by Kalina, Mark
The man's return fire slashed through the space Nas had been in a fraction of a second earlier and tracked across the decorated column which Nas had darted behind. The laser pulse seared the air with a white-violet flash and an echoing snap-crack! of superheated air and superheated stone. It would have cut Nas' head off had he been a fraction of a second slower. Shards of heat-shattered stone flew outward, pinging off the ground, somehow audible over the rising screams of bystanders.
Just my luck, the bastard is an adept too, Nas thought as he rolled up and launched himself behind a wide, thick walled stone planter, anticipating his enemy's obvious next move to make lateral distance and shoot around the column that Nas had taken cover behind. More than half of the art of telestraal was in really seeing one's surroundings and being able to understand what an enemy could and would do next. The rest was timing and speed; neuro-chemically augmented speed, for a serious adept like Nas... and like the tall man.
Another laser flash lit up the air behind Nas, striking a narrow, bright-leafed tree in the planter, cutting it in half in a spray of flaming splinters. But Nas was already behind the heavy stone planter, rolling up to ready himself for the next move. The tall man was throwing off his smoldering cloak as Nas dove out of cover, firing mid-air. The tall man was diving out of the line of fire before Nas' laser cleared the cover, and Nas' pulse missed by centimeters, striking another stone planter full of decorative blossoms and shattering a fist-sized crater into the fused stone. Bits of superheated stone, dirt and plant debris traced thin arcs of smoke through the air. Nas hit the ground rolling and firing, even as the tall man threw himself behind a stunned bystander and then somersaulted behind another of the broad stone planters that decorated the atrium mall.
With the neuro-chem racing through his system, the decision not to shoot through the bystander was calm, almost leisurely, for Nas. Instead he darted for cover in the entryway of one of the mall's stores, firing again into the planter the tall man had taken cover behind, hoping to at least distract his enemy with a shower of superheated fragments. He had no time to spare now for the rest of his team's data feed, but the flash and crack of laser fire sounding from other parts of the mall told him that he wasn't the only one in the fight.
The sudden flash-cracks of laser fire, and the screams that followed, took Freya by surprise. She had been worried, expecting trouble, but her instincts were wrong for this sort of fighting and for a moment she hesitated.
The crowd in the atrium mall was substantial, if not to the point of jostling, and Freya could not see where the shot had come from, or where it had gone.
A man dressed in a nondescript gray cloak and dark sun-visor glasses stepped from behind a wide decorative column and paused. He seemed to look at Freya for a second. Something about his manner screamed a warning to Freya, but her eyes still went wide with shock as he brought a laser pistol from behind his cloak and leveled it at her. Time seemed to slow down and Freya felt as if she could not move except in slow motion, but the combat reflexes trained at the Fleet Academy kicked in and Freya found herself twisting to throw herself aside. Too slow, she knew. The man seemed to move in slow motion also, but Freya could tell that it was an illusion, that his motions were actually blazing fast, maybe even augmented with neuro-chemical boosters.
Muir's needler went off with a rapid crackle. The stream of explosive needles tracked across the gunman's torso, detonating in a rapid line of yellow flashes. The man did not fall, but the explosions knocked his arm off its aim; the laser flashed but Freya did not feel a hit.
Freya hit the ground and desperately tried to claw her laser from its holster. The gunman was still on his feet, side-stepping and bringing his weapon down on Muir. His cloak had been torn to shreds by the stream of explosive needles, and Freya thought she could see glimpses of black polycarbonate mesh armor underneath.
The gunman's laser flashed again as Muir, a telestraal adept, threw himself down and rolled. Not fast enough. The laser pulse cut through Muir's right arm, severing it a few centimeters above the elbow.
Freya scrambled to a crouch and brought up her laser, but the gunman seemed to track her motion and stepped behind a wide column as she did, denying her a shot. Time seemed to be running normally again, and Freya could see that the gunman's movements were flicker-quick, almost certainly the result of implanted combat augmentation.
Zandy saw the gray-cloaked man shoot Muir, taking his arm off with a laser pulse that reflected for a searing instant from the glass panels of the atrium-mall roof. Muir's severed right arm, still holding the little needler, lay on the mall's polished floor. The laser had cut too fast to cauterize; bright red biosim circulatory fluid, not quite the color of human blood, pooled around the severed limb. Muir rolled behind cover, as if unaware that he had lost an arm.
Everything seemed to freeze. Zandy saw Freya come up from a dive with her own laser in hand, but the gunman was already gone, flowing behind cover.
The facts of the sudden fire-fight seemed clear, even crystalline, in Zandy's brain, but her reactions were lagging. She wasn't in an interceptor here, and none of her honed combat instincts seemed to have any relevance.
Belatedly she threw herself down behind a wide stone planter that held a spray of colorful flowers. Three or four laser pulses flashed somewhere in the mall, strobing reflections from the glass roof like miniature lightning bolts. Zandy looked down to find her needler pistol in her hand. She did not recall drawing it.
Her instincts were screaming nonsense at her, telling her to deploy sensors drones, to see from behind her bow-shield; and the mild but persistent disorientation of the new avatar was making it even harder. Part of her mind seemed to think that since she was in combat, she must be in a 'ceptor. She had only minimal training for this sort of thing; a personal laser fight in close quarters was not what the Fleet expected its interceptor pilots to get involved in.
Another exchange of laser fire flashed across the atrium, reflected flashes lighting up the transparent panels of the ceiling, and this time Zandy heard the hissing cracks as the laser pulses superheated the air and the simultaneous echoing bangs as solid matter exploded into vapor. People were screaming everywhere, and security alarms added their shrill warble to the cacophony.
Zandy crouched behind the stone planter, gripped her needler and tried to figure out what to do.
"Shit!" Ylayn gasped, as Gira's signal went dead. She had been mildly fond of the other woman, enough to consider trying to seduce her... but there was no time to dwell on it. The Coalition commandoes were reacting to the eruption of laser fire, and finally she had enough signals to correlate encryption solutions and launch her final penetration codes.
"Got them," Ylayn exclaimed a second later, as more laser fire flashed across the atrium-mall. She was plugged in to her pers-comp, and the tactical data being exchanged by the Coalition special operations team was all hers.
Almost as soon as she had the data, she was feeding it into the Whisperknife's infiltration team's tactical net. Now her people --her surviving people-- would know exactly who and where the enemy was. Not really fair, when your info-net was compromised, but then, neither was Gira being dead... and anyway, Ylayn had no particular affection for fair fights.
Ylayn watched over her link as one of the enemy commandoes ran by Hyuer, utterly unaware of him as anything other than a bystander, moving to take the Captain in a cross-fire. On Ylayn's tac-net he stood out clearly, flagged as a hostile. Hyuer calmly drew his laser and shot him, the high energy pulse slashing into his back. A spray of vaporized polycarbonate armor exploded outward from the man's back and he spun with a fast flowing grace that showed he was heavily augmented. Hyuer shot again, the pulse cutting into the man's exposed neck, almost severing his head from his shoulders in an explosion of vaporized blood. The body fell limply to the ground.
"Hyuer to team," came a quick subvocalization, "set your lasers to a narrow track; the bastards have armor... and thanks for the setup, Ylayn!"
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nbsp; Of all the things Pyer might have expected, seeing the supposed-to-be-dead void-runner captain and his crew was the very last one. Sheer shock had not quite managed to override training, and Pyer's draw and shot had been as fast as neuro-chemical augmentation could make it. He'd killed the pirate woman, but the damned void-runner captain seemed to be just as fast as Pyer was... or faster.
There was no time to wonder what was going on. He had to take out the targets and get out of here. Nothing else mattered now, and later there would be time to try to figure out what had gone wrong.
Chaos was spreading through the crowd, radiating outward like ripples in a pool of water. More and more people were screaming, or trying to push their way in different directions.
His data link was feeding him a tactical picture, and he watched as one of his men engaged the targets, trying for a kill before the chaos of the crowd reached him. Too slow! The female captain managed to reach cover, and the other daemon was only injured. He focused for a second into his data link, ordering the rest of his men to move in on the targets. They had to take them out quickly, before local security could complicate the situation.
Pyer knew that void-runner would be moving to get a firing angle past Pyer's cover. Training reflexively suppressed the desire to stand and take a shot; the enemy would have already internalized Pyer's position, before he started moving. The fucking pirate didn't matter anyway, except that he was making the job harder. Pyer rolled out from the cover of the heavy stone planter, coming up with a decorative column blocking his sight of the pirate. He had to move fast now. The laser fire had set off alarms, and local authorities would be inbound. Given the volume of laser fire, the locals would be sending in high threat security forces: SWAT teams or their functional equivalent. The only thing left to do was to ride the chaos that the sudden laser fire had unleashed, kill his targets and get out.
Freya crouched next to Muir. He looked stunned and bemused. The biosim avatar had reacted to the loss of its arm, his arm, by shutting down the flow of circulatory fluid to the damaged area and suppressing the pain signals the damage would have caused.
"Lost my needler," Muir said, almost apologetically.
"Right," Freya said, trying to suppress a hysterical giggle.
"Move!" Muir said, with sudden intensity.
He gathered himself, not quite balanced without an arm, and threw himself sideways, across the open space between columns. The gunman was waiting, moving smoothly around the column he had taken cover behind. His laser tracked Muir.
Freya shot. Her first pulse strobe-lit the gunman, lifting the torn cloth of his cloak in a puff of vaporized carbon, but Freya couldn't tell if it had burned through the armor or not. Her second pulse missed over the gunman's shoulder, blasting a palm-sized crater in the wide column and sending superheated stone fragments into the gunman's armored back. Her third pulse caught the gunman in the chest again. Either it burned through the armor, or the armor had been ablated away by the needler darts and the first pulse, because the man dropped his laser and fell, screaming and clutching himself.
"Muir! Get to the uplink center!" she shouted, turning and scrambling in the direction of the uplink facility's wide, tinted glass doors.
Nas was moving through chaos and panic of the atrium-mall, dodging shrill bystanders, eyes and mind simultaneously open, with Ylayn's tactical overlay superimposed with what his own eyes saw. Multiple alarms shrieked, competing to make the most noise, punctuated by flashes and cracks of laser fire.
The tall man had gotten out of Nas' line of fire, but Nas could see exactly where all of the enemy were now. Even better, Ylayn was sending him the data as to where the bad guys thought his people were, as well as where they thought three "targets" were. The "targets'" probable locations were marked with the highest priority in enemy's system.
The "targets" intrigued Nas. Whoever they were, the Coalition commandoes were here to kill them... were willing to start a firefight in a public mall on a Hegemony planet to kill them. Enemy of my enemy, thought Nas. If these Coaly bastards wanted whoever it was dead so bad, then, as far as Nas was concerned, the "targets" were better off alive, if only to give that tall son-of-a-bitch grief.
And, by the sound of it, the "targets" were fighting back. None of his people were using needlers, and he doubted the Coaly commandoes were either, but the sharp crackle of needler fire had been distinct among the flashes and flat snap-cracks of laser fire. It might have just been a local cop, Nas thought, but...
One of the commandoes was moving towards the targets, weaving from cover to cover, almost in position. Nas changed his path to meet him. The man saw Nas, moving through the panicked crowd. The commando turned, and Nas dove towards cover, shooting as he did. All three of his pulses caught the man in the chest, the narrow-track lasers cutting through any armor the man might have had. The man jerked backwards as a gust of vaporized lung tissue erupted from his mouth, then fell. Nas rolled as he landed behind a column, then rolled again to his feet and was moving again.
Zandy crouched low behind a fused stone planter. She could see a spray of broad-leafed plants and a slender fern-like tree that spread its leaves wide above her. Past the decorative foliage, she could see people running or standing in panic. Incandescent bursts of light flashed and reflected from the glass panels of the atrium. Dozens, or maybe hundreds of people were shouting, screaming, and the screams were periodically punctuated with the sharp hiss-crack of laser fire.
"Zandy, come on!" came a shout from Freya. The other woman was shouting from the open sliding double-doors of the data center, beckoning Zandy to run towards her. Zandy tried to gather herself for the dash. It would be like an interceptor launch, she thought. No time to think about the danger, just time to act, fast.
Zandy got her legs under her, ready to run, needler held ready in a two-handed grip. Her biosim avatar was breathing hard, panting with nerves.
A laser flash illuminated Freya, tracking a micro-second of unbearable brightness across her right shoulder. Vaporized biosim tissue erupted outward in a sudden cloud, throwing Freya backwards and down.
Zandy turned desperately to look behind, where the laser pulse seemed to have come from. A mirror-visored man in a dark blue traveling cloak stood among the scattering crowd, perhaps fifteen meters distant.
The man saw her; the visored head turned incrementally to face her and the hand holding the laser tracked towards her with smooth speed. Zandy threw herself down, interposing one of the mall's foliage-filled stone planters between herself and the gunman. She hit the ground crouching on her knees and one elbow, and holding her needler up over her head, firing a long blind burst in the direction of the gunman. The weapon stuttered and vibrated in her hand as it sprayed out a stream of high velocity projectiles. Some of her darts struck the tree in the other planter, blasting leaves and branches apart in a rapid-fire burst of small explosions. Other darts, sent high by Zandy's angle of fire, detonated against the atrium ceiling at the far end of the mall, shattering the clear panels in a shower of falling crystal. Zandy held the trigger down, hoping that any bystanders were down behind cover, till the weapon sent an "empty" signal into her data feed. She switched to the needler's stun-dart magazine and fired another long burst, scampering back into better cover as she did so.
The weapon sent a second, final "empty" signal.
Shit, just expended all my ordinance in one go, Zandy thought; fucking dumb thing to do. God, I hope I didn't hit any civilians. The thoughts were almost ridiculously calm, in contrast with the near-panic that seemed to be driving her actions. If the gunman moved in, she supposed she could throw the empty needler at him.
It was odd, she thought, that she was probably going to die here, in a biosim avatar. Somehow she had been certain that her last moments would have been in an interceptor body.
She shook her head, the suddenly focused on the sight in front of her; the body of one of the gunmen, the one Freya had shot, lying just a couple of meters away, with a laser pistol
in his outstretched hand.
What the fuck... nothing to lose, Zandy thought, and lunged for the weapon. Her hand closed on it just as a laser pulse flashed into the paving stones next to her, blasting out a gout of superheated fragments with a painfully sharp CRAACK!
An instant later, a rapid sequence of laser flashes seared the air above her. Pulses struck cover and exploded in bursts of flash-vaporization off to her left and her right.
Zandy rolled back towards her cover, expecting the searing heat of a laser pulse. Nothing. Her arms and face stung where tiny fragments of hot stone had hit her, but she didn't think the damage was serious. Now that she was moving, fighting, she found that the temptation to hide was gone; this was a fight, and the urge to act, to be unpredictable and aggressive, was almost overwhelming. In an interceptor she would have known what to do. Here, she had to guess and hope.
Zandy gripped her new-found laser and found the safety override, switching the weapon to fully manual mode; there was no time to try to interface it into her data feeds. Holding the pistol ready, she poked her head up, trying to find the gunman. For an instant she saw him as he dove behind one of the wide columns that were spaced along the length of the mall. Several laser pulses struck the column in bursts of searing brightness, blasting out clouds of vaporized stone. Someone was shooting at the gunman, Zandy realized.
Freya tried to get back on her feet, but the biosim body wasn't responding properly. There was no pain, but her right arm wouldn't move and her breathing had a horrible-sounding rasp to it. The smell of burned carbon was very strong. At least burned biosim didn't smell like burned flesh, Freya thought.