by M. D. Cooper
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 leading back to the warehouse, something caught her eye: a light was on in one of the 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 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 meters 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 yet, 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; 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 fists 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.
The closest attacker was twenty meters away, and Rika rushed toward him, brandishing the arms she still held, as the assailant fired before ducking behind a crate for cover.
It didn’t help.
Rika slammed into the crate at full speed, and pushed it back against another stack, crushing the man in between. She strode around to see him struggling to get up, his right arm hanging limp at his side.
Wordlessly, she swung one of the severed arms, striking him in the head, before grabbing him by the throat with her foot and tearing him free from the crates. At the apex of her swing, she let go, and he flew headfirst into a nearby support pole.
She wasn’t certain if he died before or after he hit the pole, but as his twitching body landed on the floor, she knew it didn’t matter.
Gunfire sounded from Barne’s position, and responses came from two locations.
Rika selected her next target—the sentry entering through the south door—and ran toward her. The woman didn’t fare any better than the rest had.
Rika circled around the enemies in the warehouse, getting behind the one furthest from Barne, who was trying to move into a flanking position.
She smashed the farthest sentry’s head. Barne opened fire once more, and then stopped and called out that he was clear.
Rika returned to Barne’s position. “You got two?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Barne said with a nod, as he dropped the rifle and walked over to one of their supply crates.
“So Cheri sent them, did she?” Rika asked.
“Yup,” Barne said with a grunt, and pulled out a tank of light brown liquid. “Bring all the bodies over here; we have to clean up.”
“’Clean up’?” Rika asked.
“Yeah, we have to get out of here, and we can’t leave it like this.”
She grabbed two of the closest bodies, and carried them back to where Barne had pulled all the equipment out of a case and was pouring the liquid into it.
“Nope, the crates on the far side of this warehouse are fireworks. We’ll just set something up so it looks like a spark from a truck started it, and then we’ll watch…well…the fireworks.”
“What are fireworks?” Rika asked, walking away once more.
Rika gathered all the bodies, and then walked to the east side of the warehouse where she had spotted a cleaning closet. Inside, there was a hose and some cleaning supplies. Rika spent the next twenty minutes getting the bits of bone, blood, and hair out of her armor.
Rika sighed. Have a nice stroll through the city, enjoy a latte, and a walk through the woods…check. Kill a bunch of people, dissolve their bodies, and steal a truck…double check.
She grabbed a hack unit from the staging area before walking outside, and carefully surveyed their surroundings. By some miracle, the commotion within the warehouse didn’t appear to have drawn any attention. Rika didn’t see another person as she retrieved her robe and pulled it on, wrapping the shawl around her head once more.
The cluster of warehouses had no shortage of trucks, though most were too big for their needs. Something with a box only eight meters long was preferable.
Rika was walking around the fourth building when she spotted the perfect candidate: a white box truck with no markings on it whatsoever.
She pulled the lock off the back, and lifted the rear roller door. A bench ran along each side of the interior, and duffels filled the space in between.
Rika walked around the truck and opened the driver’s door. She pulled out the hack unit and then slapped it on the truck’s control panel. The Marauders’ tech was good. Thirty seconds later, the truck started, and Rika climbed in and drove the truck to their warehouse’s loading docks.
It occurred to Rika, as she pulled the truck up to the building, that this was the first time she’d ever driven anything with wheels.
It was strange to feel it bounce and jostle over the uneven pavement, but it also gave her a sense of power. It took her two tries to back it up to the dock, and then just fifteen minutes to load all of Basilisk’s gear.
“You’re pretty damn fast at that,” Barne said as she approached where he was carefully pushing the last body into his makeshift vat of acid.
“I have a lot of experience,” Rika replied. “Why do you use acid for that? Can’t you get nano to do it better?”
Barne nodded. “Yeah, but it’s hard enough getting what we need planetside for missions like this—like your rifle’s rounds. Acid, we can source locally, and make out of stuff that no one will wonder about.”
Rika nodded silently, watching one of the attacker’s faces dissolve. She knew that she should feel something—be sad, angry, something.
Mostly she just felt disappointed. Disappointed that she had killed so viciously, disappointed that her perfect day had ended like this.
She had noticed, however, that Barne hadn’t said a single insulting thing to her since the fight. It seemed like he couldn’t decide to be wary of her, or grateful that she had saved him.
“Can you help me with this?” he asked as he closed the case. “There’s a drain over where you cleaned off. We can pour this down, and rinse it out.”