by M. D. Cooper
“Got left behind, did you?” Rika asked as she reached her left hand out to stroke its head. The dog didn’t shy away, and she smiled to herself, happy to see that someone accepted her without reservation.
Though she knew that thought wasn’t entirely fair. Leslie had never once seemed disturbed that Rika was a mech; nor had Captain Ayer.
As Rika stood, she heard a sound from behind her and she snapped her knees straight, leaping into the air as an electron beam streaked through the space where she had been a moment before.
Rika arched over backward and saw four shimmering figures at the entrance to the alley.
Shit, that’s good camo, she thought while firing two projectile rounds from her GNR-41C, followed by a full auto spray from her JE78. The large caliber rounds from the GNR took out the Niet with the electron beam, and the other rounds drove the rest of the enemy back around the corner.
Barne chuckled in their minds.
She saw Leslie’s location on the combat net and fired a few shots out of the alley’s mouth to keep the Niets engaged with her. One ducked around the corner and fired a few rounds, which missed because Rika was halfway up the wall of a building and climbing.
Another Niet tossed an HE grenade into the alley, and Rika raced up the wall, tearing out bricks and mortar as she went. The explosion blew past her just as she reached the top.
Rika heard weapons fire on the street below and moved to the edge of the building to look down. Leslie was across the street, just emerging from cover, and squad one’s lead fireteam was half a block to the north.
The Niets were all dead.
Rika stayed on the rooftops for the next kilometer, ranging further ahead and using her drones to scout the alleys and streets around her. She was now within two kilometers of the canal and the downtown district on its far side, and she scanned the gleaming towers that rose into the air.
The streets on the north side of the canal ran at a forty-five-degree angle to the waterway, which provided line-of-sight protection for the platoon as they advanced behind Rika. Unfortunately, the manufacturing district had given way to smaller commercial buildings, which were still tightly packed but were often only one story high. They wouldn’t provide much cover if any significant fire came from the three-hundred-meter-high buildings across the canal.
Rika sent her drones further into the sky and overlaid their feed with the images delivered from the ships and satellites overhead.
The combined visual showed a lot of activity in the towers along the canal. There were also a lot more heat signatures than could be accounted for by the Niets alone. Marauder Intel and Analysis determined that the towers were occupied by at least a hundred thousand Theban citizens.
Artillery was out of the question.
Along the northern edge of the canal—on the side Rika was approaching—lay a wide, heavily wooded park. At first it appeared as though the park was empty; Rika sent her drones down into the trees. They passed through an EM shield and suddenly picked up dozens, then hundreds, of heat signatures in the trees.
The Niets were waiting for them.
Three of her drones went offline, and Rika assumed the enemy had deployed EMP countermeasures against them. Rika released another passel but kept them high and further back.
Barne offered a suggestion.
Rika liked the plan.
CRASH
STELLAR DATE: 12.22.8948 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Northern Districts of Jersey City
REGION: Pyra, Albany System, Theban Alliance
Rika said.
Leslie cocked her head as she crouched next to Rika, considering the idea.
Rika brought up the canal’s far shore, looking for other options.
Leslie shrugged.
Leslie gave a rueful laugh.
The pair backtracked and found a storm grate that they would fit through. Rika pulled it up as quietly as possible and, once in, lowered it over them.
There wasn’t enough room to stand so the two women crawled on all fours—all threes in Rika’s case, with her GNR draped over her back. Leslie was in the lead and she reached the spout into the canal first.
It sat halfway out of the water, and Leslie glanced back at Rika.
She slithered out of the spout and down into the dark waters with Rika right on her tail. They fell to the bottom of the canal, which was just over four meters deep at this point, and lay still in the mud.
No weapons fire came, and Rika wished she had a drone feed to be certain that a hundred Niets wouldn’t be waiting for them on the far shore—but the EM signals would have given them away.
It took the pair over ten minutes to cross the canal, staying low, crawling across the muddy bottom and angling across to the inlet. When they finally reached their exit point, Rika sent a drone to the water’s surface and passively scanned the area.
The drone picked up two Niets nearby and a motion sensor to their right. However nothing appeared to be covering the route they needed to take to get to the Withermere Tower, which rose up on the water’s edge like a great glass reed only a dozen meters to the east.
Rika motioned for Leslie—who was also tapped into her drone feed—to follow. They slowly rose, taking care not to cause
too much of a disturbance on the water’s surface.
Leslie moved ahead, her armor’s camo systems giving her the edge, and she signaled to Rika when the coast was clear.
Rika kept expecting weapons fire to rain down on them at any moment as they moved from cover to cover, but none came. Five minutes later, they finally reached the entrance to the Withermere Tower.
Rika peered through the glass doors and saw a dozen guards. Leslie saw them, too, and she glanced back at Rika.
Both women knew that if they breached the building and took out the guards, it would alert the enemy to the possibility of an attack down the center. However, if they waited for the Marauders’ artillery to strike, they wouldn’t get to the weapon emplacements in the tower fast enough.
Rika noted a small patio wrapping around the Withermere Tower and hanging over the water. Chances were that another entrance would be on the far end of the patio.
She signaled to Leslie, who gave a nod, and the two Marauders began to creep alongside the building and around the corner onto the patio. They had a clear view of the canal and the park beyond—which would still be teeming with Niets. If just one enemy soldier peered back across the canal, their little surprise would be over.
The far end of the patio was occupied by a dozen tables with umbrellas; many of which were still holding the remains of food. Rika spotted a door that led into a small café. Leslie checked the entrance for any active monitoring and, when none was revealed, opened the door and slipped inside with Rika trailing right behind her.
Within, more tables—most covered with discarded food and drinks—filled the space. Overturned chairs and a smashed interior window showed the signs of a struggle. The door leading into the interior of the tower was closed, so they stepped through the broken window and slowly walked down the hall to the bank of elevators.
The first door was open, with an elevator car within. The second was closed, and Rika prised her fingers into the gap and pulled the doors apart.
She peered inside and saw a ladder to the right. Rika stretched a leg out and clamped her clawed foot around the vertical rail on one side of the ladder, and then swung out into the shaft, clamping her other foot on the other side. She’d learned long ago not to trust her weight to ladder rungs—most weren’t rated to hold her two hundred and thirty kilos.
Rika proceeded to walk up the ladder, her body perpendicular to the elevator shaft, while Leslie swung out behind her and pulled the door shut.
Rika laughed.
Leslie accepted the cable that Rika spooled out from her armor and clipped it onto a hook at her waist.
Rika picked up the pace while still trying to climb as quietly as possible. As they passed the closed doors to many levels, muted voices could be heard. Most likely the Theban populace, being kept in the towers to make them less appealing targets.
Their destination, the sixtieth floor—where I&A had placed the first of the Niets’ heavy weaponry—took three minutes to reach. When they arrived, Leslie unhooked from Rika, pulled herself over to the door, cracked it a centimeter, and passed out a drone.
She reached the top of the shaft less than a minute later and pulled herself up to the a-grav emitter in the machine room that sat atop the building. There was a service hatch on one side, and Rika carefully maneuvered herself through it and onto the roof.
Rika surveyed her surroundings. There were no Niets on the south side of the roof, but she could see several on the tops of the nearby buildings, clustered around railguns that were set up a few meters back from the northern edges. She imagined the same setup was on the Withermere—the guns out of view but ready to slide forward and rain down punishing kinetic fire on any attackers across the canal.
Rika logged the locations of the guns. Once the assault began, she would relay the weapon coordinates to the artillery platform; perhaps they had airburst options that could at least blind the enemy weapons.
If not, she would take them out the hard way.
She passed a drone around the side of the elevator machine room to get a clear view of what she faced before the assault began. As the drone peeked around the corner, it caught sight of a pair of Niets walking around to the south side of the tower’s roof.
“Shit!” Rika whispered. She considered her options. She could circle around to the west side of the machine room, but the two patrolling Niets would probably make a full circuit anyway. That would force her into full view of the rest of the Niets on the roof.
Her best bet was to take them out as quietly as possible when they reached the south side. Five nearby towers were as tall as the Withermere, and the Niets on their roofs would easily spot anything more than a quick takedown.
Of course, the enemy was wearing heavy powered armor, so taking them out quietly was going to be easier said than done.
Damn, I’m an idiot, Rika thought, realizing that she could just climb onto the machine room’s roof and stay out of view. She clambered up to the top with only a second to spare and lay prone, hoping that the patrol hadn’t spotted her.
The fact that the Niets didn’t have drones covering every rooftop, elevator shaft, and stairwell was a testament to the losses their assault craft had suffered when dropping to the surface of Pyra.
With her drones withdrawn, Rika had little visibility onto the roof around her and she didn’t dare move until she heard the footfalls of the patrol move away. Slowly they passed around to the east side of the roof, but something was wrong. There was just one set of steps.
A thud sounded behind her, and Rika flipped onto her back to see a Nietzschean soldier in heavy armor standing over her.
“Gotcha,” he said aloud.
“Get this!” Rika said, and swung her gun-arm up and fired a high caliber projectile round into his groin. The man’s armor dented and cracked, and he fell back with a shout.
A few seconds later the scream of incoming shells obliterated the silence of the early evening.
Explosions a kilometer along the canal to the east and west flared brightly, throwing entire trees and clouds of debris into the air. Rika rose up on the elevator house’s roof and noted that the Nietzscheans on other towers were sliding their railguns forward, training them to the east and west, assuming assaults would come from those directions after the artillery ceased pounding the park.
All the Niets were occupied except the team on the Withermere; they were spinning their gun to fire on Rika. She dove off the top of the elevator’s machine room as the railgun fired, blowing it to pieces, and sending the a-grav generator falling down through the shaft to the base of the building.
She reached the far southwest corner just as the Niets locked onto her with the cumbersome weapon, and she fired her GNR.
The uranium bolt flew from her gun’s muzzle, a
nd she sighed with relief as it hit the railgun, tearing it in half and causing the weapon’s energy coils to discharge into the soldiers nearby.
Rika unslung her JE78 and sent a series of pulse blasts into the Niets, pushing them back as she charged forward. One tripped after getting hit by a pulse and fell off the roof of the building; another nearly followed, but managed to hang onto the edge.
Airbursts from the artillery platform began to shower the adjacent buildings with EM and shrapnel, further lighting up the sky as Rika fired several high-caliber rounds into two more Niets. Then she kicked the hanging one off the roof.
Leslie’s words were punctuated by explosions several floors down; Rika smiled, knowing that the Withermere Tower no longer posed a threat to the Marauders.
As Rika emptied a magazine from her JE78 into the last Nietzschean on the roof, she looked around at the other towers.
The team on the tower to the west of the Withermere was in disarray, but the one to the east was braving the artillery fire and had slid one of their railguns to the edge of the roof.
It fired at the advancing Marauders in the park, getting off two shots before one of Rika’s uranium rounds slammed into the weapon, tearing it in half and showering the gun’s crew with shrapnel.
Rika glanced down as beamfire erupted from lower floors in the adjacent building, lancing out into the night. She gauged the distance to the next tower and backed up ten paces before taking off, running toward the edge of the building.
She pushed off with her right foot, moving at over one hundred kilometers per hour, and sailed between the buildings. The gleaming side of the adjacent building rushed toward her, and Rika fired four ballistic rounds, shattering the plas and a desk beyond.