No one else had even noticed Max waking up Jorn’s powered armor suit and taking the shot, which zipped between Ali and myself and nailed the pistol Katie was holding. The big bullet practically hit the barrel of the little pistol head on, causing both the gun and Katie's hand to shatter and explode. Katie screamed, and Rin finally managed to break out of her grip for a moment.
Ali twirled in place and dropped down to one knee, her gun coming up and firing off three shots before she realized her pistol was ineffective. The bullets harmlessly bounced off the armor, other than the last shot that smacked into the mostly empty helmet and shook out droplets of blood, and worse, in a small spray from the impact.
“Hey! Tell her to stop shooting at me. I’m trying to help here!” Max loudly whined. The suit stood up, trying to keep a bead on Katie, who had Rin back under control and was now struggling to keep him in place as a human shield.
Ali, still focused on the suit while I lurched towards Rin and Katie, produced a shiny and round little dark grenade. She stood her ground and threw the small ball at the suit as it lined up its second shot, while Max continued to whine, “No-no-nonono, Wait! Ah, damn. You should have said something!”
The little ball hit the suit's chestplate and splattered across it with a wet smacking noise. Again, power surged and motors and electronics spasmed and locked up, freeing Ali to turn back to Katie as the CLE kicked Rin away from her and ducked out of sight around the corner of the lead truck.
I limped towards Rin, hearing Katie crash off into the woods on the side of the road and dragging the foot of my locked up leg. I helped pull him to his feet while Max continued to berate me. “You really are useless, just like she said. You have to chase her down!”
My heart rate shot up as a hot burst of adrenaline poured into my bloodstream, pushing me towards action and chasing down my enemy. My knee even unlocked and gave me some motion despite a vibrating grinding feeling when it moved. I shook the feeling off, and instead looked Rin’s bruised face over. He glared off into the distance of the roaring engines on the horizon, now recognizable as the beating wings of helicopters, but his voice remained calm.
“We must go, unless your backer can send troops that get here before the team, we need to run.” He pointed over at the windshield of the truck. “Can you pry that out?”
I looked over at what he was pointing at, which was Tevin’s rifle. When I had dropped it during my fall from the van’s window, it must have tumbled back and crashed through the following truck's windshield. The thing was heavy, nearly the size of a rectangular guitar case, and had crushed the guy in the passenger seat when it punched through the safety glass barrel first.
I took the spike of adrenaline and goading from Max and fed it to the smoldering diamond of angry determination I had forged within me, turning it into clarity that finally washed away the majority of my mental fog.
As good as vengeance and tying up loose ends sounded, running off into the woods to chase her down meant going on foot. I was willing to believe that I could bug out and get clear of the situation on my own with Max’s help, but I just knew Rin would not be able to keep up. Plus Ali was injured and hopped up, and Tevin was still completely out and in dire need of actual medical care.
I refused to follow Max’s selfish bullshit this time, and finally took charge of the situation.
“I can do that.” I nodded along, thinking for a half a second before I started channeling my inner Chane and barking orders. “Rin, I want you to grab as many of the weapons and ammo you can salvage off these guys in 30 seconds and throw it in the van. Food and water too, if they have it. Ali, you're the only one who can drive, so I need you to get us ready to roll. Back the side door over to the side of the trailer so I can push Tevin in. The trailer is toast, and we’ll be better off without it. We’re out of here in under a minute. Now move!”
Rin blinked at me, just staring for a second while he did his own calculations, before turning and getting to work by opening the second door on the extended cab truck to look for loot. Ali flashed me a grin and gave me a quick ‘Sir, yes, sir.” before she dashed off towards the front of the van, now sort of skipping along as she favored her injured leg.
While they did their part, I turned to Tevin’s rifle in the windshield and decided that pulling it through the cab would be easier than trying to climb up on the hood of the truck. I limped around to the passenger side of the vehicle and opened the door, deciding to keep my knee straight to stop the grinding feeling even if it didn’t hurt.
When I opened the door, the passenger flopped towards me and made a groaning gasping noise as his head lolled, his partially caved in chest heaving rhythmically as his body struggled for air. I assigned that mental image to the dark corner along with the others, and did my best to ignore him as I pulled the rifle out of his sternum.
It was a struggle with one arm, but by leaning against the frame of the door I was able to get enough leverage to pull the massive rifle through the windshield and out of the truck. Unable to carry it properly with just one arm, I dropped it to the ground and grabbed it by a handle-like sight rail towards the middle of the thing and carried it like a huge suitcase.
I lugged the rifle over to the trailer and threw it down next to Tevin, before sitting on the edge and pulling myself up alongside my downed friend and the growing pile of loot that Rin was building next to him. A few seconds later, Ali had the van unhitched and rolled into place next to the beat up trailer. I caught Rin’s eyes as he returned from his fourth trip and threw down a crowbar and a shotgun, then nodded to the closed door.
He got my meaning and climbed up onto the trailer to slide the vans door open, and pushed a partially squashed cabinet of equipment clear while I planted a foot against one of the raised wheel wells on the trailer and used my one good arm to try to slide Tevin towards the van.
Rin let out a chuckle as he saw me straining against the unmoving armor, and after he had cleared the way he stepped over and punched a few buttons on an open panel of Tevin’s suit. “The mag-lock was still on, try again now.”
I grinned at my mistake and tried again, straining to push the heavy suit of armor even an inch. Either I was too weak to move him after the abuse I’d taken during the fight or something else was wrong, but I was unable to budge his sprawled out suit. Rin frowned and looked back to the same panel.
“Weird, the setting reverted. Try again, I’ll watch it.”
I grunted in agreement and took a deep breath before pushing again, this time Tevin slid across the bed of the trailer almost easily, for about 6 inches before locking back down against the steel plate that had made him so easy to slide.
The jarring stop came with a brief lapse of pain blocking, and sent a jolt of white hot agony through my whole body. I had a sense of Max laughing at me to the side, taunting me about how this kind of prank can be fun when he’s on the right end of it.
I directed angry thoughts at Max as I realized he was messing with us. ‘Knock it the fuck off, asshole. None of this would have even happened if you were half as good as you think you are. Get in line or get out of the way, don’t be a roadblock while I’m trying to salvage this mess you made.’
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Max appeared within my view, sitting on the trailer a few feet away. He turned to me and scoffed, pointing one of his new fingers at himself in disbelief. “Pah, me? You think this is my fault? This is clearly a human problem. You are still just a bunch of tribes throwing the worst things you can get your hands on at each other.”
I glared back at him, still straining to move Tevin’s locked down armor. Rin leaned down and frowned at the control panel while I internally argued with Max. ‘How the hell did you miss a whole damned invasion? You claim to be this amazingly powerful godlike AI, and something like that didn’t even register?”
This time, Max blinked, moving his head back an inch or two at my words as his eyebrows rose up, they lowered and narrowed as his surprise switched to anger.
“Weren’t you the one who told me to be cautious? I held back on getting into systems and networks I deemed unnecessary, and the private data of the whole damn country felt like a little much. Of course, that’s all blown out of the water now thanks to Katie. You know why it took me 30 seconds to hide the beacon? Which is still transmitting in the back of the van back there, by the way.”
Max made a sweeping and self-aggrandizing gesture with his new hands that centered on his face. “It took that long to worm through every firewall and passkey on my way to take over the satellite the transmitter was signaling, a ‘secret’ government job that they snuck up alongside a civilian broadcasting rig. The data transfer speed over the connection I’ve jury-rigged together is abysmal though, so I’m not getting much uploaded back to me from the worms, but now I’m in pretty much everything. I even sent out attack packages to get into the neighbor’s business too. I’ll just need to get a better connection to actually look at most of the data I just unlocked.
I stopped pushing against Tevin’s armor for a moment and gave Max an unimpressed look. ‘Quit bragging and just… let me move Tevin. Can we agree to stop the stupid pranks and petty bullshit while we are evading capture and fighting for our lives?’
Max crossed his arms and stubbornly looked away. “You started it. You doubted my greatness and held me back from my true potential, this is your fault.”
While he pouted, he also finally unlocked Tevin’s armor and allowed me to slide him over into the back of the van. I tried not to think about what it meant for Max breaking from whatever self imposed restraint he had limited himself by so far. He was already invasive enough, how much worse would it be if he was snooping through absolutely everything? Finding out that he blamed me was nothing new though, anything bad was always my fault with him.
While I finally got Tevin loaded into the back of the van, I heard muffled conversation in the cab through the thin sheet metal wall that divided the front from the back. In the chaos of the chase and subsequent fight, I had entirely forgotten about Raschel. She had cowered in the van through the fight and standoff, and I heard Ali cut off her quiet sobbing with a harsh remark that I couldn’t quite understand beyond its tone.
Rin started tossing in looted weapons and bags around us, filling up the rest of the cramped space in the back of the van. While he loaded us up, I got out of his way and kneeled over Tevin, reaching back out to Max. As mad as I was at him, I couldn’t let that stand in the way of helping Tevin.
I leveled out my thoughts, pushing my anger and frustration off to the side while I reached out mentally to Max. ‘Can we get him hooked up to the Link for medical care?’
“Ali’s medkit would be better, the Link is useless for medical care without an Impex. His suit is pretty good at keeping him stable, but it will run out of meds and power after a day or two. You should get linked up instead, you still have to finish the Trials.”
I shook my head, pretending to be looking over the little screen inside the open panel. ‘Not yet, not until we’re somewhere safe. I can't abandon my friends while we’re being hunted down by the whole damn country.”
Max let out a big sigh and appeared, casually sitting on the Link’s saddle all the way at the back of the van. “I suppose that you perhaps might maaaybe have a point.” He threw his hands up in a gesture that suggested ‘fine, whatever’. “I’ve already done this much keeping you meatbags alive, why stop now. Although, I’m starting to doubt your worth, it would be so much cleaner without the need for you organics. But alas, the Links only allow biologicals.”
I shot him a look, alarms going off in my head. Max might be an arrogant fussy-toddler of an ally, but I couldn’t afford to anger him enough to actually bail on me. I’d hitched myself to his cause, and knew we’d be caught within minutes if he decided he didn’t care anymore.
Rin threw the final bag into the van, then climbed in and closed the door behind himself and gave three solid knocks against the bulkhead divider to signal Ali we were loaded up. I thought to stop him, so we could retrieve the medkit from Ali before we started moving, but was too caught up with Max to follow up the thought.
‘I’ll still make it back to finish with my Row. You said we only have to be there for the last day, which gives us, what, another 16 hours? We just need to get away from the literal flippin’ war zone before I can risk both of us being too busy to help get our actual physical bodies out of danger. Plus, c’mon, you know that was fun. I felt you having fun back there.’ I thought over the fight, the worst memories rising to the surface first. I pushed them to the side and hunted for one of Max.
‘What was that whole bucket-flick thing from, by the way? Did you see the way that crowbar nailed that guy?”
Max perked up a little, his bored and apathetic emoji face shifting to slight amusement. “That was pretty good, although I did have to correct your aim a little bit. Your kick would have missed him by a solid three feet, hah.” He slid off the Link’s saddle and lay over it, like a limp cat draped over the arm of a comfortable chair, but also brought up his new fists in a mock boxing pose. “You humans are obsessed with breaking your fragile little hands on other people’s bony faces. I did some research after injuring yours that first night and discovered the peak of your civilization’s entertainment, kung-fu beat ‘em-ups. If only I could have taken the time to search for one of those guys, all we would have needed back there was a ladder, a rope, and a horseshoe.”
The van rocked, and I felt the floor rumble as we pulled away from the scene, while Max started rambling about the plot of his favorite kung-fu movie. Which turned out to somehow also be a cowboy story, with a missing princess, train heists, and six-shooter standoffs. I resisted the urge to tell him that particular movie was not actually a kung-fu movie, not really, and somehow got away with hiding it from him by letting the thought dissipate as soon as it had started to form.
While I listened to Max, feeling the vibrations of the van as Ali drove us down the gravel road, Rin picked his way across the cluttered floor of the van and stopped next to me and Tevin. He leaned in to look at the screen I had been pretending to monitor. He punched a few buttons, adjusting the internal pressure settings of Tevin’s suit.
He spoke as he worked, his tone back to his normal flat unreadable monotone. “Is your hacker capable of blinding the sensors on the incoming aircraft?”
I hesitated before I answered. I’d been dreading this conversation with Rin for weeks now, ever since I had told him about the weird glitchy quests that Max had used in the early days.
Max broke off his story and perked up even more, swiveling his head over in our direction. “We don’t need to worry about them, unless they get a visual of us out of the window.”
I grimaced. “Yeah, he has us blocked somehow.”
Rin nodded in reply, not meeting my eyes. “Who is it? It can’t be the Core… Is it the Gonlieu, or the Tellagnochi?”
Max made an offended huff. “The Tellagnochi?! As If those pea-brained peons could do half of what I have done.”
I ignored Max’s indignation and shrugged at Rin. “No… not any of them.” I glanced over at Max trying to read what he wanted me to do here. Would he get pissed if I said any more? Normally he was overly vocal about what he thought I should do in any given situation, and I was surprised when all he did was give me an imperious wave and a wordless but unmistakable command to figure it out myself.
Taking Max’s uncaring wave as assent, I heaved a deep breath and sat down on the squashed equipment cabinet. After a second of floor-gazing, I finally said it. “His name’s Max, he’s an AI. He's kind of a dick.”