Neb was so deep in the moment when the idea came to him, and he had been so well trained, that at first he did not stop firing or change his position or do anything at all to indicate that he had thought of one last roll of the dice.
But then he yelled to Meathead, ‘Cover left!’ and he saw the big man adjust his field of fire accordingly without questioning it, sweeping with SPUR in a torrent of destruction, pushing the scorps back in a cacophony of screams and severed limbs and exploding clouds of white liquid.
No-one paid any attention to Neb. There were just seconds left. He got down on his knees and took the little case he had found in the gun room out of his inventory. He undid the latches and flipped it open. An egress kit, the Game had called it. Single use. Design to be used with a very powerful weapon. Goddammit I hope I’m right, Neb thought. But then he only had enough life left for this one act, so in a way it didn’t matter if he was right or not. The thought brought him the calmness he needed.
Inside the case were seven small golden discs laid out neatly, each about the size of a large coin. He picked one up and turned it in his hands, and it immediately jumped to his body armor and attached itself snugly, the sudden movements making him flinch. He could move it a little with his fingers, but it clearly did not want to come off. He examined the disc in his overlay and the description read: Egress tag. Part of the Ultrafusion Field Launch System.
Egress tag. Egress kit. Egress was certainly what they wanted, but how did it work?
The scorps formed a thrashing ring of horror all around them, barely being kept back. ‘Nine percent on the SPUR!’ Meathead yelled. Gray fired the last burst from her rifle, and yelled: ‘I’m out!’ Neb saw the glow of a healing orb being used from behind him, but he didn’t turn to see who it was.
‘Gray,’ Neb called to her, and he held out his rifle. It was a desperate act for a soldier to give away their primary weapon, but Gray took it without questioning. One scorp was charging at them wildly and she blasted it with two rounds in its triangular head, then she cut the legs from under two more and caused a pileup that bought them another precious moment.
Along with the tags in the egress kit there was a black-gold disk, bigger and heavier than the tags. It had come to life when the tag had jumped to Neb’s body armor, displaying glowing Main runes. His Main Scholar skill activated for one of them and told him that it meant relocation. His heart pounded even harder. The nerves and anxiety that had somehow been held at bay came crashing down on him. How the fuck did it all work? Was there even time? It seemed certain there was not -- the battle was right on top of him. ‘Three percent!’ Meathead screamed. It was like throwing pebbles into an oncoming tide. Again the scene was briefly tinged with bluish light. There was no point in holding anything back.
There was one more thing in the egress kit box, and this at least was clearly recognizable -- it was an activation switch very like the one Mallory had used to fire the tokamak rocket.
‘Fuck,’ Neb murmured. Tags, a heavy disc labeled ‘relocation’, a button… His guess was that activating the system would relocate the tags and the people they were attached to back to the disc. Which would be great if the disk was in a safe place some distance away, but wasn’t much good to them when Neb was still holding it in his hands.
He looked around in desperation. Could he throw it, somehow? Or was it powered in any way? Could it fly? He turned it in his hands but it seemed to be just a flat, unadorned thing, simultaneously wildly advanced and completely utilitarian.
Then Neb’s eyes fell on Mallory’s rocket.
He stood. He slapped two of the relocation tags onto Meathead and Gray, who did not even notice.
His idea seemed too stupid to even consider, but stupidity didn’t matter now. ‘Mallory,’ he shouted into the big man’s ear. ‘Can you fire that rocket without the payload?’
Neb had expected to be ignored or cursed at, but Malloy answered at once: ‘It’s possible, Doc.’ He was grunting under the weight of his thumper, blasting through the waves of scorps. Neb stuck a tag on his shoulder, and turned to Buzz.
‘Sir,’ he shouted, fighting to keep his voice intelligible while Buzz fired the last of his rifle ammo. ‘We have one last play, but I need Mallory!’
Buzz and Mallory exchanged a glance. Neb could see how reluctant Buzz was even in this desperate moment to try a tactic that was not pure warfighting. But the commander hadn’t got to where he was without being able to transcend his own nature when he needed to.
‘ONE PERCENT!’ Meathead screamed.
‘Mallory,’ Buzz ordered. ‘Give me the thumper. Help the Doc.’
It said something profound about Mallory that he followed the order without question or hesitation. But when he turned to Neb he said: ‘This fucking better be good, Doc.’
Neb just focused on the tiny part of the shitshow he could control.
‘Remove the rocket payload and put this in,’ Neb said, handing Mallory the relocation disc. He was surprised by the command in his own voice, and Mallory did it without question. He took out the tokamak rocket from the launcher, opened a panel on the side, and removed a gray sphere that was clearly very heavy. He put the sphere carefully on the ground, then put the disk into the space where the sphere had been. It barely fit, but Mallory was able to replace the rocket in the launch tube. He looked at Neb.
Neb felt a surge of hope. ‘We need to fire it to --’ he began.
But that was where everything went wrong.
‘I’M OUT!’ Meathead screamed.
The SPUR fell silent and the scorps finally got their opening. They were on top of the humans in an instant, mouths huge and dark up close. They barrelled through the team, knocking them in all directions, pushed forward by the pressure of the great mass of creatures behind. Neb was sent sprawling. He managed to hold on to the egress kit activation switch but the remaining tags were thrown from his hand.
‘Oh fuck!’ he screamed, the sound lost in the chaos. He struggled to his feet. There was the sound of automatic fire from his right and he turned to see Gray firing the last of Neb’s own rounds into the head of the scorp which had just been about to deliver a fatal blow. Then he was knocked to the ground a second time, this time by Meathead diving out of the way of the grasping pincers of another of the creatures. The tripod was knocked over. Neb crawled forward, scrambling desperately on the scorched ground for the metal tags. Boots were in front of his face and then gone. Someone tripped over him and swore. A scorp spike slammed into the ground just centimeters from his arm.
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But he couldn’t find any of the tags. He fought back rising bile, trying to think clearly. Who had he already tagged? Meathead, Gray, Mallory and himself, but not Anna or Buzz. He pushed forward through a tangle of scorp legs and was drenched in the foul white liquid from one of the creatures when someone shot it at point blank range, but he was barely even aware of it.
He saw a tag in the dust, trampled but still glowing, and he dived for it. His hand closed around it. But at the same moment a scorp jammed its spike through Neb’s arm and hauled him forward. He screamed in agony. The scorp’s eyes glinted and glimmered, triggering a deep-seated horror in Neb almost as bad as the pain.
‘HELP!’ he screamed. ‘HELP ME!’
But there was no-one to help. His arm was agonizingly painful as the scorp pulled him by it. It lifted him up and opened its huge mouth to clamp down on Neb’s head.
‘Oh fuck YOU!’ Neb screamed. He reached across his body and pulled out his pistol left-handed, then fired his last rounds point blank into the scorp’s head until the pistol clicked. Out of ammo. But the shots were enough to gouge a jagged gash across one of the scorp’s eyes, and the wound sprayed a foul black liquid all over Neb. The scorp reared backwards screaming and Neb fell to the ground, pain surging in his arm as the scorp spike slipped out of it.
Then Buzz was in front of him, firing from his second rifle, his face set in a grimace that was part hate and part rage and part delight. He moved gracefully, like a dancer, with complete awareness of what was around him. Neb had only an instant to tag him with the tag he had found. Buzz never even noticed the disk attached to his breastplate as he fought on through the chaos, delivering headshot after headshot, making every round count.
Neb clutched his injured arm, and heard himself whimper. There was so much blood and pain and he felt so woozy that he had to use one of his two orbs. Everyone was now tagged except Anna. Where the fuck was she? ‘WHERE’S ANNA?’ he screamed, but no-one answered. His voice lost in the sonic madness of gunfire and screams and clashing pincers and snapping mouths.
It was almost over. Meathead was down and Buzz was healing him, but then both fell under a pile of scorps. Mallory was firing the last rounds from his thumper, and as Neb watched it ran out of ammo and Mallory dropped it, pulling his two huge pistols. Gray was down to 2/40 HP, unconscious. She was badly injured, a deep gash across her chest.
Then Neb saw Anna. She had been pulled a little distance away from the group. All that she had left was her pistol and she was using it with perfect control and regularity, taking out eyes and firing into open mouths and keeping the scorps at bay for a last few desperate seconds.
‘Mallory,’ Neb has gasped, half coughed. ‘Fire that fucking rocket. It’s our last hope.’
Mallory just nodded, firing the two pistols almost continuously, ducking and diving from the slashing, driving scorp attacks.
Neb ran for Anna. Neb knew he was slower and weaker than the others, but compared to what he had been just two years before, he was like a bull. He drew the sawfish sword and felt a total, single-minded focus. A scorp swiped at him and he dropped and rolled under it, slashing the sword upward through the creature’s abdomen and feeling a drench of foul hot liquid. Another attacked with its pincers and retreated screaming as the sword sliced its arms away with hardly a change in momentum. Neb swerved and ran and chopped, his heart bursting and yet feeling like he could do this forever.
Anna was only twenty meters away, fighting to her last breath. Neb chanced a glance back towards where he had left Mallory, and his heart sank. Mallory’s position had been completely overwhelmed. None of the humans were visible.
Then he felt a heavy impact from behind and looked down to see a blood-slicked black spike emerging from his chest. It felt suddenly almost impossible to breathe, as if he was trapped under something very heavy. He was lifted high into the air and he saw his own blood arcing bright red into the air, stark against the blackness of the burned ground and scorps.
It’s over.
He couldn’t see Anna any more. He couldn’t see anyone.
He closed his eyes and felt the choking taste of his own blood.
It was the sheer number of the scorps that gave Neb one last chance.
The blood from Neb’s wound drove them crazy and they all forced their way towards him mindlessly, overwhelming the scorp that had impaled him, mouths and pincers snapping, spikes waving, clashing and clacking into each other with the sound of something small and scuttling writ hideously large. He found himself falling and the spike sucked its way back out of his chest, disappearing like a reverse growth as Neb groaned in pain. He hit the ground in agony, feeling like he was drowning in blood. He had no option but to use the final orb on himself.
The blue glow spread over him and he felt the terrible pressure and sense of drowning recede. The next death is the real one, he thought. He forced himself to his feet and hacked and slashed with the sword, creating a miasma of black body parts and white liquid. He glanced desperately again towards where he had left Mallory but there was nothing to be seen except an impossible weight and number of the scorps, piling and crawling over one another in a horrifying ecstasy.
He reached Anna. She was lying on the ground unconscious. Neb was just in time to stop the killing blow from a scorp, to slice with the sword and eviscerate the creature. He stood over Anna, dancing and whirling and fighting far beyond what he would have thought possible. But inexorably, the scorps closed in. He felt the searing pain of something gouging into his back. Pincers, he thought numbly. He fell, lying beside Anna, unable to move. He felt sad that it was ending, but he felt pride, too. He had given it absolutely everything. Left it all on the field.
Then ahead of him on the ground, he saw something that at first he could not recognise. But then he understood: It was the sphere Mallory had taken from the tokamak weapon. It looked squat and exposed and evil sitting there on the blackened earth. If he had a single round left… But he had fired every last bullet. He let his head fall back to the ground. His eyes were closed and he did not dare look up at the scorps around him, their waving arms and screaming triumphant faces. They had won. They always did.
Then a memory came to him: Anna in the cage at the zoo, shooting the goblin leader with her last bullet, then Mallory passing her another round. One round to make sure she was never captured.
He forced himself to move even though every fiber of his body resisted it. He reached over and took Anna’s pistol from her hand and checked it.
One round left.
Overhead the scorps screamed, reveling in the moment of their victory. They were drawing out the kill, an ancient instinct for hierarchy dominance and control.
Neb racked the bullet back into the pistol. The gray sphere was about five meters away, and he only had one chance. He could almost hear Mallory’s voice: Fuck me Doc, even you should make this shot. But scorp legs were dancing around in the line of fire, and Neb’s body was shaking from exhaustion and pain. Even as he watched, one of the scorps unconsciously knocked the sphere a meter further away.
Still, though. Nothing to lose by trying. He forced himself to sit up just enough to sight the pistol on the sphere, fighting back the agony in his body. He could only hold that position for a few seconds, but that was all he needed.
He sighted down the barrel, breathing slowly and painfully. The gunsight bounced around the sphere, but with the last of his strength he was able to hold it steady.
‘Have some of this, you fucks,’ he murmured.
Then he pulled the trigger.