Fueled up, unmanned, unbothered, thriving
They fanned out across the wide carpeted space, which curved to the left and gave way to a wide-open drop to the right.
There was absolutely no good cover that he could see. The crescent of carpet was dotted with dining tables with the chairs balanced on top. The railing at the edge was clear glass, and beyond the drop, down past two more terraced levels where couches and bar kiosks promised some kind of high class interspace shindig, the massive velvet staircase that ran down the center of the slope ended at the bottom floor, which was solid polished marble and extended out into a wide balcony through the massive floor to ceiling window wall, which was a good five stories tall, half a football field wide, and gave an admittedly gorgeous view to the city stretching out toward the horizon, which glittered with the faint motion of seawater, and the hundred lane half-pipe highway which Gradie remembered they were here to shell.
As the city approached the highway, the buildings got progressively more bombed out, with those nearest to it sticking up jaggedly like the broken off stumps of snapped matches, but here, closer to the tower, the city seemed relatively untouched.
He counted three towers close enough for sniper fire. Suddenly, something exploded far away behind them, and the blast was reflected sharply on a small section of the nearest tower.
Immediately, Gradie felt exposed and crossed over to the high wall rising to his left. If the stairs and elevators were death traps, then what the fuck was this?
“All right you mother fuckers,” Maverick whispered out loud. “Come out and say high.”
“Don’t forget,” Angel said on the group comms. “You have a standing shield in your kit, in case you need some extra cover.”
“Extra?” Luke said sarcastically, pointing his helmet around at all the bare ground.
“Yeah, here.” Angel must have pinged it, because Gradies HUD lit up with a notification about something in his inventory. He mentally activated it and something on his belt glowed bright green. He imagined a sniper using it to get a bead and turned to point it at the wall, until he realized the glow was probably only in his HUD.
He moved one hand down and grabbed the flat case hooked to his belt over his left hip. It had a handle like a clothes iron, and in a flash, as Gunmaze used the dream knowledge burst of mem (which for the game was described on his screen as “uploadable memory”) to show him how to deploy it. He half-saw, half-remembered a quick flick of the wrist with the handle in hand, and a strange mesh like a mosquito net reinforced with umbrella wire expanding into a standing half domed shield, like a short podium made of window screen.
“What will it stop?” Gradie asked.
“Most rounds, actually,” Angel said. “But if it gets too much at once itl snap. And a good explosion will just knock it into you, of course.”
“Moving up,” Maverick said on the group comms. “Sulphyr, Nuke, on me. Watch top of stairs.” He motioned with his hand, and Nuke, who up till then had been walking with Gradie like they were the only two shooters in the building, waved at him and jogged up to the front, where Maverick was facing up the massive central staircase toward the top level.
Sulphyr raised his LMG and Nuke raised her grenade launcher (Gradie had figured out how to browse info on the teams gear via his helmet computer) and the rest of them formed into a v formation pointed up the stairs, and started the ascent to the next level.
It was an amusing sight, the eight armored and armed death machines marching up the blue velvet stairs, pointing their deep-space grimdark weapons at sleeping dining sets and eye-roll-inducing art pieces and shuttered bars. His imagination ran off, and he saw the rolling parties flowing down the stairs like a colored metallic waterfall, all kinds of costumes and people, and aliens, like a fan convention with an endless budget, but then it occured to him that there had probably never actually been any parties here, that this place was made solely to be blown to pieces, but then, why hadn’t that happened yet? The twins spoke of this gameworld as being out a long time, so what? Did they reset the city after a certain level of destruction? Was it a weekly—
“Shit, got something,” Nova said. The party came to a stop and got low. Gradie cussed at himself in his head. About a thousand times in the clubhouse, he had spaced out on some daydream, and Philip or someone had gotten the drop on him, not to mention the close calls in the Hardworlds. Once, he was sure Philip had figured out what was going on, and told him,
Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.
“Focus on your sensations, the feel of the gun, the ground under your feet, the air on your skin, you know, the skin I'm going to shoot to pieces if you—”
It was often like being pulled in two directions. His imagination had often saved him, and had arguably been the only thing that had helped him find the coin when stoically digging through boxes proved useless, but it could also get him killed, and in the clubhouse, usually got him shot. If he could find a balance, if he could control it…
The team continued and half his mind listened.
“Ping it,” Maverick hissed pointlessly, as Nova was already sharing his feed. Something was flying out of the top penthouse, fast.
“Gun drone!” Maverick said. He turned to Robin. “Tune your laser to—”
The top level exploded, and an instant later, the air was alive in an almost familiar way.
The last terrace at the top of the central staircase held a double level of elevator bays, the top one opening onto a catwalk that wrapped around and came down as two fan shaped staircases on the side. There was a single marble staircase in the center which bisected the elevator levels and ended in a large double door on a third level that according to the map led to the penthouses. It was this door that had exploded in a burst of thick wood fragments, and now revealed a shielded machine gun placement letting lose like a mother fucker.
Cover!” Nova yelled, and the team scattered in a flash, some moving with mechanically enhanced speed, and the rest bolting at the edge of human ability.
Luke slapped Gradie on the back as he bolted for the wall perpendicular to the central staircase, and Gradie sprinted after him.
The machine gun had an electrical tone to it, like a minigun on an A10 mixed with a blown transformer, and the rounds, whatever they were, cracked through the air like bullets, but also hissed like rockets and buzzed like a pair of toy magnets. The staircase and the railing and everything else shattered and puffed and blew apart in such a real and unimaginable way that the idea that everything around him was made of imaginations and wishes evaporated from Gradies mind and he went bolting after Luke.
“Sulphyr! Supress that piece of shit!” Maverick said on the comms, a strange even sound that floated under the deafening gunfire. Sulphyr threw himself prone in the staircase with his LMG aimed up the stairs and a mesh plate expanded around the barrel, leaving him a thin slit for vision, and he slammed on the trigger. It was a similar mechanical sound to its sibling gun, but the rounds didn’t glow and its roar was less chainsaw than helicopter.
The MG at the top didn’t even flinch, and calmly walked its fire over towards Sulphyr’s position.
“Explosives out!!” Nuke yelled, in a voice that was halfway to a death growl. Her grenade launcher made a rapid-fire pomp-poomp-poomp noise and a trio of explosions blasted the top level into a cloud of marble flechetes. The fire paused temporarily.
“I’m flanking that mother fucker!” Mack said on the comms, and Gradie watched dumfounded as he activated his halfmoon pistol things, which glowed like arc lights, and used them to climb up the wall onto the next level.
“Get the fuck down!” Nova yelled, and for a moment Gradie thought he was talking to Mack, until the five-story high window exploded inward.
If the top of the stairs MG sounded like a minigun, the guns on the drone sounded like a robot’s scream skipping repeatedly on a CD and blasted over about a hundred concert amps. The sound was so loud, for a moment Gradie thought it was the noise alone that had shattered the window, but then the rounds started chopping up the terrace.
The drone was about the size of a kayak, with two rotating machine guns on either side of its main fuselage, and a single barrel, which reminded Gradie, for some reason, of a leaf blower, sticking out of the center. It had dual jet engines, currently aiming down, blasting hot plasma and waves of heat that, combined with the muzzle blast of its dual guns, made it look like a hummingbird with wings of molten metal.
“Get behind me!” Nuke yelled, and surprisingly, Maverick and Bled Robin scrambled to do exactly that, while Sulphyr whipped his LMG around and opened fire.
As the drone got farther across in its deadly arc, and the wave of destruction tearing the terrace level to shreds approached them, Robin slid to a stop behind Nuke, who did something that Gradie at first thought was squatting, until his brain caught up with what his eyes were seeing.
She had compressed herself into a shorter, even squattier shape, and her thick metal plates melded together, as she froze completely still.
Gradie laughed out loud, which was unfortunate, because tragedy soon followed.
Maverick at first tried to squeeze in next to Robin, who was hunched in a ball between Sulphyr’s legs, but seeing that it was hopeless, turned and ran right towards the edge of the terrace, blasting his strange shotgun at the drone, which shook of the explosive slugs and Sulphyr’s LMG fire in sparks off its fuselage, and kept on firing.
In slow motion, the wave of shredding carpet and metal washed over him and took on a pinkish hue. Then, as the stream of bullets was just about to meet Nuke, the barrel in the center of the drone flashed, and Sulphyr and the two girls disappeared in a massive explosion.
“Fucking sick,” Luke said, in a casual tone that disturbed Gradie just as it had before in the Hardworlds, until he realized none of the death in front of him was even half as real as all that.
But his apathy at the team’s demise did not quite extend to himself.
“Shit! Move!” Luke grabbed Gradie by the handle again and pulled him up into a sprint. The world exploded behind him as the bullets and grenade storm caught up with them.
“Fuck it! Jump!” Luke yelled and pulled Gradie with him in a sudden left turn right towards the edge of the terrace. Gradie got the idea a moment before the ground ran out, and sprinted off the edge.