Step into the dojo

On the small window in Gradie’s HUD, Maverick exploded into a million little pieces and the hallway crumbled like a kid’s diorama caught in a pressure wash. The feed went solid grey with dust and the team was invisible until the drone switched to thermal. The steady beam of machine gun laser fire lit up a solid line that strafed back and forth, blindly.

“Shields!’ Nova shouted, and Luke and the others held up their barrier meshes. A stray burst from the MG caught the top corner of Luke’s and ripped it out of his hands in chunks.

“Well that didn’t do shit,” he said flatly.

A burst of sparks above Gradie’s head made him jump and almost squeeze off a round, but he realized it was Nuke cutting through the shaft on queue.

“On me!” Angel screamed. A burst of white light on the small screen told Gradie Angel was activating his rad thrower in short-range disintegrate mode. Luke snapped up and bolted to Angel’s side while Robin held Nova VIP style and rushed him to his brother. She had a shield mesh raised in front of her head, and when a burst of MG fire hit it, it fared better than Lukes, absorbing half of the rounds in a series of small flashes before shattering and spraying off them like a bonfire caught in a strong wind.

Another burst struck Angel dead on but was buffeted against a till then invisible force field that took on the color and glare of the laser fire and warped and wrapped around it in a cone for a brief second before vanishing again. The MG danced across the room in another pass, came back and rippled Angel’s barrier again, and was on its way toward Robin and Nova when Angel and Luke suddenly disappeared.

“Jump Robin!” Nova said, and the two figures leapt forward just as the laser fire sparked off Robins armor. They disappeared into a darkened pit and an alert on Gradie’s feed told him Robin had taken critical damage, but was still alive.

“Shit!” She yelled in the comms, and in some strange defect of the telepathic channel, her voice rang right in Gradie’s skull as if she was trapped inside his thoughts.

“Jesus!” He threw his hands up to his head and Nuke’s cutter went dead above him.

“Dammit Robin watch that shit!” Maverick said.

“I swear that girl’s a Speaker,” Mack said.

“I am not! I’m just fucking pissed!” This time her voice was a normal volume on the comms.

The MG went quiet suddenly.

“Shit!” Robin said. “They know we’re down here!”

Gradie looked on the mini-map as Nuke started cutting again. Nova, Angel, Luke and Robin were all clustered in a room on the far side of the condos, one floor above Gradie and Mack and one floor below the floor Nuke was cutting into.

“I’m working on cameras now!” Nova hissed. Small dots on the mini-map tracked his drones as they spread like flies throughout the penthouse. Gradie noticed there were quite a bit fewer than there had been just minutes ago.

Nuke’s cutter went dead.

“Wait, can they see me cutting!”

“No! My drones wiped everything they found on the other side of that door.” Nova pinged the two drones drilled into the top of the shaft on the HUD and a log of everything they had done in the past ten minutes, drilling, tapping fibers, cracking wireless, and even disabling something labeled “LNDRY RAD-T”, scrolled by in a small window on the screen.

“Get inside immediately and look for a fucking opening on that MG!” Maverick said. “There can’t be more than five fuckers in there, and I bet they’re all huddled around it like little bitches!” A large dot lit up on the mini map in the general area of the back west corner.

Nuke’s cutter lit up again and an explosion boomed through the walls. Robin shrieked.

“Nades! Move! Move!”

Gradie watched their icons spread out and move to the north as more explosions shook the ceiling.

“On me! On me!” Robin pinged her location on the mini map repeatedly. The other dots moved through the floorplan map and found their way to her.

“Damn, how much space moolah you think it costs to get a kitchen like this?” Luke said in an easy tone.

A loud slam echoed down the shaft as the metal rectangle Nuke had cut out of the door plate fell to the floor upstairs.

“Emp ‘nade out!” She tossed one in and it rattled across the floor upstairs, then went off with a humming pop like a transformer blowing.

After an unusually silent pause, she said, “Its clear! Get the fuck up here!”

Mack shot up the shaft, propelled by his jumpsuit and made it to the doorway in a single bounce. Gradie followed but almost missed the doorway. The mechanics of the jump suit meant that every slight movement became a directional propulsion, and by kicking his leg slightly to the right, he had thrown himself off course. He grabbed the ladder with one hand and swung himself around, scrambled in the doorway and found Nuke and Mack standing in a small room at the end of a long, strange hallway, and it took him a moment to realize what was strange about it.

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All the doors had been covered by some kind of bulging material that looked like spray-foam frozen in place, and at the far end, about fifty feet down the hall, a pile of something that might have been patio furniture was stacked clear to the ceiling.

“Uh,” was all Gradie could get out before Nova, watching his feed, put 2 and 2 together.

“Get the fuck out of there!”

The pile coughed up a stream of laser bullets and the hallway was packed with a wall of sound.

“Get behind me!” Nuke yelled, already turtled. Gradie shot to the left behind her as machinegun fire tore up the air, but Mack flew up to the 12-foot ceiling and grabbed on to a light fixture.

“I fucking knew it would be there!” Angel said. “It’s the only—”

“Start cutting god dammit!” Mack yelled out loud, his voice echoing in the telepathic chat.

“Fuck that!” Nuke yelled, then solely on the comms she hissed, “Grab a charge off my belt and throw it over my head. I’ll slap it on the wall.”

It took Gradie a second to realize she was talking to him, even with the blinking “Request from ChknMiniNuke” on his HUD, but with the help of some pop ups and AR arrows and instructions, he got a square packet about the size of a pop tart out of an armored box on Nuke’s belt by pulling it out like a napkin, then pressed a button in the center that made it expand to the size of a spiral notebook and threw it over Nukes head, hoping like hell the MG fire didn’t hit it.

Instead, suddenly, the fire stopped.

After a few seconds of dead silence, Mack asked, “What the fuck?”

“They can’t see us,” Gradie said, just as he realized it. “They heard the blast and knew Nuke threw that grenade, so they know we’re here, but they can’t see us.”

“What do you mean they can’t—” Mack started.

“Holy fuck he’s right!” Nuke hissed. “They’re little furniture trick relies on cameras Quasar and I took out.”

“Aw shit, so let’s rush em!” Mack said.

“No!” said Nuke. “If I try and break through all that shit,” she pointed at the furniture pile at the end of the hall, now spilling out in fragments but having lost none of its height, and which Gradie could tell was at least twenty feet deep. “They’ll hear it and shred us again. Also, they might just be reloading.” The fear broke out of her voice with her last words, as if she had just realized it as she spoke.

“Maybe they can’t see you, but they can sure as shit hear you,” Nova said. “I’m picking up a harmonic sensor on the frame. Don’t move a fucking foot. It’s gonna take a while for my drones to isolate it.”

“Great. So what’s the plan?” Mack said.

“Blast our way out. Ok Corpse,” Nuke said, and it took Gradie another confused moment to remember his username was OrbitingCorpse. “Very carefully, reach between my legs,”

“Hmmmmmm,” Mack said on the ceiling, like a chortle being forced out of a slightly open balloon.

“Shut up. Corpse, reach between my legs, pick up the charge and press it against the wall, as high up as you can get it.”

“Uh,”

“I’m not about to get out of Turtle mode with a live MG pointed at us, and I don’t want you coming around and getting splattered all over me.” (Once again, Mack wrestled with a laugh and got it beat down into a grunt,) “Just hurry up!”

Gradie very slowly and with as light movements as he could manage, got down on his hands and knees and reached between the two solid pillars and tried not to think about what was at the end of them, and grabbed the charge. He grabbed onto one of Nukes armored legs and leaned as far through the gap as he could, then reached up until his shoulder was rubbing against her tank-hulled crotch, and slapped the charge on the wall.

They were all silent for a second. The slap had echoed down the hall louder than Gradie had expected, but the MG didn’t answer.

“Ok good job,” Nuke said. “Mack. Get the fuck down here.”

One of Nuke’s legs made a soft metallic latching sound as she moved it against the other one. It locked back into turtle mode with a chunk and she was a solid pillar of hopefully very blast resistant armor.

Mack swung on the light and slow-fell down next to Gradie, but as he did the big tacky chandelier swung backward and squeaked, and then exploded.

“Shit!” Nuke yelled. The MG roared again and poured fire into the ceiling above them, raining down fragments of space age drywall.

“Charge out!”

The blast rattled Gradie’s skull and a few other bones he tried to convince himself didn’t actually exist here. Nuke yelled ‘move!’ and disappeared through the still smoking hole in the wall and Gradie scrambled after her. The MG fire darted from ceiling to floor and chased him out. As his left leg followed the rest of him into the next room, a round obliterated his calf and sent fire up his thigh.

“Fuck!” he yelled out loud and fell over onto hard tile.

It was a bright flash of pain, and from its molten center deep in his calf, reality spread outwards. Like someone had flicked a light switch, the showers around him became every other gym locker room he had ever seen in his life, the HUD just a cheap rendering displayed by his phone slotted into a VR headset, even the armored figures rushing by him were nothing more than cosplay. His body ached, his leg was screaming, his breathing was shortened, and his mind reached out for an answer in memory, an answer to how he got here and what kind of drugs had been involved.

Then the pain vanished and with it that whole other slice of the real world, and he was back in Gunmaze watching rounds punch through the walls of a space opera gym shower.

“Holy shit,” he said out loud, but barely a whisper, as he looked down at his leg. His calf armor had been blasted off, exposing the shreds of a kind of black rubber undersuit, and a strange beige gel expanding over his wound.

“Your suit’s got an auto-doc bro, just let it work.”

“I felt it.”

“You’re about to feel something else!” Nuke yelled and grabbed him by the handle on the back of his armor. The showers exploded in tile and dust and jets of pipe-free water everywhere and he scrambled up to get behind her just as she squatted down and turtled.

The MG wasn’t taking any chances this time. Second after second, the bursts continued, and the room became clouded with porcelain dust like the world was ending.

“Once these mother fuckers run out of ammo—” was the last thing Mack got out. He had been hanging on to a vent in the ceiling, but the MG gunner must have caught wise to his previous ceiling trick, and sprayed a burst right through him. His body misted and the remnants fell to a crumpled heap just feet away from Gradie and Nuke, while, oddly, his voice screamed on the chat.

“God fucking dammit!”

“Every fucking time bro!” Maverick laughed. “That’s why you’re Timmy twenty deaths.”

“Bitch you’re dead too!”

“Yeah, for once. Tally it up bitch.”

Suddenly, the gunfire stopped.

“All right, I found the Harmonizer,” Nova said. “Shit its right under them. Im gonna have to choke it off.”

Gradie looked back down at his calf as the dust settled, and was reminded of his previous pain, just as Macks crumpled body caught his eye again.

“Hey Mack, did you feel it when you died?”

There was a chorus of laughter on the line and Gradie felt his face warm, drawing more attention to the flesh he was desperate to escape.

“Aw shit, now new guys got fucking jokes!”

“No, I’m serious.”

“Fuck do you mean did I feel it?”

“I got shot in the leg and it sucked.”

“Why wouldn’t it?”

“Cause it’s a game?”

The only one with anything to say to that was Angel.

“The more realistic the sim, the less your Spirit is removed from its physical memory. You’ll feel what your mind expects unless you learn to expect not to.”

That wasn’t exactly comforting to Gradie, but his time for contemplation had run out.

“Ok, got the Harmonizer isolated,” Nova said. “Now we can move.”