“Where’s Dakota?” Mai was sitting in the command centre, eyes blurring from going over list after list of inventory. One of the perks of being base commander was getting a nice room, with the most comfortable bed she’d ever slept in. One of the downsides was having to review every single document placed before her. And that was after her staff had filtered out all of the non-essential work.
“Not sure ma’am, saw her leave with some friends a couple of hours ago,” one of her staff replied as she dropped another sheaf of files into Mai’s retinal monitor.
Mai groaned as she saw how many files there were.
“Do I really have to review and sign off on all of these?”
“’Fraid so,” the woman grinned, “that’s the last of them though.”
“Thank the gods for small mercies. Ask the gate guards if they know where Dakota went would you?”
Going still for a second, the staffer blinked, then looked back down at Mai.
“Guards say that Dakota didn’t really say where they were going, but that they all seemed fired up about something.”
“Gods,” sighed Mai. “Put out the feelers, see if anyone’s …”
“Gunfire in the Talisman’s control area. Mother’s down,” called out an intel officer. Mai had installed a dedicated intelligence gathering station in the command centre. Biyu had utterly loved the capabilities it gave her and her team. It had been costly, mostly due to the fact that it used a lot of drones to gather the information they so desperately needed, but it had been worth it. Especially if it meant she was able to find her friend.
“Mother’s down?” Mai frowned at the staffer. She’d already had to tell them more than once that they needed to give clear reports.
“Apologies, Mother’s one of the highest ranking gangers in the city. Not a local. Seems she’s been assassinated on the steps of her headquarters, a lot of her people killed at the same time. Reports are coming in that they’re pursuing the attackers. One is down. Identified as …”
Mai leaned forward as the staff pressed their finger to their ear bead, trying not to scream in frustration as the man screwed up his face. By the look on Biyu’s face she felt the same.
“Hammer, Hammer’s down,” the man finally reported.
“That was one of the people with Dakota,” said her admin staffer.
“All drones to the area, pull them from any non-vital tasks. I want them found. Pull in all patrols, get our people ready to rescue them.” Ordered Mai.
She paced the control room, trying not to ask for another update. Every time she looked at her retinal monitor it seemed as though an hour had passed, only to see that bare seconds had.
“Get recon squad One-Three ready. Biyu, you’re with me. Make sure your eyes and ears know we’re coming.”
Biyu nodded, she’d worked hard at building a network of spies and informants throughout Nether City. Some she’d recruited by buying their loyalty, paying more than their employers ever could, but others she had recruited through building a rapport, humanising them, convincing them that they were important, helping them release their goals, stoking their resentment, assisting them in finding love. Whatever it took, Biyu was able to identify it and manipulate it to her own aims.
Mai had a mix of emotions on the subject. Firstly she was immensely proud of what Biyu had achieved in her time as Spymistress, a title which she had actually earned once she recruited her tenth spy. Secondly, the network of watchers and informants that she’d build up rivalled and most likely exceeded anything their enemies might have, sometimes even taking informants from other factions and turning them. Double-agents. Thirdly, she was secretly appalled at the devious and Machiavellian nature of Biyu. Never in a month of Sundays would she have thought that the rebel she had met in the sewer base could be so utterly devious.
None of which she allowed to show on her face as Biyu sketched a salute and started speaking into her comm.
“Do we let the Ghosts know?” asked Mai’s admin staffer.
“No. I don’t want to be owing them favours so quickly into our relationship. But have someone ready to ask for their help if things get hairy,” the staffer nodded and resumed their station.
“Word’s out, my pigeons are ready already sending reports. I’ll have my team verify and pass on only solid leads once we’ve deployed,” Biyu seemed to be somewhat distracted, understandable considering that it appeared she was filtering a lot of the reports coming in herself. “If they’re in the area we think they are, I’ve got people on the inside.”
“Let’s get moving, it’s going to take a good half-hour until we reach the edge of their control point and I can’t believe that they won’t have people out there trying to create a line between Dakota and home,” Mai winced as she selected and morphed her clothing into a Night Wolf.
As she walked she created a faction-only mission. RESCUE THE ASSASSINS, immediately choosing the YES as soon as it popped up.
“I’ll comm that out to my people, if they all accept it they’ll be able to hopefully level up as informants, watchers and spies,” Biyu muttered into her comm bead as soon as she finished speaking to Mai.
Mai waited until she had sent word of the mission out before speaking again.
“What’s the difference between an informant, a watcher and a spy?”
“Ah,” Biyu rubbed her hands together, “I love it when people ask me this. An informant is someone who either keeps their ear to the ground or works within a faction and sells me information. Sometimes useful, sometimes not. A watcher is someone tasked with watching and following specific people, items, buildings, what have you. And a spy, unlike the other two, is someone who can move around the city, insinuating themselves into whichever faction I deemed necessary to gather information and kill if so required.”
Mai nodded, Biyu’s words having confirmed some of her initial thoughts on the subject. Moving out of the command centre, they met the recon squad that Hind had brought with him.
“Want me to come along, Mai?” he asked, bouncing on the balls of his feet.
“No, I think we’re going to have enough of the upper command staff out and running around the city as it is. You and Jock stay here, be ready to rain hellfire down on the X if we don’t make it back.”
“You’d think that with the loss of Mother they’d be running along like headless chickens,” Hind pointed out. “Reckon they’ve got some sort of second-in-command who was just waiting for this sort of thing?”
“Makes sense. Biyu, any chance you can find out who?”
Biyu nodded, face going blank as she tasked her people to find out. Mai suspected that if Biyu didn’t already know it was because the second-in-command was another newcomer. Probably one of the people who had come initially to take the bounty on her head but stayed once they realised what Nether City had to offer.
Looking at the team Hind had brought, she was impressed. They were all hard-bitten men and women. Their whole demeanour radiated confidence to the point of arrogance, whilst their eyes were constantly shifting, taking everything in and either cataloguing it or assigning a threat rating to it. She had no illusion that each and every one of them had already worked out at least three different ways to kill her if they had to. It was second nature, instilled by the training simulations she’d had all of her best people running for at least four hours each day.
“I have command of this squad,” she said, trying not to shift as all of their hard, cold eyes turned upon her. It was as if she was being locked onto by combat droids. “The mission is simple: retrieve Dakota and any of the people she has with her. If I’m incapacitated, or killed, the mission remains the same and Biyu has command. If she falls, then command reverts back to Sergeant Huang. Clear?”
There was a round of nods. Short, sharp, no more than was required. Mai’s confidence in the people assigned to her went up.
“We’ve got them, they’re in Butcher’s Row, sector five-one,” Biyu reported, striding towards the rebel base camp. “We need to hustle.”
“Get ready!” Ma called out as she ducked down behind the shelter of a wall. Outside were the roars of the gangers and the locals they’d recruited to help them. Bullets peppered the walls in a near continuous hail of lead.
“Fucking outsiders!” cried Wu as he lobbed a grenade into the street. They’d had to stop worrying about killing civilians as it seemed that everyone in the sector was trying to kill them. There was a sharp explosion and the hail of gunfire died down for a second.
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“They’re going to try the stairwell again,” Dakota warned, scooting along on all fours into the main corridor of the hab block. She formed three mines, placing one directly opposite the exit from the stairwell, and the other two in planters containing fake plants. She didn’t have to worry about the elevator as they’d simply called it to their floor and then placed a cup in the doorway, preventing it from being closed.
Moving back to the room they were holed up in, she tried once again to contact the rebel command centre. Nothing but static greeted her.
Bastard jammer! They’d lost comms five minutes after killing Mother, static filling their minimap, clearing for an all too brief moment, then filling it again. It was only by following the sound of gunfire that Dakota had been able to meet up with Wu and Ma. Where Red was she had no clue.
“Who the fucking hells is leading them?” Wu cried as bullets punched their way through the plasticrete wall.
“It’s another outsider, not seen them before,” Ma had grabbed the remains of a mirror and was holding it up to look at the street beyond. Fortunately for them they’d been able to find a three storey building which wasn’t overlooked by a similarly tall building on the side they were sheltering. They had the height advantage but were facing at least thirty to one odds.
Locals really liked Mother, what hold did she have on them?
It pained her that they were forced to kill people she knew most likely didn’t have a choice over their actions, but she’d come to the cold realisation that if it meant she lived, she’d have to find a way to live with the guilt.
KILL!
KILL!
KILL!
HIT! 65%
BLEED @15% PER SECOND
STUNNED
HIT! 45%
BLEED AT 30% PER SECOND
STUNNED
Dakota popped her head around the entrance to the apartment they were in, bodies and body parts littered the corridor that wasn’t obscured by smoke.
“They’ve just triggered the first mine, I’m going to stay and fight from here,” dropping to her belly, she sighted on the now shattered stairwell door and prepared to sell her life dearly.
“Dammit! Where the hells did all of these pl … outsiders come from!” Mai bit her tongue at the slip she nearly made, the idea of losing Dakota driving her to distraction.
“Seems that Mother has been recruiting them recently. A lot were bounty hunters as we thought. But the rest have just started coming down. No-one knows what’s attracting them,” Biyu replied, seemingly not having noticed Mai’s stammer.
I fucking well know why these bastards are here, Mai thought. Perhaps we should start recruiting players to our faction as well.
She parked that idea, deciding that she would speak to the GHOSTS COMMANDER once they were back at the base on the best way to do it.
Bullets streaked down the street as the enemy players tried to hit her and her people, their stealth suits completely throwing off the enemy’s aim. Not that Mai was going to rely on that.
“Dakota! If you can hear me, we can’t reach you. We’re going to have to get the heavies!” she ducked back behind the building they were sheltering in as plasticrete was sent flying by a stream of bullets. She looked at her team. All of them were streaked with dust, blood on their faces from where shards of plasticrete had cut them. “Sergeant, pull your people back and get into the building at the end of the street. That’s going to be our command post. I’m going to call in the Knights. Biyu, get your people off the streets. They want a war, they’re going to get one.”
KILL!
Dakota spat a string of curses as she took down yet another of the players. They were all low-level members of the gang, and if her game playing experience had taught her anything, they were also low-level players.
Fucking beginners, probably promised a quick level up if they kill the famous Dakota, not that she knew whether the gangers had any idea it was her who had been involved in the killing of Mother.
Two of her mines had been detonated now, the enemy pushing further and further down the corridor with each attack. She was letting them come on, her bio-mass getting too low for her to be able to just spray away. Now she was forced to pick her shots, take her time aiming in order to ensure she got as many hits as possible. Although every miss still meant that she had an increased chance of SUPPRESSING her targets.
“Where the fuck is the rescue party!” screamed Ma. She’d been forced to use the last of her bio-mass HEALING a nasty wound to her shoulder and had been reduced to rummaging around in the hab block’s kitchen for a knife. The look on her face when all she’d found was a butter knife had sent Wu and Dakota into fits of giggles. Dakota had passed over her culling knife before Wu followed through with her threat of gutting them with the blunt knife.
Mai took the bio-mass boost Jock held out to her. Despite her orders, both Jock and Hind had brought a squad of Knights rather than sending them along. All of them were anti-personnel, Mai having decided that anything heavier risked doing more damage than necessary. She wasn’t sure she had the control points required to fix any damage that the anti-personnel suits were going to cause as it was.
“Remember, outsiders are the priority. Only engage locals if they engage you. This is going to be as quick an in and out as we can manage. There’s a jammer which kicks in about fifty paces away from Dakota and her people.”
The battle raging around Dakota’s hold-out had been easy to find once they’d moved a drone far away and high enough to look down on the battle without being jammed.
“There’s a lot of locals in that battle,” Biyu started to mark them in yellow. “Looks like they’re being used to pin Dakota’s team down whilst the outsiders storm the building.”
Looking at the display from the drone, Mai could see bodies littering the street, giving up on counting once she reached twenty.
“Charge in, charge out. The enemy aren’t using any heavy weapons, so I’m not worried about that. Don’t get slack though, nothing to say they won’t up the ante once they know we’re here.”
She didn’t wait for them to reply, forming her own mecha-suit and running through the start-up process. Smiling, she realised it felt good to be back in the suit.
Born to mecha, she thought as she gave the signal for her Knights to move forward.
As they advanced, Mai programmed in a pattern for her countermeasure grenades. Taking point, it was her responsibility to ensure that the advancing mecha had as much cover as they could possibly get. The counter-measure grenades would not only obscure them from normal vision, but they would scramble retinal monitors and weapon scopes, making it even harder for their enemies to hit them.
“Firing counter-measures,” she keyed the trigger and there was a series of small explosions on her mecha’s chest, the grenades sailing out over one hundred and fifty paces away. “Advance, half-speed.”
Her Knights sped up from the slow walk they’d previously been moving at to a jog, their heavy feet pounding in a clashing chorus of metallic impacts. As good as the cover the counter-measures provided was, it also prevented them from being able to see their enemies.
Mai licked her lips as they plunged into the smoke area, wild shots striking her mecha, the small calibre of the weapon doing little damage. Her minimap fizzled and died as the enemy jammer took effect.
Unlike comm beads, mecha suits also had tight-beam laser comms capable of locking onto numerous receivers so long as they had an unbroken line of sight.
“Close in Knights, let’s see about taking these bastards down before they even realise what they’re facing,” she received a chorus of enthusiastic replies, her Knight’s blood up.
She wished that she had a Destroyer, the suit's capability for destruction would have proven to be useful in driving away the civilians from the area, but the potential for collateral damage had been too great.
As it was, their Nightmare anti-personnel suits still stood five paces tall, with their inherent INTIMIDATION buff which applied to not only those who could see them, but also hear them.
"Key your subsonic speakers, let's have these bastards wetting themselves before they even know what they're facing."
Glyphs appeared as soon as she fired up her own speaker, the subsonic waves designed to induce PANIC within thirty paces. Unable to use her minimap, she prayed that the enemy were starting to break.
They cleared the counter-measure cloud with no warning. One second they were blind, the next they were back out in the artificial light of Nether City, stunned enemy gangers only just now realising what they faced.
She didn’t give them a chance to gather their wits. Her tri-barrels spat lasers, explosive vaporisation blowing her targets into bloody chunks as she raked a cluster of PANICKED gangers.
KILL!
KILL!
KILL!
MULTI-KILL
TITLE - GODDESS OF NIGHTMARES – MORE THAN TWENTY ENEMIES PANICKED AT ONE TIME
As her Knights added their own firepower to the already one-sided battle, the gangers broke and fled. Mai slowed her rate of fire, conscious of the cost in bio-mass, even using the speakers was costing her half-a-per-cent per second. It didn’t seem a lot, but when she added the cost of repairing any damage to her SOAK, as well as the rest of her weapons it all added up.
The door in the building the gangers had been besieging opened up and Dakota and two others sprinted out of it, running in her direction. Spinning around, she dropped to a knee and popped open the canopy of her suit.
Dakota and her friends ran around the front, taking shelter behind her suit’s bulk.
“Damn it’s good to see you,” Dakota gasped, bending over as she tried to catch her breath. “Things were a bit hairy.”
“Take a swig and form your own suit, we’re leaving,” Mai handed each of the Chosen a bottle of bio-mass boost, taking them back once they’d had their fill. She couldn’t tell if she was relieved that they were alive, or utterly livid at the risk her friend had taken.
Both, I’m fucking both, she thought, fighting back tears and the urge to scream at them for their stupidity.
“Is that all of you?”
Dakota had the grace to look ashamed as she scuffed the ground with her toe.
“No, we’ve lost Red. Can’t get hold of her and no knowing where she's gone.”
Mai pounded the side of her mecha, lips pinched tight so that she didn’t say something they’d all regret.
“Suit up, we’re heading home. If we need to, we’ll come back and rescue her. For now, let’s get out of this shit show you’ve caused.”
As the other three formed their own suits, Mai sent a tight-beam to her Knights, commanding them to withdraw. Leaving a burning street littered with the bodies of locals and outsiders alike, the rebels headed back to base.