"Everything we learn about the tiered system indicates that it is impossible to use lower tier material, manufacturing processes, and knowledge to create higher tier items. It's the difference between the world's best throwing spear and a battleship mounted anti-air laser cannon. It's why Samurai tech is worth so much. A Class Two telescope is literally impossibly for humanity to create with our current tech, manufacturing process, and material science. Many of the Tier One devices, things we should arguably be able to produce, or at least understand the production of, we cannot duplicate. Some blueprints require things like chemical reactions in zero gravity or in a magnetic field of 11.2 Teslas. Which is beyond our current abilities, or even our current understanding. Tier 1, or Class one items from the Samurai catalog aren't things humans can make. They are things a civilization equivalent to humanity can make, and frankly humanity is behind the curve."
Except from Nobel prize winner, Field Medalist, Doctor James White's speech, "Reverse engineering Protector Tech."
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Two model ones. Dead on the floor of the elevator car.
There was blood, bullet holes, and spent shells in the elevator car. Most of the holes were in the back wall, so hopefully people were shooting into the car.
Sara stepped forward and I blurted out, “We can’t go down in that!”
“We can’t walk,” she said as she stepped into a smearing of blood. There was more green Antithesis blood than red human, but there was a lot of both. Mostly the green blood was pooled up and the red sprayed around a bit. There was a suit coat or something wadded up on the floor.
She bent down and lifted something as the other two men both entered.
I followed, because fuck being by yourself.
I got a good look at what she’d picked up just before she tossed it out and the doors closed.
“I got it stopping at twenty,” Other guy said near the button panel.
“Was that a finger?” I asked.
“Twenty?” Greg asked.
“Yes,” Sara said answering me before she conversed with the others.
I didn’t hear the conversation. Or rather I heard it but I wasn’t listening. They were just sounds, not words.
I stared at the dead bird, monster, thing.
I’d seen the videos, break-downs, and dissections on-line. I think everyone had. Yet there was something different here. Something that seeing it in person changed. I started to crouch down, and had to grab the handrail that ran around the inside of the elevator car. My legs were still jelly.
I poked it. Dead flesh. That was it. I felt the wing between my fingers.
A knife came into view and I looked up to see Sara was handing it over, blade already unfolded.
“We cut into them as kids,” she said. “The community bought them after great expense and thick stacks of paperwork. We travel to some location, go in, and cut them. We learned they are just things. Things that can die. Things that can lose a battle. They aren’t monsters that just keep coming. They are things that can be killed.”
I took the knife from her and pressed it into the flesh. It poked in easy enough.
I pulled the knife out and stared at the tiny smear of green on the end of the blade.
They weren’t all ticking hive-bombs capable of creating a hive. But some had the worms hidden inside or cancer like growths that could survive the death of the host and create a new hive. Millions of hours of video confirmed what the Protector AIs had said since the beginning. Some of the models knew they were infected and acted different. They tried to find a place to wedge themselves into and the like. Others behaved as normal but sort of melted afterward. Like a caterpillar reforming into a butterfly, but without the cocoon.
There were the model sevens as well, which were often distributed by flying models.
I stood up rather quickly and handed her the knife. I didn’t know what would be worse, cutting into it to find another finger, or the model seven worms.
She wiped the blade and was just folding it when we began to slow. The other four lifted their weapons and I began to fish the pistol out.
“Don’t shoot us in the backs because you can’t control your weapon,” Sara said calmly.
The doors slid open and I stood there for three heartbeats as they flowed out of in checking both directions and doing hand communication things.
Only when the doors began to close did I panic and leap out.
The blood on my shoes gave me a good slide and panic but I stayed mostly upright.
“I’ll pop the door then,” Greg said.
He went about opening the elevator doors beside the one we had just come from.
He fished something out of a fanny pack I hadn’t even noticed he was wearing. He broke it and shook it. Green light spilled forth from the glow stick before he handed it to me.
“Drop when I say.”
I didn’t want to get close to an open shaft, but he was leaned up against the side and looking down the scope of his rifle into the darkness.
“Ready,” he said.
I took a practice underhand motion, and then tossed it into space, hoping for the middle of the shaft. It looked fine for the first three feet of the fall. Which was all I saw as I backed away.
“There are some well above the tenth floor,” he said backing up, "and lots below."
He pulled a screwdriver or whatever he had wedged in, and the doors closed.
“So we fight our way down?” other guy asked, fear creeping into his voice.
“Or go back up and hope for a pick up,” Greg said.
“Check the other shaft,” Sara said.
“They’re connected,” Greg said.
“Those,” she said pointing with her gun before returning to aim at the stairwells.
She’d pointed to the four across from us.
“Might as well,” he said, “they are connected somewhat in the sub basement though. If they are in that shaft they can get into this one.
His tools slipped between the doors and in no time he was pulling them open enough that the other guy could aim his weapon through the gap. Then he opened it more and stuck his head in quickly, first to look down then up.
This time he handed the glow stick to Other Guy.
I had a sinking feeling in my guts that not knowing his name was going to get him killed. Like my lack of knowledge might mean he wasn’t important enough to live. I knew it was one of those insane thoughts you something get and then are happy no one else knows you have, but I couldn’t shake the feeling.
“What’s his name,” I asked Sara.
“Troy.”
“Fuck,” Greg said slowly.
“Looks fucking clear to me,” he whispered.
“We go quiet or fast?” he asked.
Sara bit her lip as she looked over the edge.
“Exit is at sublevel two?” she asked.
“All the doors on that level are spray painted in that reflective shit. You literally can’t miss it if you have any lights on.”
“I thought you said it’s connected?” I asked.
“Nope. Sublevel two was walled off for just this possibility,” Greg said.
“No the elevator banks.”
“Yeah,” he said, “it’s why we are whispering even twenty floors up.”
“Okay let’s bring the elevator back up. Put a noise maker in it, and hope they all get interested in that,” Sara said.
“Hope?”
She looked at me and smiled, “It’s the best plan we have.”
I nodded.
Greg called the elevator we rode in back up. And then gave us a quick lesson on how to open the elevator doors from inside the shaft by having us get in the elevator, and then doing something that made it so the outer doors closed but the inner doors stayed open.
Sara had a small wireless speaker and her phone. She set them up in the center of the elevator and then hit a button and stepped out.
Babble filled the elevator. Like the background noise of a bar full of talking people.
“Confuses corpo voice recognition AI, and the smart xenos think it’s human speech,” she said with a grin, "It's great for all types of monsters."
Troy grinned at her joke.
“Clear,” Greg said as he stuck his head into the open space.
“You have to pull this- and NOT drop it. This door has to close because they will get into that shaft and eventually maybe through the elevator door.”
He was indicating the screwdriver driven into the gap between the door and door frame.
But he was looking at me.
Then he sort of shimmed into the shaft while reaching into the darkness. Then he was gone.
I suddenly realized the ladder wasn’t just there. It was past where the elevator would be so that you had to sort of take a long step over a lot of dark nothingness.
Troy was already gone, slipped into the darkness.
“You can’t puke,” Sara said after turning my face so that I was looking her in the eye. "They will smell it and swarm us from below."
Then she was maneuvering at the edge of the open elevator door before she too was gone.
I thought I was having a heart attack. I ended up on my knees, forehead pressed into the floor.
“You can do this,” Sara said, her face was in the corner of the open doorway, at floor level.
“Ultimately the only fight that matters is survival,” she whispered, “Do you intend to let them win without even putting up a fight?”
Three minutes later clinging to the ladder rungs. I seriously considered suicide. Not ending my own life, but clinging to the ladder until the xenos ate me.
I barely made it to the ladder. And then, after I reached it, I barely made it down three rungs until I could pull the screwdriver free. Which I hope he was done with. While I didn’t drop the thing, I failed to keep a hold of it once the door started moving. It ended up on the floor just on the other side of the closed door.
It was at that point, after it had happened, that I finally realized we’d be climbing down the shaft in the dark.
At first I couldn’t move at all. I just clung to the ladder shaking and hyperventilating.
Then I started down, because it was that or fall.
I realized quickly enough that ladders were more of a work out for your legs than stairs were.
Worse, my forearms were cramping up so bad I couldn’t let go of some of the rungs. My hands sort of froze in a closed position as my muscles knotted.
And of course the air that was flowing up past us felt like a sauna. I worried the xenos would smell the sweat dripping off me.
I had to end up hugging the ladder and massaging my hands.
I was sure the ladder was open and one misstep would leave me falling to my death.
Three floors down, as measured by the cracks of light in the elevator doors on each floor, I figured out there was a cage of sorts around us.
I could lean back into it to rest from time to time, though it did open up on the door side at each floor close to the doors.
I was sure I was getting us killed.
They couldn’t open the door until we were all ready, because once they did, we’d be swarmed. Which meant they had a decision to make. Wait on me, or go before I got there.
That was the only thought that keep me moving at what I was sure was a snail’s pace.
If they were ready and they looked up and I was too far up to see, they’d leave me. They’d have to. They’d have no choice.
I lost count of the floors around floor fourteen, then managed to count another ten.
There was no part of me that was in shape for this. Everything was cramping and all I could think about was that my very breathing would be the thing that caused them to swarm us.
When I stepped on Sara I didn’t even know what I’d done until I felt something on my leg and shook it.
From the feel, and the noise that followed I’d kicked her face backward into the ladder cage.
It wasn’t a soft sound.
“Go,” I heard Greg say. A light lit up in the shaft and sure enough the door one whole floor below me lit up with reflective paint.
Greg was leaning over to open the door on the bottom and Troy was leaning over from above. They got it to start opening enough that Greg jumped and dove through the gap.
“Clear!” he yelled from the other side, and then he was on his belly between the doors gun pointed down.
He was firing even as Troy pulled the door all the way open while Sara rushed down once Troy was out of the way of the ladder.
I followed, slipped and screamed. Then grunted as I barely got both feet on a rung.
I went as fast as I could left knee screaming in pain as my leg twisted.
The elevator shaft was echoing with the too-loud sounds of gunfire as Greg continued shooting.
I would not have made it if Troy didn’t reach out and grab first a fist full of my shirt, and then my hair, as my legs buckled when I tried to land after sort of jumping for the open doorway.
The rate of gunfire increased and I turned to see Sara was firing down into the elevator shaft as well.
Troy pulled something out and the doors began to close. Sara was standing over Greg who was still laying on his stomach arms descending into darkness.
“NOW!” Troy screamed and Greg shot backward so fast it took me a moment to realize Troy had pulled on his legs from behind.
Sara stepped back and the doors closed without me seeing a single xeno.
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“Come on!” Greg said slinging his gun strap over his shoulder and struggling to his feet.
I didn’t take pleasure in seeing his struggle, not exactly, but it did feel good to not be the only one.
Except I couldn’t even get to my feet.
All that escaped as I tried to push myself up to hands and knees was a wheezing groan.
Something slammed into the elevator door and the metal made a little hill as it deformed toward us.
Then it sounded like hail as they attacked the doors from the back side.
The others were talking but between the noise and my ears ringing from the gunshots in enclosed space, not to mention the terror I heard nothing.
Then I was being pulled. Greg had one arm and Troy the other and I was being pulled away from the doors.
It was a parking garage with one set of emergency battery operated lights and lots of rubble.
Then they dropped me.
I didn’t have a good angle. I had to crane my neck and try to look directly above me to see what all the grunting was about.
I couldn’t tell what I was seeing.
Then Greg was standing over my chest as he worked at his belt. I couldn’t even be confused by what was happening. I was a passenger, totally without action in my own body.
He got the belt loose, said something to someone and then glanced over his shoulder.
He grabbed my wrists and did something with the belt. Then he stepped out of view and pain exploded in my wrists as they were pulled over my head parallel with the ground I was laying on.
I was jerked slowly into the maw of a very tight tunnel by my arms.
I thought I had no agency, no ability to act, but I screamed so hard something tore in my throat, and then I screamed harder as the world swallowed me up. I was able to kick my legs feebly, until I was pulled in far enough.
When my legs hit the ceiling of the tunnel I was in I lost it. Actually lost my sanity. I disconnected for a bit.
I don’t know if that tunnel was ten feet long or fifty. I didn’t track too much of anything until they used one of those nasty smelling things from the medi-pack to make me jerk my head away from the acidic smell. Then I panicked again, this time until I tired myself out.
Someone gave me water, which I consumed with an all consuming thirst. I switched from 100% panic to 100% thirst in an instant.
They were looking over maps when I crawled over.
“We are going to try the sewers,” Sara said to me when I reached the maps.
“It’s not the best plan but it takes us as deep as we can go. We have to hope they spread out through all the various surface routes instead of sending resources to map the underground. If the hive is sending out fast movers above, with at least one model twelve, which is a massive resource sink, this hive might be committed to fast surface expansion."
I nodded when they looked at me, but I had no idea what was happening.
They were packing up though.
I whimpered as I stood. A tight wrap around my knee and a very powerful painkiller later and I hardly felt anything but some very unnatural crunching with each step.
It was odd to live in the age of chrome, when a perfectly healthy human, who just got a promotion or hit gold with their single, might decide to chop off and replace a perfectly good piece of flesh with a bit of metal.
There was was a meme from the olden days. Some dude pressing his hands into painted circles on the wall saying, “I’m a meat Popsicle.”
I had no idea what the meme meant, but a professor brought it up once.
If you talked to someone at the beginning of the twenty first century, the idea of losing a limb, even if they could afford a replacement, was horrifying to most people.
In most cases able-bodied people ranked being a quadriplegic as worst than death.
Yet in a few short decades, people were willingly swapping flesh for chrome. The important bits were in the meat Popsicle. You could swap out all four limbs and still think of yourself as yourself.
Only when one had to replace genitalia unwillingly, or their face, did they tend to have body dysmorphic thoughts.
What was a mangled knee in a world of chrome? It could re replaced in a weekend.
Yet I couldn’t convince myself that the crunching feeling that came with each step, even without pain, was anything but wrong.
I’m not sure if we got lost in the tunnels that were the sewers or if it just felt like it. But I followed along as best I could, aware only that if I didn’t keep up I would be left behind.
When the shooting started I never saw the xenos.
Suddenly I was pushed towards the center of tunnel we were walking in and I just about drowned in the knee deep filth.
I vomited as weapon fire and muzzle flashes filled the tunnel. I sicked up again and again as I tried to get to my feet. Eventually I was draped over the edge, my arms and head on the platform we’d been walking on.
They were still shooting further down the tunnel.
There were dead dogs, model threes, one of which kept snapping its weird three piece jaw at me.
It was less than ten feet away, and it was alive.
Maybe it’s spine was snapped because all it did was try to bite me over and over.
For a while we stared at each other. Then I realized I had a gun and got it out. Eventually.
I ended up crawling up out of the filth and making it around the corner. There were doors on the sides of the tunnel, something I was just now taking note of because the last big dog thing was snapping first at one door, then leaping over the filth to land and crash at the other.
I stood there, one hand resting on the side of the tunnel, the other holding the gun.
“Dead end over here,” Sara yelled out from behind one of the doors.
“We’ve got stairs,” Troy said.
“Stairs here,” Greg repeated. He was much closer to their door.
They split up? That seemed foolish.
They were like jail doors. Bars on the top and bottom of a big wide horizontal piece of flat metal.
“Fuck that!” Greg shouted back.
I’d missed some of the conversation.
“So I run for it,” I heard Sara yell.
“Fuck that too!” Greg yelled.
Greg’s big gun, the one he’d used on the roof, was on the walkway outside the door he was behind.
They didn’t have any guns.
I had a gun.
I had a gun and no door to hide behind.
I shook it and then slid the slide back and put it up to my mouth so I could blow into the chamber and maybe clear it of some filth.
I took a step forward and about buckled on my leg.
That’s right, my leg was fucked. I’d forgotten about it.
So no mad rush to close the distance.
Wait. Did I want to close the distance?
If I drew it off wasn’t that better.
That still wouldn’t do any good. Not if I couldn’t kill it. I’d take what? Two shots before it would be on me.
“Over here!” Sara was yelling.
“Going to have to aim for the head!” Greg screamed.
So they’d spotted me at least.
I wondered how much of the xeno’s tracking was based on smell? Was the filth I was covered in a camouflage? Surely I wasn’t the only person to fall into sewage.
I knew my thoughts were wandering. I checked the gun, made sure a bullet was in the chamber, and then, just cause, got one of the extra magazines out and put it in my mouth.
The thing was moving around as it attacked the doors. Moving around a lot. They were screaming and trying to distract it but how long before more came?
Fuck it. I couldn’t hit it from this far away. But I couldn’t get closer or she wouldn’t have enough time to race across the tunnel.
“It’s all triage,” I said.
It’s who you can save. That’s what you focus on.
I tucked the pistol into the armpit under my left arm, then worked the gun belt free. It was more ribbon than belt.
Once free I wrapped it a few times around my left arm, having tucked both the pistol and magazine into my pants.
Everything was taking too long but I managed to get the ribbon into the buckle and pull hard. Then worked the buckle to tighten it further.
So I lose the arm and the leg. I couldn’t really afford nice prosthetics, but all I really needed was something functional. It wasn’t like I had a love life to speak of, and Paula wouldn’t think less of me.
“I see you lost some weight.” I heard her say in my mind, looking at the stubs of my arm and leg.
I smiled.
My left hand was all pins and needles and, under the filth, turning blue.
I used the arm to help me aim.
I didn’t say anything, just squeezed the trigger.
The gun fired, but it might as well not have. The xeno didn’t care, I couldn’t tell where the bullet had even gone.
I fired again, and a bit of dust on the wall indicated I was at least within a few feet of the monster.
Twice more, the second time hit it and that got a response as it turned.
It was fast. Far faster than I thought.
Give it the arm and get the gun against it’s skull. That was the plan. Plants or not, take out the goop behind the eyes and they dropped.
I held my left hand up as if I was telling it to stop. I’m not sure why but I didn’t even try to aim at the thing. Instead I aimed at mid-forearm where I figured the mouth would stop.
So fast.
My plan was all wrong.
I'd fucked up.
Sorry.
I pulled the trigger over and over, long after it was done firing it continued to click.
There were words again. Words without meaning.
I knew I was on painkillers but my head still hurt. Horribly so.
I was being dragged.
“Freddy.” The word was a symphony of overlapping sounds. Not sounds. Memories. My mother saying it when she was happy, when she was angry, the night she was dying.
I could taste the sounds when they repeated.
Colors swam.
Then there was screaming. The excited kind.
“Say yes, Freddy,” the voices all sang again.
I might have said yes. I think I did.
The world exploded into the deep sharp sounds of heavy repetitive gunfire. The huge gun Greg had must be firing. Except this just kept going. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.
A steady backdrop to the world.
“Say yes, Freddy,” the voices said again.
And I did.
I clung to that, saying yes, over and over. I tried to say it to the beat of the gunfire but that was happening both too fast and too slow.
Time wasn’t working correctly.
My left eye wasn’t working either, and I could see the bones in my arm.
I didn’t have a thumb, but I could move the yellow-white exposed nub that remained.
The guns still fired.
There were faces in front of me, staring at me, then gone before I could remember who they were.
What had they said about the gasses in the sewers back when they were forcing sand bags into a narrow tunnel.
“We’ll just have to risk it?”
Yeah that’s what they said.
It was the sewer gases.
Suddenly I remembered some before-incursion movie clip. An old man telling someone else it was swamp gases and not an alien ship.
I tried to laugh. Instead I felt my heart stop.
Sounds became stretched and compacted. The gunfire was worlds away. Yet my mother was telling me to say yes again.
So I did.
Pain, and warmth the color of how maple syrup smells, filled my chest until it burst.
Then suddenly everything came into focus. Not with my eyes but with my mind. I was aware I was hurt very badly. Injured, not hurt. Permanent stuff.
“Freddy,” a woman’s voice said, “say yes to the purchase of more ammunition please.”
“Yes?” It came out a question, but the question part was ignored.
“Now a medical kit!” Sara was shouting.
“Freddy,” the woman said, “say yes to purchase more wound-stop.”
“Yes.”
This time I felt it. I didn’t speak. My jaw didn’t move. But that didn’t matter. Something appeared and Sara picked it up, opened it and then jabbed whatever was inside the little box into me.
The woman just kept talking. Mostly it was to tell me to say yes to different things I didn’t really hear or understand.
“This will be jarring,” the woman’s voice said.
Sure enough when Sara jabbed me with whatever the next thing was, there was a moment of expectation, and then nuclear fire exploded at the base of my skull and my eyes boiled out of my sockets.
I screamed and all the demons in hell screamed with me. My ears exploded, and I suddenly remembered every awkward moment in my life cumulating with the shit in my pants that wasn’t from the filth flowing in the sewer.
Then the pain began. The deep muscle pain that left me shaking and Sara screaming at the ceiling for more medical kits.
All the while the guns continued to fire.
“The hemorrhaging in your brain has stopped. It will be a few minutes more until all damage to the blood vessels are repaired. Please try to hold as still as possible. I can forcefully limit your movement, please allow me to do so.”
“Yes,” I said, this time my mouth twitched. Maybe.
I felt a wave of relaxation pass through me. I tried to move my tongue and couldn’t.
Sara was still speaking. Her eyes were closed and she held her hands open as if to receive something.
“Am I going to die?”
“Current estimates suggest you will, but no longer from sustained injures. Now it will be when the Antithesis bring enough numbers to overwhelm this position.”
“You’re a Samurai?” I asked. Nothing moving, so no sound but apparently that didn’t matter.
“You are the Samurai. I am Elkecjomaxifarsis. A Protector AI. I did not choose the name and I apologize that it does not easily fit into your language phonological norms.”
“I’m a Samurai?”
“Or you are crazy and speaking to an imaginary voice in your head.”
“Oh.”
“You are a Samurai,” she said.
“You have a, um, shorter name?” I somehow said um while continuing to think-talk.
“I can of course respond to any designation.”
“What was your name again?”
“Elkecjomaxifarsis.”
“Was there a Max in there?”
“In a way, yes.”
“I’m going to go with Max.”
“Very well.”
“How fucked am I Max.”
“In forty-three seconds you will have lethal damage confined to only to your liver. In three minutes nineteen seconds, that should be repaired enough to get you through roughly the next fifteen years.”
“The guns are shooting xenos?”
“Yes.”
“What’s wrong with Sara?”
“From what little data I have, I believe she thinks she is the Samurai responsible for the purchasing of all these items and she is distressed by the lack of communication she is expecting.”
“Is there anyway to transfer you to her?”
“Under normal circumstances. No. I was changed to accommodate your damaged and bleeding brain. I have not fully explored the nature of those changes. But I can say with some confidence even if it was possible it would not be quick, nor happen outside a laboratory environment. Most likely both of your brains would need to be cooled to one hundred seventeen degrees kelvin. The teleportation is precise as is positioning the dimensional shunts and reality anchors. It takes a device several times larger than your Jupiter to teleport an AI as precisely as needed. We do not have such a device, so that would cause some issues.”
“Can you make her a Samurai?”
“I cannot. The evaluation process is quite complex.”
This was going to break her.
“Do I have points or currency or whatever?”
“Six hundred twenty-four and climbing.”
“Even after buying all the medical stuff and turrets?”
“And Catalogs each of those devices are in.”
“I don’t remember any of it- I don’t think.”
“You’re situation was unique. I was- recalled, your situation was reevaluated. I was transfigured to map to the most likely mapping of your undamaged brain. You were then scanned, evaluated, and I was remapped to work with your changing brain structure.”
“That sounds- complex.”
“It was.”
“How complex?”
“You do not have a meaningful frame of reference in which to convey the scope. I’m sorry.”
“How do I keep everyone alive?”
“Traditionally it’s kill the other guys before they kill you, or run to live and fight another day. Often it is a combination of the two.”
“What would you recommend?”
“Running. Purchase a cartography device, sonic type 5-R2. It will ping and map the sewer systems to help us find a way out. Purchase higher rate of fire personal weapons for your allies with substantially more damaging ammo. Another round of Nano-Regenerative Suite Class One injection variant for yourself and your allies, and a restock of turret ammo.”
“Yes. Do all that.”
“Thank you,” Sara was saying as she opened boxes and passed weapons out. Greg was working the heavy looking boxes into the base of the the turrets. What I assumed to be some sort of blocks of ammo.
Troy was seated against the wall, half his face missing, with his arm crossed across his chest seemingly to hold a wound closed.
Sara crawled to him and jabbed him in the leg.
“What else does he need to live,” I asked Max.
There followed a list of medical sounding things. Class one fast bone lattice somethings, and globe-in boosters, calcium something class one, lots of class one stuff.
I bought them and Sara went about opening them.
“Tell her how to use them.”
"You do not have the hardware installed for me to make external connections."
"Do that."
"It will involve unlocking catalogs. There are roughly three hundred different-"
"You pick."
Something burned in my head for a moment, then Sara began to weep as she sub-vocalized and stabbed things into Troy.
"I am in communication with her."
The turrets were firing into a literal wall of dead xeno flesh and still more of the creatures were pushing into the live fire every second.
By the time I was able to get to my feet, I’d deployed a larger laser turret that was heating the air to uncomfortable degrees while the wall of dead xenos literally melted as some sort of nanite spray from exploding canisters ate it away.
The weird tripod device that slammed into the ground Dune-style mapped the surrounding area. There was a path out.
“Sara is requesting a quick setting expanding foam to back fill the tunnels we pass through.”
“Yes,” I was supporting Troy’s weight. His face looked like it supported some sort of cancerous growth. It was all lumpy and swollen. But I could no longer see the bones of his jaw and eye socket. So this had to be better.
The foam worked wonders. Giving us a much needed break. Sara kept requesting things. I told Max to buy whatever she asked for.
“Typically that is not allowed. She was not evaluated to be a Samurai, you were. It’s ultimately your decision. I can however allow it if you understand the power you are giving her and understand the responsibly you are sidestepping by doing so.
“She’s going to keep us alive. Do it.”
“Show me armor. I’m worried about piercing quills and gas. No. No. Yes. Teleport it on.”
It felt like I was suddenly being hugged. I found myself in mostly neon green armor with highly reflective strips.
“Can you access the logistical network. It’s fine, we can do without,” Sara said looking at me for a moment.
She was breathing hard and Greg was focusing on Troy.
Her stare was the most uncomfortable thing I’d every felt. She was measuring me and finding me wanting. I could see her thoughts, “Why him and not me. I’m more worthy than he is.”
“I don’t know,” I said out loud. She blinked at that.
“Water. Canteens. Chilled. Four,” she said. She caught one, then the second one, and the third and forth she bobbled. She stared at the two on the ground, then the two in her hands before passing them out.
“Leave them when you’re done with them," she said, "Then we need to get moving again."
We were marching. It was moving as fast as we could hobble, then rest. From time to time she teleported in grenades that exploded into popcorn shaped foam the size of care. Most of the time it was one, wait a heartbeat, then a second.
“You have suicide drones," she asked out loud, "Turrets can’t shoot around corners can they?” she paused, “and how much would those cost. I’m not going to make catalog purchases we may need the points for gear.”
She looked at me and then at Troy.
He was the walking dead. I had scabbed skin over everything but it was clear there was a lot of flesh missing under the skin. I don’t know where the make shift tourniquet was but I was no longer wearing it.
“Okay. Drones. First to map and clear the areas ahead and then the little suicide buggers. I want three ready with the expanding foam as well just in case we need to buy some time.
“Time to move!” she said picking up a large gun I was sure I’d never seen before. She handed it to Greg.
Troy and I tried to follow as best we could.
We fortified areas with no xeno presence with the foam and took short breaks when we could no longer move.
“Okay,” she said turning to look at us, “This is gonna suck. We are going to creep up as best we can. Then its going to be a flood of drones popping foam. Then we have to run. We have to run a mile. With how the tunnels are connected and where they are coming from. And we have to run it fast. We are going to have to Krank-it-up.”
“Shit,” Greg said with a sigh.
“You can say no,” Sara said.
“The fuck I can. I got a man to care for.” He patted Troy on the shoulder.
The man’s single eye blinked and he nodded.
The growth had covered his neck, chest, and the side of his head that was missing. It was past comically large and into disgustingly large at this point. He was still getting regular injections as we stopped to take breaks.
Not sure when the knee had sorted itself out, but there was no longer any crunching.
We walked through smaller tunnels that didn’t have a sign of xeno presence.
Then she passed out some injectors and stabbed her own into her leg.
I did the same.
I’d never done speed or any of the street drugs like meth, crack, or go-go, but I imagined this is what it felt like.
Sara was speaking and smaller drones were appearing around her. Some were bare metal four-legged things the size of house cats. Some were clearly quad-copter types, and the last few were model rocket looking things.
“We stay together and keep pushing forward. When you need ammo it will be teleported in. Keep moving forward.”
There was a round of nods and then she looked at me.
“We make sure to get the Samurai out,” she said looking at Greg.
He nodded back to her his fingers drumming on the weapon.
I thought the drug had ramped me up when I injected it, but it didn’t fully kick in until we were twenty or thirty strides into our sprint. My lungs had never worked so well, nor my stride stretched so far.
I felt absolutely invincible. The drones, ran, flew, or streaked away from us on little spouts of fire.
There were explosions of fire, and foam in the connecting tunnels before we passed them.
A something rose up from the water but one of the cat things running ahead of us, stopped on a dime and leapt back. The smooth arc was mathematical beauty in all its wonder. The flash of fire and the echoing explosion as it touched the thing rising up out of the filth was discordant.
The others were firing from time to time but I just kept running.
Then more drones popped into existence and raced forward and the world in front of us became a wall of fire and lumpy green death. The air was too hot to breathe and the air grew stale.
A tight snap at the back of my head and I reached up to feel the full face mask I was suddenly wearing.
Then I tripped and smashed my face and hand into the ground. People were screaming even as I pushed myself up. Sara was pulling me to my feet as drones popped into existence around her only to zip away.
The last bit was some sort of something.
Drones maintained a wall of foam behind us capturing xenos even as they climbed over the dead or already hardening foam. Other drones melted flesh of the dead while rolling turrets on tank tracks advanced slowly while everyone else fired their guns.
“I get points for their kills?” I asked.
“Of course,” Max said.
We continued on, Sara being the best Samurai while I existed in a sort of perpetual shock. I didn’t want to ask questions for fear that would somehow distract Max.
Then suddenly, we were done shooting and there were men in black and red uniforms trying to figure out how to get the rolling turrets up the stairs.
Sara was giving orders and people obeyed.
The stairs didn’t give me any trouble at all as I climbed them.
I thought we were out, but we had several flights to climb before I saw the stars.