My lungs worked slowly, evenly, as I forced air in and out of them at a constant rate. It was irritating, because it was just difficult enough to no longer be instinctual. At the amount of g-forces my body underwent, the human reaction would be to hold one's breath, but that was a mistake, that lead to blackouts, when my amount of blood-oxygen already dipped low.
My engines raced and flared, flashing to life with a sudden burst which threw me forward just underneath the VTOL. One of the VTOLs. One of many, many VTOLs. The others held their fire on account of my proximity to the first, but that was their error. It gave me the time I needed to bring my weapons to bear.
Two were hovering nearby, 'defense platforms' as they would be termed in a military operations manual. They functioned as gunboats, all of their weapons brought to life, and their perimeter intended to be a secure zone from which the others could weave in and out. I brought the envervator to bear on the one on the left, and held the firing stud.
The effect was immediate and satisfying. The vessel seemed to twitch, to shudder, as its internal systems winked out one-by-one. I could vaguely see the pilots within, frantically working the unresponsive controls, pulling the yoke forward, kicking up the throttle, flipping switches to reassign power, restart systems, anything. But it was fruitless, the miracle-weapon in my arms had drained their systems dry, and it would be hours before their cells would generate enough power to prime the engines again.
It would be only seconds before the ground consumed them in a catastrophic conclusion. I had to grin, despite the situation. Possessing this exotic felt, perhaps, addictive. Power as I imagine only Exhumans could wield on a personal level. It was delightful.
There was no time to savor, however. The VTOL behind me had given up on turning to put me in firing range and had instead chosen to rise and back away, and as it did, the remaining defense platform opened up on me with a coordination and synchronicity which demonstrated the capabilities of the USAF. I had mere moments to react, my body shuddering again, and the air attempting to flee my lungs as I bolted off, the familiar numbness in my legs as blood tried to pool in my lower extremities, my flightsuit's constraints keeping it from doing so.
As I peeled off, the other VTOLs came in screaming. Three of them, flying in formation, engaging to sortie, their strafing weapons unmanned and unpowered in favor of more traditional front-facing armament. My visor flashed dozens of warnings of the sensors sweeping over me, which resolved more and more concretely into targeting locks, missiles firing, and weapons in pursuit.
As much as I wished it were so, my new gun was no panacea. It took several moments to drain the life from its victims, and should I pivot in the air and wave it across the pursuing missiles, it was possible I might disrupt them in time, but more than likely, they would merely be half-coordinated, punch-drunk, their systems beginning to falter...as they impacted me and strewn my innards across the thick grasses and scattered trees below.
I did halt in midair -- the momentary pause required for my guts to not rupture feeling like a luxury I could not afford -- before diving back in at full acceleration again, this time towards and under the incoming missiles.
My visor screamed as the proximity between us vanished. I could see its projection of them, painted above the back of my skull, red exclamation points, flashing constantly so as to be unignorable. There were six of them, extreme overkill, two fired from each of the air-superiority fighters. Each missile cost upwards of three-hundred thousand credits. Even with my brain struggling for oxygen and the world upside-down and tearing past me as I shot towards the earth, my mind did the math as though on its own. One million, eight-hundred thousand credits worth of death, curving downwards towards me, in as small an arc as it could manage without tearing itself apart.
I should have been flattered. I knew that we -- Pulverizer -- were of note, but I did not think two-missiles-per-pass note. The thought of what good nearly two-million creds could have done briefly flashed through my mind, and with it, words of my father on the positive nature of military spending.
Arms spending is money that pays for itself. You use the same credit to pay the generals and your contractors.
The missiles were too fast. Had they been fired from a defense-platform VTOL, they might have made the turn, but shot off at maximum speed, they instead streaked straight into the ground, and became near-two-million credits of craters and fire on the ground.
Which was not to say I was clear, or anywhere near being so. I'd wasted over ten seconds driving the missiles downwards, and the air-superiority VTOLs were coming to bear on another attack run. Another two had joined the engagement and were setting up as defense platforms, and the one from earlier was edging forward while hoving, precisely cutting off my most direct escape route for when the others came in for their run.
A matter of zones and control. Agile and deadly as I was, I could not take a hit, and if they locked me in, it would be a mere matter of time before the blow came.
All that, and my greatest threat was the rock coming right at me. All trillions of tons of it, rushing up to meet me after my suicide dive to throw off the missiles.
I jammed the breaks hard, harder than I should have, and my head went stupid as all the blood in me tried to congregate there instead of my legs. For a moment, I forgot to breathe, and it only took that long for blackness to creep in on the edges of my vision and for the world to go streaky and greyscale. Were I more aware, I might have noted a sudden absence, as my brain no longer had the bandwidth to process hearing, the world going mute to accompany the grey.
And yet, despite my drastic action, the ground was still coming for me. Involuntarily, I leaned away from it, as though the extra millimeters between my face and the earth would be my salvation.
My arms clenched tight, holding the gun to my chest. Behind my visor, my eyes flickered open and closed as things flew at them. I could feel the tall grasses whip past me, their tips like the rough side of a sponge at these speeds, raking at my armor.
My engines screamed their protests, and I was nearly blind with the amount of warnings my visor threw up. Too much, too fast. Over thirty g's, and I could feel the painful swelling as my skin bruised from within. Though my flightsuit was designed to protect them, my organs would be next. It seemed I wouldn't hold.
What happened next, I do not know. Blackout took me. But from where I was and how I felt, I had a guess.
The sky above me and the Earth on my back somehow. Shoulder dislocated, elbow jammed. Half of my face and visor scraped and scuffed to the point of bleeding. Armor plate on my right thigh, along with several pouches and a chunk of my flightsuit and much of the skin under it, completely torn free. My hair was evidently long enough to catch and hold grass.
Not bad, actually. I could still fly, I could still walk. There were vials of medical gel strapped to my chest to seal my wounds and numb and disinfect them. Somehow, my mind's last directive to hold the ennervator had worked, and it remained clutched to my chest.
I saw nothing but grass, three or four feet tall, enough that the VTOLs in pursuit would lose me for a moment. But I'd probably already been out for that moment, and could expect them anytime. Gently, I set my gun down and leaned sideways, putting the back of my hand flat against the ground and gingerly stepping on it.
And then, neither gently nor gingerly, twisting my torso upright. My trapped arm screamed in agony, but there was a pop as my shoulder set back into place. I allowed myself a single disappointed sigh at my stims being lost in the crash. Several grenades as well, in addition to one of my batteries of micro-missiles. I made a mental note that they would be harder to use now, as they would fire asymmetrically across my body and twist me back and left. If I had the time, I would have disabled their counterpart unit, but I suspected I did not.
"You okay there, Karu?" I heard AEGIS ask, her voice crackling and her comms backlit with the sounds of explosions. "Heard a crash, was that you?"
Before I could answer, a VTOL dappled in squares of grey camo roared down towards me. It hovered ominously for one moment, barrels spooling up as it acquired me on thermal, I knew.
I had been there. Often, had I been the one manning those guns. Rarely had I considered what it might be like to be on the other end of them.
I rolled sideways, my shoulder feeling as though it were ripping off, and the gash in my leg, still untreated, threw blood into the grass at my movement. My fingers scrambled over the smooth metal of the ennervator, desperately scrabbling for the grip, for the firing stud, trying to turn it in my hands and bring it to bear and fire it all at once.
Vulcan cannons like those present on VTOL gunships do not sound as though they are firing bullets. With their rotating barrels, they can throw one-hundred and eighty bullets per second at their targets. Shells really -- with their casing included, nearly the size of one's forearm. It is not an exaggeration to say these arms were capable of sawing a tank in half.
And the VTOL firing them at me had two of them, one mounted on each side, on an extended strut. The noise they made was less gunshot and more chainsaw. But loud enough that my visor had to dampen the noise, lest I risk hearing loss, even at this range.
Desperation bought me a moment as I engaged my jetpack to maximum, despite being embroiled in the weeds and the ground. I did not so much fly as be thrown upwards and forwards and somewhat sideways. As I was hurled, my back leading, my fingers finally found purchase on the grip of the ennervator, and I contorted in the air to wave it across the craft with the trigger held.
There was a weakness to those guns, despite their power. Not so much a flaw as a limitation. Though every effort had been made to disperse and diffuse the ungodly recoil of the weapon, those systems could only function optimally when the craft was stationary, or moving smoothly. The barrels were designed such that the ventilation of the blast pushed the gun forward to the same extent that the recoil pushed it back. But so great were the forces at play, that if the VTOL pivoted while firing, it stood an excellent chance of misaligning those forces, merely ripping itself apart.
In practice, this was often a non-issue. The guns could still pivot without the craft, and the targeting systems were intelligent and the threat enormous enough that rarely did this become a problem. I only knew of it because, while uncommon, the magnitude of the risk was enough that all pilots had it drilled into them. In fact, while the targeting system was up, the craft could not change direction as a safety precaution.
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My moment with the ennervator had not disabled the craft, but the second I had fired, the vulcans had ceased to pivot. It was enough to scramble their targeting, which bought me yet another moment. My errant leap had sent me flying towards my pursuer, in a fashion, very near the tip of the wing, and more pertinently, the humongous turbofan embedded within it, which would chew me up like a meat grinder if I approached its vortex.
Still, I had time for something, before the canons re-acquired. I could try to twist and pray that I fired before they did, but my instincts took over, years of drilling, when in doubt, move. My engines fired to life again, attempting to straighten me, wrest control from the tumbling dive I was in and turn back inertia.
It...did not work gracefully. I levelled out, but felt a pained impact which knocked the wind from me, as my gut wrapped around the tip of the VTOL's wing. In the corner of my eye, I saw the vulcans moving again, the blaring, chainsaw baseline growing louder in my ears as the stream of death closed on me again. I had no time to reorient the gun in my hands around the wing and fire again. I could only move, and hope I could evade the stream.
Which I couldn't, I knew. I was fish in a barrel to that weapon. I was all offense and mobility, and for the moment, I had neither.
It amused me somehow that AEGIS was still asking my status. If only she knew.
My jetpack roared as I prepared my final, desperate maneuver. Perhaps if I dipped under the wing, I could lose them in a blind spot. But to do so would bring me near the vortex, and that invited an even more inescapable death. I hesitated, wondering if, perhaps, they would not fire on their own wing.
Which was folly, of course. There were too many ameteur pilots who had shredded their own craft in this manner. 'Clippers', the mocking term went, for those who trimmed their own wings. Clippers were rarely given a second chance.
Yet I doubted this crew would care. A wing, a VTOL, that was little cost, I imagined, to what the armed forces would be willing to expend for my death.
So I hung there like a dope, watching and hearing the bullets grow closer. Where they passed, the grass was cut, the world's most expensive lawnmower. By inches it pivoted, though the arc of its rampage was passing ninety degrees by now. Only moments for me left.
To hell with it, I thought. Better to go out all at once through the meat grinder. The fans were relatively brittle and gave me better odds than the bullets. Or at worst, the resulting catastrophe would take them with me. My engines went to full, and I braced myself against the wing for a moment, steeling myself for a maneuver so foolish, I'd have yelled my best at Ashton for even thinking it.
But my moment never came. As my engines kicked, I pushed myself forward. The wing moved with me, the whole VTOL groaned as I leaned against it. And then I grinned as I realized the implications, a cruel, unjust giddiness filling me at the sudden discovery.
Instead of every direction, the tendrils of my jetpack aligned and pushed me forward. I was very nearly crushed against the wing, but it budged, rotating by degrees as I threw myself against the tip with all the force I could.
And then, without warning, I wrenched forward, my ears muted at the sound of a world-shattering explosion. Catastrophic failure ripped the VTOL apart, the torque of the craft spinning, and it's own pivot towards me plied the firing vulcan with too many external forces, and the delicate counterbalance of recoil and venting forces became unaligned.
The gun had, in an instant, ripped itself from its mount and flown into the body of the craft, a missile propelled by its own bullets. In the few moments of life the disembodied weapon possessed, it wrecked incalculable damage from within, the stream of destruction slicing through components and crew alike, passing effortlessly through internal systems with more ease and destruction than Ashton's blades.
The effect was immediate. Something exploded, and then, something else even larger exploded. I was thrown sideways as the wing detached, which was a blessing, as I missed much of the brunt of the shockwave, and even more of the shrapnel thrown from the craft, as it touched the ground and detonated from too many forces and too much structural damage.
Which is not to say I was unscathed. The blast shredded my skin, and had I been facing it and not controlling my breath, would have forced itself down my airways and seared my lungs. Shrap caught me in the back and I felt pieces of it land between my armor plates.
But on the whole, I had been lucky. Lucky to be thrown clear, lucky to be alive. Lucky to have found a solution at all.
"Karu here," I reported in to a frantic AEGIS. "My apologies, I have been engaged."
"Oh thank God," she replied. And I was honestly taken slightly aback at the relief she expressed at my survival. "Any luck finding Athan? Everything's gone completely to shit."
"No. I found where he had disappeared, but there is naught but an ominous void in the shape of a triangle, fist-sized there," I related. I righted myself and urged my engines forward, low and fast, where the wake of my heat against the ground would make target acquisition that much harder for the next ship. "I hesitate to say, I fear he may be gone."
"He's not gone," she said defiantly. "He wouldn't die like that."
"I did not say he died, I said he was gone. I had time to introduce several pebbles and a handful of grass to the triangle-rift, and they passed through without apparent effect. I suspect our friend is capable of opening doors, of some nature, and whatever is on the opposite end, Ashton is there."
"Why didn't you go after him?"
I laughed at her, deliberately. "Did you not hear when I reported it the size of a fist? I am not so slender. Perhaps bring Saga, her emaciated frame will do us a service for once."
"I don't think--"
"It was a jest. Update your humor cores, AI. And besides, I could not get close, it was positively bleeding radiation. A lethal dose would require mere moments."
She went quiet, but the implication was clear. We both just had to hope that the gate was the source of the radiation, and not whatever was on the other side of it. Not wherever Ashton was.
"If he's hurt…" she growled. "I see you, Moon," she interrupted herself. "Come here and use your power on Saga."
"I would mention the non-zero chance that this simply debilitates both of us," Moon said.
"Noted. But we're kinda getting fucked her, and we need Saga to unfuck us."
They were interrupted by sounds of a scuffle. In the skies, I could see another wing of VTOLs breaking off towards me. Time to fight again.
I wished, not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, that I hadn't lost my stims.
I caught one of the turning VTOLs with the ennervator, and in becoming a two-and-a-half ton paperweight, it clipped one of the others in formation, and both of them went down.
Had I mentioned my still-blossoming love for this weapon? I'd given Ashton no amount of crap for his love of the AI's body, as it were, and yet here I was falling for a damn gun.
Cosette crackled in our ears. "Look alive ladies, I've got word that the XPCA and National Guard are mobilizing in as well. I hope you guys can avoid tanks, because I'm not sure you're gonna beat this many."
"AEGIS," I said, "it is becoming clear to me that Ashton is not here. This is a fight we must escape, not win."
"Yeah I was gonna say the same," she said, though I could hear she was not being entirely honest. "I guess...Athan would want us to fall back, yeah?"
I could not respond in the moment. The two remaining VTOLs had found me, and they had gone for a harrier strategy of moving towards me at a fixed pace while their vulcans erupted. I had to shoot upwards to put myself in their blind spots, but what was blind to one was not to the other, and the overlap was tight.
"How is Saga?" I grunted as the two flew under me, and their vulcans silenced while they turned to strafe again. I managed to clip one of them, and their turn went wide, but they didn't go down.
"Still out. Moon's out too, now. At least all three of them are light, I can mostly carry them and still move...and Tem's helping a lot, actually, which is nice."
"I'm helping." I was not certain how she could sound so happy given our situation.
"Yes you are. Thanks, Tem."
She went quiet for another few minutes as another volley of artillery pounded around her. I took the moment to shoot down the last two VTOL in the formation and perch in a tree, hoping my pack would cool down enough that I might evade detection on thermal for a spell.
"So what now?" AEGIS asked, breathing harder than before. "We can't run to the water, I'm a slow swimmer."
"Because of your weight?" I asked, bemused.
"Because of my density. And I'm carrying three girls. How many are you carrying, Karu?"
"The artillery is from ships in the water anyway. They will have escorts, and that will be a blockade we cannot breach. So, inland?"
"Inland, generally speaking, is where the ground forces are coming from," Cosette reminded us. "More exotics that way, and a lot more men to accompany those vehicles you've been fighting."
In the distance, I saw AEGIS moving. She was somewhat impossible to miss, even through the trees and grass, as her every stride kicked up a cloud of dust and dirt as though a bomb were detonating. I saw another VTOL on approach behind her, and one from the front.
I took off as she dropped all three of the girls she was carrying at her feet and sprang, like a javelin in a yellow sundress, crossing the fifty feet or so to the craft before her and punching straight into its cockpit with a crack I heard from here. What ensued inside I could not make out from this range, but it began with the craft listing badly to one side and ended with it slamming wing-first into the ground, AEGIS bounding clear at the last moment.
I had much less need to show off, and merely drew within range of the other in pursuit, and with a pull of the trigger, dropped it to the ground with similar results.
"Thanks," she said, breathing hard. Much of her hair was out of place, and she scrambled to tie it back up with deft fingers as she caught her breath over the bodies of the others. Well, the bodies of Saga, Moon, and Moon's phantom of Saga. And Tem, who was distinct from the apparent corpses only in that she was sitting up.
"I don't think inland is an option," Lia said. "Intel suggests that basically the entire US armed forces are coming after you. Like...all of them. They seem dead-set on making sure you don't get anywhere near New Orleans."
"Yes, that makes sense," I mused. "Our only option might have been to draw them into an urban engagement, where they could not bring their numbers to bear and would be adverse to collateral. They would do all in their power to keep us from that."
"Also like, um, all the people there," Whitney added.
"Yeah that too," AEGIS said, looking about as dour as I did. "Could we go west, following the coast?"
"That's where the air force has been deploying out of. You'll run into a base if you head that way, and I'm almost certain they'd tie you up long enough for the rest of the combined arms to engage."
"Well we can't just stand here and discuss it forever. Is there anywhere not crawling with some branch of the armed forces?"
"Up or down, maybe," Cosette offered. "Which might only apply to Karu…"
"Even then," I shrugged. I could already see another wave of VTOLs through my optics, a good twenty of them over the horizon to the west.
Tem suddenly shrieked in surprise, a half-formed laser pouring out of her and vaporizing the torso of a body which fell at our feet, seeming to appear out of nothing as his active camo shattered. And then the far-off booming of more artillery being dumped into us.
"It's obvious they've got recon teams on us," AEGIS said with frustration. "We'll never root them out, and so we'll never escape. I think...into the city is where we might just have to go."
"We could equally diminish their numbers if we escaped to the water. Hijack another craft, and hope Tem does not put a hole in that one."
"I don't know that we can," she said, looking west. "Too many, too close together. We'd only get one shot at it, and I don't know how we could get these three into it…"
We began to move. Our internal clocks of how long we could stand still both went off at once. Artillery would be falling here in a few moments.
Though where we'd move to, I had no idea. The situation seemed unwinnable, to say the least.
"Man, where the fuck is Rito?" AEGIS complained. "I wish I had her powers."
I was about to respond when a familiar, shimmering-blue egg of pure, sky blue appeared before us. I blinked several times to make sure I was not seeing things, so bizarre was its appearance, like a simple circle stamped into the world. And then from it, an even more familiar figure emerged.
"Oh hey guys," Ashton said, with a wave. "Thank god you're--"
I cut him off by seizing AEGIS and hurling her and her wards into him, sending them all back into the portal, a look of shock on her face as she disappeared.
And then I went forward myself, only to pass through nothing but the sticky spring air, the sounds of falling artillery growing in my ears.