Gun Runner

by Larry Correia

  “MacKinnon must be capitalizing on the chaos to make his move,” Jane mused. It kind of made her glad she’d pulled Boris and Bubbles off of him, otherwise he might have been too preoccupied with not dying to be this useful.

  “Let’s just concentrate on getting out of here before this whole place melts down in a civil war. You ready to move?”

  “Almost there, Chief,” Katze replied as Baby climbed out of the hole in Bushey’s side.

  Jane shared Baby’s report. “The bleeder’s repaired. There’s a bunch of foreign bodies in there that we’ll need to clean out before he gets sepsis, but in the meantime you can seal him up.”

  “Your bedside manner sucks, Jane,” Bushey said. “But your tiny robot is fantastic. Thank you, tiny robot.”

  Katze squirted the wound full of nanogel and slapped a seal on it. “Good to go.”

  Their ragged bunch got moving again. Jane had given her gun to Tui. He was far better with a firearm than she was, plus, to be fair, if they were in a situation where Jane was shooting people instead of running her bots, things had gotten really dire.

  As they walked, Jane kept flipping through maps, tracking guard movement and police reports, and assessing docked ship vulnerabilities. “Okay, I’ve got us a good potential ride off this dump, but we can’t get there using the underground. We’ll need to go back up and cross the city to reach the docks.”

  “Are you sure?” Katze asked.

  Of course, she was sure, but Jane tried not to take it personally. “We’re in the spinning tube, only way to the weightless docks is through the stabilizer.”

  “That’s one hell of a chokepoint and it will be guarded,” Tui said.

  “The only other option is to walk along the outside, but you don’t have an environment suit, and Bushey’s is wrecked. Unless you can hold your breath for twenty minutes at minus two hundred…”

  “Back to the big spinning platform thing it is!” Bushey said.

  Jane’s bots told her it was clear all the way to street level. There were a few security doors, but Jane sent ahead bots with cutters to make a path. The only way she could tell that they’d left the bowels of the colony ship into new construction was that the walls changed from orderly, bland plastic, to a mishmash of scavenged materials bolted together.

  The route Jane picked out took them into what was probably someone’s apartment. The hatch led into a very humble kitchen. There was one man standing there, perfectly still, a drink in his hand. He was staring at Ron the bear, who had its gun pointed at the poor fellow.

  Bushey saw the man and immediately shot him with a tranq in the side of the neck.

  The man jolted. “What’s going on here?”

  “Lie down or fall down,” Bushey said.

  The man blinked. He set his drink on the counter, then began to kneel. He made it part of the way, then fell to the floor.

  “Was that necessary?” Katze asked. “We’re in the guy’s house!”

  Bushey shrugged. “I don’t trust anybody on this stupid orbital.”

  Jane checked the feeds again. “We’re two klicks away. The streets are a mess. Now’s our chance. Nobody will notice us in the confusion. We can—” Suddenly, Jane lost contact with Bubbles. The little bot had been pulling rear guard back in the tunnels one second, the next she was gone.

  “What’s wrong?” Tui asked.

  “I don’t know.” Bubbles had been the farthest back, but Rene, the jewel wasp, was only fifty meters from her last position, so Jane turned Rene’s aggression up to 10 and sent her buzzing in that direction. “I think someone might be tracking us. I’m checking now.”

  According to her hacked intel, there was nobody behind them. So if there was someone back there, they had to be some kind of ghost that didn’t show up on any of the systems. Rene would find out. Only she didn’t make it very far. Even though she was one of the fastest and deadliest members of Jane’s swarm, something got her. Jane received a brief flash of video before Rene got zapped out of the air. It was some kind of…wolf-bug monster? She immediately put the confusing image on her wrist holo. “This is half a klick behind us.”

  “Bloody shanks,” Tui muttered.

  “What is that thing?”

  “A grendel. Fain’s hunting us.”

  “Who?” Jane asked.

  “The guy who beat me like a rented mule.”

  “We should set up an ambush,” Katze said.

  “His hound will smell it, or he’ll see it coming. His mods make ours look obsolete. I’m talking top-tier supersoldier abilities.”

  “Do we stand and fight, Chief?”

  Jane didn’t think she could actually remember Tui showing fear before. He was trying to hide it, but she saw it on his face, and that scared her.

  “Only if we have to. We run.”

  Chapter 36

  Wulf was about ten klicks from Warlord’s mountain base on Swindle, standing with his father in the closest thing the Originals had to a command center. They were guarding Marie LaDue, the leader of their little nation. It was an honor to be chosen to protect her, even if he wished he was on the front line.

  He watched the feeds coming in and doubted anything would come of this. Over the last three years they’d mustered twice for an attack that had never been ordered. This was the third time. All the cells had been positioned and were waiting for the signal.

  Except this time felt different. Reports kept coming in about fighting in Big Town. Wulf’s hopes were rising. Videos leaked. There were too many to stop. They showed their brothers fighting Warlord’s soldiers in the streets of Big Town. On many of the streets. And the mansion was in flames. The mansion, beneath which many of their people had been enslaved with wetware.

  “Well, I’ll be damned, Sergeant Jack,” LaDue said. “You really are full of surprises.”

  They watched the videos for a minute, the waving flags, the chants, the tear gas, and the mobs. They fought—only this time, mechs didn’t come to disperse them. It went on and on until Wulf began to fear LaDue would leave their orbital compatriots to die yet again.

  Except instead, she declared, “The uprising has begun. Notify every cell. Strike their targets. Strike them all.”

  The signal was sent.

  “It’s really happening,” Wulf said.

  “Ja,” Father agreed, his face grim. “Now we must see it through.”

  Wulf wanted to be up there. Wanted to be where he could get a shot at the Warlord. But shooting some of his lieutenants down here would have to suffice.

  “We’ll chase every single one of them off our world,” LaDue told them. “Get ready.”

  On one of the displays, the guards suddenly toppled without any sign of who shot them. There was a massive explosion near one of the gates, big enough that Wulf felt Swindle tremble beneath his boots.

  And from the woods streamed the Original army in their ragtag exos.

  * * *

  With the combat reflexes package active, the Citadel was shockingly quick. It took Jackson’s smallest guidance and extrapolated out the most efficient way to make those wishes reality. The mech ran through the streets of Big Town, jumping cars, vaulting buildings, and, remarkably, not stepping on anyone.

  The Big Town Guard, on the other hand, wasn’t nearly as careful.

  The Korvan was following him, still indiscriminately dumping rounds through its chain gun. He’d caught glimpses of one of the Thunderbolts paralleling him on a side street. Of the one he was really worried about—Warlord’s Spider—there had been no sign yet.

  With most of his sensors offline, Jackson wouldn’t see that thing coming. Unlike him, Warlord’s weapons were live, and since he’d been putting down rebels at the CX plant, it was bound to have some weapon systems mounted capable of punching the Citadel’s armor. If Jackson was going to survive, he had to be smarter than his opponents.

  Hiding was out. Something five meters tall couldn’t just hide in town, especially when there were already thousands of people wa
tching it. He had to keep moving, stay ahead of them, because the longer he did, the longer Jane and the others had to get away, and the longer she had to break the Citadel’s systems so he could fight back.

  Problem was, Jackson’s combat experience had been gained on a planet, not inside an orbital. He wasn’t used to thinking in terms of having ground troops standing on the ceiling above him.

  The proximity alarms were still off, so his first warning was when a near-miss warhead detonated right behind him. He looked up and saw one of the old T7 Jackals had climbed a building to get a bead on him, way, way up the orbital’s slope.

  Jackson had to dive and roll as the Jackal pilot ripped off an entire rocket pod. Buildings were shredded. People fell screaming.

  He watched that, baffled. How could the self-appointed protectors be that callous about the lives of those they were supposed to protect? The old colony ship was big enough that those little rockets wouldn’t endanger the hull itself, but that was just a ridiculous, unnecessary loss of life.

  Furious, Jackson target locked onto the Jackal, wishing he had his guns so he could smoke that psychopath, but all he could hope was that the Jackal’s systems would sense the lock on and duck, not knowing he couldn’t shoot. Sure enough, when it got pinged, the little scout mech dropped from its perch and took cover.

  “Jane? Come in.”

  “Sorry. Running. Busy.”

  But he saw that her programs had cracked more systems. He still didn’t have medical, which was bad, because things were getting really mentally foggy and he was really cold. But he had some more defensive countermeasures available.

  He spotted more mechs above, and to the side, and Jackson suddenly knew what they were doing. They were herding him. But he didn’t think the other mech pilots were doing this on their own. They weren’t that clever. They wouldn’t be that coordinated while driving manually. Warlord was watching, guiding them. Waiting to take his shot.

  Jackson got the missile lock warning a few seconds later. He sprang up, ran, dodging side to side, and then slid beneath an overpass. Whoever was lasing him lost sight, and the alarm stopped.

  No. Jackson knew who that had been. Warlord was here. Moving from under this cover meant catching a missile.

  Except that brief delay beneath the bridge meant the Korvan had caught up, and it had reloaded its big guns. It had a line on him.

  Jackson was flipping through the countermeasures menu with his eyes. There.

  As the Korvan started shooting, Jackson detonated a can of Shine.

  The thick veil of light-producing particles spread between him and the military mech. The container of the Shine he’d used to blind Nivaas security had fit in his pocket. This was a 40mm shell of the same stuff. Everyone on the block was blinded.

  Including the Korvan, whose sensors were temporarily overwhelmed. That pilot didn’t see the Citadel launch itself through the cloud.

  Jackson hit the Russian mech with a flying tackle. The two of them went rolling through the street, scattering Shine particles. They crashed into a freight hauler, and the two mechs went sliding apart.

  The blinded Korvan pilot kept firing everything he had, in every direction, wildly turning. It was a good thing the colony ship had a hull like a battle cruiser, or this fool might have vented the entire populace into space. Buildings exploded. Innocent people died. Jackson had to end this fast.

  Except he only had one hand, and the Korvan was a slippery little bastard.

  It seemed like an agonizing decision. He’d denied this part of himself for years, shut it away, in the deepest, darkest prison his mind could create. He’d promised he’d never risk hell again, but despite those vows, someone had still invaded his mind. It had all been for nothing anyway. He could keep denying who he was and what he could do, in a vain attempt at keeping himself safe, or he could rise to his full potential and stop this maniac from killing everyone.

  It wasn’t about the cost. It was about doing what was right.

  It seemed like the decision took forever to make. It didn’t.

  Jackson switched from manual to fly-by-mind.

  The electrodes on his head that had been reading impulses through his skin, suddenly turned rock hard, locking him in place. Now they used a wireless tight beam to connect directly to the old implant, buried deep in his brain. The block Jane had jury-rigged wasn’t as complete a block as the last one had been. In fact, it seemed a lot of the old Gloss circuitry was still ready to go. He reached for the Citadel and it reached back. There was a moment of alarm and headsplitting pain, and then there was a melding. He felt himself become the Citadel, felt the Citadel become him.

  A small packet of joy washed through his brain, for he could suddenly feel the power, the capabilities, the fine engineering of what was now his body. He saw what it saw, and even still secured by its antitheft protocols, he could see so much more.

  And do so much more.

  He saw every bullet, every bit of flying shrapnel, the angle of the Korvan’s muzzle, and where they would be aimed in the instant it took him to cover the ground between them. He dodged side to side as bullets shredded the ground, leapt, and caught the Korvan’s chain-gun arm.

  Jackson’s ruined hand twitched uselessly, but he didn’t need it to tell the Citadel what to do anymore. He just needed to think it, and the machine filled in the rest.

  There was a horrendous screech of metal as he twisted the cannon arm back into the Korvan’s body. The pilot was still manually squeezing the trigger, not realizing he’d just signed his own death warrant. Jackson jammed the muzzle against the other mech’s cockpit, and let that pilot kill himself.

  The guns fell silent. The Korvan flopped at his feet.

  Jackson had to stand there for a moment to collect himself. He looked down at his big metal hands and curled them into fists.

  It’s been a while.

  The human mind is severely constrained by the capacity of its working memory. It can hold only six to nine bits of data at the same time. If one wanted to manipulate the data, such as with multiplication, the number it can manage falls to two to four. However, the implant Jackson had been given to meld his mind with machines had dramatically expanded his working memory capacity. Jane’s new block hadn’t damaged that either. With the Citadel’s ultrapowerful processor, it was as if Jackson’s brain was on fire. He didn’t need to think. That was too slow. He just needed snatches of thought, and the Citadel would do the rest.

  As he was in the machine, the machine was also in his head. Only that comparison didn’t really work either, because plugged in, it was hard to tell where one entity ended and the other began. They simply were.

  If he wanted to preserve innocent lives, he needed to change the venue of this fight. Just thinking that made it so that the Citadel combed through all the information in Jackson’s head, the schematics of the station Jane had downloaded for him, compared those with the Citadel’s extensive knowledge of combat history, Jackson’s gut instincts, ran the numbers on all of them, and within half a second he had eight different paths to choose from.

  By the time the other mechs could see through the Shine again, the Citadel had vanished.

  * * *

  The captain had been through more than his share of space battles but compared to the sleek vessels he’d served on during the war, this was like watching two fat ladies have an icepick fight.

  “Come about, vector delta two.”

  “Moving to delta two,” Alligood responded.

  The Downward Spiral had been launching missiles at them continually as she closed. The Tar Heel wasn’t exactly fast, but distance was their friend, and some judicious maneuvering had been able to keep them safe. They had tossed a few missiles back Prunkard’s way, but only their slowest, dumbest ordnance. The kind of cheap stuff that would be normal on a carrier of illicit goods. The captain didn’t want to tip his hand just yet.

  “Prunkard doesn’t strike me as much of a strategist,” he mused.

 
“He’s more of a bludgeoning instrument,” Castillo agreed. “Scans show he’s got six external containers with their hatches popped. Those are the missile tubes that he’s been cycling through. There’s two more containers aft, still closed. From their length, I’ll bet they’re railguns.”

  “Not fat enough to be a plasma cannon. Not long enough to be any sort of beam strong enough to slice us open.”

  “Yep. Gotta be rails. I bet when he gets to within five hundred klicks he’ll swivel those our way.”

  That was spitting distance in a space fight, but he knew how his XO came up with that estimate. The enemy ship was already going slightly faster than they were, and a railgun that size would be throwing projectiles at around four thousand meters a second. As big a target as the Tar Heel was, the Spiral gunners just needed to aim dead center, and with less than two minutes to get out of the way, odds were they would still get clipped somewhere.

  Still, the missiles weren’t that worrisome, yet. They needed too much fuel to close the distance, so by the time they got close their maneuverability was limited. Plus, one of the containers they’d moved to the rear of the ship was a close-in defense system that should be able to blast most of the incoming. One downside of not being a real navy was that having to hide your weapons until you needed them didn’t lead to the most efficient setups, so Poor Roderick Su was back there in a space suit, riding in that deathtrap, manning their speed gun.

  However, if Prunkard got into railgun range, they were in deep kack. Su could throw up a ton of lead, but there was no intercepting anything that tiny and fast. They couldn’t speed up because that would take them uncomfortably close to Big Town’s defensive picket, and since they were in such a relatively low orbit, Swindle’s upper atmo was uncomfortably close. The directions they could go were limited. It was the sort of situation that would make the inexperienced captain of a lightly armed freighter feel rather trapped.

  The captain planned out a new suggested vector on his pad, up and away from their current orbit, then he put that on the main display.