by David Ryker
Icarus’ eyes widened and I felt myself being pulled forward as Greg ripped him out of the cockpit. He took me with him, his hands like pincers around my throat.
My neck clicked as I sprawled forward, his hands taking the weight of my body, and everything else swinging under them.
My eyes bulged and his fingers tightened, cutting off the air altogether, his expression unchanged. He knew he was in the grip of a mech, his body a toothpick in a vise, but he didn’t let go. If nothing else, he wanted his last act to be wringing the life out of my body. And, if it wasn’t for the nanites running through my body, driving every last shred of oxygen into my brain, I would have faltered. But they were, and I didn’t.
I could have pounded on his arms — on his chest, even on his head, but it wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference. I didn’t know if Greg was trying to crush him, or if he even could — I didn’t know how strong the Tenshis were, how much force it would take to break one. But it didn’t matter anyway, because he didn’t have to.
My hand spidered across my chest, my neck holding tight as my legs kicked underneath. My left closed around Icarus’ wrist and held tightly, supporting enough of my weight so my neck didn’t snap in his grip. My right found the grip of my Arcram and my thumb touched the dial, spinning it to the max setting with practiced ease.
It slithered out of the holster and I shoved the muzzle against his solar plexus. I didn’t know how tough these Tenshis were, but the Arcram bit like a viper and if he was wearing body armor then there was definitely an element of mortality in their physionomy.
I felt it kick back in my hand as my finger pulled the trigger, the mouth of the pistol spitting rounds dully into Icarus’ chest.
He’d made mincemeat of me on Notia, but I didn’t know what I was up against back then, and this time he didn’t know what he was.
The bullets sank into his flesh and lost themselves inside him. Blood spurted over my hand and dripped onto the dry ground. His eyes widened and his bared teeth, once white and straight, now oozed blood. It sprayed through them, misting my visor in a thick spray. He coughed and covered my helmet, blinding me.
I felt his hands loosen and then part, jolting open and then closed as he fought to keep his grip. With each heartbeat his life force drained away, pumping over my hands and pouring onto the floor of the cavern.
My vision started to strobe, the dying hands of Icarus still trying their utmost to wring the life out of me.
And then I was falling, suddenly, without realizing.
My heels hit the dirt and I sprawled backward, coughing and choking.
A dull thud rang out in the darkness and my eyes shot open, my lungs filling with air. I was on my feet on reflex, one hand tearing my bloodied helmet off, the other curling into a fist to protect my face.
I twisted low, ready to take a punch and throw one, breathing hard, but Icarus wasn’t standing to face me.
He was lying on the ground in a crumpled heap, clutching at his stomach and the half-dozen bullet holes there.
Blood was pooling around him in a thick black puddle and his eyes stared up at me, glazed and still.
I coughed and went to a knee, down onto my hands in the blood, sinking my fingers into the still warm liquid, my chest heaving as my blood oxygenated.
The thumping died from my ears and the world pulsed back into focus.
The sound of gunshots started seeping in and my head lifted, staring beyond the tree towards the other side of the room.
I could see muzzle flash and glinting metal.
Kat and Alice and Fish were still locked in a true deathmatch.
Icarus was dead, but there was still a long way to go.
20
I stumbled forward, running a bloodied hand through my hair, pushing it off my forehead.
My twisting feet, oxygen-deprived muscles, and rubbery legs all galvanized with each loping step. I could feel my heart squeezing, my lungs pumping like bellows, the taste of blood full in my mouth. My throat had been half crushed, I could feel the dents of my teeth deep in the flesh of my tongue, and Icarus’ blood was dropping in lines down my face, blending salt and iron.
I heard Greg take up behind me and then overtake on my right as we headed for the other side of the room, leaving Icarus where he was.
Like a rehearsed dance, he crossed my path and spun on his heel, dropping his hand to the ground without stopping. I planted my foot in his open palm and felt him lift, jumping as I did.
The hatch flew open to accept me and I brought my knees up to clear the edge, hitting the seat as he made the full rotation and kept running, passing the tree on his left. I glimpsed the stirring soldiers, finally starting to shake their heads and shrug off the current that had downed them.
But they were small fry — they weren’t going to be an issue once we had dispensed with Fox.
I watched as Fish’s Panther turned in the air, twisting slowly, and then hit the ground flat on its back in a plume of dust, Kat Fox’s heaving form looming from the cloud having just flung him over her shoulders. Her back was up, arms bowed, fists clenched, her chin lowered, sucking ragged breaths between her teeth.
Alice was off to the side, circling, one of the arms on her flight-capable F-Series hanging loose and limp. It looked like the shoulder had been twisted in the joint. I could see now the glisten of fluid wet on the side of her hull — hydraulic fluid. She didn’t have her rifle either. Kat had disarmed her, literally.
Fish was lying flat on his back, and I could see the hand of his T-Series in her grip. She had one fist around two of his fingers, her boot on the upper arm, pinning it flat to the elbow. Though the Panther was much smaller than the F-Series, it still dwarfed her, and yet despite each of Fish’s fingers being big enough to fill her hands, solid steel, they still looked brittle.
She locked eyes with me, her blond hair hanging down over her piercing blue eyes, like cold fire burning in the darkness. She pressed down with her boot and twisted hard, tearing the fingers in opposite directions and cleaving the hand in two down to the wrist.
The jointed steel split and wires peeled out of the mess like veins and sinews, the maimed hand now useless.
She held it hostage, waiting for me to make a move. Fish couldn’t move either. The blade on his wrist was snapped off down to the sheath, and her heel was just one lift and stomp away from blinding him.
Alice was biding her time too. It looked like they’d tangled and she’d been bested, her rifle taken from her. The other weaponry she had was a lot heavier — explosives. She couldn’t risk shooting one off. We all still had a hope we’d be getting out of this, and firing a sticky bomb this close to so much Iskcara was just asking for disaster. The shockwave alone in an enclosed space like this could be enough to set it off. It was too much of a gamble and it was one I was glad she wasn’t taking.
“Fox!” I yelled, stopping about twenty meters away.
She tightened her grip on Fish and slid her foot down his arm to show me she wasn’t fucking around, but didn’t say anything. In the five seconds we kept our eyes on each other's, her breathing settled to a steady pace. She was stained with grease from her scuffle with Alice, her shoulders cut and grazed from throwing Fish over them. But it didn’t make her any less dangerous. She didn’t even bother looking over to where Icarus’ body was.
That I was standing there was enough to tell her that he was dead. Her baleful expression confirmed that. Her pistol was still holstered on her thigh, useless against our thick armor. So long as we didn’t come out, she couldn’t do anything to us. Her eyes twitched and narrowed, like she’d heard something. They flitted to the tree and back and then she curled a smirk, muttering something under her breath.
“Greg — sound — what’s she saying?” I said quickly, watching as he dialed up the sonic scanners and got a fix on her. We only caught the tail-end of what she was saying.
“—finish the mission. Get the shards, set the charges, and prep the device. Quickly.”
She was talking to the stunned soldiers. She had to be. There was nobody else and there was no way she was communicating with the surface, no matter what sort of comm-dot or transmitter she had. And that meant that the soldiers were awake — or at least alert enough to take instruction. But what the hell did ‘get the shards’ mean? Shards of what? Iskcara? Is that what the power tools were for? It made sense, that they were here to collect more of it now that they’d been found out. That they’d harvest enough to arm a fleet and then blow it all to hell.
The increased sensitivity on the mics started picking up the scrabbling of footsteps, murmured orders in my periphery. Of power tools being picked up and started — drills and saws.
I clenched my teeth and raised my rifle, pulling Fox into my sights. “Call them off, Fox — this is over. Your man is dead — there’s no way out of here. Let him go and—”
“What?” she laughed. “You’ll make it quick?”
I gritted my teeth. I was going to say that we’d take her in — but as I flexed my fingers in the gloves that felt precise and soft, more so than any Federation rig I'd been in, I remembered we weren’t here on Federation orders. We weren’t here to arrest them, or to take anyone in, or do anything other than making sure that this technology never made it off Aerra.
Rhona had her job, and we had to pray she’d done it — no, we had to assume she had. Otherwise, what was the point in any of this? I took a breath and answered.
“You’re not walking twice, Fox. I let you go on Draven, you slipped through our fingers on Telmareen. But this is it. It ends here.”
She let her perfect lips curl into a deep smirk. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
Before I could react, her foot rose into the air, and in a perfect axe kick, she brought it down on Fish’s cam dome, shattering it in a shower of sparks. Now it was two on one, and her odds improved.
I pulled the trigger and fired, but by the time the round zipped past, she was gone, and all that was there instead was a hole in the wall behind her the size of my fist, still smoking, a brutal reminder of just how fast this bitch was.
I started strafing.
The momentary muzzle flash was enough to let her slip away. By the time Fish’s arm hit the ground, she was already charging down Alice’s throat.
“Fish,” I said breathlessly, taking off toward them, my rifling swinging round. “Ditch your rig, stop the soldiers. They’re harvesting Iskcara.”
He gurgled in response and popped his hatch, rolling backward out of it and springing to his feet.
As they hit the ground Fox stopped and skidded to a halt, spraying Alice with dirt and avoiding a heavy swipe with her good arm. She ducked under it with ease and turned back toward Fish, who was now rushing at her team, one hand around his Arcram and the other armed with a curved knife.
She bared her teeth in anger and started coming back toward me, threading herself between my shots, keeping her focus on Fish the whole time, reeling him in as she went. Though he only had to cover fifteen meters and she had more than fifty to go, it was like he was standing still.
She hit the brakes, turned around a volley of fire from my rifle like it was tossed gently at her, and drew her own pistol, a heavy looking semi-automatic with a sleek barrel and perforated muzzle.
I turned my head to look at Fish streaking across the last stretch of sand toward the tree. Only two of the soldiers were standing. Three were on their knees and one was still flat on his back. If Fish got there, they wouldn’t have a chance, and six fewer guns, mortal or not, in this fight, wasn’t something she could give up.
I slammed my toes down and boosted between them before Fox could get a shot off. Her bullets pinged off my hull and shot into the air.
Fish kept running behind me.
She stopped and aimed her pistol right at my cam-dome. “Move,” she growled.
“It’s over, Fox,” I returned. “You can’t win this fight.”
She laughed, spitting blood onto the floor. “No? I already took one down, broke the other. It’s just you left now, kid.” She widened her free hand, and grinned with bloodied teeth. “You can still walk out of this. Just let us go.”
“You were asking us to join you a second ago — join you or die, I think were the options.”
“I changed my mind,” she grunted. “You put down Icarus — that’s something no one’s ever been able to do. He was one of my best. And yet…” Her smile turned to disdain. “That earns you your life. Call it mutual respect.”
“I think you’re just bargaining because you know you’re fucked, Fox.” She’d tried stalling before. Now it was my turn. The sooner Fish got to the soldiers and dispatched them, the sooner he could turn his attention to Fox. One extra avenue of fire on her was one more thing to dodge, and she’d get tired and slip up eventually. If we couldn’t best her by force, then we’d wear her out. She couldn't dodge bullets forever.
Her eyes flitted to Fish and then back. She was out of time. Bullets rang out behind me, and then piercing screams split the air.
Fox fired first. Greg’s hand flew up and deflected the shot, anticipating it, but it was never meant to do anything except blind us.
A great steel hand blocked my vision, and by the time it moved, Fox was gone.
I turned to follow her, raking with a wide line of fire, but she streaked around me and headed for the other side of the room.
Greg killed the fire and we stopped, getting dangerously close to the tree.
Alice came up on my flank at the same time that we started forward. She’d recovered her rifle now but it looked heavy in one hand, her lighter air-capable F-Series struggling to wield it effectively.
We skidded into view of the scuffle at the same time, seeing Fish suddenly overwhelmed by Fox’s onslaught. He’d taken out two of the six soldiers by the time Fox had reached him, and now she had him on the run.
He dived sideways toward the tree and a bullet from her pistol clipped his arm, spraying blue blood across the yellowed sand.
I fired quickly and Alice rushed forward, shielding Fish as he retreated. A steady stream of fire poured out of my rifle and sent the soldiers sprawling. Fox ducked back behind the tree and circled around.
Two of the Free soldiers returned fire, but were blown away. Two more dived to the ground. One of them still hadn’t gotten up from the shock, and the last one scrambled forwards toward a crate on the ground.
It was too close to the tree — and while my aim was true, if one of the soldiers decided to pin their triggers on the way down, a stray bullet could be the difference.
I turned my attention to the two scrambling soldiers and put them down before they could regain their feet, plugging them with a bullet each. A single round was more than enough from the rifle.
I could hear fire behind me and turned to see Fish firing on Fox. She’d left him where he was, under Alice’s feet, and had gone straight for her instead.
Fish had backed off and was cycling sideways, laying into Alice with his Arcram as Fox rode her like a mechanical bull.
Alice was swiping at her with her free arm, whirling it around her head like some sort of weird heli-rotor.
Fish was doing his best to pick Fox off, but between Alice moving and Fox dodging, every shot was going wide.
Fox was going for her camera dome, looking to take Alice out of the game as well. It was only a matter of time before she did. She’d put her foot through Fish’s, and it wouldn’t be too much trouble for her to rip Alice’s out or just crush it altogether. She was expecting the shots from Fish, too, but it was the unexpected that had put Icarus down.
I dropped my rifle and reached for my revolver, pulling it up and measuring the shot. Greg’s voice was in my ear suddenly. “We cannot guarantee that we will not hit Alice.”
I shushed him, closing one eye, the blood still stinging them.
“I predict that there is a seventy percent likelihood that you will cause damage to Kepler’s unit if—”
/> “Shut up,” I said drawing a breath and steadying my hand. Alice was whirling in circles and Fox was on her shoulders now, ducking and swiping at the cam-dome as Fish’s bullets pinged off the armor around it.
I fired.
The round sizzled out of the muzzle with a bright flash and hissed toward Fox who, in the blink of an eye, looked up and saw it coming. Except it didn’t hit her. It hit Alice — which was where I was aiming.
If I’d have fired at Fox, she’d have dodged and it would have gone wide, over Alice’s head, and that would have been it. She was too small to pick off, and too fast to get caught out with such a heavy slug. Alice, on the other hand, wasn’t too small, or too fast, and I’d put enough plasma rounds into mechs to know what happens when you hit the sweet spot just under the camera dome.
The second she turned toward me I let off, and the round screamed towards them, smashing into the gap between the dome and the body, nearly forty centimeters of Alice’s head, and well away from decapitating her.
The white-hot projectile severed all the connections between the cam-dome and the body and sent it flying upward like a rocket.
It hit Fox square in the chin and flung her backward with a sickening crack. It’d happened before she’d realized the chain reaction it would cause. Her brain told her it wasn’t going to hit her, but by the time it hit Alice, there was no time to react.
Her body spun through the air but I knew that it wasn’t going to be enough. We needed to finish this and get back to the surface somehow, and now that I’d blinded Alice, she’d be no use either. If Fox wasn’t put down immediately it’d be one on one, and I wasn’t too sure I liked those odds.
I closed the gap between her and me with a quick thruster boost and wound up my leg, punting her body.
The jets drove my foot through the air and it crunched into her. She let out a strangulated yelp and flew sideways like a ragdoll, spinning, her arms and legs flailing limply. A crack ripped itself up the wall as she impacted some thirty meters away, slumping to the floor in a limp heap.