Max appeared next to Jorn, for an instant he just stood next to him. Max examined the soldier closely before double-fist flipping him off right to his face, growing fingers on the end of his nubby arms just for the purpose. Then he flashed to the side and pointed one of his new fingers at me.

“So, we have a big call to make, and since you’ve been getting all angsty and whiny about having a say… as per your request, let’s talk about it. This’ll probably cost you a few brain-cells, because I’m basically overclocking you, but I gotta stretch your limited capacity for the perception of time to get through this all.” He faked a cough and the rest of the world went a little fuzzy.

“Here's the thing, I’m already in most of Jorn’s suit’s systems, there are a couple of modules that were shielded and powered down, which he activated when he pinged Katie with the video footage. Before that, they were relying on literal text messages with a super low capacity, not much better than your old SMS system.”

Max paced back and forth as he spoke, occasionally waving at the frozen Jorn or in the direction of the van. I found that I could only barely move, and was just as frozen as the rest of them, but I could think. ‘Get to the point’.

Max huffed in frustration, tugging on his head as if he were trying to tear nonexistent hair out.

“I can interfere with the long-range communication from the beacon, and that's the only signal within range of getting picked up by anyone else. I can disrupt it, and in about 30 seconds or so I should be able to hide the beacon entirely.

That’s not fast enough though, they won’t get the video transfer on the other side, but they got the initial burst of information and they’ll still pick up a scrambled signal and this location real quick. In fact, they already have. Whatever code they sent with that first burst transmission has cut through a ton of red tape and they are collapsing the entire front on us, and, uh… they authorized targeted orbital strikes on the city instead of retaking it with ground forces.”

They were going to bomb the city? How was that even possible? As far as I knew, Arktria did not have any real military space program. Some of the other oldest and wealthiest countries across the ocean had already imported a limited number of alien made spaceships, capable of easily making and breaking orbit. As far as I knew, nobody had any warships though. There was a whole well known treaty that many countries had signed years ago about it.

“Bah, like countries let silly things like treaties stop them. Of course there are warships up there, most of ‘em overpriced second-hand junk. Arktria can’t afford one in any case, but they do have a couple of satellites that can drop rods of unusual sizes. There's talk with one of the countries that does have an orbit jumper for a resupply run actually. The council has tried to deliver more of the rods with their own rockets, but that did not go so well for them, hah.”

My head was starting to actually hurt, even through whatever Max was doing to block out all of my pain. I pushed a thought at him as the world went even more blurry, ‘What are you getting at?’

“Don’t you want to be informed? You need to know all this crap to actually make a real choice. This is the bare minimum you need to halfway grasp the implications of what we need to choose. I’m not even getting into everything happening, as we don’t have the time.

The point is, before Katie’s signal, they were going to use ground forces and sweep the city clear, now they’ve switched priorities and the ground forces are coming here. They’re writing off the city and coming after us, which is… not ideal.

Now, I’m not sure what they think they know, they probably think you’re some kind of undercover cyborg spy or plant, the Greys tried some shit like that a year ago in Oros and it spooked a bunch of governments real good when it got out. That doesn't matter, why they’re coming for us matters less than the fact they are.

We can’t let these two pawns blow the whistle on us. Arktrian security is compromised, if they find out the truth it’ll leak back to the core somehow and we’ll be proper boned.”

Max calmed down and stepped closer to me, filling my vision and giving me the most serious look I’d seen on him. “So, I can scramble the digital recordings, I can cut off their electronics, I can even lock Jorn’s suit down. The question, the decision you need to make is… how do we deal with these two?”

He paused and just stared at me, his dotted eyes locked onto mine while I tried to push through the growing mental fog and pain to think.

“I say we just kill them and keep moving. Your names weren’t in the transmission that got through, so if we can evade capture they won’t be able to connect us to this mess. The only way the council finds out we’re involved is if one of these two tells them.”

I finally caught up and pieced together a thought, ‘You’re saying we need to kill Katie and Jorn?’ Which only made Max laugh and slap his palm into his forehead. It was so hard to think, all I wanted to do was to sit down, to stop hurting. Everything was numb, yet everything hurt at the same time.

The pain broke through from the background for an instant, spiking and washing away the meager thoughts I had barely cobbled together. I wanted to fall over, to clutch my head to keep it from exploding.

“It’s either that, or try to feed them some bullshit convincing enough that they don’t lock us up in a lab and dissect us. I’m pretty confident they can’t contain me even if they do, I’m already too deep into their wider networks, but I’d really rather not have to requisition any more of the lattice I stole and put into you to run my highest order processes. But, since I don’t want you to keep complaining about how I keep you in the dark, this is your call to make. I hope you’ll choose wisely, but knowing you, I doubt it.”

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Even Max was going fuzzy now, and while I remained frozen in place the distinct and powerful feeling of falling rang through me like a bell.

“Damnit, you’re cooked. We’re out of time, make up your mind, Nick!”

The feeling of falling grew stronger, and then I landed flat on my back as the world sped back up to normal time. The groaning of the fallen fighters around us faded back in, and I found myself squinting up at a bright blue and windy summer sky with one eye. My head felt hot, both too big and too small at the same time.

I tried to shove the discomfort and distractions away, to wrap my mind around all of the information Max had just dumped on me. Yet whatever he had done to slow time down to get that whole conversation smashed into a split second felt like it might kill me. Most of my body was fuzzy and numb, the sensation of falling being the only thing to cut through Max’s block for most of my body, but the feeling of having my skull cracked open and injected with boiling jello overpowered everything.

Thankfully, the bright overwhelming pain faded quickly, leaving me breathing hard and laying in the bloody gravel as everything numbed back out. Something cast a cool shadow over me, a mountain on the horizon blocking out the light. The blurry form focused after a couple of blinks, and I turned my head to point my good eye up at Jorn as he loomed over me.

We looked at eachother, his one eye locking onto mine through his cracked faceplate. That eye looked wary, confused, tired.

What the hell was I supposed to do? What was he about to do? He still had his rifle, but he had slung it back onto his chest plate and was now working to remove something from a compartment built into his suit.

I turned my head over to him as he crouched down next to me, my blurry eyesight finally focusing enough for me to makeout the manacles he was holding.

“Time to make that call, boss.” Max murmured as Jorn tossed the broken barrel I had been using as a club, then lifted up my limp arm and slapped one of the cuffs onto my wrist.

Did I really have a choice? I had to go with Max’s plan. There was no way I could talk my way out of an interrogation room once they noticed any of the changes that had been made to me. No wonder he was giving me an option here, he had me right where he wanted me. What was I supposed to come up with other than his way? I could barely even think after the overclocking thing, something I’d told him not to do and that he had only done to buy the time to spin me a tidy web of reasoning to do what he wanted.

Oh well, I was in too deep to stop swimming. I’d joined his cause, and would have to pick my battles to push back on.

Before the thought finished and I gave my assent to Max to shut them down, Jorn screamed and made a wild jerking motion before his joints locked into place, the momentum of his brief surge of action carried his locked up suit over onto his side.

I summoned the strength and initiative to prop myself up with my still working arm. Still too fuzzy to really think clearly but knowing I had to do something, I dragged myself back from the locked up and vibrating armored soldier as he grunted in pain. I swiveled my head over at a new noise, the sound of sprinting footsteps tapping lightly in the gravel.

A scoot or two later, I noticed what had hit him just before I watched the next thing hit him. There was a blobby patch of dark gray material smeared across his back and shoulder plate, as if someone had thrown a ball of dark gray clay at him. Except this clay was humming and arcing with electricity and power as it disrupted Jorn’s suit.

Ali barely showed a limp from her injury as she ran up on us. She was holding the pistol that I had thrown her and she slid to a stop, falling onto her shoulder to get the right angle on Jorn’s broken faceplate. With unblinking determination, she emptied the magazine into his cracked helmet as he lay there locked up in his armor.

I watched in shock, and Max scoffed, clearly just as surprised as me by Ali’s decisively brutal action. I continued to just stare at her as she got up and half-ran half-crawled over to me, kicking up more dust as she kneeled at my side and looked me over. Her eyes grew wider and wilder as she discovered each new injury, but all I could do is laugh.

“Hah, holy shit, Ali. You just shot him.” Hearing the idiotic tone my voice took as I said that created enough mental dissonance to start to shake me out of the stupor I’d been stuck in.

“I heard him, I saw him, the coward. He let you, an unarmored superior, do all of the fighting. That… was really stupid, by the way, sir.” She pulled out her medkit from where she had slung it behind her back and began slapping sticky pads and jamming needles into me as she spoke, her actions smooth and fast.

I couldn’t feel much still, but whatever the medkit was giving me felt cool and calming in my burning veins. My body rejoiced at a sensation after so much numbness and pain, and I leaned back into the feeling.

A gunshot rang out, causing both of us to refocus and look towards the noise, which was in the direction of the van.

Rin stepped out from near the trailer, coming around the open door of the first still idling truck. He had a small pistol in one hand, the barrel of which only barely extended past his closed knuckles, and a sleek silver tablet in his other hand. He back stepped towards us as he kept the weapon pointed at Katie, who was trailing along behind him with her hands raised.

Rin kept his flat eyes on Katie as he spoke out, as direct and to the point as always. “She called a bag-team on us. I don’t know why, but she triggered a national level emergency response plan with a clearance too high for me to be read in on. She burned all of our patences.” He jabbed his pistol at her with his last sentence, just a hint of anger and sorrow flavoring his normal tone of voice.

“Oh, is thaaaat what those numbers in that burst transmission were? Let me check… ah, well… it would seem he is correct about the patence thing, I never bothered to decompress those files. Hah. Your government keeps waaay too much info on all of you.”

Everyone looked at me, while Ali shakily wrapped up the worst of my wounds in bandages. I was stunned to see the ragged hole in my chest, a patch of my skin and a portion of the muscle had been blasted apart. My overgrown rib cage was visible at the surface under a layer of rapidly solidifying scab. I looked away from the injury as a wave of nausea washed over me.

“We’re all going into the darkest hole of a prison for this.” Katie threatened, her voice low and dangerous as she pleaded to my entourage. “We’ve been played. Mr. Spenser is no hard working citizen, he's a foreign agent, and we all played into his plan. Look at him, he's a freak, he's not human. If we cooperate when the retrieval team gets here, maybe we’ll get to keep our lives, if not our jobs.”