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***

--Roomsweeper with directable rounds. Safety is off. Set to 3-round burst.

A new rifle dropped into my hands. I raised the weapon and sighted through the targeting reticle. Lines appeared on my glasses, sweeping out towards where I had aimed. The weapon barked, and the rounds flew out, following the displayed lines. They passed through the M-3 I had fired at and continued on into the throng behind it.

“What the hell?” I was expecting a submachine gun, not strange lines in my glasses.

--It fires high-velocity guidable flechettes. You should be able to put each round through multiple targets with each trigger pull. The flechettes won’t penetrate armor, so you’ll need to aim around the hard points.

I shot again, and the flechettes whistled as they flew into the antithesis. This time I saw how I could change the trajectories in flight, allowing angles that normally would be impossible. I started to angle my rounds to hit multiple Anti’s before losing power. An ammo counter appeared in my heads-up display; I was down to half a magazine already.

A couple more bursts drove the Anti’s back, and I felt I was getting the hang of the weapon. The waves paused while a tank-like M-6 was temporarily stuck in the door. That gave me a second to change out the ammo, and I asked for an extended mag. It came in the form of a hundred-round drum. It felt like it took forever to swap over to the new mag as the M-6 beat at the doorframe and forced a way through.

Back in action, the guidance on the flechettes proved critical against the heavier-armored Six. I had to find the light rounds couldn’t penetrate their armor, forcing me to aim for gaps or go for eye-shots to take out the brainpan.

We continued to sweep the room as more waves entered. The M-6’s would get stuck in the doorway for a short time before powering through. Each time they broke free, the opening grew a little bigger.

When the first M-5c appeared, I focused on it, arcing rounds over the sea of bodies and catching the alien in the head. It died before any spikes could get free to throw at us. Eventually, the bodies in the room started to stack up and interfere with the sight lines. We couldn’t stay here forever.

“Ginny, fall back and make sure we’re ready to leave. Kaitlyn, switch sides so I can get in the doorway.” I was still standing out in the open with my back to the wall. Ginny’s lighter rounds stopped, and I started shifting, even as Kaitlyn’s fire paused.

I asked for more ammo from Corie when I ran out. As I switched, Kaitlyn ran out of ammo. I fumbled through a hot swap as the Anti’s flowed in. At the last moment, the cartridge fell in, and I fired full auto from the hip. “Oh, this is just... cheating,” I said. In my glasses, I still had the same aiming reticle with the aim point automatically adjusted for the lower barrel height. With the guidable ammo, I could spray from the hip and still land rounds with high accuracy. I felt dirty, but I kept up the fire as I mowed the Anti’s down.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Eventually, the horde started to falter, with fewer Anti’s entering the room. As I dropped a final M-5c in the doorway, one of the Chibat drones passed by towards where the monsters had been coming from.

“We need to leave.” Tara startled me. I had forgotten she was on the conference call. “Another wave is coming. More of them. More of the bigger ones, the shell beasts and thags.” Despite the alarming news, Tara spoke in even tones without a hint of stress.

I called up the feed and saw a large kitchen filled with Anti’s. From the angle, I could easily count a dozen M-6s and nearly as many M-5cs. As they streamed by the camera, more entered from the door on the other side.

“Falling back now. Corie, an enzyme fogger, please.” I hoped that the fogger would repel the Anti’s and give us some time to leave.

"Purchased: Kniesen Enzymatic Corpse Reduction

Cost: 20 Remaining points: 1,474”

The bodies had stacked high enough to slow down even the agile M-3s. But while it was a huge amount of points, compared to those same piles of bodies, it also felt small. “That was a lot of Anti's,” I said.

The fogger was released, and I backed up into the prison and through the nearest hole. As soon as I was past the metal wall, Ginny was putting the cut plate back over the opening. Tara darted in and squirted sealer around the plate, locking it into place. Glancing at the other end of the room, I saw that the opening had been similarly closed, along with the original hole the three used to escape.

Kaitlyn was still facing me with one of her eyes backlit, a sign that she was recording on her augs. “Were you recording the whole fight?” She nodded in the slow way that one does while still recording. “Please don’t post that, but I do want a copy to study.”

“I can try, but it was live streamed, and I can’t promise it wasn’t downloaded... oops! AirGirlGoBoom says she has it all and is cackling her head off. I think she likes you.” Kaitlyn winked with her non-augmented eye.

I rolled my eyes and turned to the handful of people who were still in the room, some with scraps of green still on their clothing. “What are these people still doing here? I thought we had everyone in the safe space?” I asked Ginny.

Tara was standing in the middle of the security door. She glared at the people between us, arms crossed. “They are cultists. We shouldn’t help them.”

I could sympathize with her feelings, but I also wasn’t comfortable with rejecting the cultists, who literally had nowhere else to go right now. These were the same people who had kidnapped her, held her for who knows how long, and threatened to feed her to the antithesis. I’d find it hard to forgive in that situation, too. However, it was the nature of cults to trap people, and I had actually hoped that more would take the chance to escape. I was at a loss for how to convince Tara to give them a chance. I realized that to get here, the cultists had to have made it past Ginny and Kaitlyn.

I looked at Ginny, tossing the ball into her court. She pointed to a woman with long, frizzy hair in a homespun skirt. “Tara, do you remember when we were working on the hole and I gave you that nutri bar? You had worked through the meal and didn’t get any. That woman noticed that you weren’t there. She slipped the bar to me when no one was looking.”

“And that dark-haired woman gave me a note right before we left. It was asking for help.” Kaitlyn added. She dug in her pocket and showed the slip of paper to Tara.

“Please,” another raven-haired woman said. “My husband and I. We were on the street—no place to go. Our RIS IDs were lost. The weather was turning bad, and we needed shelter. No one would take me in on account of the baby. They didn’t want the insurance risk.” She laid her hand on her belly, then twined her other hand with one of the men. “When the cult found us, we didn’t know what they were talking about, and frankly, for a warm shelter, we’d do anything. Once we got here and found out, there was no way out. They don’t let people go. Half of those bodies out there,” she gestured towards the window at the end of the room, “were former cult members."

I looked Tara in the eyes. As hard as it sounded, Tara was more important to me than all the cultists—Ginny and Kaitlyn too. Beyond the work she was doing with the drones, the four of us had been through a lot, and I’d come to care for them. I was determined to keep them safe at all costs. She looked back at me with uncertainty in her eyes.

“I’m not saying they get a free pass, but we can’t leave them. They are victims here, as much as you were. The least we can do is give them a second chance.” She gave a slight nod and backed out of the doorway.

I subvocalized in the conference call, “Thank you. Feel free to use the drones to keep an eye on them. In fact, please do.”

I turned to the group. “Let me be clear: you are on probation. You already had one strike, and you don’t get another. Please hand over any weapons to Ginny and help out where you can. We’ll see about any more help when we’re all out of here.” Behind me, I heard claws scratching at the plate we’d glued over the prison’s back door.