the largest at damn near six foot seven, but as our heavy weapons specialist, his APS had been built to take seriously big fucking guns.
Everything from area denial smart drones, bombardment cannons and gamma cannons to missile or rotary fléchettes launchers could be mounted to his massive frame. Even now, the ground shook as he stomped past; the twin shoulder-mounted rail guns he’d chosen today—armor killers—tracked his vision, locking in on the slightest threat.
There were similar but smaller versions for mine and the blitzkrieg models to carry, but his? Easily twice the size of ours.
Where Richie—Five—was an expert with comms and all forms of tech, Fergie was the bear of the team: massive, a heart of gold, and a temper that could drive him to beat the face of God in.
“You getting anything now that we’re inside?” I asked Richie, and he nodded, as the first pings started up.
“Looks like a scav base,” he repeated. “I’m seeing multiple recent tracks of boots, too many and too regular in routes to be specters.”
“Tracks? What if it’s raiders? Man, we’ve not got the ammo for this shit—” came the whine before I cut him off.
“Can it, Barnes,” I snapped. “You earn the right to bitch on my team.”
“How we looking?” Blue One skidded to a halt across from us, ducking down behind a fallen mass of rusty metal as he peered into the darkness of the factory.
“Scav base,” I advised, bringing him up to date quickly.
“What’s the play?”
“Couple of specters roaming the outside, most likely drawn by the tech we’re here for. Betting there’ll be more around. But there’s booted tracks…”
“Tracks?” Blue One asked.
“Here.” Richie sent, and a second later, we all saw what had caught his eye: multiple sets of tracks trodden through the dirt and dust, patrolling what looked like a regular perimeter.
“Recon drone out,” I ordered, hearing Blue One order his team the same a second later.
Rich, in Red Five—the traditional slot for the tech in any team—lifted his left arm, the suit not even shaking as the larger recon drone unfolded its repulsors and took off.
Where the relay drones were four centimeters on a side—cubes that the suit carried three of as standard—the recon drone was their far bigger cousin. Half a meter long, with four small repulsors that folded down, locking into the left arm of the comms loadout, and with a small turret for defense, it could operate autonomously as needed, its RI—restricted intelligence—able to follow simple commands.
Right now, though, Richie broadcast the feed on the tacnet. A small window popped in to the bottom right in my HUD, making it possible to see it or to ignore it as I needed.
“Blue? Want to take the lead?” I asked, seeing the second image flashing up as an option, and he nodded.
“Blue Team, advance!” he called out, and they were up and running. The six of them raced forward as we spread out, watching all sides and behind, ready for anything as we followed.
“Richie, check out the upper floor. Sync, what’d you see outside?” I asked, rifle sweeping as we moved forward, expecting to be hit.
“Movement up above, but too fast to make out. Angle was shit, even on replay,” Sync responded, her words clipped and precise as she walked backward behind us, watching our backs.
“No scavs gonna fight us,” Barnes interrupted. “I mean, come on, they’re scavengers! We’re the APS Corps! They’d not stand a chance!”
“Barnes…” I said slowly as my radar, and that of others in the team, flickered, the jamming clearly being reinforced.
“Yeah, boss?” he replied. A confident grin would be on his stupid face, I knew.
“Shut the fuck up. The adults are talking.”
“Boss…” Richie interrupted.
“Yeah?”
“Switch to heat vision,” he whispered.
I did, trusting him implicitly, before stumbling.
“Oh, fuck…BLUE, FALL BACK NOW!”