He landed in another slope that knocked the air out of him, then the unspent momentum pitched him into a roll, and then gravity did the rest. Gaylen rolled and slammed and slid down, too fast to grab onto anything. The surface was uneven, and bruised and battered him as he went on his way.
When he came to a stop it was with at least a dozen new faint throbs that would become pain once the adrenaline wore off.
Gaylen patted the yellow X cylinder, confirming that it was in place. Then he picked himself up and kept on going. However much he wanted to, he couldn’t continue straight on at his previous pace, but then he seemed to have gained a bit of distance. He’d gotten somewhat close to another pillar, though not the one he needed, and the lights on it gave him a hint of the nearby ruins. He entered, putting a few half-standing walls between himself and pursuit before leaning his back against one.
He took a welcome breath and gazed upwards. He couldn’t be entirely sure that his sense of direction was still on point. He was doing his best to make sense of the sparse forest of distant pillars when his comm, set to silence, vibrated.
“They might be listening in,” Gaylen whispered as he answered the call.
“I’ve shaken those two for now,” Herdis said. “No injuries. Yourself?”
“Same. Let’s stick to the plan.”
“I’ll try.”
“Good. Out.”
Gaylen cut the call. He really wished he’d thought, before the tram opened, to make up some code between the two of them. Something he could have said over the waves to misdirect the mercenaries. But he hadn’t, and that was that.
He kept on going. He’d recovered a shred of his vigour, and the less time he gave his bruises to catch up with him the better. Gaylen wove through shadowy hints of debris and rocks and metal and cut stone, always doing his best to avoid open areas, where rifles outdid pistols every single time.
Soon enough he’d touched and glimpsed and bumped into enough of his surroundings to realise that these were yet more First Civilisation ruins, partially buried amidst younger ruins long since abandoned by the industrialised planet. As he peeked through a window frame he also came to realise that there was some kind of central area, and uneven though the landscape was because of the ruins it dipped towards it through a series of slopes.
Gaylen went along what seemed to be some sort of fallen tower, hoping for a break in it that he could pass through. He got closer and closer to the nearest slope edge and slowed his steps lest he accidentally blunder over it in the dark. And finally there was a break in the obstruction and Gaylen went for it.
The merc came around the corner, leading with his rifle. Gaylen steered the barrel to the side with his left hand, and the shot went wide. Gaylen shot him right in the face. The helmet held to a degree, but the man was still stunned for a moment. Gaylen stuck the barrel of his gun right into the crook of the merc’s neck and fired again. The fibre between the plates was tough, but a point-blank shot like this still penetrated.
The pistol went through a delay, that damned little delay hand-held weapons needed to cope with the heat, as another merc appeared behind the first one, and the injured man swayed and feebly struck out.
Gaylen then fired again, into the exact same spot, and the Blue Strike mercenary dropped like a sack. Immediately, Gaylen launched himself to the side. It was a ridiculous move, the kind of stupid showiness that got people killed. But he had no cover. And by luck or perfect timing the rifle-blast did miss him an instant before he slammed onto his side.
The rifle came around as Gaylen lay there with about four metres between them, the perfect target. But his pistol recovered sooner, and he shot the rifle.
No one wanted to buy a weapon that could blow up in your hands, and the rifle reacted as it was designed to do in case of a breach. The power of the plasma turned inwards, superheating the weapon in an instant. The merc threw it from his hands, and it was already half-melted before it hit the ground.
Rather than be rattled by any of this, the mercenary immediately charged.
Gaylen got off a shot. Either the man’s shield was spent or he’d never had one, because the bolt hit right in his left knee. Gaylen wasn’t sure if he’d hit perfectly between the plates or not, but the mercenary did stumble and came crashing down. Gaylen mostly managed to roll out of the way, and brought the gun around. The mercenary grabbed it, and just like that it was a ground fight.
How often he’d been here, in the old days, grabbing, twisting and straining against someone doing the exact same thing with the exact same desperation. Of course, those men normally hadn’t been wearing hard armour.
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The man managed to twist the pistol from Gaylen’s grip, and it clattered onto the ground. With his right hand now free, Gaylen counter-twisted, and managed a half-decent lock on the man’s left arm. He sprang up to one knee, forcing the man further down to the ground. The mercenary’s free hand fumbled for the pistol, and Gaylen rose more fully and kicked it away.
That bothersome free hand got a bit of a hold on his ankle, enough to yank on it and throw him off-balance. Gaylen lost his grip and the man sprang up like the professional warrior he was and bore Gaylen into the ground.
Gaylen managed to get his feet up between them and pushed with all of his might. The merc was thrown back, and took just long enough to recover for Gaylen to get back up.
The mercenary went for a blade in his belt and Gaylen ran into him before he could bring the weapon to bear. An armoured elbow hit him in the side, followed by an armoured headbutt, weak only because Gaylen had seen it coming. It was a skill, this, reading and predicting an opponent’s body in the most primal form of violence. And he’d had way too many chances to learn.
Gaylen kept the struggle close and intimate, denying the man the full use of his armoured fists and doing his best to force his weight onto the shot knee. After a two or three second long eternity of straining muscles he got a firm grip on an arm, and after a feint that made the Blue Strike man shift into the wrong direction Gaylen got him in another arm bar.
The man resisted fiercely and Gaylen kept on pouring precious strength into attempting to break the limb, simply hoping that the armour didn’t have internal joint braces.
But there was still that pesky right arm. And now it touched one of the grenades in the man’s belt.
“Eat this...” the mercenary wheezed.
He would have a decent chance of surviving if he simply dropped the explosive at their feet. Gaylen would not. So he swung the man around, then launched him into an over-the-shoulder toss. The mercenary hit the slope and the grenade flew from his hand. Gaylen threw himself down again, and heard the merc start a brutal downwards roll just before the blast sounded.
He’d just managed to cover his ears, so the boom merely hurt his ears instead of deafening them. Yet again he hurried to his feet, swayed a moment, then looked for his gun.
Where is that damned thing? he thought as he felt around with hands and feet both. Every wasted second enhanced the metaphorical bullseye on him.
Finally he found it, and risked a peek over the edge. The mercenary had evidently rolled down all the way, and in the faint light of a nearby pillar Gaylen saw a welcome surprise; the distinctive outline and colours of a Kavian Hunter, forcing the woozy man over onto his stomach.
Well, who am I to interrupt?
Gaylen kept on going, plunging himself back into the haphazard maze. He entered what he presumed to be either a hallway or a tunnel; it was rather too neat for a coincidental gap in rubble. A single pillar light was visible in the distance, but once he reached the exit he found actual rubble almost filling it. Only a narrow gap remained on top, and Gaylen tried climbing up and pushing his way through it. The cylinder in his coat got in the way of his efforts, and no matter how he twisted and turned he couldn’t entirely fit his shoulders through. He stubbornly tried for a few extra moments, furious at the thought of wasting time by backtracking. Then he let himself drop down, furious at having wasted time on a fruitless task.
He jogged back the way he’d come, exiting the tunnel ready to be shot at. When that didn’t happen he went around the nearest corner and found himself facing one of those curved, pointy First Civilisation struts, long since fallen. He took the cylinder from his coat and found that he could sidle alongside the obstruction, until he emerged into a great, big pile of rubble.
Gaylen tried heading up but soon found the thin rubble moving beneath his feet. Any attempt at stopping it simply made things worse and he just fought to keep his balance as he slid downwards. The rocks were leading him towards the edge of the nearest slope, and the moment a standing wall was within reach he reached out and grabbed it. He managed to pull himself to a stop, then made his way around the thing and off the giant pile.
He’d entered a long building of some sort, long since stripped of its roof and interior, leaving only pillars and exterior walls that were more windows than anything else.
The comm buzzed again as he jogged along, and he put it against his ear, set to low volume.
“They’re on you!” Herdis shouted.
Gaylen screeched to a halt by a pillar, and right on cue a shot hit it. He let himself drop down into a crouch as another shot came, taking another chunk out of the pillar. He was being fired at from two directions. This was an ambush.
Another shot came from somewhere in the gloom, and then another came from the way he’d arrived.
Three directions.
Gaylen turned around and fired, and was rewarded with the crackle of a failed shield. He threw himself flat just in time for another shot from that direction to narrowly miss him. Gaylen fired back and saw the sparks of stricken armour. But it wasn’t enough to kill the mercenary, and Gaylen had nowhere to seek cover. Nowhere that wouldn’t get him shot from another direction.
Herdis’s rifle made its thum, and Gaylen saw a larger shower of sparks.
“I’m on top!” the woman said through his comm, forgotten in his left hand.
Gaylen fired yet again, even as more chunks were blown out of his cover, and now saw the man stagger unsteadily into view. Herdis’s next shot hit him right in the head and he fell. Then she came under fire and Gaylen thought he heard her yelp, before the direction of one source of shots changed. A mercenary was circling around, making his own use of the pillars.
Gaylen pressed closer against the pillar and dared to move alongside it a bit, exposing one side a bit for the sake of protecting another. He fired back, and managed to get another shot off without being retaliated against.
That was when the grenade went off.
The concussive blast hit Gaylen with the force of a hurricane. He flew out the unglazed window and down into the slope.