Camping piece of shit

“We’re coming in,” Maverick said on the comms, and the mini map pinged him and Sulphyr moving down the same path the team had taken earlier. On their mini stat-graph, the word ‘clone’ was highlighted.

“My MG still there?” Sulphyr asked. Nuke was over by the charred hole in the floor where the cannon had gotten him, and she kicked around.

“I don’t see it.”

“I got it,” Nova said. One of his drones chirped in the back half of the room and lifted the LMG out of a pile of broken dishware.

“Fuck yeah. Let’s storm this breach,” Maverick said.

The two of them came in through a door in the back that was untouched by the drone’s assault, and it looked like they were coming on stage, moving from a world of peace and quiet and snack trays onto a set painstakingly decorated like a war zone.

“So how we doing this?” Maverick asked.

Nova pinged the mini map.

“There’s a service staircase at the back pantry that leads right up to the next terrace’s kitchen. We’ll take that up and rush him from that level.”

Robin looked at him, her eyes narrowing behind her red plastic face shield.

“Thought you said staircases were a no go?”

“This one doesn’t go anywhere else. It wouldn’t make sense for them to waste time or resources trapping it when they could just concentrate their defenses on the actual penthouse chokepoints.”

“You willing to bet your ass on that?”

“Yeah bro, that’s why I’m going up the stairs.”

“We’ll I’m not risking all of us at one route,” Maverick said. “Nuke, you and Robin get ready to pop a thermal smoke on the staircase and push this mother fucker. Sulphyr and I will leap-frog up the sides.” He gestured with his thumb toward something on his back, a kind of braced backpack connected via tubes to elbow and kneepads that he hadn’t been wearing before he dropped into his clone. Whatever it was, Sulphyr was wearing the same thing.

“Quasar, you and your crew can take the staircase. If you make it, we’ll rush it once you’re in position. Got it?”

“Alright, yeah,” Nova said. “Makes sense.”

“All right let’s kill this bitch,” Maverick said, and got moving.

Nova made some keystrokes in the air and Gradie’s team table floating off to the side changed shape. The other five members greyed out and minimized, so only Luke and the twin’s stat bars appeared next to his. A notification alerted him that he had been moved to “stairs team”.

Angel flipped something over on his rad thrower and another message told Gradie it was now in “extreme CQC mode”. He took up point with Luke behind him, followed by Nova then Gradie taking up the rear. They advanced in a staggered formation and Gradie batted away more clubhouse flashbacks.

“They wanna suck down machine gun fire out there, so be it,” Angel said as they made their way through a back kitchen area towards the staircase. “Mav always likes to over plan everything.”

“I can kind of see his point, though,” Luke said, in a tone that Gradie knew was tense from not wanting to tell Angel how wrong he was. Maverick’s plan was textbook, besides maybe the part with the girls running at MG fire head on, smoke grenade or not. If Nova’s sweeps had missed a bomb in the staircase, it would have been game over for the entire op if they all took the stairs.

“You mean being better safe than sorry?” Angel said, not really asking. “Yeah, but Quasar swept that shit all over, and he’s assuming they don’t have another gun drone just waiting out there. And we could take the stairs one at a time if he’s really worried. And what the fuck are we gonna do if one of us gets dropped if we’re split up? Can’t get to each other for aid if we’re spread out. Isnt that one of the basic rules of combat or something?”

“You’re making a lot of good points,” Luke said. “And I could have some answers to them, and you could bat them back at me, and we could sit there talking forever, but I think you’re missing the big picture. There’s no good way to rush a fucking MG.”

“Alright, fair enough,” Angel said, sounding more fed up than intellectually satisfied with the response.

The staircase, despite some attempts by the dev to make the recessed lighting look ultra futuristic, was a basic cement fire escape. Nova’s drones went up first, found nothing, and then the team followed. Absolutely nothing happened inside, but when they stepped out onto the humming service hallway, Gradie felt something had changed.

While before the Hardworlds had felt separated by a vast distance, and their calls to him had felt like forlorn cries of morning sailing over a deep canyon, the simple act of ascending a baren concrete staircase, rifle raised, had stirred up the pieces of them wedged in Gradie’s soul, and now he felt them around every corner. Maybe they had gotten fed up with his spurning them and taken matters into their own hands. For not the first time, he was struck by the feeling that the Hardworlds had a mind of their own.

“We’re in position, and all in one piece,” Nova said on the comms as they stepped out onto the carpeted terrace. Gradie had déjà vu. It looked exactly like the level below now reduced to rubble by the drone, only smaller, as if the world was slowly collapsing in on them. The massive window frame glowed with dying orange sunlight, as if a shadow cast by some cloud or tower had passed away when they were in the stairwell. Without the tinted glass, the flashing, sparkling skyline seemed to point in at them like bared knife blades.

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“Nuke, pop a smoke when youre ready,” Maverick said. “Robin, hold your fire till you’re sure you got a bead.”

“So never?”

“Pretty sure then!” Maverick said over the stifled laughter.

“Smoke out!” Nuke whispered, and the sound right in his ears sent tingles down Gradie’s back.

There was a pop up the staircase, and a strange sparkling smoke that flashed in places like shrunken lightning spread across the top landing. Nuke and Robin stepped out onto the staircase and started jogging up the stairs, a jog being about as fast as Nuke could move. Her footsteps fell heavily on the stairs, and Gradie was sure the noise alone would give away her location, smoke grenade be damned.

“Aight, moving up,” Maverick said. A few seconds later, he floated up like peter pan on a stage wire and flipped over the glass railing on the terrace at the other side of the wide staircase. He rose and fell, completely soundless, and aimed his weapon up towards the smoked out MG position at the top of the stairs. A few seconds later, Sulphyr floated up and over and landed behind him.

“Hold it till he starts firing,” Maverick advised.

“Yeah, I know!” Robin hissed.

Suddenly, a red laser darted out of the smoke, seeking, it fluttered back and forth down the staircase, until it grazed the top of Nuke’s head, then doubled back and settled on her chest.

“How the fuck is it getting through—” Sulphyr started.

Three things happened at once. Maverick yelled “Turtle!”, Robin fired her laser, and the MG went wild.

Sparks skipped off Nukes armor and she squealed and contracted into a short pillar that made the stairs under her flex into a dip. The soft carpeted stairs around her coughed up fabric and plastic as Robin sent laser beams as thick as telephone poles towards the MG.

“Engaging!” Gradie yelled out loud, unable to fight the habit, and stepped back until he could see the central portion of the electric smoke, where strange muzzle flash glowed dully like lightning behind clouds, and lay into his neo-AR. Luke opened up a second later, and before another second had passed, they were talking their fire again, sending a single sustained stream of whatever the rounds were made of onto the MG position.

But much like the last time, it didn’t seem to make a lot of difference, though it did seem to piss the guy off.

The stream of tracers, mixed with the sporadic pulse of his targeting laser, danced away from Nuke and Robin, and headed straight for Gradie and Luke.

“Shit!” Before Gradie had the word out, Luke had grabbed him by his back handle and thrown the two of them to the ground at the base of the wall. The terrace exploded over their heads, and the four of them, almost at the same time, flipped open their cover packs and held them up like the machine gun fire was only so much drizzle.

With cartoon-like comedic effect, the stream of floor-ripping death stopped just feet from where Gradie and the other three were huddled against the wall, then flew back the way it came like a frustrated phantom made of tracer fire.

“Wait...” Luke said, barely out loud.

“Fuck!” Robin yelled. “He’s got prismatic shielding! I saw it!”

“I’m gonna cover you!” Maverick yelled, now up on some higher level. “Get ready to move, Nuke!”

“You can’t cover shit!” Robin yelled, flipping something around on her cannon. “He’s dug into a god damned slit!”

Sulphyr’s MG opened up somewhere before she finished talking, and the enemy MG swept back over her towards the other side of the staircase.

“Pussy mother fucker!” she yelled, and her canon fired a single laser-less shot that Graide’s HUD told him was a railgun, of which she only had five rounds per mag.

“Yo Maverick,” Luke said on the comms, calm as a barfly. “I think the MGs locked horizontally. It couldn’t quite make it to us.”

Across the way, the machine gun fire chased Sulphyr and Maverick back towards the far wall, their jump suit assisted leaps looking like circ de solei maneuvers out of place. Just when the fire seemed like it was about to catch them, it stopped.

“Holy shit! He can’t touch this far!” Sulphyr whooped, and lay into his MG as the enemy shredded the floor just feet from him.

“Fuck!” Robin mashed the trigger on an open bolt. All five of her rail gun round had sunk into the black hole of the MG position without effect.

“Nuke, move the fuck out!” Maverick yelled.

“Got it!” She popped out of her turtle form and sprinted up the stairs. Robin fell over onto her face mid reload.

“What the fuck!”

“Not up!” Maverick yelled frantically. “Get out of there!”

“Fuck him!” Nuke said, firing her grenade launcher as fast as she could.

Robin scrambled up behind her, crawling up the stairs.

“Bitch if you get me killed you’re paying for my clone!” There was laughter in her voice.

The spray of fire darted over like a flood light and Nuke disappeared in a cloud of debris with a squeal.

“Shit!” Robin threw herself as flat as she could and the tracers zipped over her head and one sparked off her armor.

“I cant move!” Nuke yelled. As the dust cleared, Gradie saw she had turtled mid fall and was laying flat on the stairs like a toppled cocoon.

“Cover me!” Angel said suddenly behind Gradie, and moved out with his rad thrower raised. Gradie bolted up and held his cover mesh like a spartan shield and fired blindly at the fading smoke atop the stairs. This time, the MG ignored him and walked its fire from Nuke to Robin.

Just before the line of fire made it to her, Angel’s gun made a rocketpunk whining sound and shot a burst of green light right at Robin. The staircase beneath her disintegrated and she fell down into darkness as the tracer rounds blazed through the empty air she had just been breathing.

“Ahhhhh shit!” she screamed and landed hard somewhere below. Angel turned to shoot Nuke, but the MG flashed over to them and Luke had to pull him and Gradie back by the handles as the wall next to them exploded.

“Moving up!” Maverick yelled. Gradie saw him and Sulphyr ascending the staircase on his minimap. They were hugging the far wall and were still a good fifty feet from the top level.

The enemy machine gun changed pitch, to a steady rhythm of one second bursts.

“He’s drilling my head!” Nuke yelled, completely serious. Robin, Sulphyr and Mack all burst out laughing on the comms.

“Fuck you assholes, do something!”

“Just let him finish,” Mack snickered.

“I’m going to fucking kill you!” Nuke squealed.

“Ok, fuck it girl. I got you,” Mack said, and Gradie saw his icon move suddenly from where it had been sitting for the past ten minutes at the top of the stairs, toward the MG position.

Gradie had gotten to his feet and was stepping back with his rifle raised up toward the elevator platforms when he saw Mack, very small and partially blending into the wall via some kind of active camo but outlined in green by the computer’s HUD, climbing across the walls and ceiling. It took Gradie a few seconds to understand that Mack was using his half moon weapons to grab the surfaces like a sci-fi spider.

When he got right over the smoke, he paused, hung by one hand, and then swung down and disappeared.

“Grena—”

The explosion cut him off, and even from behind the smoke the flash was almost blindingly bright. A few seconds later, chunks of debris rained on the stairs.

There was an unexpected moment of silence, the first real quiet in ages, as the MG died and the team waited breathlessly for it to return.