Rikas Marauders

by M. D. Cooper

  Strange as it was, the custom suited her fine. If everyone on the street was wearying skin-tight polymers, she doubted that Jerry would have let her roam about for the day—unless it had been a world of heavy modders. Then she’d fit in perfectly.

  The residential district gave way to rows of small shops along the street, and Rika laid eyes on a coffee shop that had a holosign displaying a rotating array of drinks that made her mouth water.

  Each of the Marauders had fake idents, and was masquerading as a Theban visiting Pyra. Rika’s used her real name, though it cited her birthplace as Lils—an orbital habitat further out in the Albany System. She had credit, too; physical, and online in a planetary bank.

  When she’d checked the balance, it had blown her away. She may not be getting ‘paid’ for the job, but she had more disposable credit available than she had seen in years.

  She decided there was no reason not to treat herself to the local delights—a perfectly reasonable thing to do for a tourist. Rika approached the shop, and as she pushed the door open, the scent of freshly ground coffee beans hit her nostrils. She drew in a deep breath with a broad smile on her lips.

  “Has that effect, doesn’t it?” a man said with a grin as he walked past, holding a steaming cup of coffee with an intricate pattern in the frothed milk floating on top.

  “Sure seems to,” Rika replied.

  She looked over the menu and opted for a caramel latte. She had never tasted caramel before—not outside of a sim, at least—and wasn’t about to pass up on this chance.

  As she ordered the drink from a woman with a kind smile behind the counter, she felt a pang of guilt for the turmoil the Marauders would cause on Pyra in just a few day’s time.

  Unbidden, the memory of Chase being beaten once again dominated her thoughts. Is he still there? Still slaving away in Hal’s Hell while I go for sunny morning strolls, and drink my latte while planning the death of a president?

  That was months ago for him, she reminded herself. He’s recovered; he’s forgotten about you, for now. Probably chasing some other girl.

  She wasn’t so sure, though. He had asked her out for drinks every day for months. Chase didn’t seem like the sort to give up so easily.

  But where would he go to find me if he had the means to do so, which he doesn’t? Even if he found out I’ve been bought by the Marauders, what would he do? Visit their HQ?

  She didn’t even know where that was. For all she knew, it was on a ship, or on some rock, floating in the interstellar void. That’s the sort of place she’d always heard that mercenary outfits operated out of.

  “Rika,” a sweet voice said, and she turned to see the woman behind the counter holding out her drink.

  “Thanks,” Rika answered, and took the cup, touching it to her lips and savoring the scent before taking a taste. “Stars!” she exclaimed. “Oh, wow, that’s so good.”

  The woman giggled. “Glad to make your day. Next, please?”

  Rika realized she was holding up the line and stepped aside, taking another sip of the coffee as she walked out of the shop and back into the late morning light; all her worries about past and future already forgotten.

  “Oh, stars,” she whispered. “Can’t this just last forever?”

  * * * * *

  Rika strolled down the paths in the forest to the north of the presidential palace, taking in the sights with an innocent joy that was barely an act.

  Even though she was surveilling the protections the president’s security had placed along President Ariana’s running path, the high volume of cameras, automated turrets, and sensor systems didn’t diminish the joy she felt.

  Shit, if this is slavery, I’ll take more of it, she thought; but then a frown creased her brow.

  No, a gilded cage is still a cage.

  She knew agony awaited her if she didn’t get back to the warehouse by the proscribed time. That was not freedom.

  The chain may be long, but it was still present.

  She refocused on the task at hand. Rika knew from the intel that Team Basilisk had gathered already that the president took only one of three routes through the forest for her early morning run. However, all the routes converged at a specific point; a dozen meters beyond that point, the trail passed into a wide glen.

  Rika walked through the glen, looking at the large trees that bordered it, eyeing each in turn, looking for one with the right branches in the right place.

  As she reached the far side of the clearing, she spotted the perfect tree. It had a cluster of trunks that stayed close together for almost twenty meters before branching out. She could hug one of the trunks, and rest her rifle along a branch. The cloak she wore could double as camouflage, and there was mesh back in the warehouse with which to cover her GNR-41C.

  She would be invisible.

  Rika kept walking further down the trail, noting fallback positions and places where Jerry and Leslie could hide.

  Their job would be to keep on the lookout for anyone who may compromise Rika’s position—but also to finish the job, should Rika’s shots not prove fatal.

  That wasn’t an outcome that worried Rika. She would kill President Ariana; it was a foregone conclusion.

  Barne’s job was the getaway. He would park a truck holding several hoverbikes nearby, and would also pay off a local bike gang to drive by the palace and throw rotten fruit at it.

  Two kilometers away, there would be other transportation for them to switch to, and access to three possible safe fallbacks. She hadn’t been given the location of the fallbacks yet, but Jerry had assured her that she would know about them in due time.

  Rika nodded to a young couple as she walked past, giving them a warm smile. The gesture wasn’t entirely disingenuous, but enough to make her feel guilty for enjoying this peaceful place, knowing that she would forever mark it as a place of mourning.

  Instead of admiring the beauty of the glade, passersby would remember their beloved leader and revile her killer.

  Better her than me, she thought, pushing the concern from her mind once more.

  Eventually Rika left the park and took a different route back toward the warehouse, walking at the slowest pace she could manage while still giving herself a buffer, in case she ran into any trouble.

  Rika hadn’t bothered to mention to Jerry that receiving discipline while out in public would most certainly reveal her—and their operation. If he’d known, he probably wouldn’t have let her go on her own; now that she had spent this day in paradise, she was all the more glad that she had omitted the information.

  Or maybe he knew; maybe he was trusting her, allowing her to prove that she was part of the team.

  Quite the risk to take.

  Dusk was beginning to fall as she neared the warehouse. Everything appeared to be as it was when she left, save the positions of transport vehicles around some of the other buildings.

  As Rika walked down the road, something caught her eye: a light was on in one of the warehouse’s windows. Not an overhead light, but a small one, close to the glass. Rika focused on it, picking up slight pulses in its intensity.

  They contained a message, which she decoded: Intruders. Seven.

  Rika slowed her approach and casually stepped into the ferns lining the road, activating her robe’s camouflage. Once hidden from sight, she ducked down behind the greenery and switched her vision to IR, followed by UV, as she scanned the perimeter for sentries.

  She picked up two—one rounding a corner on the far side of the building, and another one closer, walking past the road she had been strolling down a minute earlier.

  Rika remained still, praying that her robe’s camouflage would fool whatever sensors the closest sentry possessed. He paused a moment and then resumed his route, heading south around the warehouse.

  The robe that had hidden her form would now be a hindrance. Rika pulled it off and bundled it up before stuffing it beneath a fallen branch. The scarf and pads on her feet followed.

  Thirty met
ers of open space lay between the warehouse and the trees. Rika considered her options. She could run across, hoping that no one spotted her—but if whoever these people were had half a brain between them, there would be motion sensors that would pick up her movements.

  She eyed the roofline, looking for a good landing spot—something that wouldn’t make too much noise, or transfer vibration into the building’s wooden structure.

  Walking east, keeping well within the tree line, she saw a loading crane that sat ten meters from the building. That put it only twenty from cover; an easy jump even without much of a start.

  Rika checked the ground and moved a few branches out of the way. Then she backed up several meters and took off at full speed. As she left the trees, she pushed off, soaring through the air and catching the crane with her still-gloved hands before swinging underneath and arcing through the air to the cornice around the roof of the warehouse.

  She caught it with her clawed feet and crouched low, scanning the rooftop. No sentries were visible; though several air conditioning units blocked her vision. Rika carefully crept across the crushed rock on the roof to a staircase, which led down into the warehouse below.

  It wasn’t the one she’d used the night before—that one let off almost on top of where Team Basilisk had set up their base. This one would bring her down on the far side of the warehouse, a few dozen meters away.

  As her hand stretched toward the door, she prayed that whoever had taken the warehouse had disabled the alarms, or her element of surprise would be gone in the next few seconds.

  The door was unlocked, and as she eased it open, Rika saw that the sensors were indeed off. Analyzing the stairs leading down to the warehouse’s wooden floor, she took slow, careful steps—the wooden stairs only giving two soft creaks as she went.

  Given how much the old building moved and sighed as the sun set and the air cooled, she hoped it wouldn’t be noticeable.

  Once down the stairs, Rika ducked behind several dusty old crates and looked for movement and heat sources. Though she had spotted two sentries outside, Rika had to assume that there were at least seven within. Maybe more. Barne may not have seen the whole team when he set up the light.

  An IR bloom appeared to her right, and Rika saw a woman prowling past, her eyes on the doors and windows, not looking within the warehouse. She walked within four meters of Rika and then kept going.

  Rika considered taking the woman down and seizing her weapon, but she didn’t want to alert the other intruders without getting a better grasp on what was happening.

  Carefully moving from cover to cover, Rika crept through the warehouse, spotting two more sentries before reaching a stack of crates with a small gap between them. She peered through and saw Barne with five other figures.

  Two of the intruders held Barne against a stack of crates while one of the others paced in front of him.

  “You said she’d be back by now! Where is she?” the pacing one asked—a woman, though rather husky sounding. Rika wondered if she had always been a woman, or if she was in the midst of a gender change.

  Barne gave his deep chuckle. “How would I know? She’s just the meat. I don’t talk to meat.”

  So much for no one calling me ‘meat’ yet, Rika thought.

  “Well, ping her again,” the woman said.

  “Just did,” Barne said with a shrug. “She’s not answering. Maybe she ran off.”

  A smile formed on Rika’s lips. She had received no message; maybe Barne wasn’t a complete ass after all.

  “Cheri got it out of Jerry that your mech girl has a compliance chip. She’s not running off, and she wouldn’t miss her return deadline.”

  Barne laughed again, leaning back against a crate. “Back in the war, I saw a mech lose its shit. AM model. It killed seventeen men and women in my regiment. The LT was hitting it with more Discipline than he ever had before, and it just kept coming. That shit is a rope, not a chain.”

  Rika wondered about that. She had never heard of any mechs successfully resisting Discipline; granted, she had only met a few hundred, and there had been over a hundred thousand of her kind in the war. It was probably safe to assume that tales of mechs resisting Discipline were kept hushed.

  The woman continued to press Barne, and Rika took the time to examine the intruders.

  Like the sentries she saw before, they wore robes—though theirs were not as advanced as the one Rika had spent her day in. Her enhanced vision traced the outlines of light armor as they moved, but the speaker’s was heavier and powered to some extent.

  Their weapons were multifunction rifles, capable of firing pulse rounds and projectiles. None of the intruders appeared to be carrying beam or plasma guns.

  She turned and looked behind her, catching sight of one of the sentries twenty meters away. That would be her first target.

  Rika crept back through the warehouse, angling toward where that sentry would be in a minute’s time. She waited behind a crate, and when the sentry’s boot came into view, she rose to her full height, clamped her hands around the person’s head—a man, younger by the looks of him—and broke his neck in one swift twist.

  She grabbed his rifle as it slipped from his lifeless fingers and looked it over. It was the same model as the ones the others carried. Rika also saw that it was biolocked.

  Without an unlock kit, it would be death to grab the weapon’s grip—for a human. Even so, Rika wasn’t keen on the idea of shorting out her hand. Looking around, she saw some metal strapping nearby and quietly wrapped it around the weapon’s grip. Holding the gun by the stock in her left hand, she took a deep breath and slipped her right hand onto the grip.

  Nothing happened. She wondered if the weapon’s biolock was enabled. Then sparks flew from the metal strapping wrapped around the grip, and it grew hot in her hand—not that Rika cared. Then the sparks ceased, and she carefully pulled off the strapping.

  It was easier said than done, as some of the pieces had been welded together by the electrical current. Once she had them free, Rika checked the weapon’s readout and realized that the pulse functionality had been fried.

  No matter, she thought. I wasn’t planning on using that, anyway.

  The weapon had a mechanical firing system for the projectiles, and she checked its action, making sure that it was still functional—which it was.

  Time to kick some ass.

  Rika circled around to come in behind Basilisk’s staging area, where the intruders were holding Barne. During her first kill and the time it had taken to make the weapon usable, the woman yelling at Barne had moved on to hitting him.

  That was good news for Rika. It meant that three of them would be distracted. The remaining two—a man and a woman—were standing near the cases that her armor and weapons had been in. Rika crouched low, getting right behind them before leaping up onto the cases and stooping down.

  She gave a wild scream as she grabbed the intruder on her right by the hair and pulled him off the ground, while firing three rounds into the back of the female intruder’s head.

  The woman fell to the ground, dead, while the man writhed in Rika’s grip, his hands wrapped around her wrist.

  Rika flung him straight up into the ceiling, but by some miracle he managed to hold onto her wrist. She swung her arm back down, slamming him into the ground as she jumped off the cases and landed on his chest, smashing his ribs like they were twigs.

  The two guards holding Barne had seen the whole thing, and for the five seconds it had taken for two of their comrades to die, had simply stared with mouths open.

  “Oh, there she is,” Barne said with a laugh, as he pulled his right arm free and grabbed one of the men by the neck. Barne grunted and swung his arms together, and his two former captors slammed into one another; then one of them—Rika wasn’t sure which—got a boot to the chest.

  Rika had only been watching Barne with half an eye because she was busy emptying her weapon’s magazine into the large woman who had been driving her fist
s into Barne’s gut a moment before.

  The rounds ricocheted off the woman’s armor, and she gave a grim smile. “Gonna take a lot more than that to kill me, meat.”

  Rika threw the weapon aside and charged at the woman, driving both fists into her torso, and the satisfying crack of shattering armor plates reverberated up her arms.

  The woman, for her part, staggered back, but didn’t go down. She set her teeth, grabbed Rika’s forearms, and delivered a powered kick to Rika’s gut.

  The blow pushed Rika back, but she was on the woman a moment later, grabbing both of her arms. Rika rotated her wrists, twisting them nearly all the way around—one of the benefits of being less than human—until she heard two loud cracks, and the woman began screaming.

  The sounds were like music to Rika as she planted a foot on the woman’s chest—her three claws digging into the cracks that her initial blows had caused. Her heel claw drove through the cracked plate and the under-layer, sinking into the woman’s gut.

  Rika took a deep breath, straightened her leg, and pulled the woman’s arms off. Her enemy fell to the ground, and Rika planted her other foot on the woman’s chest, tearing her chest plate off.

  “I. Am. Not. Fucking. MEAT!” Rika screamed, and slammed her foot into the woman’s chest while tearing the other free, pulling a string of intestines out into the air.

  “Holy shit,” Barne whispered from behind her.

  Rika turned to see Barne standing over the two men who had been holding him back, his eyes locked on the pair of arms she still held.

  “What?” Rika asked, her voice still filled with rage. “Don’t like your rescue?”

  “Uh…no…” Barne stammered. “I just haven’t seen anything like that since…”

  “The war,” Rika said with a nod. “Guess the war’s not over yet, is it?”

  “I don’t know what that means, but could you put those arms down? They’re creeping me out.”

  Shots rang out and ricocheted off Rika’s armor. Barne ducked down behind a crate, but Rika turned, catching sight of three more enemies closing in. Her IR and UV blend also picked up the two sentries from outside entering through the north and south doors.