Moments later, one of the doors was kicked open from the inside, hard enough for it to flop off its hinges. In an unrealistically dignified manner, Commissar Stella crawled out of the upturned vehicle, reaching back in to retrieve her hat. She then took a while to fix her attire and hair before pulling out her revolver and emptying it at something down the street.
“Motherfucker.” The mechanic blurted out when the Commissar’s gaze locked with hers from across the street and through a window, and the usual creepy grin spread on Stella’s face.
“No cursing in the bar.” Rosie quickly reminded her daughter.
Stella dropped the casings from her weapon and started reloading while calmly walking across the street. At the door, she holstered her weapon and took off her hat, and likely stop her form immediately being thrown out. Stepping in with a grand smile despite obviously not being welcome, she greeted everyone with a quiet nod and made her way to the counter.
“It appears I’ve had a slight automotive incident, so I have come for some civilian assistance.” The commissar declared and didn’t even bother to face anyone besides Anastacia. Not that the others would have had much to say, as they did their best to pretend like they weren’t there.
Anastacia noticed that as she walked, Stella left behind a trickly trail of amber liquid, that appeared much like oil. “Have you checked the oil filter?” She suggested as unhelpfully as she could and finished her coffee. “That’s usually what it is.”
The commissar briefly turned to look at her car, which was mostly crushed, missing two tires as well as several other parts, flipped over and very nearly broken in two. “I’m not certain. I’d ask my driver, but he has caught quite a lot of pavement with his face and is fairly dead.” She explained and shook her head.
“Look, lady, stop harassing Anna already. I can get you a drink and let you use our phone so you can call someone to get you, if that’s what you need, but otherwise you need to leave.” Rosie said sternly and pointed towards the door.
With the same unrelenting smile on her face Stella made her demands. “In case you haven’t noticed, we are in a middle of an… engagement out there, which legally gives me the right to take what I need – forcibly, should that be required. If I am resisted, I am also within my rights to declare those resisting or denying me of what I have asked as enemies of the state, who are subject to summary executions carried out by me. So, as per my rights, I am demanding the aid of anyone here who can manage a barrel change on a mark 72 chain gun. There wouldn’t happen to be anyone like that here, would there?” She stated coldly, constantly leaning closer to Anastacia.
“Nope, I don’t know anything about… what was it? Chain guns? Never heard of them.” Anastacia lied while gesturing for her mother to stand back. For whatever reason, she had impressive amounts of leeway when in came to the commissar and wasn’t terribly worried about lying to her, but she wasn’t sure if it would have extended to anyone else in the bar.
“In the last three years, sixteen issues of the bimonthly magazine called ‘Art of War’ have been delivered to this address through the imperial postal system, three of these issues have covered the maintenance procedures I have mentioned before for the exact model of weapon in question.” Stella stated as matter of factly as possible for a human. It almost seemed like this was something she had memorized if she ever needed to take Anastacia with her ‘legally’. “It is a completely fair assumption one of the two people living here is at least moderately familiar with it.”
Anastacia frowned. “Are… are you reading my mail?!” She exclaimed.
“It is a matter of national security. There could be poison in your mail.” The commissar said completely unashamed of her antics.
Annoyed by the attack on her privacy, Anastacia stood up and only barely kept herself from shoving the commissar. “Why would anyone mail poison to me?! I’m just some girl from Valour.”
“Because I mailed poison to you.” Stella immediately admitted. “Well, technically at least. The poison was detected when one of the postal workers who handled it died. Regardless, it allowed me to monitor your mail for the sake of public safety.”
The part of Anastacia that wasn’t internally screaming out of both terror and rage was actually quite pleased that her security devises and planning weren’t vastly overblown, and that the commissar was actually insane enough to likely at least consider breaking in.
“Now, shall we go and inspect what’s wrong with my car?” Stella asked and grinned victoriously. “Remember, summary executions!”
Anastacia rolled her eyes. “Don’t think I have much in the way of options.” She sighed and took comfort in the fact that at least Stella couldn’t abduct her because her car was beyond screwed. Pushing the commissar away, she turned to the counter briefly. “Mom, looks like I have to go out for a bit. Don’t worry about it too much, okay? I can handle her.”
Rosie had heard the conversation and knew enough about The Correctional Office that there were no alternative options, and enough about her child that Anastacia would never want her problems to spread on others. “Obviously I’m going to worry! But you do what you feel like you have to.” She accepted somberly, but reached over the counter to grab the commissar’s collar to pull her closer and whispered. “If something happens to her, they will never find your corpse.”
“Should something happen to her, I would already be gone by then.” Stella said with a strangely serious tone that completely lacked her usual insanity or blatant evil intent. “Your threats are meaningless, but I will see your child returned. Her safety is of unparalleled importance to us, which is the reason I would rather have her with me at the moment. On a related note, I would advice that you and your patrons vacate this room and move to the cellar under your kitchen.” She continued and freed herself to escort Anastacia outside.
The mechanic waved nonchalantly one more time to her mother to calm her before heading out. On her way she briefly kneeled, pretending to tie her shoelaces, but actually tapped her finger into a small puddle of the liquid leaking from under the commissar’s coat. She rubbed it between her fingers and quickly sniffed it to be sure, and could immediately tell it was some type of oil based hydraulic fluid. It was hard to imagine the car leaking any on her during the crash, and the arm prosthetic shouldn’t have had any in it, so Anastacia found herself slightly intrigued about its source.
Stepping into the frigid air outside reminded Anastacia that she had forgotten her jacket, but when she tried to turn around, Stella pushed her onwards instead. “So what kind of fucked up round of slap and tickle have you got planned now? The car’s clearly fucked, so there has to be something-“ She asked but fell silent as she stared into the direction of the gunfire and where the car had been thrown from.
Roughly two hundred meters above the cityscape was what very much appeared to be a hole in the sky – a hole that led into a bright void that cast blinding light downwards, burning away the ever-present fog. The bar was just out of the reach of the cone of light, but Anastacia could see it illuminate whatever was happening down the street. From the hole poked out a strange metal pyre that almost reached all the way to the top of the buildings. Monolithic and lacking a lot of detail, it appeared almost black, even in the bright light around it, and based on its somewhat blocky knife blade-like shape, a good part, if not the most of it was still on the other side of the portal. This skyscraper-sized craft had two larger cannons on its sides and several smaller turrets scattered across its hull, luckily, the larger cannons seemed to have extremely limited ability to turn, and couldn’t be aimed to the sides. However, the smaller turrets kept occasionally answering to random bursts pointlessly fired at them from the ground. Curiously, the bright blue bolts of something that launched out of them, made no sound at all when fired and only a faint thump when they hit a building or a street below.
Absolutely none of this was in any way familiar to Anastacia, and all she could do is point at the massive thing in the sky and stutter something at the commissar, who was calmly walking to her car. “Wha- Wh- Tha-“ She uttered.
Stella unholstered her revolver again and once more emptied it in the general direction of the craft while she waited for Anastacia to follow her.
“WHY ARE YOU SHOOTING AT THE HUGE THING WITH GIANT FUCK OFF CANNONS?!” Anastacia exclaimed in response.
The commissar emptied the casings from her weapon and started to slowly reload it. “Might as well, it’s not like I can miss something that big.” She said and closed the cylinder.
“What even is that thing?! And why is it here?!” The mechanic demanded to know.
“It is a ship. Someone activated a beacon and it came looking.” Stella answered in her usual, direct manner. She leaned against the wreckage of the car, moving oddly stiffly, like her back was hurt. “We were on a trail of one some time ago, but lost it in the end – I was worried this would happen eventually.”
Anastacia’s stomach did a flip. The timing of ‘someone activating a beacon’ and her messing with a piece of foreign technology were just a bit too close to each other to be a mere coincidence. “Wh… what’s a ‘beacon’?” She asked to confirm her worries.
The commissar could no doubt see Anastacia’s sudden cold sweats and shaking, and could make her own deductions from them. She grinned wilily and approximated the size of the strange metal box with her hands. “It would be a metal case, roughly this big. It has a few buttons on the top and makes a ticking noise when activated – but of course, one would need to tune it to a specific frequency for it to work.”
This was all, without a doubt, all Anastacia’s fault – and the commissar knew it.
The mechanic nervously watched as two of the smaller turrets shot towards muzzle flashes in the distance. “Can… can we do anything about it?”
“I came to get you for a few reasons, and one of them was the fact that you know how to maintain a Mark 72 chain gun. I have my people drawing fire to abandoned buildings and such, so there is some time before casualties start to mount and we have a moment to set up.” Stella explained and hit the trunk of her car with her elbow to pop it open. After opening some straps three large, heavy-sounding metal crates fell from the upside-down compartment into the commissar’s feet.
Anastacia recognized them as standard munitions crates for the forces The Correctional Office was a part of, but strangely they didn’t have any markings on them. Their size corresponded with the uncomfortably large caliber of the chain gun in question, but the obvious problem with the Mark 72 was that it was the type of an autocannon that was typically strapped on ships and most definitely wasn’t meant to be operated from a trunk of a car.
The trunk contained in total, six knee height boxes of ammunition, which the commissar arranged next to each other with relative ease despite only using her non-prosthetic hand. Each one of them must have weighed more than the mechanic unhelpfully watching from the side, but that didn’t seem to be a problem. With the ammunition in place, Stella took out a massive lump of metal with several moving pieces, hoses and two handles on it. It vaguely resembled the receiver and autofeeding mechanism of the Mark 72 Anastacia was familiar with, but most definitely was not that.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
From her magazines, Anastacia knew that such a thing weighed well over a hundred kilograms, but again, that didn’t seem to concern the commissar, who hoisted it on top of the crates and gestured for Anastacia to come closer.
“That’s not a Mark 72…” The mechanic commented.
“This is the one the design is based on. Let us say that it has been in my family for a while.” The commissar said and opened a latch on it, which Anastacia could guess to be the part holding the barrel in place, though the gun still didn’t have one. “Do get familiar with it. It functions almost exactly like its descendants, so you should still know how to use it. What I need you to do is change the barrels for me. It takes me six seconds to go through a single box, but the belts can be linked together. The problem is that all I have available are the barrels for the Mark 72, which I consider substandard, because they will begin to melt after twelve seconds of sustained fire. So, what I need you to do is change the barrel while I put in a new belt. It takes me roughly 10.44 seconds to do that, and I would much like to have a new barrel by then.
“I could do it myself, but the moment I open fire with this, I become a target. So, I would like to get through all six boxes before they get a bead on me. It should be enough to make them… let us say ‘rethink’ this whole thing.” She explained and handed Anastacia three long barrels the mechanic recognized from the magazines.
Anastacia laid her hands on the weapon, expecting it to speak up, but the gears, belts, chains and springs remained completely silent. It puzzled her for a moment as she manually turned few of the pieces and studied the mechanisms in front of her, but then the reason hit her like a brick; attached to the receiver was a copper plaque with an eerily familiar text stamped to it, the same one that had started the whole mess. “Aureun Simulatronics…” She muttered worriedly and absentmindedly flipped open the latch that would hold the barrel in place.
Each barrel was about one and a half meters long and weighed a good bit on their own. It was hard to imagine them being as disposable as the commissar claimed, but Anastacia wasn’t exactly in a place to argue. She had to exert a fair amount of strength to hold the barrel straight enough for the locking lugs to engage and latch to close properly to get the weapon ready. The procedure itself wasn’t anything special and would have been easy enough to teach to basically anyone, but the idea of doing it under even more stress and while the used-up barrel was red-hot made Anastacia understand why Stella could have preferred someone with at least some level of competence – regardless of her obsession.
While watching the mechanic practice her part of the deal, Stella prepared her ammunition and gave a few pointers to her, such as using gloves and standing somewhere the empty casings won’t hit her.
Having gained some confidence in her ability to carry out the switches, Anastacia started to inspect the rest of the weapon again. From the front handle, dangled two fairly short power cords that obviously should have powered the weapon’s feeding mechanism. This struck her as a bit weird, as the more common counterpart of the weapon was typically powered indirectly by a tank or a ship engine and even if Stella’s car was intact, it would have definitely struggled to run it smoothly.
“How are you expecting to run this… thing?” The mechanic asked and worriedly glanced at whatever the hell it was they were planning to aim for.
“With beauty and grace, obviously.” The commissar grinned. She then grabbed a pair of earmuffs from the trunk and placed them on Anastacia’s head. “If you’re ready, we should begin. I need you to understand that I will be unable to move upwards of fifty seconds after I cease firing. You won’t be able to hear a thing, but if I look directly at you at any point, take cover.”
Anastacia nervously swallowed. “O… okay.” The number of things about the plan that made no sense to her were starting to mount up, but she figured that being the one presumably at fault for the whole incident, she didn’t have the luxury of opting out – no matter how bad things got. Her home and friends were in danger, and somehow her insane fascist stalker was the only one providing a solution at the time.
Stella once again proved apt at reading her forced assistant’s mood, as she placed her hand on Anastacia’s shoulder and gave it what she for sure thought to be a reassuring pat. “It’s all going to be over much faster than you think. Keep your eyes on me and act accordingly, I’m sure you’ll do just great!” She said in a way that was no doubt supposed to be encouraging, but the commissar seemed completely oblivious to the fact that everything she did and said seemed like a threat to literally everyone else and in no case made anyone feel better.
Content with her practice, and to at least die trying, the mechanic places the two spare barrels in a spot she thought they were easy to get from and watched the other half of the operation start fitting the first belt of ammunition into the feeder. Even the just bullets themselves fitted into the cartridges were easily larger than her thumb and seemed something one would use to kill buildings with, which more or less what they were doing.
With the first barrel in place and the weapon loaded, Stella rolled up the sleeve of her non-prosthetic hand and proceeded to jab both of the cables into her arm with as much force as the other hand allowed. Anastacia could do nothing but stare as the mechanism, though still mute to her, sprang to life with a joyous electrical hum. Strangely enough, the deep and sizeable gashes in the commissar’s skin didn’t bleed a drop of blood when she grasped both of the handles of the weapon and hoisted it up. As soon as she was in position with the next belts within her reach and her feet firmly planted onto the ground, an obnoxiously loud mechanical hum started to build up from her direction, but it didn’t seem to be from the weapon. It sounded like a flywheel spinning up to a frankly unsafe speeds and ended up being loud enough to permeate even through the earmuffs at an uncomfortable level.
Without any further warnings and with a menacing smile on her face, the commissar squeezed the trigger and unleashed a barrage of hellfire towards the mysterious craft. Every window along the street shattered immediately from the wave of pressure exiting the barrel and it almost knocked the unprepared mechanic over, even when she was standing in a spot she had been told was safe. Hundreds of empty casings popped out of the weapon and bounced along the cobblestone of the street and quickly filled the ground. Even for someone accustomed to a bit of gunfire here and there, it was absolutely terrifying to stand anywhere near the damned thing, terrifying enough for Anastacia not to be able to do anything but stare. Had she the presence of mind to think about anything besides not wanting to be where she was, she would have busied herself by wondering why both the commissar and the weapon hadn’t already flown five hundred meters backwards from the recoil of what was supposed to be exclusively a mounted gun, why it even functioned in the first place or why she had to be such an overcurious moron to cause the entire scene. Yet, before she could even blink, it was over and the weapon spat out the last cartridge.
The street was now uncomfortably hot and the emanating heat from the cartridges didn’t make things any better. It took a moment for Anastacia realize she needed to be moving already, but seconds felt like minutes after what she had witnessed and in reality, her stunned shock only lasted for less than a second.
Stella rested the weapon against her knee in a way she could reload without having to move and the barrel was in the mechanic’s reach. The commissar probably said something creepy or witty, but Anastacia couldn’t hear a thing anymore, ear protection or not and simply focused on what she needed to do.
Seeing the state of the barrel made Anastacia understand why Stella considered them bad, as it was bright red, visibly bulging from the base and its muzzle brake was just gone – all very much things you didn’t want in a tube you’re tying to send ordinance through. Gingerly opening the latches and turning the barrel from the spot that looked least infernally hot, the mechanic dropped it down, trying her best to get it to roll even a bit further away. Switching in a new one went fairly smoothly, and by the time Stella was done reloading, Anastacia was back in her safe spot.
During the next brief hail of bullets, Anastacia took a glimpse into the direction they were aiming towards and could see the tracer rounds make a slightly curved path all the way to the side of their monolithic target. The rounds sank into the metal armor plates fairly easily, causing several explosions inside the structure. A few of the cannons had already stopped moving due to the damage done by the first volley, and the second one was even causing some structural damage. But just like the first one, the second one ended in what felt like a blink of an eye.
The second barrel was in no better shape than the first and needed to be hit a couple of times before it loosened from its fittings. Even though she tried to be careful, the red-hot temperature of the metal ate through her mittens. Trying her best to not let the pain bother her, Anastacia put the final barrel in its place – just in time to glance at their enemy, and feel her stomach drop as a glowing blue bolt of something whizzed over their heads and collided with the road a couple hundred meters behind them, upturning a fair patch of it.
The commissar immediately pushed Anastacia to the side with the weapon, sending the mechanic tumbling over the empty casings a few meters away as she opened fire for the third time. It was impossible to tell how long she managed to fire before the next bright blue bolt engulfed her entirely.
The resulting pressure wave was completely noiseless compared to the blaring racket of the chain gun, but it further tossed Anastacia against the wall of her home bar and knocking her out for a few seconds. When she came to, her ears were ringing and the overwhelming smell of gunpowder snapped her fully awake, reminding her where she was. Fully expecting to turn and look directly into the barrel of the cannon that had managed to get its crosshair on them, she was astonished to see the burning wreckage of the whole structure collapse and fall down as the hole in the sky it dangled from closed in a blink of an eye and cut it off from the rest of whatever it was. Whatever brief relief or happiness she felt was quickly and violently killed by the realization that the broken structure fell down onto her home city. For what little it was worth, the massive piece of metal was sturdy enough to bury its tip into the earth firmly enough to not tip over. Instead, its burning remains were now left to shadow much of Valour.
Though no doubt destructive closer by, where Anastacia was, the collision felt like a strong gust of wind following a small earthquake, and didn’t cause any more damage than had already been done. Somehow, the victory didn’t really feel like one when it was entirely her fault in the first place.
Not daring to look at what was left of the commissar, the mechanic tossed away her earmuffs and steeled her nerves for a moment before turning to where the bolt had hit. Expecting a gory stain of red, what she saw was far more confusing than anything.
In the middle of the street, standing on a little patch of pavement that remained in the middle of a shallow crater, were the smoking remains of Stella. Not a drop of blood was to be seen, not a single piece of bone or muscle was visible, but instead, metal. The top of the commissar’s head had melted and blown off by the looks of it, as were both of her arms and uniform – meaning what was left behind was a pair of legs, a torso and the lower jaw, all still attached to each other and still standing. The blow had peeled off most of the skin from her entire upper body, revealing an intricate collection of metal plates and mechanisms in the shape of a human.
“What the fuck?...” Anastacia uttered and stumbled up. Her feet could barely carry her but she needed to get a better look at the machine in front of her. Stumbling over a couple of times, she made her way over and started to inspect the remains.
Parts far more intricate than she had ever seen, mechanisms that should have been fragile and weak built in a way they were actually useable in purposes that required force and just a copious number of things she flat out didn’t understand. At any other moment, it would have been an absolute treasure trove of technology that probably didn’t even appear in the wet dreams of the leading engineers yet, but in her situation, there was only a single detail she could focus on – a copper plaque.
“Aureun Simulatronics…” She once again read the text out loud and reached to touch it.
Just as her fingertip reached the stamped surface, a voice echoed from inside the correctional metal husk. “Unit four-four-seven: extensive damage, mobility functions disabled. Performing final data upload.” It spoke with Stella’s voice.
“Data… upload… what?” Anastacia said and frowned. She was only barely able to hear the lines from under the ringing in her ears, but she was sure she heard them.
“Upload complete. Orbital silo seven within range. Coordinates confirmed. Orbital deployment of unit four-four-eight initiated.” The husk continued to speak.
“Orbital? Like space-type orbital? There’s nothing up there… what exactly are you deploying?” The mechanic wondered and stared at the sky.
Maybe ten seconds later, she could see a flash of light that resembled a shooting star – one that started to get larger and larger as seconds passed. By the time the definition of ‘orbital deployment’ hit her, Anastacia only had a handful of seconds to scramble her way back to the side of the road and dive through the broken window into the bar.
One loud crash and a whole lot of flying rocks later, she peeked out to see a half-buried metal canister in the middle of the street, exactly where Stella’s remains had stood. About big enough to uncomfortably fit an adult in it, the cylindrical canister lacked any distinguishing features other than the numbers 4-4-8 painted on it in black.
Suddenly, the top of the canister popped off as it had been punched and out climbed none other than commissar Stella. This time complete with both of her arms, she stretched a bit and straightened her uniform before looking at the piece of the previous commissar with a humored look on her face.
“What a shame, what a shame, what a shame. A couple more years and I would have had two full centuries in that one…” She half-heartedly lamented and started to look around for something. “Now then, Anastacia, could you help me with some of these parts? We’ve only got so long before the wider military swings in to investigate and we don’t want my supposed employers to get their hands on this level of technology, do we?”