Traveling through the storm drain made it clear that metahuman labor had been behind the construction of the hill. At certain points, the ground sharply sloped up, bending the walls and floor in a very unnatural manner. Don't even ask about the section where we walked on the walls as water flowed uphill.
Consulting the stolen tablet, I identified that we were about 200 meters away from the palace when the drain came to an abrupt stop. We'd have to climb out, onto the street or busting through like we had been.
I pinged Alan to check in on him, and was disturbed to hear him whining and whimpering, hardly able to talk.
"Are you hurt? Your vitals monitor is still green." I asked him, because the system did indeed suggest he was in good health barring minor wounds. In response, he just shook his head and began TPing, taking a circuitous route till he ended up above the drain.
We climbed up a ladder that had become angled more akin to a staircase to pop out in a deserted alley. He lay against the wall, hyperventilating and whining as I gently turned him over.
Fuck.
At the start of the fight, I had dosed him with the drugs needed to kickstart the production of the cells that were responsible for fine touch and other sensations. What I hadn't accounted for was it still amplified pain to an exorbitant degree, or at least Alan had been trying to be stoic in front of Alia in the villa.
While he'd been employing hit and run tactics, he'd still taken a few hits, including some light burns.
Well, they'd have been light for me, with his increased sensitivity to all sensations, he was in absolute agony and barely holding it together.
"I need you to jump clear, head to the villa with Alia and stay put alright? Use this now, and the rest later." I ordered him, handing him a salve and strong painkillers with numbing agents.
He'd be out of action when he was back, with his skin numb he'd be unable to use his powers in a timely manner or carry anything of note.
I sent Grim out of the alley to check it was clear, then helped Alan out to where he had line of sight to begin jumping away. I didn't want to rely on his ability to jump up and go intangible when he was in this state, especially with the drones watching.
It hurt to send away someone that useful, but in his current state he'd just end up getting himself killed.
We moved down the road, using Grim and the camouflaged operatives to make sure the way was clear while I used the tactical tab to track his troops.
This turned out to be a problem when we ran into a squad of Honor Guard, who apparently didn't use the same friendly tracking system as the grunts.
We retreated back under a hail of fire, unlike the regular soldiers, these guys were heavily augmented and while not as capable as we were, they still outnumbered us sufficiently to keep us pinned for a flanking element to polish off. We couldn't afford that, speed and brutality was all we had.
Grim tried to peek the next corner and almost had his head blown off for the pleasure, these guys had tactical systems that must have been immune to his Incog powers.
Instead, we had Emily step out next, carrying a heavy metal door as a makeshift shield. We ran out behind her, tossing smoke grenades to confuse them as we tried to make it across the street. Emily could only cover us one at a time while the rest returned fire through the smoke, by the time it was my turn, the shield had more holes in it than a screen door, the bastards were using heavy armor piercing ammunition. I lost a finger when we tried to cross, but thankfully it was just a pinky, turned into pink mist by a stray round. I was so amped on stims I barely felt it.
When we emerged onto the next road, there was a manned SUV I'd seen in the palace approaching down the other side. The Russian operative with us noticed that there was what looked like a soccer mom and several kids sitting in it, and attempted to wave them off in a different direction.
In response, she gunned the accelerator, careening down towards where the man and Emily now stood. She just about tossed him aside to safety before the vehicle plowed into her, wrapping itself around her like she was a stout post. Airbags deployed, and she rushed ahead to tear off the door and help the occupants to safety.
The operator with the scar and I (against my better judgement) , rushed over to help her and the wailing kids.
He leaned over into the car. "Are you OK mis-" before she fired a handgun right into his eyesocket, sending him recoiling backwards to fall down dead.
She turned the gun towards me, but Emily threw herself in front of the barrel and took the hit before screaming- "We don't want to fucking hurt you, drop the fucking gun!" at the crazed woman, who instead pulled out a small vibrodagger and stabbed at her throat. Emily pushed the blow aside with her hands, spraying blood from a papercut, but the woman must have had an inkling of her durability and instead sprayed what must have been pepper spray into her face. Unable to contain herself, Em lashed out, smashing the woman to a pulp against the other door of the car, but even with a broken spine and half her body crushed, she still feebly tried to stab her again. Failing to reach us, she instead turned the blade around and cut her own throat, still glaring at me as gurgling blood poured out of the wound.
What. The. Fuck. This is why I hated mind control.
Emily screamed, falling back. I turned back to see where the rest of the squad was still fighting the Honor Guard. That was almost the last mistake I made, because a screaming child, barely ten years old, launched himself at me wielding his mother's blade.
It took me by surprise and I collapsed next to a squirming Emily, with the kid riding my shoulders and bring it down, slashing at my face, the blade cutting deep. It wasn't as sharp as a monosword, but it was enough to be a risk. I managed to grab his wrist and shove him aside before he got to my carotid, but he just charged at me again. I hadn't prepared for non-lethal engagements, so I flipped him over and overpowered him, holding his hands down while I used some rope I had to bind him together.
He screamed incessantly, struggling against the restraints. I stabbed him with a sedative, or rather a very large dose of the painkillers meant for the others, and he lapsed into unconsciousness, doing his best to bite his own tongue and choke himself to death as I held his mouth open with my cybernetic hand.
Meanwhile, Emily was being swarmed by the other kids, she was mostly blind now, and a little girl, barely seven, was doing her best to force a handgun against her damaged eye and shoot her point blank. It wouldn't kill her, but damn it must have hurt.
I rushed over, to see that two other children were stripping Degurov's corpse. I barely managed to override and abort the smart mine one activated before it blew us all to hell, and behind me, Emily finally broke, she grabbed the girl's arm and hurled her aside into a storefront's glass window.
I could hear the others running up to us, clearly outgunned by the Honor Guard, and I heard the toothache-inducing thrum of one the agrav drones approaching.
With no time to waste, I broke the hands of the child struggling in my grip, and tossed him aside, albeit more gently than she had.
The surviving four special operatives were more circumspect when they caught up to us and understood the situation. They snapped the spines of the children throwing themselves at them and left them wriggling ineffectually in the dust.
I didn't have time to praise or critique their methods, as I was escorting a sobbing Emily down the street. She retched, throwing up the morning's breakfast as we sought shelter in a sufficiently sturdy building. I did the only thing I could, and forced her to swallow a large dose of amnestics, not that the trauma would fade that quickly.
The building rocked under a barrage of rockets, and we ran out through the back garden, which thankfully was adjacent to the rock walls of the lower end of the palace. Em was still lucid enough to punch a hole in it, and we squirmed through right as another flash of heat and light informed us that the drone was lasing the building behind us.
Using neutrino imaging a few days back, I'd determined that the hill the palace was built on was more like a bubble, the originally flat ground bulged out unnaturally to indulge El Presidente's vanity project. The interior was mostly hollow, barring reinforced columns that held up the thin skin of the hill on the intact bedrock below. Emily was able to tear open a hatch embedded in the hill, showing a tunnel leading straight in. We opted for that, as running up the winding path above would leave us sitting ducks for the drones.
It was lucky that she had taken the lead, because once again we found ourselves under a hail of bullets, they had an emplaced machine gun down the end of the tunnel. I directed a staggering Em to punch through the wall next to us, putting us in a utility corridor.
We emerged in a massive underground car park, where El Presidente's collection of classic cars was parked. Emily shoved aside a 2012 Lamborghini Aventador, sparking a series of car alarms that turned the echoing space into the scene of utter cacophony.
More Honor Guard pushed towards us, these ones likely the most enthralled because they showed suicidal courage in the fact of our fire. No wonder El Presidente didn't use more humanoid drones, they were paradoxically more dangerous to him than humans were, especially when with a mere word he could turn them into fearless berserkers.
I ducked underneath the shredded Lambo, spotting a make of electric car notorious for its shoddy battery safety. Quite pleasingly, it indeed went up in a small explosion when I shot it, tossing a Guard out into the open where a burst from Grim put him down.
A rumble indicated something heavy rolling towards us, and with a resounding crash, one end of the car park went up in dust and smoke as a fucking tank rolled in.
At least it was an antiquated model, an M1 Abrams variant that had likely served in the Gulf War. But that was little consolation as it fired, the concussive force blowing out a hundred car windows, and the impact of the blast blowing Emily away. She ended up as a tangle of limbs several meters away, and my taclink lit up with alarms as it reported her taking serious wounds.
Fuck. On one hand, a concussion might do her some good, but on the other hand, we needed her to deal with this fucking thing.
It rolled forth, firing multiple machine guns that ended up catching one of the SpecOps boys, blowing a chunk of his torso and an arm away. I pulled him aside when I could, but he was already out of the fight.
By now, the place was a maelstrom, burning cars billowing smoke, the fire suppression systems desperately spraying foam everywhere. Visibility was down to a half a dozen feet, so I was just as surprised as the Honor Guard I ran into was as I tried to run towards the other end of the place.
He was fast, and managed to tackle me off my feet into the side of a Tesla as I tried to bring my gun to bear. He punched me, and I felt my helmet cave in and my jaw almost break, and I spat out several teeth as I struggled against him.
I tried to reach my monosword, but he managed to rip its sheath away, sending the blade skittering away. His attempt to draw his own blade was thwarted by me smacking down on him with my elbow, and he grabbed me again and rolled me over onto the ground once more.
I tried to push him off me, but the bastard was tenacious and stronger than me to boot, and slowly, inexorably, he raised his blade and tried to bring it to bear, the whine of the vibrations numbing both our hands as we grappled. To my dismay, I felt the point cutting through my armor, then my skin, and I desperately tried to fend him off as he tried angling the blade to pierce my ribcage.
That was the moment when I remembered that I'd packed half a dozen zero-days, but to my dismay, the man was too hardened for me to hack his implants. What wasn't particularly secure were half the cars in the place, with their antiquated systems.
I picked the closest of the vulnerable cars, namely the one next to us, and threw a kitchen sink of attacks at it via my lace. The Tesla Cybertruck came online, its electric motor too quiet for my assailant to notice, then rammed straight ahead, giving me just enough time to duck my head down as it smashed the man off me and into the side of a wall. He'd barely recovered enough to start struggling when I put a bolt through his skull.
And then two more, because fuck him.
I broadcast my discovery over our comms, and all of us began hacking the cars nearby, slamming soldiers off their feet or into the line of fire. To my surprise, a Porsche rolled up next to me, containing a heavily wounded man propping up Em next to him. I didn't recognize him, but he did me, because he told me to pile in as he gunned it to the other end of the park as tracer rounds smashed through the windshield. Thankfully, I was seated in Emily's lap while she was semi-comatose, and they didn't hit me.
He smashed through a thin barrier, bringing us out of that mess to where the surviving members of the team were keeping their heads down. Behind us, it was pandemonium as cars smashed into people and each other. The Abrams was firing indiscriminately, adding to the confusion, and thankfully the drones couldn't enter the cramped confines of the space.
We finally had a moment to catch our collective breaths. I was an absolute mess, running on adrenaline and stimulants. Grim, now that I recognized him, wasn't doing so hot either. Emily verged on unconscious, but then I realized that her severe wounds had opened access to her bloodstream, and managed to force autoinjectors into them, their needles almost breaking at the force needed to pierce her exposed veins. However, she did awaken with a gasp, almost knocking me away before realizing where she was.
The Russian man was in a bad way, he'd taken multiple hits straight to the dome, and the titanium plating of his skull was dented and torn, revealing a gently throbbing mass that I realized was his exposed brain. He barely acknowledged my presence when I shone a light into his eyes, and his eye augmentation were malfunctioning, the pupils stuck in a constricted state. His legs were fucked too, the actuators grinding as he stood back up.
"We'll hold them off. Buy you time." Grim muttered through gritted teeth. I looked around, we'd reached the bottom tier of the palace proper, surrounded by expensive furniture and opulent decor. If they used their optical cloaks and did a fighting retreat they might actually stand a chance.
I nodded assent, bone-tiredness leaking into the gesture, but he grabbed my arm. "Get the bastard. If we die right now, we're just fucking terrorists, make it count." He told me. The Russian nodded in agreement, motions lax and his face slack.
"I'll get him. One way or another." I promised them, handing them the lions share of the weaponry we still had. My bolter was out of ammo anyway, so I threw it aside, taking a scavenged assault rifle someone had picked up in our escape.
They activated their camo, turning into smears that flowed against the background, taking up positions around the base of the stairs to await any enemies pushing up on us. To make life easier for them, I found an exposed access point and uploaded another program to mess with any CCTV surveillance inside the building.
And then, I used up the last of my precog time, to narrow down where the hell he'd finally bunkered down.
I slammed more stims into myself and Em, and the two of us headed down a hallway towards the where the hospital lay.
To be fair to El Presidente, he had good taste in interior decor. We walked through multiple rooms, each tastefully done, though I think Anjana would have had an aneurysm when she saw the carpeted toilets.
The most obvious signs that we had walked into a despot's lair were the large screens in every room, likely for some kind of projection. We were clearing what had once been a nursery, with abandoned toys littering the floor and plastic dust covers on the furniture. I was trying not to think of what had happened to the kids when all of the screens flared to life, displaying an image of El Presidente inside what I presumed was the hospital.
He was wearing a stereotypical Generalissimo's uniform, festooned with all kinds of badges and medals, while smoking a rather fancy cigar. Remind me to steal a set for myself when I'm done killing the bastard. To give him credit, he looked quite composed, albeit for all I knew he could have rolled out of bed in his undies and just had the camera throw on a filter.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
"Finally! To think I went to such lengths and it took this long for someone to try and kill me!" He exclaimed, fiddling with controls to try and lock on to my position.
Normally, I refrain from making small-talk with people I'm trying to kill, but I was long past the end of my tether and in outright freefall. I wanted him to know how much I wanted him dead, for my wife's sake, and for the tens of thousands dead under his reign. For the genocides in Haiti and Jamaica, for letting Lumen and other cockroaches fester under his watch.
I patched through the block I'd put on the monitoring equipment so I could transmit my voice and nothing else, but refrained from speaking just in case he dropped something else.
"The sheer expense. My dear Maria always said I was too paranoid, the people loved me, but she was too good for this world. Well, who are you? Mossad? BOPE? Is the CCP salty about me cutting ties?" He peered closer to his display, still searching for us.
"UN? Turing? Make this easier for both of us, otherwise I won't have an address to mail your corpses." He laughed, muting the mic to speak to an off-screen audience.
In my fugue state, the stims no longer fully compensating multiple concussions, liters of bloodloss and sheer desperation, I kinda wanted to say something along the lines of "I'm vengeance", or "I'm your Death", but refrained due to the sheer edge-lordiness of it all.
Instead, I asked him something I'd always wanted to know, as I had Em bash through an empty servants quarter as a shortcut.
"Why did you kill your family?" And I was genuinely curious.
He raised his eyebrows. "Normally I wouldn't really go around discussing family matters, but I suppose in honor of you getting this far, I'll let you in."
"You see. They aren't dead. Except Fernando, but I had nothing to do with that." He said. I stopped momentarily, confused. His massacre of his family had been public knowledge for months.
"No. Far from dead, safe. All of my grandchildren are aboard colony ships, distant ones. I only tell you this because I doubt anyone hates me enough to kill them. My children, the ones who didn't want to go, I had their memories wiped and let them start new lives where they asked. Most stayed on Earth, but you'll never find them, The Changer is worth every dollar I spent." He admitted, looking somewhat emotional.
"Why?" I asked, as Em and I swept the corner before the walkway leading to his medical facility. I was even more on edge at the surprising lack of resistance, it seemed all the servants had fled, and the guards showed no signs of catching upto us. Only distant gunfire gave me a clue that the others were still alive.
"Why? Why would I send away my flesh and blood? Because of the endless stream of Pendejos like you who want me dead. They're safer that way, and that's what matters." He admitted, wiping his eyes. I didn't know if he was faking the sentiment.
"Good. I didn't want their blood on my hands anyway. Still plenty of reasons to slit your throat." We had reached the final walkway, which I'd verified didn't have line of sight to the rooftop turrets, or any real defenses for the matter.
"Please. Cuba has prospered under my watch, and most of the things you think I've done, were because Chang twisted my arm. Do you think I wanted to get involved in Haiti or Jamaica? That was his bidding, and the need to keep millions of refugees from overwhelming all I've done for the country. But no, you don't see hordes of hired goons trying to kill him, it's wonders what American PR can do." He waved his cigar and leaned back.
"I really don't care anymore. Knock knock, I'm here to kill you." I told him, cutting off the hospital's surveillance. I was bone tired, and darkness was clouding the edge of my vision.
"Oh. I see you now!" He declared, and then I heard they hellish throbbing again and realized that the agrav drones had found us, as we crossed the walkway.
I half-heartedly stepped behind Em, for the little good that would do.
Two of them uncloaked, little patches of the Cuban skyline turning the dull grey of graphene as they circled closer. I stood there, head lowered, convinced that I was going to die.
Emily was braver, standing up straight despite her wounds and raising her remaining autocannon to face it. But the flash of extinction didn't come as expected.
Instead, I heard him chuckling. "You're almost there. Come, I'm not going to kill you yet, you haven't even seen why this was all futile!"
I staggered against her as the drones moved closer, not yet firing. Did he really want me to go inside?
"Bottom floor, then the basement. Try not to trash any more of the place, it's a fucking charitable hospital." He suggested.
I checked to see if he'd say something about us carrying our guns, but he didn't, so we limped in, entering the building.
Maybe he did let others use it, because there were abandoned belongings strewn in the lobby. There weren't any staff present, and the drones didn't follow us in, but loitered outside, content in knowing we had no way out.
We were at the bottom floor, but we went further, into a basement that I'd previously assumed was a shielded zone for MRI machines and the like.
There was a final foyer, and then a set of sturdy vault doors. A camera observed us standing outside, but it was too primitive for me to actually hack. Likely even analog.
"I'm in here. Come on, tea's getting cold." He teased, a smug expression on his face. Well, if he thought vault doors would keep Emily out, he had it coming.
She walked forth, and braced herself before pulling them apart, the metal making a ghastly noise as she tore into it.
El Presidente continued watching contentedly, if the display in the room was accurate.
She huffed, straining, and finally pulled them out of the way, the sheer force required causing her feet to dig inches into the metal floor below.
And there, on the other side of the doors, was a sheer black wall.
"No no, let your little body builder keep digging. I'm on the other side." He was outright excited now, cigar burning away unheeded.
Emily flexed her wrists, and then punched, not even bothering to do it all that hard. The blow bounced straight off.
She shook her head, puzzled, and dug into the floor once again for leverage, before punching full force, forcing the metal beneath her to bend under the strain. The impact shook the building, but of instead of the expected hole, the material stood there without a dent. She hadn't even made a scratch.
She stared at her hands. "I think I broke something Adat."
I stared too, her hands were mangled, fingers clearly broken. In the year or so she'd been with me, I had yet to see something that could withstand a blow, especially when she had leverage.
El Presidente burst into laughter, the sound muffled by the lush hangings in the room.
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"Worth every cent! I'm half tempted to let you go home and come back with a nuke, see if that works any better." He stood up and poured himself a drink.
I overloaded myself, my lace running hot, trying to figure out how to get to him. He had to be there, the precogs were almost never wrong. What the hell was that wall made of?
"I wanted to build the whole place out of neutronium, but frankly even I can't afford that. Look here boy, I'm sure your owners would stop at nothing to wrest this stuff for themselves. Starships immune to particle beams, make it thick enough and it might even do something to those fast rocks the aliens love to throw about. But this is it, it's all I could buy from Lumen even with all the help I've given them over the years." He said, downing the whiskey neat. He wiped his mustache and settled in again.
Emily was on her last legs, but she dug through the floor, checking for a way to get in from below, but the material curved around at the base. I examined the wiring of the camera, and saw it go through sub-millimeter holes in the material.
"Can't squeeze through that I'm afraid. This baby is self contained and NBC sealed. I have enough in here that I can wait you out for years. Although I should have packed more to drink.."
I was floored. Neutronium was certainly not supposed to be a stable substance, all those pop science references to a tablespoon of the stuff weighing more than Mount Everest neglected to mention that it was only that dense under the sheer pressure of a neutron star's weight, and if liberated, would explode with as much force as a nuke. I had no idea what metahuman fuckery Lumen had done to actually make and stabilize this much of it.
I was barely able to stand, and didn't bother anymore, sinking to the ground. The world swam, and my thoughts raced some more. I hadn't brought chemical weapons or nanites, and I was inclined to take him at his word about it being sealed off. Could Alan enter it? No, he needed to have line of sight with the naked eye to teleport into it.
"It really is astonishing isn't it? I had another one of Lumen's people peg it to a privileged frame of reference, in case you started getting ideas about pulling down the supports, it'll stay floating right here."
Heat? I had no way to make nearly enough of it.
My vision was pulsing, everything but his smarmy face blurred as my lace desperately tried to keep my cognitive functions online.
Emily crawled over to where I lay, and propped me up against the wall. She looked like I felt, but squeezed my hand to comfort me. They'd blind her, then poison her or find some other way to kill her. Alan wasn't responding to my pings, and wouldn't get here fast enough even if he wasn't unconscious. Alia was away because of Emily's soft-heartedness, but she wouldn't be able to cut through either.
"Did you think of a way to get in? Tell me something interesting and I'll make it quick." He proclaimed, pouring himself even more liquor.
The world was darkening, and my lace had given up on blaring warnings and was simply fighting to keep my brain oxygenated.
Then it struck me. Would this even work?
"Doctor Rodriguez, would you say that this place is a hospital?" I enquired, summoning up the last of my strength.
"What, did the lasers blind you? Of course it is, you dimwit."
"No, do you have medical facilities in your panic room?"
He appeared puzzled. "I have an auto-surgeon in here, can't use homeopathy for everything, but I won't count that as an idea, it's air-gapped and hardened, you can't hack it. Think of anything else?"
"No, I think that's enough." I said, patting my aching ribs in search of something.
"I don't want to stay in here any longer than I have to. Excuse me, I'll have someone in here to kill you shortly." He said, turning away to call his guards.
I found it, a rectangular plastic object, the screen cracked from the bullet impacts, but the display still lit up.
He stopped, adjusting his glasses before zooming in.
"A pager? I haven't seen one in years!" He exclaimed, the liquor getting to him.
My lace interfaced with it, the ancient electronics slow to respond. It was a two-way device, as I'd learned later from checking the web.
MR. RED TO THE OPERATING ROOM
I sent the message into the void.
"They used to be everywhere once, all the old hospitals in Cuba swore by them. Or is a disguised comms device? Not that a pager isn't technically one of those.." He was rambling, and I stopped paying attention to his words as my consciousness faded away. My lace began to give up on me, activating a Last Wish protocol, backing up as much of my memory as it could to the cloud, while preparing a final message for my wife.
There was a commotion on the display, El Presidente had spilled his drink in his haste as he rose to look behind him.
I was dimly aware of Emily trying to perform first aid with her mangled hands, and then the camera's view shifted to follow El Presidente as he got up and grabbed something under the desk.
The best surgeons were always punctual.
"Who the fuck are you?" He cried out, talking to someone off screen. He held a shotgun in his shaking hands.
"An actual doctor, my friend. Not a charlatan like you.." A familiar voice said. The display began glitching as a man walked into view. He wore a surgical gown, still damp with fluids (who am I kidding? It's blood), and began pulling on gloves.
"My colleague here is indisposed, otherwise I'd invite him for the surgery. Your surgery, my tinpot friend." The Red Doctor said, gently pacing towards his cowering victim.
"No! They said this place was teleporter proof!" He pulled back, backing himself up in the cramped confines of the room.
"Teleportation? How droll, I just show up where I'm at home." The Doctor chuckled, voice oddly distorted, alternating between the posh British accent I'd last heard and a chorus of voices consigned to a fate worse than death. It sussurated, getting beneath your skin like the sound of a scalpel being stroked on glass.
"I have no beef with you! Do you want money? Ten billion, in your account the moment you leave." His tone became panicked as the Doctor strolled closer, gently withdrawing his tools.
"I'll collect my fees later, but this is a professional courtesy. You have no idea how much I despise homeopaths." The image feed was drenched with static, and even on this side of an inviolable wall, I felt my hair stand up.
"Fuck you!" El Presidente screamed, unloading his gun into the implacable figure. He was packing something heavy, the shot blew out the wall and filled the view with smoke and dust. When it settled, the Doctor stood there nonplussed, dusting himself off.
"He tried to shoot me, he genuinely doesn't know who I am! Years of academic efforts wasted, not to mention the sterile field." He began humming gently, almost in touching distance of the dictator, now down on his knees.
"Please! I'm not a bad man! You have to-" his pleas were cut off as he was grabbed by the hair and lifted several feet into the air.
"I think I'll use homeopathic anesthesia for this one eh Adat?" He laughed, slicing a scalpel across the struggling man's tendons one by, paying no heed to the screaming till he hung limp and bleeding.
There were more cameras in the rest of the panic room, because the view shifted, tracking El Presidente from another angle as he was dragged like a skewered pig out into the hallway behind his office, past a colonial life support system with a hydroponics bay, a lavish bedroom, all the way to where a lone autodoc table sat empty.
The Doctor sighed, and clenched his fist. "Shame you're too out of sorts to help me. I never liked robotic assistance." At his behest, a manipulator arm grabbed his squirming patient and placed him not particularly gently on the operating table. Piss and blood ran down the sides into the convenient gutter.
The scene devolved into screaming, the crack of broken bones and the hiss of cauterization. I couldn't prop my head up any longer, and sagged back into Em's arms.
I felt the rhythmic thump of my heartbeat grow louder, faster. Too loud, much too fast.
No, that sound wasn't my heart. The whole building was vibrating, the autocannons and AA emplacements on the roof firing at something, giving it all they had.
She dragged me aside, and ripped out a section of the wall revealing the exterior. What I thought were streaks in my failing vision were SpaceX droneships burning their retrothrusters, laser point defenses engaging the incoming projectiles.
The noise mercifully drowned out the last gurgling sighs from the monitor, and I began losing track of time.
The last thing I remembered was Emily yelling orders at someone, a large robot clambering through the hole in the wall.
It was blue in color, a shade I was very familiar with. I fell asleep before it could reach me.