I screamed the warning into the tacnet, as a dozen areas I could see around me, never mind how many more must be hidden inside the factory, suddenly showed up as the telltale dark blue of coolant pods.
“What?” Blue barked into the tacnet, confused, but going with it. “Blue Team, break!”
The team, running forward as one, broke apart, darting left and right, skidding and sprinting for cover, even as the coolant pods triggered.
On all sides, the upper dome of renovated, previously recessed turrets broke free. Their delicate electronics filled the air with tracking data as they triggered, homing in on us.
“Take them down!” I roared, my rifle locking on as I opened fire, a three-round burst sufficient to shred the old turret as it tried to acquire its first target.
All around us, they went active, and they were heavy models, clearly intended to defend the mech assembly plant against incoming enemy mech.
We were in the latest and greatest personal armored suits that could be built…but yeah, built by the lowest bidders. That meant that although we were generations ahead of these turrets, we were far from impervious.
The turrets had been designed to take down assault mechs, and the chatter of heavy fire roared out from the left. Three locked onto Fergie.
“Fuck youuuu!” Fergie roared, our heavy weapons specialist clearly “forgetting” the minor rule about no heavy ordnance as his twin rail cannons opened up.
The air filled with the clatter and chatter of heavy and light machine guns, the crack of supersonic rounds from rail guns, and the sizzle of atomized shit from the lasers and grazers.
I slid to a halt behind a mass of fallen scaffolding, using it as cover even as I fired again and again, pivoting my aim left and right, taking out turret after turret.
Where I’d seen a dozen or more earlier, now more were going active, and the fuckers were everywhere! Lasers joined the ancient slug throwers. Turrets chewed the rubble and scaffolding I crouched behind. I swore, hearing shouting as scavs raced to join in as well.
Grenades and old-style slug throwers, chemical rockets screamed through the air and more.
Fragments of stone and rusted metal showered me, and I snarled, returning fire over the top, using the camera on the massive rifle—sized for use by a three-meter-tall APS unit—while I searched for a more defensible spot.
This was the best I was gonna get, I guessed, as I figured out flanking paths. The mass behind me shifted, and I froze, thinking it was about to collapse.
The recon drone flashed overhead a second later, then exploded as it was shot out of the air by at least five separate sources.
“Boss, move!” Sync screamed.
A crack rang out. A supersonic round flashed past me to smash into something out of sight.
I was up and running as soon as she said it, sprinting. Cameras on the back of my APS showed an image of something that had been buried under the mass of rubble beginning to tear its way free.
Staggering, I cursed as my shield dropped. The blue aura flared red as it went from just under seventy, to fifty, to thirty. I dove right, hitting the ground and rolling, coming to my feet and sighting in on the heavy turret that had been pounding me.
I fired a three-round burst. The high-powered armor-piercing slugs tore the old turret apart. But even as I did that, my eyes widened at the form that shredded its way free of the rubble and scaffolding.
We’d been badly fucked by Tyrannus with this one.
They were scavs, all right. Nobody else had the skills, nor the insanity to do what they’d done, and certainly not the sheer fucking brass balls. But now?
“Richie!” I bellowed, firing again and again, as I shifted from target to target.
“That’s why they took the Corium, boss. It’s a fucking power source!”
“What the hell is that thing?” Blue One shouted over the roar of gunfire.
“It’s a mech!” Richie replied quickly. “Overlord or nemesis class, and they found it. They’ve probably been rebuilding it for years, and shot down the satellite to loot the power core!”
“Weaknesses?” he asked after a few seconds, their own tech keeping noticeably fucking quiet.
“No shields—it’s why they were scrapped—heavy weapons, but slow to turn, easily targeted from the air, so…”
“Get outside!” I ordered. “Everyone, fall back!”
“Turrets first or we’ll be chewed up!” Sync called.
I cursed, agreeing and opening fire on another and another as I corrected my order. “Turrets first.”
“Weapons?” Blue One called over the gunfire.
“Didn’t see,” Richie snapped. “I literally saw enough of the torso to ID it, and they blew the drone.”
“How big?”
“Assault mech,” Blue Five said, clearly reading specs as we took out as many turrets as possible, getting ready to run. “Fifteen meters at the shoulder. Original recommended loadout has it with shoulder-mounted LRAMS, Gatling cannon, and a flamethrower for trench clearance.”
“LRAMS?” Barnes asked, and Richie took pity on him.
“Long Range Artillery Missile System. Basically, it’s a launcher on its back. Fires the missile like it’s out of a cannon, then the missile activates, autocorrects and steers. Think rail gun, but a missile instead of a slug.”
“Well, that’s not fucking happy making!” Barnes grunted, and I stifled a laugh as Fergie spoke up.
“Speak for yourself. I wants me one!”
I shook my head at the mad bastard. He’d try to fire it offhand as well…and probably succeed, knowing him.
“Scott,” I called, seeing the mech was still struggling to free itself.
“Yeah, boss?”
“You think you could take that down?”
“If you keep the turrets off my back, hell yes,” Scott replied.
I turned to ping Blue One, opening a private command line.
“You think?”
“Sacrifice play?” Blue One’s voice made it clear he didn’t like it.
“No. We back them, you send Blue Four as well.”
“I…” He hesitated, then swore, before switching to the tacnet. “Blue Four, don’t let that Red asshole have all the fun—get in there!”
“Sir!” Blue Four agreed.
Scott burst out of cover, and we all stood, opening fire over and over, switching from target to target.
“Sync!” I barked. “Vanish. Get the high ground and end these fucks!”
“Moving!” came the agreement, as her camo-plates powered up, the multi-ton APS vanishing in a heat haze.
“Go!” Blue One, and his Six, vanished as well, as he and Blue Two joined me, even as a good dozen new signals appeared. The jammer was clearly running out of power.
“Threes, I don’t like this building—get rid of it!” I ordered, no longer bothering to go through Blue One.
“Sir!” Blue Three acknowledged, as Fergie, Red Three, whooped and planted his feet.
The heavy weapons build for the APS wasn’t just in the upgraded servos and the enhanced armoring and musculature to handle weapons that used to be carried by ships, tanks, and mechs. To handle the recoil, their legs and boots were entirely different than the other models, and they made that clear now. Stabilization platforms locked down; additional shielding came online as their secondary power cells activated. Barnes backed up without having to be told; connectors snaked from his backplate to Fergie’s, sharing the load and forming the soldier/heavy symbiote.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Rounds slammed into Fergie’s shield, now extending automatically over Barnes, and powered by the combination of both Fergie and Barnes’s cores. It barely flickered, while the rail guns fired over and over.
Barnes laughed, a crazed sound that was barely this side of madness, as he fired, and we all understood.
“You want some?” he cried out. “You do? Fuck yeah!” Where the rest of us were mobile, ducking in and out of cover, Barnes and Fergie had to stay where they were. Any movement would break the connection.
Where Fergie was heavily armored, and could take a pounding, Barnes was in a standard soldier build, like mine, but without a command mod.
That meant that as much as he was a kid, as green as that fucker was, if he stayed in place and survived this? He’d earned his place in the team. Stepping up like that took balls, and doing it without being ordered to? Well, it spoke volumes.
He hammered away at anything that wasn’t us, and the turrets were being replaced by the scavs.
They were asshole mercs and thieves in a mixture of heavy armor, ex-military surplus, and the kinda brand-new next-level shit that corpos swore they’d never sell outside of to the government.
Which meant every fucker had them.
Missiles and gear designed for the sole reason of taking down APS teams started to pop up, and I swore as my shoulder-mounted replenishment system, mounted on my right arm hardpoint, went dry.
I changed to the locked-in mag, armor-piercing punching holes in my targets as I called to Richie.
“Get those helos on station!” I barked. “I want the back half of this building leveled!”
“Got it!” Richie grunted, switching channels as we all shifted and fired.
“Bringing the pain!” Fergie bellowed as both gamma cannons went active at once. The eye-searing green light of a grazer—a gamma-ray laser—lit the factory, and enemy screams filled the air.
Lasers could cut steel, slugs could deform it and even punch through, fléchettes could tear through and shred, but only the gamma cannon could render a living form to mush through six inches of steel.
The cannons’ boom rang out over and over. Each hit, even if the target hid behind cover, was a kill, and we cursed as the mech struggled out from under the mass of fallen steel.
They’d clearly left some of the crap above it hoping to keep it hidden, and although they must have expected a response, they’d must not have been anticipating it for a while yet.
If not, they’d have had it clear and ready to go. Systems were coming online, but others were failing. The left arm was working, the right totally dead; automated turrets on the outside of the hips opened fire, as the Fours leapt on it. Scott had a plasma blade out and active; Blue had a power-axe, a massive thing that crackled with energy as he swung it at the right arm of the mech, just as it started to jerk, coming to life.
Scott hacked through the hip turret on his side, then staggered, vanishing in a bloom of fire, hit by something on the far side of the mech. He reappeared, lurching, wreathed in flames.
“Motherfuckers!” he screamed, bracing himself and leaping out of sight behind the mech, as Blue’s axe sliced into the right arm, severing sections.
The mech sagged, then braced itself and rose. The sheer fucking insanity of a fifteen-meter-tall assault mech towering over the three-meter APS teams made my asshole clench and stomach twist.
“Richie, where the fuck—”
“They won’t fire!” He cut me off, even as Scott’s camera flashed up on my HUD, clearly being fed to me directly and deliberately.
I focused on it as I ducked back down, searching the image, seeing…“Scott!” I barked. “Fall back!”
“Can’t!” he bellowed. “Too many…sorry…”
The feed cut off as an explosion rang out. The entire factory shook as I replayed the last seconds of Scott’s fight, including the mech staggering and falling to its knees.
The area behind the mech, and where Scott had been seconds before, vanished in a huge fireball. Entire sections of walls, the floor, and upper and lower levels were shredded in an instant.
The mech was sent careening and support beams flew in all directions.
At least half the scavs were wiped out, maybe more, as flames and worse filled the air. Shrapnel reduced unshielded bodies to mince as Scott’s markers flatlined in my vision.
The mad bastard was a martial arts genius, ducking and weaving, his fists, feet, and blade as lethal in the APS as Fergie was with his cannons. But in the last seconds, I saw what he—and the bastard scavs had—done.
They’d had a massive stockpile of weapons behind the mech, buried under something, and had been bringing them up from a basement floor below.
Dozens of the scavs had been there, with three of them hefting a latest model AROC—Armored Recovery Ordnance Control—and pointing it at Scott. In that last second, he’d seen the lock-on and flung his blade into the piled-high explosive, knowing exactly what would happen.
“SCOTT!” Fergie roared, pummeling the massive mech repeatedly as it hit Blue Four with a backhand, sending him staggering, then pummeling him with turret and scav fire.
His shields failed. Shots slammed into him and sent him reeling, until the mech’s Gatling cannon spun up, the damn thing still trying—and failing—to get to its feet.
The fire cut Blue Four’s armor apart like a hot knife through butter, as we all focused fire on it.
Fergie screamed at the loss of Scott even as rail guns punched holes through the assault mech’s outer armor. The gamma cannons had little effect, thanks to some property of the design.
I snarled as I connected to Richie’s comms kit and onward. Even with the jammer down, the walls here were too thick for a clear signal, and I needed this to be clear.
“Helo-7! This is a direct order. I want the north side of this factory fucking vaporized!” I bellowed, cutting off the ongoing argument between Richie and the pilot.
“Negative!” Helo-7 bit back. “Captain Tyrannus has refused authorization. Feel free to take it up with him.”
“Richie!” I snapped, cutting the link to the helo, and grunting as Richie replied.
“Patching in Operations Control. Captain Tyrannus is…he’s refused the link, redirected to…fuck! Redirected to corporate liaison!”
“What the fuck?” I grunted, dismayed and in shock. Yeah, this was a corpo gig; they’d paid for us to be assigned here on “recovery”—no doubt greasing that fucker Tyrannus’s palm to make it happen—but this was an army mission! The request for reinforcements had nothing to do with…
“M-Corp Liaison, please state your request,” came the bored voice of the liaison.
“Request?” I snarled. “This is Red One, Harry Kabutt. We’re under heavy fire on your retrieval op, and the helo—”
“Acknowledged and identity confirmed. Sergeant Kabutt, your request for orbital bombardment is denied—”
“What the fuck do you mean, denied? We’re surrounded here!” I roared, barely able to hear the operator on the other end. “And orbital? I want the fucking helos to—”
“As the sponsoring corporation, M-Corp has enforced a maximum threshold on investment for this operation, as we’re paying for everything from fuel to ammunition. Until the target is physically confirmed in the containment sleeve, M-Corp will not authorize any additional expenditure.”
“You…I…”
“Is that all, Sergeant Kabutt?” the liaison asked coldly. “I’m a very busy man.”
“We’ve lost two APS already!” I barked. “We’ll lose more—hell, we might lose the entire team!”
“That has been factored into the mission evaluation. Insurance premiums have already kicked in, and the loss of the APS will be covered. Orbital bombardment and helo Hellfire munitions, however, are an entirely different class of expenditure. If you want M-Corp to assist you, finish the mission.”
“Are you fucking—”
“Have a nice day,” the liaison sneered.
“Commlink is blocked, boss,” Richie growled. “Tyrannus has blocked us too.”
“I’ll kill them all. With my own two…MOTHERFUCKERS!” I roared, standing up and firing the last shots from the mag, sending scavs flipping and falling, before dropping it out and switching to incendiary.
“New plan!” I snarled into the tacnet. “Drown them in their own blood!”
“So…no backup then?” Blue One asked me on the command channel.
“We’re not worth the extra investment,” I hissed.
“Insurance kicked in as soon as we lost the Fours, didn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, that’s fucked my week.”
“Same. So, fuck it…might as well kiss the bonus goodbye,” I joked blackly.
The mech finally rose again, towering over us all. Fergie forcibly overrode and disconnected from Barnes, reaching back and shoving him away with one smoking cannon.
“What the…” Barnes gasped, stunned, not expecting Blue One and me to run left and right, firing over and over, punching holes in the massive mech…before the Gatling cannon screamed out again and tore Fergie apart.
The line of fire jerked to the right, slicing Blue Two and Three apart, their twinned and boosted shield still popping under the onslaught.
“Boss!” Sync cried desperately.
“What?” I screamed, rifle clicking empty again. I ejected the mag and tore a fresh one, my last but one, and slammed it home, not even looking to see what it was.
“The pilot’s a scav!”
“So?”
“Link me!” she demanded, and I did it, trusting her.
The scav pilot’s voice was full of hatred and glee. “Surrend—”
“I’ve got your family under my eye,” Sync cut him off flatly. “Thirty-seven women and children, with three fighters watching over them…” A single shot rang out. “Two fighters…” Another shot. “One…”
“Power it down, or she launches the area denial drone. Full summary judgment,” I cut in grimly.
“You…you’ll kill them all anyway.” His voice changed to disbelief and desperation. “Hold fire!” he bellowed into a separate link. The fight slowly petered out, as Blue One did the same, the link shared live on my side.
“You attacked us. We came for the core, and we’ve nothing to lose. One more of my people die, and she launches. We all lose.”
“Or…?”
“Or you power down the mech, you drop your weapons, and we judge you. Combatants only. We win, we retrieve the core, and we didn’t see your women and children, and they stay hidden until we leave.”
“They’ll be killed in days,” he snarled. “Raiders, hunters, monsters…”
“They’d have a chance,” I countered. “Better than they have now.”
“You wouldn’t,” he bluffed. The commlink expanded to show a tired, scruffy man in filthy overalls, head wired into the mech on the right side, hair hanging down his face on the left. “You’d not kill…”
A second image popped up, as Sync connected her scope to the commlink, zooming in on the face of an older woman, one who was looking around fearfully, before reaching for the gun of a fallen fighter.
“She touches that weapon, she’s a combatant,” Sync warned him.
The woman’s fingers curled around the grip of the rifle, lifting it and turning…then she vanished in a bloom of blood. The scope dialed back out, before zooming in on another, a young man—a boy, really…maybe twelve or thirteen—as he reached for another gun.
“Sooner or later, we’ll get to one you care about.” I hated that Sync had done it, but knew that it needed to be done. I’d been on fucking hundreds of judgment runs, hitting scav bases, caravans and more, after they’d raided merchants or tried to steal from the recovery teams.
That’s what we were now. We were the law to the lawless; we brought judgment on these fucks when they attacked the innocent. I didn’t like it much, but the value of a life in these days? Nothing compared to what it had been in the old world.
The wilds and those who lived in them understood force; they understood consequences. Fuck with Artem and its people? The APS came out and judged you. That was all the law that existed out here now.
“You fucking corpo scum! You goddamn monsters! We just want to be free! Is that too much to—”
“Bang,” Sync said coldly, moving to the next target.
“Stop!” he begged. “Look, you leave, back up and run, I’ll let you g—”
“Not without the core,” I snapped. “Not without our people.”
“You can’t win,” he warned us, shaking his head. “If you kill them all, you die and—”
“You know why nobody ever talks about taking down a full APS squad?” I bluffed. “Orbital strike. We die, you all die.”
“Bullshit.”
“How certain are you?” I asked, sensing a string to pull. “You’ve got a choice. We all die—you, me, your families, everyone. Or just you and any soldiers we’ve seen.” I stressed that last part, and I saw the wild look in his eyes. “We win, or you lose. No other way this plays out.”
Seconds passed before he cut the connection abruptly, and I cursed, ready to open fire…until the mech sagged. Pressurized gasses vented around the massive hulk as it powered down.
The pilot stepped out, raising his hands into the air, glaring at us in hatred, and I raised my rifle, sighting down it.
“This is for my team, you fuck,” I growled, and shot him in the head, painting the mech’s interior red. “Guilty!”