The drugs mostly, but also the relative quiet of AEGIS and I crawling inch-by-inch into the house, of having Saga behind me and Karu above me and Tem and Moon in front of me, it had all conspired to lull me into a sort of false sense of…not security, exactly, but complacency maybe? The opening part of the fight had been disastrous, yes — I needed to look no further than my own leg to confirm that. But as we’d inched towards the zone of control owned by the two Tems, and as more fire had been directed at them instead of us, as everyone around us provided us with cover and protection, it might have been easy to attribute the relative calm to us turning the tide, or things getting better.
It took…seconds, maybe, of being back out there to prove just how fragile this illusion was. I was lucky to have jumped through the layer of light constructs without being debilitatingly shredded, only enough to rip off a fair amount of my skin and clothes, and probably some of my less-essential muscles and organs. And waiting past that shell, the XPCA opened up on me, and I found myself struggling just to keep their weaponry from blowing me to chunks.
The welcome wagon was a VTOL, with two nasty-looking cannons on either side. Tem speared it across the wing with a beam before it fired, sending both of the shots it’d levelled at me into the ground, the vortexes in the bullets’ wake like two tornados, even at range. Definitely a big enough shot to punch through my shield and me, I made the floundering vehicle my first target.
But before I could even close within range, ground troops were popping out all around me. I was taking leaping strides, feeling like AEGIS in how the world tore past under my feet, but even so, I could feel the heat of their fire, and my shield flashed erratically, strobing on and off as I flew past obstacles which gave me fractional moments of cover from some strike teams while others opened up.
Some were unfortunate assholes who were packing lasers or rockets, something for my shield to deflect and then chase down. But most weren’t, most were shooting things at me I didn’t even comprehend, things which I was sure were dangerous, even to a darting, shielded Exhuman.
I landed for a second, catching my breath in the ruins of a blasted-down house, knowing its low wreckage was only a moment of cover. But right in front of me, nothing I could see, but could feel in my mind, my senses spiked, and I threw myself sideways on instinct.
A blast of sonic energy shattered the wall where I’d just stood, and the destruction swept towards me, turning the wreckage into confetti as the concealed shooter followed. I rolled onto my feet and pushed as hard as I could, feeling the exosuit…exoframe?…mimicking my movements with legs a thousand times stronger than my own and shooting me forward.
My blades hit the shadow ops first, his camo exploding into a fireworks of garbled color and noise as they passed through him. And then, I crashed into him bodily, my shoulder into his chin, which snapped backwards with the impact and sent both of us spinning and tumbling with enough momentum to be launched clear of the house.
I had an odd moment of absolute calm, flying in the air like that, my head reeling from the acceleration and the neural dampener. Things seemed to pass in slow motion. I could see people pivoting their weapons on me from the shadows, could see the shadow ops I’d impacted soaring backwards, his head no longer connected quite right to his body, could see the place in my shoulder where part of his faceplate and a few of his teeth were embedded and my blood and his flowed like streamers in the air as I tumbled.
I felt profoundly aware and connected with everything around me, as something in my subconscious, some prey-instinct recognized that I was being watched by hundreds of wary eyes. The wreckage only looked barren, but it was a fractal of menace; no matter where you looked, if you looked hard enough, there were weapons there, or soldiers bearing them. Tens of thousands of them, costing billions of dollars, all to converge on this point, all to destroy me, and those who stood with me.
It was an oddly spiritual moment. I’d never been this important to anyone before, and if they had their way, would never be again. And while I of course found it very impressive and very pants-shittingly terrifying the sheer amount of force they had to bear down on me, what really frightened me was just how little trace there was of Lia, the one thing in this whole situation which was most important to me.
Which was stupid, I knew. Did I just expect to find her walking around out here? If she was, she’d be nabbed or killed in a heartbeat. But I couldn’t do nothing.
I managed to get one leg between me and the ground and the inertial dampeners soaked the impact and merely sent me into a tumbling fall instead of shattering my bones. I could see why Whitney took the time to warn me that the auto-gyros weren’t working yet, and it’d be on me to make sure my legs were both the first and last parts of me to hit the ground.
I hopped to my feet and spun, my blades spinning with me, and two soldiers nearby screamed their protest as the darting swords caught them in the throats. Another stood nearby, some kind of bulky, menacing weapon on his shoulder being brought to the ready. With a sharp breath, I flung lightning in his face before he could show me what that one did.
And then the ground started exploding under me from something else somewhere else and I bolted off again. I looked down and saw fresh blood seeping from my leg from whatever that was, and the resignation that great, I’d been hurt yet again.
I continued like this for another few leaps. Landing where I could, cutting back the XPCA who seemed on closest advance to the house, and disappearing before they could retaliate. Sometimes after they could retaliate. Sometimes I wiped out a VTOL or rocket truck or on rare occasions, one of the slightly-fancier exosuits indicating someone with command capabilities beyond a simple squad lead. And then a few leaps more. And a few leaps more. And a few more after that.
After the dozenth crater of carnage, I was getting exhausted, and there was absolutely no sign that I’d done a damn thing. Even in places I’d already been, new men were pressing forward, troops or shadow ops or combat drones. Everywhere just seemed to rush inwards on the house, though so spread out I couldn’t hit more than a man or two at a time.
It was like trying to run around and push back the tide. I couldn’t beeverywhere, and while our lasers were beyond lethal, they couldn’t be everywhere either. I hadn’t seen any signs of Karu since emerging, and that worried me, but I did flash past Saga at some point, who’d built a nice little igloo out of corpses and had draped herself in an XPCA uniform that was both large enough to be more of a poncho than a shirt, and more red than black from her blood on it.
I wondered for a moment if everyone in the wall of meat Saga was building was entirely dead before they were piled into it. She certainly didn’t have the strength to arrange them like that, and I didn’t see anyone exactly helping her. The implications around that girl were always a little grisly.
But if she was holding her own, that was fine. The real problem was what we were holding our own until. Even if we could push back, eventually our bodies would fail. I was certainly running low on blood and organs by now, even if the drugs wouldn’t let me feel pain, I knew exhaustion in all of my limbs, and my head felt stupid in ways that weren’t all attributable to the neural dampening field.
In short, if we kept this up, we’d lose. We needed something, and I was quickly concluding that the ‘something’ was potentially running the fuck out of here and hoping for some way to ditch our pursuit.
A laser lit up the sky, shooting high into the cloudless air and hanging there for a moment, impossible to tell if it was a beam fired up or some holy light shining down. A signal from AEGIS to return.
It was answered by a less holy light, as Skyweb opened up with another volley, slicing, violet beams angling into the living room of the house even as I approached.
“Athan stop,” AEGIS shouted at me, and I did, still peeking for a way through the barrier of light constructs.
“What’d you find?” I shouted back, ducking into Saga’s little fort of exosuits and corpses melded with the wreckage of our neighbor’s house.
“I was able to pull the cache and review the cam-drone feeds. Lia is not here, she was taken by Rito most of twenty minutes ago. The two of them disappeared and have not returned.”
I could tell by the cadence of her speech she’d turned her emotions off again, but her words were a huge relief to me anyway. For a moment anyway, before my thoughts turned back to our current situation. “So it was all for nothing?”
“Yes,” she said. “You have failed in your primary goal.”
“Don’t listen to that gearsack,” Saga growled from nearby, as she held her head, the XPCA uniform hanging off of her swaying with her movements, except for where it was glued to her blood. “The others needed rescuing too, Athan. Whitney. Moon. Maybe even Tem, if swinging by the animal shelter for a replacement is too much work for you.”
“Tem,” I argued “is the only reason this house is even still standing, and is–“
“Mercy me, put your boner away,” she chided. “Of course she’s powerful and lovably neurotic and all that. Joudan, buddy.”
“Oh shut up,” I growled back. As much as I loved her sometimes, this was not a minute to waste on her banter. “AEGIS all we have left is to get everyone out then?”
“If that is your new directive. I view our odds of success as very slim. I might suggest that if your priority is preserving the lives of your allies, statistically speaking, it would be a much better move to surrender.”
“If we surrender, they will absolutely kill Tem and Moon for starters, and myself. They’ll do whatever they can to Saga, you’ll probably wind up in another AI project and worse than dead.”
“Yes, but there is a decent chance that Whitney and Chiho are merely imprisoned. Two of seven is a much higher projected survival rate than resisting. I can continue to run the numbers to improve certainty, but it seems a waste of processes when my systems are badly damaged and the outcome is co clear already.”
I sighed. Great, so we had the possibility of AEGIS going turncoat on us as well now. And I think I was beginning to feel pain again, so this was just…not going well. Straight to hell, really.
Not that I didn’t believe AI-AEGIS’ probability calculations, but hearing her say flat-out that we were all going to die wasn’t helping with the situation. And I was still just pissed.
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Because we were in this mess and it was my fault. Because hundreds of people were dying and it was my fault. Our house was blown apart and our lifestyle ruined and any bridges I had with the XPCA burned to ash. And it was all for nothing, because Rito had already come and gone, and the whole fucking disaster had been because I’d felt the need to confront Dragon and stop him from taking his toy back, and I probably hadn’t even managed that.
So I was pissed. Because the alternative to being pissed was giving up, and I’d already failed too much today to just give up. Even if I made a million more mistakes today, I’d somehow get these people out of my mess somehow.
We just needed a plan.
Just as soon as my head stopped being fuzzy. And I could think through my anger. And the pain creeping into my joints and where my leg should be went away.
“AEGIS, do you have any more of that drug?”
“I do not. I have other medication but nothing that potent. Using any of the others in conjunction with your current medication would probably result in hepatic shutdown however, so I do not recommend them for pain relief.”
“Great. Well, do you have any ideas for how to get us out of here?”
Silence answered me for a few moments while I envisioned her on the other side of the wall using a calculator to measure out the worth of a human life. “And you said you are not open to the option of unconditional surrender?”
“I’m not,” I sighed.
“Surrender with conditions?”
“No surrendering. No sacrificing anyone.”
“Technically neither Saga nor I would die if sacrificed. I don’t know how you calculated, but that reduces the potential death toll by twenty-eight percent.”
“No sacrificing anyone.”
Another moment of relative silence amidst the roar and explosions of the battle. “Then no. There exist no options which will permit everyone to live and escape.”
“Again, don’t listen to that gearbag,” Saga said. “What you need to do is find the source of this head-fucking bullshit so I can get the XPCA fighting for us. With it, I feel like every time I try to focus on one thing too hard, my thoughts fall apart like I just got brained with a wet rock. A slippery one.” She looked disgusted and infuriated at her own tangent. “You know what I mean.”
“I do, and that’s a decent plan as anything we’ve got right now. Mine was just to…focus in one direction and punch a hole through their defenses.”
“So that we’d be on the run again and relive the chase scene? That’s a shitty plan.”
“AEGIS, do you have any idea what’s causing this neural disruption?”
“I do not. I was not aware of any neural disruption as it doesn’t affect me. I can begin to search the cached feeds if you’d like.”
“I would like, please. Quickly.”
“One moment.”
And then we waited for what I considered considerably longer than one moment. After the first minute ticked by, I had to suppress the urge to ask her for updates, knowing that in her state, it’d just slow her down. By minute two, I’d had to dart off a couple times to take out some XPCA who were drawing uncomfortably close to our little bunker. By the third minute, I was about ready to dive through the light constructs and strangle AEGIS into working faster out of frustration.
And then she spoke like she was just resuming our conversation. “I have located the source. A large machine was deployed an hour ago in a small park to the northwest of here. I am unable to find any records of its function or operation, but it appears the only device with enough power to affect so large an area, and which was deployed in the right time frame to coincide with the befuddlement of those in the vicinity.”
“Great. I know that park,” I said, standing up and then immediately wincing as my shield turned a bullet into a hail of metal grit across my face. Vaguely, I felt the edges of pain from the fresh scratches on my face and knew I had little time. “I’ve got to leave now. I’ll…take it down by whatever means necessary. The second it’s gone Saga, you do everything you can. Have Tem signal me again if you need me urgently and I’ll come back. Okay?”
“Okay,” Saga said. “And while you’re out, we need eggs and bread.”
“You’re the absolute fucking worst,” I informed her. I didn’t pop my head up this time before I bolted around the corner, and then from there, shot off as quick as I could.
The park was about a mile away, and I realized that when heading right towards it, the numbing of my brain got a lot nastier, but when skirting around the direct path, the effect fell off quickly. Not enough that I could like, think properly or anything, but it was miles better than being directly in the center of the beam or whatever.
The XPCA were also keenly aware of this, and despite the discomfort, I quickly discovered that going straight up the path was much faster because there were no soldiers in my way. They were a hundred feet off to either side, watching and firing at me as I shot past them, fast as I could move, and much too fast to be hit.
I mean, aside from a few packs of micro-missiles and other guided arms. But my shield handled those pretty well. Compared to the sheer, limb-ripping peril of before, it was almost paradise to just fly down the empty avenue, without the capability for thought in my head.
Funny thing about paradise, though. It doesn’t ever last.
I landed in a crowd of XPCA soldiers, not even shadow ops, just regular guys in exosuits, and before they could draw on me, they were dead. I’d made pretty incredible time, and nearly a mile from home the damage was more limited, though there were still plenty of buildings which a stray beam had blown a hole straight through. This was one of them. I crept inside, watching through the paisley-lace curtains as XPCA moved in patrols, almost lazily this far from the conflict.
It was, I realized, a field HQ, like we’d always assembled at and deployed from at the start of our missions. Here were where field officers surveyed everything through feeds and issued orders to the squads under them, in coordination with others and with a wider view of the battlefield. Here is where logistics was rooted, where casualties were carted in, a constant stream of bodies flowing from everywhere, most looking like severe burn victims. Or former severe burn victims, now deceased.
And in the middle of it all, the machine AEGIS had described. About the size of a small house, it was strapped on the flatbed of a semi, a long tubular thing with pipes and walkways arching across it, the length of the tube pointed in the direction from which I’d come. A few techs in XPCA black were patrolling the catwalks, laxidasical as they moved from terminal to terminal with tablets in hand, jotting down status levels or making adjustments.
All to keep Saga’s head boiling, so that she couldn’t sink her claws into these people who’d come after my sister. I felt more than a flare of anger that these were just people, walking around and doing their job to keep this engine running, without apparent concern for what it did or who they did it to.
Charging in there might work for a little bit, but I’d be a sitting duck working on the thing itself, and that could take forever. As much as I’d love to believe that just putting some voltage into it would take it down for good, I wasn’t sure, and I’d only have the one shot.
What I needed was time with it, time alone and unperturbed, time enough to make sure I could hit more than just one or two sections and disable the whole thing. Ideally I’d have Tem here to hide me, or AEGIS to do some kind of remote hackery. Or heck, Whitney to tell me what parts of the machine were critical and which ones were just like…hydraulics to keep the thing level on the flatbed or some shit.
Yeah I didn’t know. My mind kept wandering too. I probably could circle around and get out of the direction of the beam and come up with a better plan. Just had to keep out of sight and not raise any alarms.
I started to move and my foot slipped on the exosuit of one of the four I’d wiped out in landing. The blank, black faceplate glinted at me from the dark and I paused. Somewhere in some level of my mind, I had an idea, but I couldn’t tell if it was a good one or not. But time was valuable, and it was an idea.
I spent way longer than I should have trying to move the exosuits around, pushing and shoving and clambering on them, having only marginal success in bracing my exoframe and pushing. And then I realized I was stupid, and I could just pop the back hatch on one of the suits facing down.
I still had to struggle to extract the pilot, and there was the matter of…his death, and the liquefied remains of him inside the suit. As I tried to lay down in it, I felt the slightly cold, viscous, tacky mushing of blood and medical gel congealing between me and the suit.
Before I got all the way in, I spotted the ‘net uplink on the inside of the neck and ripped it out. That was a close one, I realized. If things went south, they could have just locked me in and piloted the suit wherever they wanted with me stuck inside. It gave me a moment of pause, wondering what other short-sighted, stupid blunders I might be walking into.
My thoughts slipped past unfocused and I shook my head. Fuck it. I climbed in, gagging at the stench of blood and felt the suit seal around me.
Still logged in as the prior user, who as it turned out was only mostlydead. That was lucky. He was shorter than me, and the suit was stabbing me in the crotch and armpits and my head couldn’t stand quite upright. That was less lucky. But I moved, and the suit moved with me. My ears were full of comms chatter and the HUD was lit up with thousands of IFFs, showing moving beacons of every other ‘friendly’ in the area.
Including the ones downed at my feet. One of them was similarly just cut up but not dead. Three others were not so lucky, and all of their suits were broadcasting an SOS.
I stood there for another minute, just trying to get over the stink of blood and figure out my next move.
Some of the chatter became louder and more focused and I realized the comms were smart enough to be amplifying what was directed at me, when another squad of four exosuits came crashing through the door, weapons raised.
“One’s still up,” a woman said. “Four others down. No sign of the laser fire.”
“Acknowledged,” replied some central operator from somewhere.
“You there,” she pointed at me with a stubby exosuit finger. “Report out. What happened here?”
I blinked at her and raised my hand to my forehead, which banged the exosuit’s against the faceplate instead of being effective. Somehow in this gesture, the tense poise of the suit in front of me softened slightly, the gun coming off her shoulder as she took a step forward.
It was working, I realized. I was in, like I hoped I’d be.
“He’s befuddled by the disruptor it looks like, and his suit’s damaged, not broadcasting anything. Can you hear us?”
“Yeah,” I replied, my voice lurching as my speech forced the smell of blood further up my sinuses. I coughed, and she lowered the gun entirely.
“Easy there buddy. You’re in the path of the disrupter field so you’re probably confused. Let’s get you outta there. You can have a few minutes to get your head together before we check you out, sound good?”
I nodded at her, my head feeling like it was banging around in the too-low space of the ill-fitted suit. I took a few steps forward and really hoped she didn’t know or notice the former driver who was left propped-up in a corner. She didn’t seem to, and just escorted me out of the house and into the clearing of the park, surrounded by others moving and running around like black ants.
“Stay here just a few. We’re going to check on your team. Readouts showed that most of them survived, so don’t worry too much okay?”
I gave her one final nod and she saluted and jogged off, her boots crashing across the pavement as she went.
And she left me feeling bad, man. Here, on the side of the disruptor, my thoughts were crawling back into my head, and most of the first of them were along the lines of how nice she’d seemed, and how cool it would have been if she joined our group. We could use more people with leadership, had a niche for someone strong and tanky she could fill.
And she had a great voice…all I knew of her, really. She was strong and imperious when she’d come charging in, but then gentle and reassuring as she comforted me.
These were stupid thoughts, I realized, but this was the kind of white noise going through my brain as it sorta rebooted. My admiration and yearning ebbed away into guilt as I gathered myself, realizing it was people like that who we were killing by the dozens.
Leaving me pretty thoroughly disgusted with myself by the end of it. But I didn’t really have time for that. I headed for the machine, cringing as I passed in front of it again and everything in my head except the one simple task melted away like a good idea I’d forgotten to write down.
As I reached the front of the truck, I looked up and saw the colossal cabin. It wasn’t your typical semi, the XPCA would never go for something which wasn’t straight black and with enough straight geometric edges to cut yourself on. It was a friggin’ armored truck, as ridiculous as that seemed with the wide windows and exposed trailer. But here it was.
And there was the steering wheel and shifter and the embarrassingly-small-looking driver’s seat, designed for mere humans — albeit potentially exosuited humans — instead of the obvious superlative penis that the creator felt the need to demonstrate in the rest of the vehicle’s construction.
I paused, again unsure if I was having an idea, or just a bad idea. And then I pulled myself up the metal steps to the cabin door and let myself in. I tapped the ignition switch, and with a roar which sounded like it came from a beast, the engine in front of me came alive. Some people turned to glance at the sound, but when everybody had their own business to attend to, other things were just someone else’s business.
I gave one moment’s glance all around me, checking mirrors and remembering that I probably wanted a seat harness on. And then I flipped a few switches to disengage the levelling struts, pulled the break off, and pushed the accelerator into the floor.