Gun Runner

by Larry Correia

  “And hack a mech at the same time. Cover me.” Several of her mechs took off toward the Citadel. A few small ones climbed up on his head, as if they were about to serve as nurses. Jane gave him a shot, then held up a tiny chip. “Listen, Jackson, I just gave you a megadose of painkillers. I need you to hold very still. If I can get a direct access block back in, I can stop the influence for a while, which buys my nanites time to hunt down their nanites.”

  “The patient may experience some discomfort,” he said, cradling his ruined hand to his chest.

  “You have no idea how much of an understatement that is, Jacky. I have to access the area for direct application. This is really going to suck.”

  Then he giggled, because her strong drugs were having an odd reaction with all the other strong drugs Tiny had already given him. How many drugs could one man take? At least his hand was starting to hurt less. “You’d better hurry. Part of me still really wants to kill you, and it keeps telling me that it would be awesome.”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. At least the bomb in your spine should be far enough away not to think that it’s being tampered with and detonate…Probably.” Jane peeled back the bandage that was already on Jackson’s head. “This is going to pinch, big guy.” And she proceeded to cut a hole in his skull.

  Jackson could hear the grinding. And he could feel a dull throb of pain which he knew should have been much, much stronger. Then she struck something, and pain finally exploded through him. A lightning jolt that took away his sight. He jolted, bucked like a horse.

  Jane swore, then stuck him with another syringe. “I’m going to have to paralyze you. It’s only temporary.”

  Temporary paralysis was better than what Warlord had planned for him. “Go for it.”

  There was more gunfire. Yelling. An explosion. Jackson’s vision came back. He saw that soldiers had breached in from above, and Katze was raking the catwalks with fire.

  And there was grinding. Like someone was sawing through his head.

  “Holy hell.”

  “Man up,” Jane said, then continued grinding. The sound vibrated his head like a buzz saw and he realized she was grinding skull bone. Then Jane stopped, turned, looked for a place to set something down. She used the top of a toolbox. There were bits of stuff on it from when her bots had chewed up the guards. Definitely not sterile. But Jane placed a bloody bit of skull on it. A little chip.

  “Left side, incoming,” Bushey shouted and began firing that way. Jane’s eyes flicked briefly in that direction, and several metal wasps flew off to help him. Sometimes big is what you needed. But other times small was bloody murder.

  Jane picked up another implement with a long filament coming out the end. “Just what the doctor ordered,” she said and stuck it directly into his brain. He felt it go in. Felt a little electrical zing slide in with it.

  There was a commotion to the right. Jackson couldn’t move to see what it was.

  “Bobby,” Jane said. “Secure that flank.”

  A fat little bot no more than six inches high popped out of her pack and ran. Jane had painted this one to have a beard and a pointy red hat.

  Gnomes are real. And that thought struck Jackson as hilarious.

  “Hold still.” Jane put down the implement she’d been using and picked up some other instrument and slid that into his brain. Another electrical zing.

  It was truly wondrous, he thought. A gnome.

  The next electrical zing hit Jackson like a train.

  * * *

  Jane was, in fact, very good at multitasking.

  While she was literally touching Jackson’s brain, she’d sent Pilgrim and Seth to drill directly into the Citadel’s armored shell so she could access its system. It was so well shielded there was no way she could do it remotely. Rufus had the best sensors, so she’d had him stick himself to the ceiling to provide a real time map of the area to Katze’s and Bushey’s displays, tracking the vibrations of enemy footsteps and heartbeats. The rest of her bots she’d had to put on autopilot to help hold off the security response. Even coordinating with Rufus, that still cut their effectiveness by over thirty percent, so they immediately began to take losses. Gunther got shot down. Tim got stomped flat.

  Jane designed all her bots who used guns to take the same magazines as her own weapon, so as they ran out of ammo, they’d fly or run back to her, she’d absently pluck a spare magazine from her pouch, stuff it in them, and off they’d go, to cause more mayhem.

  Jose got blasted. Bobby got stepped on by the Ogre. The blast door was failing. Bushey took another round, this time to the leg. Tui was forced to go hand-to-hand at one of the doorways and was beating a man savagely over the head with the butt of a stolen shotgun. Jane had picked an out-of-the-way corner behind some crates to hold her field surgery, so the enemy hadn’t seen her yet, which surely wasn’t going to last much longer.

  But her block was in place inside Jacky’s head.

  It was ugly. It was crude. But it was there.

  “Suction,” she told Baby, who obediently moved the tube into the little hole in Jacky’s skull, to get the blood out of the way. And then she changed her mind. That looked pretty good, all things considered.

  Jane closed her helmet’s face shield and went to VR mode.

  Her world became nothing but tendrils of glowing green and yellow, stretching ever upward, like endlessly branching trees, a forest of dendrites. The view represented the insides of Jacky’s skull. Jane reached up with her real hands, as if she was climbing one of the trees. The view was too close, so she panned out, and then she saw the red vines. The wetware pathways of the attacking nanites.

  She searched back along those vines and found the trespasser. A brutal, jagged monstrosity. All sharp edges and meanness. No wonder Jacky said they felt like demons. But Jane’s nanotech was fierce, and she went over and cleaved that demon in half with a magic sword. The monster disintegrated into shreds of printed protein. Now that her nanites had been shown what to do, she tagged that red signal as the enemy, to be terminated with extreme prejudice, and her million-strong army went to work.

  Jane came back to reality. Katze was crouched next to her, pulling mags out of Jane’s bag and desperately shoving them into waiting, hungry bots. “We can’t hold them. We’ve got to exfil, now!”

  Jane checked the automatic brute-force programs she’d sent to gnaw away at the Citadel’s defenses. Its alarms were blaring, sending a signal to its owner—which was why they’d stolen that stupid key on Nivaas to begin with! But it wasn’t as if Warlord wasn’t already on his way back to kill them all anyway, so no great loss there. She was almost in, but not fast enough. So she launched six other programs to hit it from other directions. It threw up blocks. She broke through. And those she couldn’t break, she went around. The Citadel was a masterful piece of programming, but Jane was basically beating it like a pinata with a sledgehammer hoping for candy to come out. Systems were starting to fall.

  At the same time, she was attacking the Citadel, Jane stuck the bone plug back into the hole in Jacky’s skull, welded it back together with a collagen bond, and then sealed the area with healing gel. It would have to do. If they lived through this, he was going to need a real doctor, bad.

  “Help me carry Jacky to that mech. He’ll make us a door.”

  * * *

  Jackson came to sitting inside the familiar cockpit of the Citadel. Jane was strapping him in. Katze was a few meters away, taking cover behind the Citadel’s leg as someone shot at her.

  “That should do it. I’ll stick you with a smart pack to neutralize the rest of the paralytic agent. That’ll clear your head, but it also means it’ll counteract some of the painkillers. You’re going to be in a world of hurt. Nothing I can do about that, but the pack should keep you from going into shock,” Jane said. “I’ve got to know first thought, you still want to kill me?”

  Jackson panted a bit. Tried to gather himself.

  “Jackson?”

&
nbsp; “I want to kill you only a little.” It was like a distant lure, like the pull of a memory of ice cream at a party when he was a kid. Jane flipped down her visor and fiddled with something Jackson couldn’t see. “How about now?”

  He could feel the order to exterminate, but it wasn’t connected to anything. It was simply abstract. A conceptual thing.

  “Jackson?” she prompted.

  He blinked. “I hear Warlord’s order, but don’t feel it.”

  “It’s amazing what happens when you decouple the wetware from the lizard brain.”

  “Is it fixed?”

  “It’s a band-aid. The wetware’s gone to war in your head. This stuff is nasty, aggressive like nothing I’ve ever seen before, and it’s fighting back. I’ll do what I can to help remotely, but it’s going to be awful for you.”

  “I’ll get through. Let’s do this.”

  Jane stuck him with the tox pack. “Oh yeah, and only a few of the Citadel’s systems are online so far. It’s making me fight for each one. I’ll get them to you as fast as I can.”

  “You’re an angel.” As soon as the tox pack began attacking the multitude of drugs in his system, Jackson could move his limbs again, but then the pain came back. His hand felt like it was on fire. Lightning bolts were going down his arm. And his head was actively being beaten like a drum. Gritting his teeth, he immediately reached for the controls. The hatch began closing. The time had come to do his job.

  “I’ll get you out of here, Jane. I swear it.”

  Chapter 35

  There was gunfire and screaming, but the instant the Citadel’s cockpit sealed, there was nothing but quiet.

  Jackson took in the status. Jane had only gotten the basic motion controls activated. Sensors were limited to the most basic cameras, the sort of thing you’d let a dockhand access to move a mech from one bay to another. Reactor output at fifty percent. Weapons were offline. Combat reflexes, offline. Countermeasures, offline. Medical, offline. That one would have been really nice right about then. Information warfare, offline. Comms, offline. Bots, offline. Hell, Jackson couldn’t even use his right hand, which meant that the Citadel couldn’t use its right hand.

  But he had a promise to keep.

  Jackson got himself locked into position. Dozens of sensors extended from the chair and stuck themselves to various muscle groups. As he moved his legs, the Citadel stood.

  Because of the limited camera access, Jackson had to swing the Citadel’s bulbous head around to see everything. Just that small amount of movement translated through the electrodes on his neck made his head hurt even worse. You’d think he’d just had battlefield brain surgery or something.

  The hangar was a cavernous space. Now it felt like he was standing in the corner of a small room. The few cameras he had access to showed soldiers pouring in from the catwalk above. The main blast door had been pried open by the Ogre enough that they were tossing grenades through. Those went off with a flash, and then began to pour out gas. Jackson didn’t have the sensors to analyze what it was, but his gut told him sleep gas.

  Jane’s bots were dropping like flies. Bushey was down and Katze had to drag him behind cover. Tui had gotten shot but was laying down fire to cover his friends. There were enemies coming at them from multiple directions. One soldier was running around some crates, flanking Tui.

  Jackson stepped on Warlord’s man.

  He didn’t have external mics yet but knew from experience that a mech flattening a human body between steel sole and steel floor made a very distinct sound. From the way all the guards stopped shooting to gawk at the Citadel, it had certainly gotten their attention. Tui looked up, then grinned.

  Jackson went to work.

  A subtle muscle twitch was all it took for the Citadel to sweep its arm across the catwalk, flinging multiple men to their doom. But “subtle” went out the window when you were as torn up as Jackson was. He ended up crushing the metal grate, sending debris and soldiers in every direction. Still, he could work with that. The Citadel’s massive hand curled around the end of the walkway, and bolts sheared as he effortlessly ripped the beam from the walls.

  Weapons offline? Didn’t matter, because now he had a club.

  Bullets bounced harmlessly off his armor shell as the Citadel strode across the hangar, swatting troops. Everyone he hit went flying, bones shattered. He picked the spot he thought the big air shaft would be, aimed the beam like a spear, and drove it through the wall. He must have gotten lucky, because from the way the clouds of green sleep gas suddenly sucked toward it, he’d hit airflow. Jackson leaned into it, using the beam like a pry bar, wrenching it back and forth to make the hole bigger and bigger. He pulled the beam out. Not only did it suck out all the gas, but it was big enough for even Tui to fit through.

  Jackson was suddenly very dizzy. As the vertigo overcame him, the Citadel lumbered to the side. Without access to the preprogramed combat reflexes to keep it nimble, it crashed into the wall, and rolled, until it fell facedown. One of the antique mechs from Warlord’s collection was crushed beneath it.

  His nose was running like crazy. His training made it so that he resisted touching his face, an unconscious action which had killed many an innocent bystander standing too close to a mech. When the liquid reached his lips, he realized it was blood. His nose was bleeding something fierce. Either a leftover from Jane’s invasive measures, or a by-product of the nanite battle. Either way, it sucked, and his head really hurt to match.

  “Jackson, are you alive?”

  It was Jane. His eyes flicked to the display. Comms were now active.

  “Sorta.”

  “Bail out. Let’s go!”

  Except Jackson saw something that Jane didn’t. The Ogre 55Z had gotten the blast door pried open enough to squeeze through. “Ogre incoming. Run. I’ll catch up. I’m safer in this thing than you are out there.”

  Jane was too pragmatic to argue. “I’ll keep working on freeing up the Citadel’s systems for you.”

  The dizziness was awful. He didn’t know if he could walk himself, let alone a giant robot. “Concentrate on medical next, please?”

  “Will do.”

  Jackson got his good hand forward and used that to steady the Citadel as it rose from the floor.

  The blast doors were open. The Ogre stomped through, cannons blazing, a squad of men right behind it.

  The Ogre was a fearsome machine…to a person. To Jackson, the glorified exo was the size of a toddler. Its armor sneered at anything Katze could throw at it, but Jackson didn’t even need guns. He picked up the smashed, antique mech he’d fallen on, spun, and hurled three tons of steel right into the Ogre’s face. It tumbled back, crushing the soft fleshy bodies around it.

  The Citadel stumbled across the hangar. The Ogre driver managed to get off a burst of 20mm. Explosives shells detonated across the ceiling, but one struck the Citadel in the chest, only half a meter from where Jackson was encased. The outer shell split, but the smart armor beneath absorbed and distributed most of the hit and immediately began repairing itself.

  Jackson reached the Ogre. His arm twitched. The Citadel swung and knocked the cannon aside. The next 20mm round blew a gaping hole in the floor. Another twitch, a curl of his fingers, and the Citadel wrapped its giant hand around the exo’s arm. Jackson pulled.

  The Ogre’s arm popped off. Difference between an exo and a mech? A mech pilot’s whole body rode in the armored torso. On the little exo, the driver’s real arm was still inside there. Jackson still didn’t have his external mics up yet, but he knew that driver had to be making some noise. He lifted one foot, and the Citadel booted the crippled exo back through the blast doors. The guards who didn’t get crushed turned and ran.

  That would buy them some time. But Warlord was on his way back, and his advanced mech wouldn’t be hobbled. Jackson couldn’t fire any of his weapons yet, but there was no reason he couldn’t load up and be ready for when Jane did crack that system, so Jackson steered the Citadel over to the munitions t
hat had been delivered by the Tar Heel and started opening containers. All the weapon systems were modular and designed so that the Citadel could rearm itself without having to wait around for human help. It took finer motor control than he currently had, and one more hand, so he made a real mess of it.

  While roughly clipping on gun pods, he got a transmission.

  “We’re climbing down. The schematics show that there’s a junction below us. We should able to come out somewhere inside the city to lay low. If we can make it to the docks, maybe we can steal a ship and get back to the Tar Heel. I can’t contact the captain, but the Citadel should be able to reach him now.”

  “Roger that.”

  * * *

  The bridge was crowded, every station manned. The Tar Heel had sounded general quarters. Captain Holloway sat in his command chair, watching the readouts flash across the display. The mystery ship was still running quiet, but they were close enough now to get a visual ID. It was the CSS Downward Spiral.

  “That’s Jeet Prunkard’s ship,” Castillo said from his station at the captain’s right hand.

  It was no coincidence that pirate was here.

  “Well, at least now we know who was selling Warlord the rest of his weaponry.” The captain had been curious who else was stupid enough to do this sort of thing for a living. “Estimated armament, XO?”

  “Nothing public. Same as us. She was even built in the same Martian shipyards as ours, but she’s about a decade newer and ten percent bigger, but figure Prunkard’s got the same constraints on what he can hide from gate inspectors as we do, so it just depends on how good their cargomaster is at hiding missiles and guns aboard.”

  “I can deal with those odds.” The Downward Spiral was beefier, but Garrick Hilker was an artist when it came to hiding contraband, and his crew had spent the last few hours moving weapon systems out of deep storage and bolting them into place.

  Except the dour XO continued. “That is assuming Prunkard doesn’t have someone on the inside at the ISF who is letting them through gates without getting random checks, and he’s really got a belly full of missiles.”