by Aer-ki Jyr
Reinforcements were coming in from the other Star Force colonies as well as the Clans on a continual basis, but neither the skeets nor the gunships had enough firepower to down a fully shielded cruiser. The mechs encircling the base were another matter, but their hangars had also been hit, pinning a lot of the chassis under the rubble. Those in the field attempted to unload on the cruisers making their forays into the city, but given they were only making hit and fade runs to deliver the kirbies they weren’t parked over the city daring the mechs to shoot at them like they had been in the previous fighting up north.
Most of the weapon impacts on the cruisers’ shields were for naught, because they’d just retreat back out over the forest and recharge their matrixes. Only the lachar-equipped mechs were doing any damage, and had succeeded in taking out 3 batteries between all the active ships, but for the most part the cruisers simply ignored the mechs and continued ferrying their troop-laden kirbies inside the city perimeter.
Paul knew it was only a matter of time before they started bringing in predators…or just parking over the city and blasting away if they got all the defense towers down, which was obviously part of their aim. They couldn’t afford to let that happen, though with each subsequent cruiser run they’d hit a tower with a few plasma shots before retreating, gradually wearing down their defenses until one fell, even without the aid of the ground troops.
When Paul got up another 10 levels he ran into a bottleneck of lizards pinned behind a desk on the stairwell, on top of which had been piled a heap of other furniture blocking the path upwards. Some of them were trying to disassemble the pile while others were abandoning the stairwell and spilling out into the hallways, probably looking to cross over and move up another one if they weren’t all blocked by now.
Paul fired up at the tails of the nearest three, then bullied his way past the falling lizards and fired rapidly at the group ahead of him, targeting any and all that turned around trying to sow as much confusion as possible before retreating back down a level and sliding out a side door to wait in ambush.
As expected the lizards followed him down, half of them continuing to take the stairs down further while the other half waited on the small platform for one to poke its head out the door to see if Paul had gotten off at this level. Situated behind the door in a nook against the wall the lizard couldn’t see him, so after a few long seconds it closed the door and the other lizards continued down, figuring that was where the Human had went.
As soon as the door shut Paul leapt out and pulled it back open again, firing into the side of several lizards and the backs of others headed down, hitting several in their scaly heads that were now at chest height. He turned right and punched another, doubling it over and firing at the one behind it before bringing a knee up into the first one’s chin and knocking it unconscious with the ferocity of the blow.
He left it where it lay and jumped up three stairs as those below started to turn around and come back up. Paul finished off one more above him then had the stairs ahead clear and to himself for the moment, so he turned around and started walking up them backwards, sniping at any of the lizards coming up from below until he reached the bottom of the debris pile. There he made his stand, checking to see that there were no more lizards at his back and dropping to a knee before sliding up against the side of the wall so he could aim downward and not be in the center of the stairs for the lizards to shoot at on reflex.
As predicted they charged back up at him spaced evenly, giving him enough trigger time to sight and down each one with a single shot, followed up by a brief twitch check, during which he walked back down the stairs, stepping on and over the bodies looking for any signs of life. Where he found it he delivered cleanup shots, then he headed back up the stairs and onto the trail of the lizards further ahead of him cutting across the level.
2
Hightower was crouched behind an overturned table set just inside the double doors to the conference room nervously waiting with stinger pistol in hand as he listened to the distant sounds of battle further out in the building as their few security guards did what they could to hold off the lizards working their way up from below. Beside him were two other civilians armed with stingers, but the rest of the 83 people holed up in the room had no weaponry at all.
The Duke’s pistol had come from his desk, and he only kept one on hand because Paul had demanded that he get into the habit of stashing a personal weapon away years ago, and despite the fact that he was no longer Marquis of Clan Saber he’d kept to the Archon’s advice.
He was certainly glad to have it now, but against the lizard hoard he doubted it would be enough. Hightower had helped the rest of the civilians pile whatever furniture they could into the stairwells to block the lizards from getting up to the higher levels of the building, but from the weaponsfire outside it was apparent that they’d broken through at least one of the barricades. There was a small chance that they might continue on up the stairs and bypass this room entirely, but as the sounds of plasma died out he lifted his pistol towards the doors expecting the worst.
The rightmost door flicked open and Hightower pulled the trigger on reflex, sending the stun-laden glob of paint into Paul’s silver armor, splattering his chest plate with a blue glob.
Paul’s helmet glanced down at his chest as he felt the armor suck the faint tingle of stun energy out of his body. “Nice shot.”
“Sorry,” Hightower apologized, standing up behind the table. “Are we clear?”
“Hardly,” Paul said, waving at everyone to get up and moving towards the doors. “We’ve partially secured an evacuation route. Is this everyone?”
“Not counting security, yes.”
Paul walked over to the table and pulled it right side up…then punched down into the middle of it, breaking it in half with a loud crack. He slid half of it aside and punched the small lean-to three more times, breaking off a roughly rectangular piece before snapping the legs off and handing the impromptu shield to Hightower. “Cover up and stay close to me.”
The Duke took the heavy piece of table, gripping it from the metal frame still attached to the backside and holding it in front of him with both hands.
“Like this,” Paul said, giving another piece of the table to the other two armed men, one of which he pressed it up against his shoulder. “Hold it one handed, weapon in the other.”
“It’s heavy,” the third man said, sagging a bit under the weight.
“It’ll soak up plasma. If you can’t carry it find someone else who can and follow me out. Everyone else stay behind them and whatever you do, please don’t shoot me in the back. It tickles.”
Hightower suppressed a smirk and followed Paul out of the conference room and over to the debris-strewn remains of one of the barricades on the stairs. Two security guards were covering it, but there were bits and pieces of furniture everywhere having been blasted apart by some sort of explosive.
“You two are a last out. Get me on the comms if you so much as see a scaly tail.”
The two armed, but armorless men nodded and stepped aside, making room for Paul and the table holders to pass by…but after taking a step forward Paul suddenly backtracked and ran a few dozen meters down the hallway and pried a squarish box off the wall. He returned and thrust the emergency medical kit into the hands of one of the evacuees.
“Carry that for me,” he instructed, heading down the stairs at the head of the line.
The Archon still had his plasma rifle in hand, though his remaining ammo count was running low. If he could manage to get this group out of the building then he could start backtracking through areas they’d already cleared and hopefully wouldn’t encounter many more lizards along the way. If they did he still had his stun sword, but the charge on it had to be below half by now as well.
One level down and Paul passed another security guard stationed at the exit of the stairwell onto that floor, clapping him on the shoulder as he went by. The man stepped aside and waited till about
half of the throng of civilians passed then mixed in with the flow as they descended as planned, just in case the lizards hit them from the flank on the way down. They didn’t want the civilians to get hit with all the armed personnel at the front and back of the line, so at least this way there would be someone with a weapon nearby if they did get flanked.
Paul ran down the stairs well ahead of the table shield bearers, making sure each platform was clear and then waiting up for the line to come down before repeating the process. Only twice did he run into any lizards, which he dispatched before they got within sight of the civilians, but the lower he went the more occasional plasma blasts he heard from down below.
Suddenly the stairs below him filled with lizards and the two men he’d left to guard the ascent were firing down into the pile, out of which an orb of green plasma came up and shot past his head. A moment later he realized that most of the lizards he was seeing were dead and heaped together in a pile at the right turn in the descending stairs.
“Coming through,” Paul yelled before jumping over his men and onto the stack of bodies. He only got partially tangled up in the mess of limbs that broke his fall, landing face to face with a live one.
Paul punched it back with a quick jab, then shot it in the chest twice to burn through its body armor before kicking it back down the heap and diving forward after it.
He landed at the bottom of the stack and took a plasma shot right into the chest with his armor absorbing it in a wicked looking crater…but that was the last bit of damage the lizards would do to him. Two minutes later they were all dead and he was pulling bodies aside to make room for the civilians to come down.
“You two, get down here,” he told the security guards that had been responsible for creating the pile of dead lizards.
“Are you alright, sir?” one of them asked after they’d made their way down, referring to the obvious damage in his armor.
“Just a little crispy,” he said, jerking a thumb to the side door onto the current level. “Stay here and keep watch. I’m heading on down. Follow the end of the line out of the building.”
“Will do,” the guard said, stepping out into the hallway to avoid the lizard corpses and the civilians picking their way through them as they tried to descend the stairs through the bottleneck.
Paul tucked his plasma rifle onto his back, knowing it was almost out, and pulled out his stun sword, pointing it tip down in front of him and flipping on the charge switch in the hilt. He heard the distinctive crack/pop as the blade invisibly lit up with energy and preceded to move down the stairs slowly, knowing that it was going to take a while for the line to get past the dead lizards and he didn’t want to get too far out ahead of them.
He didn’t get down two levels before he ran into another group coming up and littered the stairs with their stunned bodies. Picking up one of their plasma rifles he finished them off just before another group came up, making Paul wonder just how many of the damn things they could stuff inside one kirby.
He fought through that group and five more before he brought Hightower and the head of the evacuee line to level 16 where he held his position.
“I need guards on the descending staircase to cover our flank,” he said into his team comm that now included all the members of his security forces that were wearing a helmet, then he turned to Hightower and the other table shield bearers. “Stand here and shoot anyone coming up from below until security relieves you. We’re almost out of the building.”
“Be quick,” the Duke urged, wedging up against one of the other men and slightly overlapping their shields as they took a knee to cover their legs, then dropped the shields down one stair to get the proper height to both cover themselves and shoot over if and when the lizards came up.
Paul led the head of the line of civilians through the area he had recently cleared on his way into the building then sprinted ahead to the walkway atrium, intent on clearing out any lizard presence before they got a line of fire on the evacuees. With so many cross hallways it was impossible to defend them all, so he figured the best chance they had was for him to play rabbit and see what incoming fire he could draw.
He made it all the way back to the atrium without incident, finding the wounded security guard still sitting where he’d left her…save the right side of her head now had a plasma burn on it. Paul also noticed three more dead lizards on the floor directly in front of her position, as well as the fact that the rifle she’d used to kill them had slid out of her grasp and was laying a few inches away from her bloody right hand.
The Archon looked around for more threats, but finding none he waved back at the leaders in the line, signaling them down the long hallway when they emerged and didn’t seem to know where to go, then he knelt down next to the dead soldier and looked at her closed eyes.
“I’m sorry. I should never have left you here,” he whispered, putting a hand on her shoulder in further apology before standing up and resigning himself to deal with the living.
He stepped back out into the hallway and saw the people were walking…didn’t they know what an urgent waving hand meant?
“Move it people!” he yelled, amplified by the external speakers in his helmet.
A bit of movement to his right caught his attention…and to his disbelief the woman opened her eyes and looked up at him, tears welling up. “I…knew you’d be back,” she stammered, the burnt flesh on her face making it difficult for her to speak.
“Damn it girl,” Paul said, dropping back to a knee beside her. “I thought you were dead.”
“They tried…but I got them. Guess I blacked out afterwards.”
Paul pried open the hilt of his sword again, dialing the stun charge back, but not as far as last time.
“I’m going to get you out of here,” he said, ever so lightly touching her midsection with the blade, then her head.
The woman’s eyes rolled back into her head for a moment but she remained conscious, barely.
“I love you,” she said in sarcastic relief as the pain almost completely vanished.
The first of the evacuees appeared beside Paul, coming into the atrium. He turned to face them but didn’t stand up. “Give me the kit.”
The man with the emergency medical kit walked over and handed him the box as more and more civilians began to spill into the atrium, including the first of the security guards.
“Check the walkway,” he ordered, prying open the box and finding a can of spray foam.
“I hope this is already numb,” he told the woman as he pulled her blood-soaked shirt off her wound, mentally cataloging a future upgrade to add a numbing agent to the foam itself. He covered her abdomen with the stuff, double thick, then administered a painkiller injection that would supplement the stun charge he’d given her.
He hesitated a moment, inspecting her head, then decided to spray a thin amount of foam over the burn mark, shielding her bloody right eye from the aerosol spray with his other hand.
“You two, carry her,” he said, pointing separately to the two largest men in the group of civilians as he closed the lid on the med kit and handed it to a random person before he made his way over to the walkway where the civilians were waiting. At the far end he could see the security guard waving back.
“All clear,” he reported over Paul’s comm.
“Let’s go,” the Archon said, leading them out at a jog through the suspended walkway, glancing out the windows and seeing a cruiser to the north unloading a fresh set of kirbies as small explosions were popping up across its hull from brief flashes of light that he recognized as lachar blasts. Meanwhile large lances of blue plasma were hitting the side and upper hull of the cruiser and being deflected by its intact shields as the yellow/tan troop-laden transports disengaged from the underside of the hull.
Paul knew that their lower shields had to have been dropped to release them and wished they had a few mechs walking the streets to target the underside.
Just then a blur of motion shot by unde
rneath the walkway and hit one of the plasma cannon batteries on the underside of the cruiser, taking it out with one well-placed rail gun slug. Paul couldn’t see it passing by in any detail, but from the tell-tale damage he knew what had hit the ship.
A gout of green plasma from another cannon flashed back the opposite way, also passing under the high walkway, making Paul’s skin twinge with goosebumps at being so exposed in the tiny tube suspended between buildings.
“Hurry!” he yelled, running faster as he looked to his right to see where the plasma had hit.
Far down the street but running forward with a smooth gait was a madcat mark II equipped with a pair of rail guns in the arms, one of which fired off another slug straight under the walkway. A few moments later it ran directly underneath them and Paul could hear the impact tremors from its footsteps. He stopped at the end of the walkway as the people ran out and watched both those coming across and the mech as it continued to attack the cruiser, dodging to the right and scraping its arm against one of the walls to avoid another plasma blast that hit the ground a few dozen meters in front of the walkway on street level.
Fortunately they were 15 stories above and unaffected but the bright green light swallowed up everything for a moment, then the madcat launched all its missiles simultaneously…or as simultaneously as it could. It took 4 seconds for it to unload both missile boxes in a flash of smoke that partially obscured Paul’s view…then the next thing he knew the glass in the walkway shattered in numerous places as the cruiser’s anti-air batteries opened fire to take down the missiles.
One man in the civilian line took a hit to the chest, vaporizing his midsection and dropping his disconnected arms and head to the side while his pelvis and legs fell out the hole on the far side that the potent plasma shard had cut straight through the walkway. A woman behind him froze in fear, then registering the gruesome death barely three feet in front of her as she bent over and puked on the floor before getting knocked down by others running for their lives behind her.