Every troll child goes through a phase where they feel invincible. It happens just before puberty; when their muscles have come in, their horns are properly grown and they’re starting to get taller than all the other kids in their class. They revel in their strength; clambering up onto the school roof, crushing cans with their bare hands, picking their friends up and spinning them like a metahuman merry-go-round. They feel like they’re on top of the world.
But they keep growing, their horns get longer, calcified growths start poking out of their skin – which itself toughens into something that feels closer to stone than flesh. They get stronger without even trying, but the strength that had made it so easy to interact with the world starts to become a barrier from it. They can’t sit in the same chairs as their classmates, they break glasses because they underestimate their grip strength, every portion of food feels way too small. They go to hug their best friend because she looks upset and even they can tell something’s wrong only for her to flinch back, leaving them to wonder if she was afraid of being crushed.
Being strong and tall doesn’t mean much in a world that isn’t built for it, but every troll starts to at least idly dream about the only ways their strength still matters. Everyone has intrusive thoughts; that little moment where they fantasise about finally dropping all the social niceties of the world and just lashing out in some primordial rage. The difference with trolls is how easy it would be to turn fantasy into reality.
Even then, the world finds ways to punish them for their strength. They could lash out, but their disproportionate force would be met by a disproportionate response. They’d carry a label for the rest of their lives – maybe even a criminal SIN – and never find a sympathetic ear no matter how hard they looked, no matter what the circumstances may be. Who would ever believe someone so big, so potentially dangerous, could ever be threatened by people so small?
The only way to turn their strength into a strength is to seek out those places where strength is acceptable, where violence is expected. In militaries, security or law enforcement, where governments and corporations hand you a uniform and tell you who you can hurt. In gangs, where violence can even afford some degree of social mobility, or so you hope. In Urban Brawl, boxing, football, ice hockey, all-arena combat golf and other violent sports, where violence can even make you rich if you’re good enough.
In Shadowrunning, if you’re truly exceptional.
I wasn’t. I’d never been in a fight in my life, never even thrown a punch as far as I could remember. I was exceptional in the matrix; unequalled mistress of the digital world. Or so I’d tricked myself into thinking, until the DemiGOD arrived and sent me scampering for meatspace like a hunted animal. And yet, I still had the biological advantage that let me leap out of a second storey window and land on the ground below with only a slight twinge of pain in my legs.
But I still trembled as I straightened up, my legs shaking far beyond the expected reaction to the sudden burst of activity, or the lingering stabs of dumpshock running rampant through my brain. The air was filled with the crackle of gunshots, the building in front of me lit intermittently from within by magefire, and I’d deliberately wrenched myself out of the matrix. It felt like I’d ripped off my own nose and pulled some of my brain out with it.
I was terrified. Adrenaline was coursing through my veins, flooding my muscles in a way that was utterly unfamiliar to me; such a biological sensation didn’t make the jump over to the matrix. I’d been terrified before, but my body had always been left to suffer the adrenaline flood in silence. Trapped in my head, I could feel every twitching muscle, every panicked surge in my emptied stomach, every gunshot that was the beating of my heart.
Bitch hit the ground beside me, her synthetic legs shifting on their bearings as they achieved by mechanical means the same level of strength I naturally possessed. She straightened up, her shotgun held in her right hand as she looked up at the building, one optic flicking left to instead look at me. I couldn’t say anything; couldn’t force my mouth to make the right sounds.
Hesitantly, uncertainly, her optics darting between me and the building, she reached out and rested a hand on my upper arm, metal hands gently closing on quivering tendons. The rest of her optics looked at me, her head turning. I’d grown used to having instantaneous access to her head. Without it, she seemed more alien in that moment than at any point since I’d met her, but I could tell what she was trying to do.
I nodded, my grip tightening on my machine pistol – which would be a submachine gun in her hands – and sprinted towards the building.
I’d always read that fear made people freeze up. That it was a paralysing thing that halted movement and left people mute in the face of danger. I didn’t know if the books were wrong or if I was just an outlier, because that’s not how it felt to me. I was afraid, but I was running forwards. It wasn’t an automatic motion; every step felt like it took an immense amount of concentration, like I was forcing my way uphill, but there wasn’t any ice in my limbs. If anything, it felt like I was running faster than I had in my entire life.
And yet, Bitch was faster than me, her shorter stride meaningless in the face of her mechanical legs. She vaulted the window of the warehouse offices without a moment’s hesitation, and that in turn spurred me on to follow her. For a moment I felt a jagged length of broken window digging into my palm as I vaulted over the window, half-remembered school gymnastic lessons running through my head before I stumbled as I hit the ground.
“Follow my lead,” Bitch said without turning back, as she brought her shotgun up to her shoulder and began moving through the abandoned office at a brisk yet cautious pace. I followed her, my submachine gun lowered but with both my hands clasped around the trigger. I felt blind, cut off from the matrix. Claustrophobia was a familiar fear, but it seemed so much worse without myriad datastreams passing through the walls and ceiling. It made them feel so much more unyielding.
She paused at the threshold of the warehouse itself, an arm waving me over to the wall behind her. I pressed myself against the faded white paint over plaster, painfully aware of how flimsy it felt. Parts of it were already riddled with bullet holes, and the gunfire from the other room was near-deafening.
Bitch moved with cold, mechanical speed, her cyberlimbs whirring as she stepped back, leant right and raised her weapon in one fluid motion. An instant later, she fired, her optics feeding her brain fire control data faster than her brain could properly process it. She strode forwards, her semiautomatic shotgun barking three more times as the bolt flew back and spent shells were ejected from the side.
I followed her in, my own motions sluggish and all-too-organic as I crossed the threshold into a scene from hell. The warehouse was on fire, the miscellaneous shelves of abandoned policlub detritus going up in burning heaps of old t-shirts, blankets and folded-up marquees, posters, flags and banners. The nine vehicles of varying sizes scattered among those shelves were pockmarked with bullet holes, some of the cheaper vans listing on their sides like half-sunken ships, their axles sheared into fragments by the weight of fire.
In and among that scant cover, half-obscured by the smoke choking the space, figures crouched with weapons clutched tightly to their chests. Some of them were dead, reduced to indistinct heaps of clothing and limbs that no longer seemed to resemble people. Others were dying, shifting and moaning as they reached for weapons that weren’t there, or pressed their hand against their wounds.
There was still over a dozen of them; Chosen rank and file, Biter’s hardened squad, even two members of the AAO security detail that Alabaster must have sent back into the warehouse to die. They could have easily overwhelmed the three Shadowrunners in the room, or cut down Bitch and I the moment we crossed the threshold, if it weren’t for the flame-wreathed form darting between the rafters.
The spirit was incandescent with fire and fury, screaming out its captive rage in gouts of flame that consumed everything they touched. It was incorporeal, diving into one patch of flame only to emerge from another on the other side of the room, in a pattern that left the Chosen struggling to pin her down or even find a place to hunker down and weather the firestorm.
But they were still hurting it. The magical binding forcing it into a feminine shape was faltering, with great rents in its form that spilled out uncontrollable solar flares of light. The bright pits that were her eyes burned with anger, seemingly directed at the entire world even as she was forced to vent her anger on our enemies.
Regent still had control, but it looked like his control was fading fast. The moment I spotted him – huddled with the others behind a van ten metres from the box truck that contained our target – I sprinted across the concrete floor to try and reach them, closely following Bitch as she fired her shotgun one-handed off to her right, trying to keep the Chosen down.
It didn’t work. Not entirely.
I was halfway to them before I even realised I was being shot at. The ground in front of me resembled a pool of still water at the start of a sudden Atlantic storm, with puffs of concrete dust rising like raindrops splashing off the surface. The reality was more violent; sharp shards of concrete peppered my legs, some even cutting through the reinforced fabric of my pants. Someone was shooting at me, leading their shots more than they needed to.
Their network’s down, I realised as my body moved faster than the speed of thought, animal instinct hurling myself into cover, skidding the last couple of feet. The G-Man must have taken out their decker in the matrix, leaving them a broken mess of dumpshock and their network a tattered ruin. The only reason I wasn’t dead was that the Chosen gunman who shot at me didn’t know how to aim without an algorithm guiding his shots; he led me too much trying to compensate for its absence.
“Bug!” Grue exclaimed as he poked his head over the front of the van, firing off a brief burst of shots before ducking back down as the van was peppered with return fire. “I thought…”
“Made too much noise,” I stammered out, too full of adrenaline for full sentences. “GOD intervened. Have to bug out now; cops are on the way.”
Grue was silent, the skull of his helmet masking his thoughts. Beside him, Tattletale shifted in response to something only she could see, standing up behind the sides of the van and clutching her talisman as she murmured an incantation. A spectral image of Bitch appeared in front of her, solidifying until it was identical to the real thing. The spectre was sent sprinting out of cover, reaching for a grenade on her belt as she tried to make it to the next van over.
There was a deafening thump-thump-thump as a high-calibre weapon was fired from the other side of the room, churning through concrete as it shattered the false image of Bitch. The real Bitch leant out from her cover and fired a tight burst across the room from the machine gun integrated into her right arm, hopefully killing the gunman and taking the assault cannon out of commission.
Grue murmured something, but it was too quiet for me to make out over the gunfire and the constant ringing in my ears. It sounded like he swore. He turned to Regent, who was looking rougher than I’d ever seen him with bloodshot eyes and grime coating his jacket. At first I thought it was the strain of keeping the spirit under control, but his hand was clutching his thigh and blood was seeping past a compact field dressing.
“Burn it,” Grue said, and Regent sighed in genuine relief. “Everyone else, suppressing fire. We bug out back the way we came.”
He punctuated his remark by removing the magazine from his weapon, slipping it into a pouch and replacing it with a fresh one. I felt my own hands tighten on my gun.
“On my mark.” Grue shifted to one knee, facing the van. I stood up, hunched over, physically ready to poke my head over the top of the human-sized van even as abject terror continued to race through my mind.
“Now!” Grue rose, slamming his augmetic elbow down on the hood of the van so hard it dented the metal. He pulled the trigger, spent casings flying into the window. I stood up, not even seeing what lay beyond the van as I brought up the submachine gun, the morning Brian and I spent in the shooting range flashing through my mind as I focused all my attention on keeping the weapon level, with both hands on the troll-sized pistol grip and my arms outstretched.
I didn’t even try to aim, just pulled the trigger and panned the weapon from left to right over where I thought the Chosen were. Beside me, Bitch emptied the magazine of her integrated machine gun in a single burst of ammunition before bringing up her shotgun and firing off three rapid shots. Tattletale was almost using her as cover, keeping most of her body behind Bitch as she shouted an incantation that took form as a kaleidoscopic maelstrom of colours and sounds right on top of the Chosen’s positions, adding to the chaos as they mimicked gunfire, flashbangs and incendiary explosions.
Someone on the other side returned fire, sparks flying off the roof of the van. I felt hot metal slice through my brow, then the bone-shaking sensation of something skidding along my left horn. The force of it knocked my head to the left, where I saw another shot hit Grue in the head, leaving a gleaming metal wound in his helmet where it scraped off the black coating but failed to pierce the alloy beneath. Both of us kept firing, though I still couldn’t see what I was firing at.
Regent stumbled to his feet, his fire spirit veering away from the Chosen as it swooped past us, its featureless burning eyes seeming to stare right into my soul before it flew directly through the cab of the box truck and into the refrigerated compartment at the rear.
A second later, the entire back of the truck exploded in a titanic fireball that rocked our cover on its suspension and knocked Tattletale and me flat on our asses, my face feeling like it’d just been hit by a gout of hot steam as I skidded back two meters, friction tearing away at the narrow patch of exposed t-shirt between my armoured jacket and my aramid-lined pants. Tattletale went twice as far, but her trenchcoat caught the worst of it.
I rolled over onto my front, reaching for my gun and staggering to my feet just moments after Tattletale, just in time to see Grue take a grenade from a pouch on his webbing, pull the pin and lob it over the van with an underarm throw. I’d seen that model of grenade before, in the event horizon, and I closed my eyes just in time to miss the deafening explosion of light and smoke.
“Go!” Grue shouted as he fired another magazine into the smoke, either using the thermographic optics of his cybereyes to mark out targets or – more likely – just firing blindly into the mass of fire and bodies that appeared as a single blob of heat to my own eyes.
Tattletale was the first through the door, though she’d been given a four meter head start by the explosion. I followed her, then Regent – almost limping with his injury and the psychosomatic shock of his spirit's detonation. Bitch lingered at the doorway, firing back into the smoke with her machine gun as she covered Grue's retreat.
We dashed through the small office space in utter silence, knocking aside dusty old swivel chairs and partition walls in our haste. The quiet was only emphasised by the sudden drop-off of gunfire from the warehouse; it felt like the only sounds in all the world were the roaring inferno behind us and the ceaseless ringing in my ears.
Regent and Tattletale struggled on the way back through the window, the elven mage cutting her hand open on the glass, but then we were out under the open sky, the low cloud layer lit from below by the city’s ambient lights. As we ran back across the street to the old lab where we’d stowed the van, I felt fatigue starting to set into my limbs. The first of the adrenaline was starting to leave my system, and each step felt like I was wearing lead boots.
That sluggishness had also made its way to my brain, which meant that I almost didn’t understand what I was seeing when two cars rounded the corner, both of them low-set sedans with their original colours hidden beneath matte black spray paint and stencilled designs in red.
As Grue swore and Bitch raised her shotgun, I finally noticed the beady red optics mounted in the faces of the cars' occupants, their jaws set in fury and fear in equal measure; the look of people who had been called into a situation with no idea of what was waiting for them, but who knew exactly what was at stake.
Their decker stayed behind, I thought, even knowing it meant divine intervention. He stayed just long enough to send out an SOS.
Across the street, there was a horrific squeal of metal as Bitch’s up-armoured van knocked the doors of our makeshift hideout off their hinges in a shower of brick dust, splintering the flimsy metal shutters beneath the Bulldog's reinforced tyres as she rammed the closest sedan side-on, crumpling its bodywork and sending it careening sideways into the second, pinning the pair of them against the side of the warehouse.
Grue fired into the first car and I followed his lead, bringing up my pistol once again. I remembered his lessons more clearly this time, taking a half-second to line up the sights of the pistol on the driver of the second car; a wizened-faced cyborg whose skin was sickly-pale going on green at the points where it met steel. I fired. First at him, then at the others in the car. My shots were in controlled bursts, as accurate as I could make them.
In spite of everything, there was enough bandwidth left in my brain to notice the enormity of the moment. I’d accepted that I’d have to kill, but I had assumed that my first victims would be shooting back. I didn’t think my first kills would be murders.
“Come on!” Tattletale shouted from the open side door of the van. I’d lost seconds, which felt like losing years in that moment. Bitch was already reversing the van by remote, separating its hood from the closest car with a noise like a can being crumpled even as she hauled her body up into the rear. I tightened my grip on my gun and sprinted over to them, throwing myself into the back just as Bitch began to swing the van around.
I thought that was it, but Bitch slowed the van once we reached the corner and opened up the rear doors by remote. I was genuinely surprised to see that the Steel Lynx had somehow survived the warehouse; its frame and three of its camera optics were gouged and damaged, but the tracks still worked. Regent murmured something unpleasant as the drone rolled into the back. He might have been complaining about stopping to pick up a machine at a time like this, but I couldn’t tell; he’d slipped back into French in shock.
Bitch hit the gas, the wheels skidding momentarily before finding purchase on the asphalt. There was a lurching sensation that almost knocked me over, sending me staggering back towards the still-open rear doors of the van. If I hadn’t managed to grip onto the bars of one of Bitch's drone racks, I might have fallen out.
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I definitely would have fallen out when the van suddenly lurched to the right, rocking on its suspension like a ship taking on water as something slammed into the side hard enough to dent the armour plates. As Bitch swung us back around, I looked in mute horror out the back at the Chosen's scrapyard tactical, the makeshift APC's engine roaring as it closed the distance between us.
Beside me, the Steel Lynx's gun swung on its axis, pivoting up to turn in the confined space of its cradle before dropping back down until it was level with the armoured plates covering the modified dump truck's cabin. The gun spun up, then spat a stream of shots across the gap between the two vehicles. Over the near-deafening sound of gunfire, I could hear the gun’s mechanism clattering and squealing. It was wounded, ready to jam at any second.
And then, it did. The ammunition belt shuddered, the barrels pausing in their rotation for a fraction of a second. Hidden from my sight, some vital internal component stuck in place, wedged into its neighbours as the gun fell silent and electric motors clicked as they tried to force bullets through the broken mechanism.
The truck almost seemed to roar in celebration, as the Chosen rigger floored the engine and accelerated. I saw a figure clamber up out of a side hatch and haul himself onto the top of the vehicle, identifiable only as a silhouette against the streetlights until he extended a long, thin blade from his cyberarm and drove it into the remains of the APC's turret to anchor himself in place. In his left arm, Barker held an assault rifle one-handed, pushing it against the sling in order to gain some measure of control. As he raised it, Bitch flicked a mental switch and closed the rear doors.
A moment later, there was a noise like golf ball-sized hailstones hitting metal as Barker took shots at us, but the armour was holding. I holstered my weapon, releasing my death-grip on the rack as I slumped to the floor, my back against the still-warm chassis of the Steel Lynx. I looked left, and saw Grue had removed a section of his chest armour as he applied a trauma kit to a vicious-looking chest wound. Beside him, Tattletale had finished sticking an antiseptic patch to her sliced palm. She held out the box to me as my left eye suddenly went blurry. I reached up and touched my brow. My fingers came away with deep red blood coating the tips.
“You okay?” I asked Grue as I applied a patch to the wound on my brow, using the base of my still-sore horn as a guide.
“The vamp's security detail got me in the lung,” he explained, a little breathlessly. “It’s synthetic, so I’ll live.”
The van swerved to the left, as another hail of shots hit the rear doors and skidded down the length of the side, chipping away at the reinforced glass of the driver's side window.
Grue looked up, smacking his chest armour back into place as he put one hand on the back of the passenger seat and hauled himself to his feet.
“Can you lose them?” he asked.
“Don’t know,” was Bitch's succinct response. “Their truck’s pretty banged up, but so's mine. Just a question of which breaks first.”
I was impressed at how she’d managed to say that while serving around a commercial hauler coming from the opposite direction – with a terrified dwarf in a baseball cap at the wheel – especially since she’d been facing away from the road, with her hands off the wheel. That jogged something in my mind; I stood upright, banged my head on the ceiling and swore.
“Bitch, you're still online?!”
I should have seen it – would have seen it if that glancing hit hadn’t scrambled my brains. She drove the Lynx here, didn’t she? Should have seen it then.
Something rattled, like the van had just driven over a curb in the middle of the street. Birch’s attention was immediately drawn back to the road, but her body reached into a pouch on her ballistic vest and loaded another magazine into her arm.
“That was a spike strip.”
Her tone was calm, matter-of-fact, even as the street was bathed from end to end in flashing red and blue lights as a black and yellow roto-drone as big as a hang glider flew over us, its camera optics firmly fixed on our position. Ahead, two bulky Knight Errant trucks were in the middle of setting up a barricade, their armoured sides swinging out to form a wall. Bitch just managed to squeeze through in time, sending taksuited officers scrambling to get out the way. I doubted it would slow down the Chosen APC at all.
“Fucking pawns!” Grue exclaimed. “Did they get us?”
Bitch shook her head, “Tyres have a synthetic lattice in them, not air. Nothing to puncture. But, not sure how they found us.”
“DemiGOD compromised your network,” I said with a sigh as I slumped back down on the floor. “Passed it onto K-E’s deckers. I’ll clean it, you lose the physical assets.”
For the first time in my life, I didn’t want to submerge myself in the matrix, but my wants didn’t count for anything in that moment. My brain was still reeling from the dumpshock of my sudden exit, and reaching for the resonance felt like desperately trying to find purchase on a frayed rope. Still, I managed to latch on, my synapses burning with the strain of the sudden return of data that should have been as natural a part of me as anything in my meat.
I shut my eyes, ignoring the violent swaying of the van as Bitch dodged her way through the streets, and opened them to see a matrix alive with activity. Knight Errant's network was familiar to me; it was omnipresent, stretched throughout the city like a web that centred on each of their precincts scattered throughout the city, all of it fuelled by their main data hub in their Downtown headquarters. At the ends of each strand of web were patrol cars, special tactical vehicles, metropolitan CCTV, the biomonitors of individual officers, rapid-response Firewatch helicopters, harbour patrol boats, a small fleet of aircraft, speed cameras and a fleet of autonomous and remote piloted drones.
When those assets converged into a single place, that web began to resemble a cage of data like the one that surrounded Bitch's van. Four patrol cars had joined the chase, in addition to the recon drone hovering overhead, and I could see more assets being routed towards our location, as well as to other hotspots. It looked like we'd kicked the hornet’s nest; Knight Errant was mobilising throughout the entirety of the North End.
I ignored them as best I could, turning my attention to the infinitely smaller network that surrounded me. Birch’s firewalls were as resolute as ever, but as I used my access permissions to peel back each layer of defence I found an icon embedded within them. A Fibonacci spiral, left there by the G-Man in an expert display of subtle hacking that would have been impossible for me to do in such a short timeframe without resorting to obvious brute force.
With the permissions it granted, Knight Errant’s deckers had been able to track Bitch and everything connected to her network. I didn’t have time to be gentle in removing it; my connection to the matrix already felt like I was moving through a dead zone, and my senses were dulling by the second. It took all I had to gather resonance together into a spike and drive it into the icon, tearing it out of Bitch's systems like ripping a scab off a still-healing wound.
Once it was out, I risked another glance into the matrix. Bitch had shaken three of the four patrol cars and ducked into a tunnel that ran beneath a high-density housing estate to escape the recon drone, but one of the cars was still on her tail and with the Chosen's APC completely offline I had no idea how close they were. Nor did I have the time to worry, as a drone suddenly came online beneath the icon of the sole remaining patrol cruiser, detaching from its host before speeding towards us at an incredible pace.
Tattletale would mock me for it, but I’d seen one before on trideo. It was a pursuit drone, manufactured by and for Knight Errant and capable of magnetically locking into the underside of a suspect vehicle, where it became an unobtrusive tracker that broadcast its position back to the operations room, allowing the patrol car that carried it to pull back and deescalate the pursuit. Someone at Knight Errant had noticed our signal dropping off their network.
I waited for it to close the gap. Not because I wanted to, but because I couldn’t spin up another resonance spike any faster. When I drove the concentrated resonance into the drone, there was a horrible moment where it seemed like it wasn’t enough, before the signal abruptly winked out of existence in sparks of junk data. I winked out with it, the strain too much to bear without an obvious enemy to keep me going.
When I opened my eyes, I thought the bandage hadn’t stuck. My eyes were gummed up with blood, but as I tried to blink I realised it was coming from my tear ducts. From the taste of it on my tongue, I had a nosebleed as well. As I slowly blinked away at the blurred red mess, momentarily unable to even attempt lifting my hands up to my face, I felt a wet antiseptic wipe pressed against my brow, wiping away the blood from my eyes to my chin with a delicate hand. As my vision cleared, I saw Tattletale looking down on me with an expression of grim worry that she quickly schooled into a fake smile.
“Hey, omae, you're looking even more like a corpse than usual,” she joked. “Glad to see you haven’t joined our vamp friend on the other side.”
I groaned, trying to force myself up into a sitting position and only succeeding thanks to a frankly herculean display of strength from Tattletale, who put her other hand on my shoulder and helped pull me up.
“Digital threat's gone,” I coughed the words out past the blood in my mouth. “Get us the fuck out of here, now.”
“Working on it,” Grue reported from just behind the driver’s seat. “Got a plan to shake the pawns and put the Chosen on the defensive, but it’s only good if you can run.”
“Don’t worry about me,” I snapped, grabbing hold of the seat next to me and using it to haul myself to my feet. My vision swayed as blood rushed to my head. “Can hold my own.”
“Fucking hope so,” Regent retorted in a manic tone. “Because I sure as shit can’t carry you.” He looked almost as ashen as I did on a good day.
“Impact in ten,” Bitch said, her tone still dispassionate in spite of... well, everything. “Everyone brace.”
I moved up to the front of the van, grabbing the back of the passenger seat like my life depended on it. Through the windshield I could see the entrance to the parking bay of one of the many residential projects that made up the New Estates; a concrete castle of pedways and apartment blocks, deliberately segregated from its neighbours to create an insular ghetto community that wouldn’t spill out into the surrounding area.
The chaos of the night had kicked the hornet's nest: industrial garbage cans and junked vehicles had been rolled in front of the entrance to create a makeshift barricade, manned by an estate gang with an eclectic mix of clothes and gear, unified only by grey camouflage patterns on some of their clothes and a vague tactical aesthetic to their gear.
“That's your plan?” I asked, incredulous, as bullets started to pepper the windshield with white spiderwebs of broken glass. “A fucking block war?”
Bitch hit the barricade head-on, the shoddy materials no match for her up-armoured van, sending gang members scattering as she quickly spun to avoid a line of parked cars. As she hit a speed bump, the van lurched upwards as I heard something scraping along the roof. That was when I realised what the plan really was; the APC was a municipal dump truck. There was no way it’d fit inside the parking garage without taking half the roof down with it.
“There's only one exit onto the road,” Bitch reported as we passed between the rows of parked cars, “and it’s the way we came in.”
“Then we ditch the van,” Grue said, thinking on his feet. “Have it circle the upper levels before sending it back out. We'll make a break for it through the estate and hook up with the van on the other side.”
“Fuck,” Regent swore, breathlessly, as he clutched at his leg. “Knew I shouldn’t have skipped cardio.”
“Here, let me.” Tattletale leant over Regent, resting a hand over his wounded leg as she murmured an incantation, keeping her grip even as the van swung wildly as Bitch turned us up and onto the next floor of the parking lot. Once she took her hand away, Regent flexed his leg experimentally before standing up.
“It’ll have to do,” Tattletale said. “As for you, Bug, nothing I can do about nerve damage. Could take the pain away?”
“I’ll deal,” I replied, shaking my head. “Exhausted enough as is.”
“Then get ready to wake up,” Grue said. “That walkway there, Bitch.”
“Got it,” came the reply, before the van skidded to a bone-shaking halt. I threw the door open, staggering out onto the concrete, closely followed by the others as Grue moved up past me to take point. The second Bitch had extricated herself from the driver’s seat, she sent the van speeding away down the lot, the auto-nav software taking over as the doors were pulled shut automatically. None of us spared it a second glance as we ran into the corridors of the estate.
The multi-storey car park opened up onto a corridor that ran down the length of one side of a vast housing building, with an endless row of apartment doors to our left and the open space of the communal courtyard at the estate’s entrance three storeys below us, past a waist-high metal railing and thick concrete support pillars. The overhead lights were already intermittent enough, but at least a third of them were damaged in some way; flickering, barely lit or just completely non-functional.
Below us, the sounds of gunfire echoed from the parking lot as the Chosen killed their way past the barricade. It ended far sooner than I’d have liked, and as I threw a last glance back I saw Biter emerging into the courtyard, his cybernetic optics scanning the estate before fixing on us.
“Left, now!” I shouted, almost shoving Tattletale and Bitch into a side corridor moments before shots began to ricochet off the walls around us. The new corridor cut straight through the centre of the estate, branching off onto side passages that led to more rows of tenement apartments. After the first ten metres, it widened into a significant arterial route with shuttered shops on either side, as well as on a mezzanine level above our heads. From the wear on the shutters, it seemed like every third shop remained shuttered and empty even during the day. In front of some of those empty businesses, or tucked away beneath flights of stairs, were makeshift tents and shelters out of which eyes watched us from sunken, near-emaciated sockets.
Above our heads was a channel cut deep into the building; twenty floors of grimy apartment windows, balconies and near-busted air conditioning units rising up past the occasional pedway that spanned the width of the chasm to the distant, overcast sky. There was a shape up there, barely visible against the clouds, with a narrow body and narrower wings sticking out of the sides. A drone, hundreds of metres up and seemingly holding right over our location.
“Fucking cops...” I swore breathlessly, even as I struggled to keep pace with the others.
Tattletale looked up, then shook her head.
“Not a model they use.”
“Then who? Medhall? GOD?”
“Maybe,” she replied, an inexplicable grin pulling at the corner of her mouth, “but maybe not.”
“We'll go down at the end of this corridor!” Grue shouted from up ahead as he and Bitch waited for the rest of us to catch up. “There's a pedestrian entrance that’ll get us out onto the street, then we find somewhere to link back up with the van!”
“Got it,” I replied, panting. With each step, I desperately wished I’d taken up running at some point over the last two years. My only consolation was that Tattletale and Regent seemed to be having an equal amount of difficulty – provided that I ignored the nagging thought that their legs were so much shorter than mine.
I half ran, half fell down the stairs at the end of the corridor. It was almost completely silent, with only the pounding of feet, panting breaths and the occasional electric whirr of a dodgy light keeping us company as we emerged out into a lobby. As with the entrance to the parking lot, the lobby was occupied by a handful of local gang members who'd set up positions to defend their home from the horrors of the night.
They weren’t expecting an attack from within, and as they turned in shock to see who had just barged out of the stairwell, they were met with the barrels of three guns as Bitch, Grue and I levelled our weapons.
“Don't do anything stupid,” Grue snapped, his voice distorted by his helmet. “We're just leaving.”
There were five of them, and from the look of them none were older than their early twenties. Their gang colours – the same urban camouflage pattern as on the other entrance – were little more than armbands or cloth masks tied over their faces. Their weapons were second or maybe even third hand, a mix of pawn shop antiques and the kind of flimsy plastic crap that could be bought from a vending machine for chump change, but they were still loaded.
I had my gun trained on a dwarf girl in a grey hoodie and a second-hand ballistic vest that still had the logo of some low-rent security company on it, as well as the bullet holes that had claimed the life of its one not-so-careful owner. Her weapon was a Streetline Special, a flimsy holdout pistol that looked like nothing more than an accessory in the face of my Executioner, but I knew it was dangerous all the same. It was still half-pointed at the door behind her; she was expecting trouble, but still focused on the wrong direction.
And then, she moved, trying to bring her pistol around. I didn’t give her the chance; my first shot hit her in the dead centre of her ballistic vest, the high-calibre submachinegun ammunition making a mockery of her vest’s low-grade protection, better suited for knives and cheap pistols than any serious fire. The force of the shot knocked her off her feet, her gun going off as her wrist hit the floor. The sound of it was lost in the sudden burst of violence to my left and right, as Grue raked his assault rifle over two of the gang members and Bitch pumped a shotgun shell each into both of the remainder.
We didn’t linger over the bodies. I didn’t even look back as we sprinted out into the street, my exhaustion being pushed aside by a last burst of adrenaline as I found myself under the open sky once again. That sudden sensation of space above me was the only thing that saved my life, as I looked up to see Barker leaping down from a third storey walkway, his cyberspur blade fully extended and aimed right at my spine while his misshapen metal maw was bared in a rictus of silent rage.
I jerked to the left, the blow that would have sliced through the back of my neck instead opening up the sleeve of my armoured jacket as it travelled down the length of my right arm, knocking my gun out of my hand even as the entire limb went limp.
I fell to one knee in absolute agony, half-screaming, half-roaring at the almost incomprehensible pain. Barker loomed above me, so much more real in the flesh than he had been through Bitch’s optics. He was firing his assault rifle with his left hand, though I couldn’t see at who until Bitch suddenly barrelled into view, firing her shotgun at point blank range into the Chosen's knee. There were holes in Bitch's ballistic vest, but she seemed unaffected; I had to assume the armoured inserts coating her sternum had held.
Barker landed on the ground next to me, already bringing up his rifle to fire again. I swept my left hand over the ground until it touched the grip of my submachine gun, then pressed the barrel against the back of Barker's head and pulled the trigger, only releasing it once I had emptied what was left of my magazine into his skull. Sparks and blood flew from what remained of his face as he slumped over, his cybernetic limbs locking him in place as his body died.
I staggered to my feet again, the slightest movement sending agonising stabs of pain through my shoulder. I still couldn’t feel anything from my arm except for the world’s worst case of pins and needles. In front of me, Grue was turning, aiming his rifle up at the monolithic front of the estate. He was too late; I saw tracer rounds pass through his chest and out the other side as Biter fired down from the balcony, with two other Chosen survivors by his side.
As Grue dropped to the floor, I raised my Executioner and pulled the trigger, only for it to click on an empty magazine. Biter's chest exploded regardless, as a deafening crack echoed through the artificial canyon that separated the estate from its immediate neighbour. A second shot rang out, taking off the head of the woman to Biter’s right, before the third passed right through the concrete half-wall of the walkway, right where the last of the Chosen had ducked for cover.
There was a final moment of silence before the sound of sirens filled the canyon from end to end, the flanks of the estates bathed in flashing red lights as a trio of armoured ambulances in green and white livery sped down the street, coming to a halt in and amongst our scattered group.
A tricopter drone alighted from the back of each ambulance, underslung laser projectors marking out minimum safe distances in vivid red lines around each one of us, while guns turned to keep watch on what lay beyond the marked perimeter. Doors on the side of the vehicles disgorged armed guards in green jumpsuits with white accents on black body armour, followed by paramedics in lighter gear with emergency equipment held in each hand.
I saw two of them laying down a stretcher next to Grue, then hands on my own arms as my weapon was politely but firmly pried from my grip. Some manner of adhesive substance was sprayed down the length of the deep gouge Barker had left in my limb, before I was gently pushed back down onto a stretcher of my own, the base of it extended out to fit a troll’s legs as the two paramedics and two guards each grabbed the sides, lifting me up and jogging across to a waiting ambulance.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Grue being carried into the back of another, while Bitch, Tattletale and Regent presented a picture of absolute confusion as they were led to the third. Tattletale looked between me and Grue's unconscious form before pulling away from the paramedics and rushing over to join me in the back of my ambulance.
She held my left hand as we pulled away, a reassuring smile on her face as I drifted in and out of consciousness, half-hearing the chatter of one of the guards near the front of the cabin.
“-to K-E liaison, clear a path through your blockade on Dockyard and Fourth immediately. We are on-route with priority wounded and-" “-clear a path now. Don’t make this bigger than it needs to be; Ares and Evo have no beef in this city-” “-appreciate it, liaison. C-C one thirty-three out.”
Any attempt to listen in further was stymied as Tattletale face was replaced by the impassive features of a paramedic, an oxygen mask in her hand. She pressed it over my mouth and nose even as I shook my head to try and dislodge it, flicking a switch that stuck the rim of the mask to my skin. My struggling became weaker after that, my vision blurring until everything seemed to blend together in a single mass of pure white.
Then, I couldn’t see anything at all.