The ‘SURFACE’ level was another large open bay. There were things covered under that thick, shiny material that looked very similar to the stuff that my meal bags had been made of, only it was white, not brown.
Mara had moved to a low pedestal at one side of the room and was accessing the glowing panel.
“What are you doing?” I asked as I slung the rifle.
“Checking vehicle ICA charge status. When I started the Power Up routines yesterday, the plant began a trickle charge to the vehicle cradles as part of the sequence. The Ape, the Guts, and the Howlers are still charging, but the bikes are ready to go. Do you have motorcycles in this time, and do you know how to ride one?”
“I know what they are, and I have ridden short-distance scooters in the big city, but that was years ago and nothing like what I think you’re describing.”
“Okay, we’ll ride double then…if you still want to help me?”
“What are you planning?”
“Screw up a bunch of slavers and make them cry.”
“I’m in.”
She smiled at me and quickly moved to one of the smaller wrapped things. Pulling a band near the bottom, she worked the white cover off, revealing a two-wheeled vehicle on a suspended cradle. Pulling a lever, the cradle lowered to the floor, and she began rapidly tapping on a panel mounted in the center of the handlebars. The wheels were made of some kind of metal mesh, and as she tapped, they expanded out into something that looked like a porous tire. Sliding her rifle into a scabbard on the side of the vehicle, she pulled a pair of helmets off the wall and tossed me one.
I slipped it on and saw that more data was illuminated on the inside of the visor. I’m sure it meant something, but at the moment, I had no idea what it was or how to use it.
Mara climbed onto the vehicle and shuffled it around, “Climb on and hang on!”
I slid onto the seat behind her, “Where should I hang onto?”
“There are grips beside the seat, but it’s safer if you put your arms around my waist. That way, I can feel your body movements and adjust our balance.”
“Are you sure?”
She laughed, “Haven’t you hung on to somebody before? Yes. It’s fine; you’re not going to be molesting me.”
Following her instructions, I put my arms around her waist and hung on. There was a whine, and the vehicle took off toward a wall that slid aside, revealing a clearing with what looked like a fallen-down cabin and an old road leading down off the top of the ridge. My visor had snapped to life, and I could see everything in that gray-toned light as though it were day.
“You okay back there?”
“So far.”
“Good, I’m going to speed up now.”
The vehicle’s whine grew more intense, and now we were flying down the scratched path through the tree line. Occasionally, she would slow quickly and dodge left or right to avoid branches or other debris in our path, but soon, she would have us up to speed again. After a while, I was actually starting to enjoy this.
“I need your help. Transferring drone control to you.”
The visor of my helmet flickered, and the view that we had seen up in the OP was now visible as a semi-transparent image.
“We’re the blue squares…opposition will be the red triangles. Those red rectangles are the carts. Look in the upper left of the helmet, see that little yellow glowing square?”
“Uh..yes?”
“Make sure you’re looking straight at it with your left eye and wink with your left eye twice.”
I did, and a string of words unrolled.
“Do you see the menu?”
“Like a restaurant? All I see is multiple lines of text.”
“That’s it! Look for ‘Drone Operations’.”
“Found it!”
“Look at it straight with your left eye and wink twice.”
Doing that caused a whole bunch of things to appear on the screen.
“Look for ‘Target Designation’, and do the two left winks.”
“Okay.”
“Great! See the four arrows at the top of the screen…?” as she was talking me through this, Mara was still controlling the vehicle as we bounced down the incredibly rough road.
“Those are the drone controls. It’s not as good as a haptic rig, but it will do in a pinch. Use your left winks to make the drone go in that direction. The Up-Down arrows beside the four will make it climb or dive. Now, fly the drone over those carts. Keep it high; the numbers to the right of the up-down are altitude above ground in meters. The numbers to the left of the four arrows is the speed in meters per second.”
Focusing on what I could see in that transparent view and using my winks, I was able to get the drone following at about the same speed as they were traveling, and then I saw them stopping, “I think they’re setting up camp.”
“They are? Good. Left side of your visor. See the ‘Highlight target’ cue?”
“Yes.”
“Wink on that, and then look at one of the bad guys and wink three times. Not two. If you screw up, look at them with your right eye and wink three times. Keep doing that until all the bad guys have red triangles on them.”
“Okay,” I got to work and was doing this quickly.
After about twenty minutes, she slowed, and the vehicle got much quieter, “We’re about 100 meters out. Are they setting up camp?”
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
“They have a fire going.”
She stopped the vehicle and motioned for me to climb off; she did the same, “Taking over drone control…unless you want to keep running it?”
“I do, but I need more instruction.”
“You’ll get it. For now, go back to the menu…the yellow square in the corner? And wink twice at ‘Tactical Plot’.”
My visor shifted, and now I saw pale blue lines highlighting trees, rocks, and slopes.
“I just added a topo scan to go with the threat marking. Let’s go.”
Unslinging my rifle but keeping it on safe, I followed her and accessed the menu again; I had seen something called ‘Vision Modes’, and it was what I thought. The two different kinds of Infrared, as Mara called it, ‘Active’ and ‘Therm’, and ‘Light Intensification’. I switched to Light Intensification, and it was a lot easier to maneuver.
“Good call. I should have thought of that. They have those two Spec-Ops augments, and they can spot the IR emitters. Going full passive is the safest bet to sneak up on them.”
“Spec ops augments? What are those?”
“The two freakish giants they have? The ones you call socs?”
“You know what they are?”
“Bio modifications. A special weapon like me, but instead of stuffing them in an avatar body, they hit them with a genetic modification retrovirus. I guess it breeds true if they’re still around.”
“Your people created them?”
“Like I said, we thought we were going to lose, and we got desperate. The rumor was we were going to load up one-way ships with Spec Ops augments, fire them at Hi-Sider transports or stations, and they would board and destroy. I don’t know if that ever actually happened or even if that was a real plan, but that was the rumor.”
Mara was incredibly quiet as she moved, and I wasn’t much louder. You learn how to hide and sneak when you’re traveling in the places I did and don’t want to draw attention. As we drew closer, little red dots began appearing on the visor.
“What are these dots?”
“The bad guys you marked. When we get within 20 meters, you’ll start getting range at your default setting.”
“So we know where they all are?”
“Uh-huh.”
When we approached the first perimeter guard, the number ‘20’ appeared by his dot and decreased as we got closer. Mara started her approach, but he must have seen something, so he was turning toward her. I stepped loudly on a branch, making it crack, and he spun to face me. Before he could shout or do anything else, Mara was on top of him and slitting his throat.
“Thank you. I screwed up, and you saved my ass. In my defense, I haven’t done this for a while.”
“Like four hundred years?” I asked innocently.
“Yeah, smart-ass, just like that.”
Dragging the body out of sight, Mara looked over its gear, pulling out one of the cartridges from the loops on the rifle stock.
”Brass, lead bullet…eleven or twelve millimeter…” she popped the bullet out with a small pair of pliers she pulled from a pocket, “Some kind of smokeless powder. That revolver of yours…that uses smokeless too?”
“Sure. It can also use black powder, but patent powder is so much better.”
She shook her head, “I should have been asking questions like that earlier and looking over your gear. This is primitive compared to what we’re carrying, but it will kill us just as dead.”
“Even you?”
“Even me, if it hits me in the right place. I am wearing body armor for a reason,” she said as she tapped her vest and her helmet. Drawing her pistol, she slid a fat cylinder out of a pouch and fitted it to the end, then she drew the slide back. I had seen the self-loading pistols the Emperor’s Guard and Security Police used; this looked much the same as those, but somehow sleeker and more deadly.
We were now moving slowly and staying low, using the blue lines in our visor to plot the best path while using as much cover and concealment as possible.
“You’re good at this,” she commented after I had gotten behind another sentry and taken him down by choking him out.
“Not by choice.”
“It’s never by choice,” she agreed as we continued forward.
Mara took out the next sentry with a surprisingly quiet pistol shot to the head. I moved forward and dragged him behind a bush as she covered me.
“How was that so silent?” I asked. I had heard that there were things that could muffle gunshots, but nothing so effective.
“Using a binary propellent in subsonic rounds, for one thing; for another, this suppressor evacuates the air a fraction of a second before the bullet is fired, leaving a near vacuum in the barrel. That removes the ‘pop’…at least that’s how it was explained to me.”
Thinking about how much technology had been lost in the war and the aftermath was stunning.
We had made our way through the outer layer of sentries, with those four now unable to stop anybody anymore. There were two more on the far side of the camp, and Mara spoke up as I was moving, “They have line of sight on each other. One goes down…the other one will see it.”
“I could take one; you could take the other?”
She thought for a moment, then nodded.
Beginning my stalk, I carefully stayed behind the blue-lined cover. Crawling at times because the undergrowth on this side was a lot less common. On the inside of my visor, I could see a blue triangle showing me Mara’s position. It took some time, but finally, I was close enough to rush.
“I see you’re set.”
How? Oh, the drone.
“On three…One…Two...Three!”
I rushed forward and tackled him, knocking him to the ground before slamming his head into a rock. He twitched a little and then was still.
“Got mine.”
“Same…moving to you.”
She appeared like a ghost, slipping through the shadows.
Opening her visor, she looked at me; I followed suit.
“Okay,” she said in her actual voice and not the whisper that had been inside my head, “Six down, fourteen to go. You were right; the Augments…the socs are the really dangerous ones. I’ll try to take of them, but first, we need to thin the rest of them out so they can’t reinforce.”
“How?”
She pulled a canister off her harness. “Make sure your visor is down and locked.”, she said before she immediately did that with her own.
Her next action was to pull a pin and then press down hard on the top of the cylinder before tossing it into the center of the camp. It landed with a thump as I was flipping my own visor down and hearing it click locked.
A second later, it started jetting out a large white cloud of smoke and looking at Mara, I saw she had just prepared and thrown another one.
“Set vision to’ Therm’,” she said as she threw the second one, “that will let you see through the gas. The socs are going to get hit harder than the rest of them from it, and they won’t be able to smell or see too well. They can still hear, of course.”
Scrolling through the vision modes, I selected ‘Therm’, and now I could see colorful shapes against a blueish background. The ones with the red triangles were clearly the ones that I had marked, and I took the rifle off safe before starting to shoot.
It was too easy; they were weeping and coughing and crying as whatever that smoke was, was bad business. The two socs were easy to spot, being so large, and there was Mara’s blue triangle moving up behind one. There was a ball of white light coming from the ghostly blue barrel of her rifle as she fired, and the first soc’s head exploded. The second reacted to that sudden noise and, with that unbelievable speed I had seen before, had turned and was charging her. Mara tried to evade but was too late, and the soc slammed into her, flinging her out of the cloud of smoke. I quickly switched to ‘Light Intensification’ and began running in that direction, shooting two of the other raiders who were hacking and coughing their way out of the smoke as I passed them.
Mara was on her feet now but had dropped her rifle while the soc was swinging at her with a massive cleaver. She was dodging and weaving, so I dropped to one knee, squeezed the grip with the heel of my hand, and placed my finger on the trigger. The aiming system appeared on my visor, and I squeezed.
The bullet hit right where I was aiming, the back of the soc’s knee as he was swinging it forward. That sent him off balance, and he crashed down on his back.
“Thanks!” she said as she jumped ten feet in the air and crashed down on his chest with both boot heels. The soc actually bounced from that impact, and I took the opportunity, as Mara backflipped off of him, to shoot him in the head. Then, there was a thud, and the wind was knocked out of me. Gasping, I turned and saw a raider with a pair of snaplock pistols, one of which was smoking. He was as surprised as I was that I wasn’t down. At this range, even the Empire’s best fiber and steel armor would have been punched through.
Still wheezing and shaking my head, I managed to raise the rifle, and one shot took him down. Turning back to Mara and the soc, I saw the giant was back on his feet, and Mara was almost dancing with him while slicing with her knife or doing precise punches and kicks. I had gotten my breath back, so, aiming carefully, I put two more shots into the soc’s head. As the head snapped to one side. Mara managed to trip him and began stabbing into its throat as it fell over. It took a little while, but now it was finally down. I watched as she picked up her rifle before we finished clearing out the rest of the raiders.