by M. D. Cooper
Rika landed on the ground in front of the K1R as the massive metal monster fell backwards.
She turned to Kelly, who was struggling to her feet; her right arm a mangled mess of twisted carbon and steel and soaked in blood.
Rika made a move toward her teammate, but Kelly waved her off.
Rika nodded and turned back to the mech, half-curious, half-scared to see what was inside. She knew that the K1R models were skinners…meaning that they still wore human skin inside their cocoon. If they weren’t pulled out and cleaned with some frequency—something that rarely happened in the field—they would be a stinking mess.
She approached the fallen enemy and saw that her beam had cut clear through to the cocoon inside. Rika slipped her AR97 back onto its latch before gripping one side of the gash with her right foot, while pulling on the other side with her left hand.
With a deafening shriek, the split widened enough that she could see the person—a man, from the looks of it—inside. He certainly lived up to the ‘mech-meat’ moniker. He was nothing more than a limbless torso, covered in bright red, welt-covered skin. Pus oozed from sores, mostly around the bio ports on his body, where cables and tubes just punctured his flesh wherever it was convenient.
Rika didn’t know what to say to the ruin of a man. Only one thing came to mind, and she activated her external speakers.
“I’m sorry.” The artificial voice the Genevian military had granted her grated out the toneless words.
The man had a pair of tubes going down his throat, but it seemed he possessed the ability to speak audibly as a mechanical voice rasped, “What are you waiting for? Do it.”
“How did they turn you?” Kelly asked. “How can you kill your people?”
“What does it matter,” the ruined man said from within the K1R’s cocoon. “We’re all just meat. All we do is kill. You, them; it doesn’t matter. It’s what we are now. Killers.”
Rika heard his words—angry, resolute—but his eyes said something else. They held a pain she knew all too well.
The man was right about one thing: they were killers.
She took a step back and switched her GNR-41B to its projectile mode before leveling the barrel at his head. Rika whispered through her suit’s speakers, “I release you.”
The weapon gave its nearly inaudible snap, and the man’s head exploded.
Rika turned away, but her three-sixty vision didn’t let her stop seeing it. She focused on Kelly, wishing she had never seen the thing inside the armor behind her.
It was a fate none of them deserved, but which they would all earn in the end.
OVERWHELMED
STELLAR DATE: 12.01.8941 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Western plains of Naera
REGION: Parson System, Genevian Federation
Weapons fire came from the ridge to the west, and the SNAP-PING of projectiles hitting the ground around them brought the two women back to their senses.
They dove behind the K1R’s fallen mass and surveyed their surroundings. At least nine of the Nietzscheans in powered armor stood atop the rise, raining fire down on them. Rika would bet her bottom dollar—if she got paid for this shit—that there enemies out there as well, moving in to flank them.
Rika slid the barrel of her sniper rifle over the fallen mech’s body and fired a pair of depleted uranium rods at one of the Nietzscheans, and then a second pair of rods at another. The rods struck true, and both of the targets were picked up and flung off the ridge by the force of the impacts.
Rika and Kelly fell prone. A party was team Hammerfall’s name for the special grenades only the fireteam leads got. Parties detonated in the air and small, guided packets flew out and attached to enemy targets—most often the head if they could manage.
Once attached, the packets ignited a thermite charge and burned clear through whatever they were stuck to. The mad flailing dance anyone unfortunate enough to be near a party when it went off was what caused the women to give it the name.
A second later, they heard the resounding crack as the party exploded—the screaming wasn’t far behind. Rika watched through her drones as seven of the Niets began tearing off their armor. They gave it a three-count before she and Kelly fired on the other five enemies, who also were frantically checking themselves over.
Ten seconds later, all twelve Nietzschean soldiers were down. Either from the party, the three women’s weapons fire, or the extreme levels of radiation that waited for them outside of their armor from both the nuke and Rika’s liberal use of her electron beam.
Rika didn’t share the sentimental feelings Silva displayed; maybe because Silva had been a real member of society with a future back in the world. Rika had never even had a home or a family. If it weren’t for the brutal mutilation of her body and the compliance chip in her head, the military would be a step up from her prior life.
Which wasn’t saying much at all.
Sometimes she wondered if she should stop fighting so hard and pray that the Nietzscheans would win. Although, after seeing the meat in that K1R, she was certain that the Niets wouldn’t be any better than the Genevians. Maybe they could both lose equally and she could figure out a way to get free.
Rika shook her head. Every option was shit. All that mattered was just surviving today so that she could make it to tomorrow. At some point, it had to get better.
Silva led them along a route that paralleled the one they took on the way out—just one valley to the east. Behind them, Rika’s probes picked up movement; probably the flanking troops that were going to hit them before Silva threw the party.
The enemy was almost a kilometer to their rear, but that was well within weapons range. She signaled for the others to take cover as she sent a probe high over the valley to get a clear view.
Sure enough, an enemy platoon with good camo gear was picking its way toward them. These soldiers had different armor than the ones in the convoy—scout gear, not heavy, fully-powered stuff. Though their armor was weaker, scout troops were usually better soldiers. Unlike the ones who stood on ridgelines to fire—they were just FNG cannon fodder.
Rika said with a mental smile.
Silva rose from her cover and crept toward the ravine.
In short order, the three women had planted their full supply of mines in the ravine and along the eastern slopes on either side of it—just in case any of the enemy scouts went around the gorge. Which they should, if they were smart.
All told, twenty-eight hidden explosives waited for the enemy. After taking up positions behind three separate piles of rock on the east side of the valley, they settled in to wait.
Less than five minutes later, Rika caught sight of an enemy drone as it crested the hill. She was surprised it was so easy to spot; but then she realized that the enemy probably expected ambush, and the drones were scanning the ground.
She pulled a feed from team Hammerfall’s drones, which were almost a kilometer overhead at this point—except for a few comm relay units, which sat on the ground between their positions. From there, she could see that the enemy drones, by some miracle, had missed their mines. She prayed that the enemy troops wouldn’t follow the paths of their drones too closely.
The mines gave off no EM signatures, and unless the enemy was running ground sonar with every step—something that would give the soldiers away like a beacon in the night—they wouldn’t be able to spot the mines.
Through her overhead view, Rika saw a few of the enemy troops begin to enter the ravine, while the rest scaled the hillsides.
She didn’t envy the poor assholes that had to go through the narrow gash between the hills, but she knew it was necessary. Their team had to clear it. If they didn’t, they’d never know if their enemy was hiding within, waiting either to strike them from the rear, or to slip off to the west and escape.
Then, just when she began to wonder if the Nietzscheans in the ravine had turned around to back out, one of the mines detonated. A cry rose up, and then several more mines exploded—likely the ones to the rear that were placed to block a rapid retreat.
As the women watched, several of the Nietzschean scouts came over the ridge, staying low and using cover well enough that they would be almost impossible to hit. Rika wondered if maybe their drones had managed to detect the hidden explosives; she was getting ready to fire her GNR, when another mine went off. This time there was no scream as one of the Niet’s bodies flew into the air, and the scouts on the hillside all froze in place.
Rika sent several rounds toward the enemy, killing two before she ran out of clear targets. She was considering moving to a new position, when Gunnery Sergeant Myer’s voice broke into their minds.
Rika knew what the ‘or else’ meant. Even from this range, it was no problem for the gunnery sergeant to trigger Discipline, something that could get them killed if they were in combat. The gunny also wasn’t afraid to use the chip’s max setting—something that hurt worse than getting shot. Rika knew; she had experienced both.
She stayed low, moving up the slope from cover to cover. Rika appreciated her caution. There was a difference between playing bait, and getting your ass shot off.
Just as they’d hoped, a few of the enemy scouts picked up the movement and leaned out of cover to fire. Five shots lanced out from Rika and Silva’s GNR-41B’s, and there were five fewer enemies.
Kelly said.
Rika nodded and moved to a new position before sliding her GNR-41B’s barrel over a rock and firing a trio of depleted uranium rounds at locations where her drones had spotted movement. By the time the rods slammed into the rocks on the far side of the valley, Silva was halfway up the slope. A few seconds later and the corporal was over the ridge with Kelly.
She looked down and saw a chunk of her left thigh missing. Great, I just have to get hit in the tiny part of my leg that’s not steel. She dropped down and clawed her way over the hilltop before rolling onto her back, wishing she could do something like wince or grind her teeth, as biofoam spilled out of her armor and sealed the wound.
Silva rushed to her side and grabbed a field kit from her pack.
Silva pulled a support rod from the field kit and pushed it into the biofoam. Once it picked up its location and read her biostats, the support rod expanded in her wound with explosive force. One end anchored into an internal mount at the top of her artificial knee joint, and the other sank into her hip.
Rika clenched and unclenched her left hand while Kelly grabbed the barrel of her GNR-41B to keep it from flailing and hitting Silva.
Rika nodded as the biofoam hardened around her leg. Once it set, she struggled to rise. Standing didn’t hurt as much as she thought it would, but she wasn’t anticipating the two-kilometer hike to where their company was duking it out with the Nietzscheans.
Not to mention going head-to-head with another couple hundred of those bastards.
The thought got Rika moving, and she followed Silva and Kelly down the slope as quickly as she could.
Above, her drones kept an eye on the scouts on the other side of the hill—who had not yet moved beyond the minefield. Rika was glad to see that they wouldn’t be hit from two sides before tapping into Silva’s drones, which had ranged to the edge of the company’s beleaguered position.
Upon seeing Alpha Company’s position, Rika wished that she could let out a frustrated sigh, or scream, or something…. The squishies were supposed to be the professionals. She and the other members of team Hammerfall had only been out of indoctrination for less than a year, and they got into way fewer binds than the regular soldiers in the Genevian military.
&nb
sp;
Rika said with a rueful chuckle.
Alpha Company was pinned down at the end of a narrow valley with high, steep slopes—how they got themselves in that position, Rika didn’t even want to know. They bore heavy casualties, but over a hundred soldiers were still able to pull a trigger.
Rika chuckled.
Fireteam Hammerfall slipped around behind the Nietzschean troops, who were taking their time wearing down the Genevians. Rika didn’t blame them. Nothing worse than a cornered enemy. Best to keep one’s distance in a situation like this.
Rika settled in behind a wide granite slab a half-kilometer behind the Nietzscheans, and twisted her wounded leg under her so that her functional camo could keep her concealed. Silva was positioned up a hill to her right, and Kelly, whose AR97 lacked the ability to fire accurately over a half-klick, was a few hundred meters closer to the enemy, below their position.
Rika watched the countdown Silva had placed in her HUD, ready to bring fire down on the enemy.
When it reached zero, she waited for Kelly to lob in a couple of parties that Silva had passed out; when the enemy began the traditional dance, Rika fired five of her uranium rods—noting that she only had ten left—before switching to the electron beam, and burning a hole through three enemy soldiers who had lined up nicely for her.
Silva followed a similar strike pattern, and while the two snipers moved to new positions, Kelly fired at close range targets with her AR97 before ducking back behind cover and lobbing another party into the mix.