by M. D. Cooper
Kelly said with a wicked grin visible over the Link,
Silva announced, and picked off one of the scouts that was slowly moving to a new position on the hillside.
Rika sent several rounds toward the enemy, killing two before she ran out of clear targets. She was considering moving to a new position, when Gunnery Sergeant Myer’s voice broke into their minds.
Silva replied.
Rika knew what the ‘or else’ meant. Even from this range, it was no problem for the gunnery sergeant to trigger Discipline, something that could get them killed if they were in combat. The gunny also wasn’t afraid to use the chip’s max setting—something that hurt worse than getting shot. Rika could safely make this comparison; she had experienced both.
Silva ordered.
Kelly replied.
She stayed low, moving up the slope from cover to cover. Rika appreciated her caution. There was a difference between playing bait and getting your ass shot off.
Just as they’d hoped, a few of the enemy scouts picked up the movement and leaned out of cover to fire. Five shots lanced out from Rika’s and Silva’s GNR-41Bs, and there were five fewer enemies.
Rika asked.
Silva replied.
Kelly said.
Silva said to Rika as she moved up the hillside.
Rika nodded and moved to a new position before sliding her GNR-41B’s barrel over a rock and firing a trio of depleted uranium rounds at locations where her drones had spotted movement. By the time the rods slammed into the rocks on the far side of the valley, Silva was halfway up the slope. A few seconds later and the corporal was over the ridge with Kelly.
Rika replied, and slipped out from her cover, carefully moving up the slope as Silva fired a quartet of rounds from above her. She was almost over the ridge when a SNAP sounded nearby, and she felt a searing pain in her right leg.
She looked down and saw a chunk of her left thigh missing. Great, I just have to get hit in the tiny part of my leg that’s not steel. She dropped down and clawed her way over the hilltop before rolling onto her back, wishing she could do something like wince or grind her teeth, as biofoam spilled out of her armor and sealed the wound.
Silva rushed to her side and grabbed a field kit from her pack.
the corporal said.
Rika hissed in response.
Silva pulled a support rod from the field kit and pushed it into the biofoam. Once it picked up its location and read her biostats, the support rod expanded in her wound with explosive force. One end anchored into an internal mount at the top of her artificial knee joint, and the other sank into her hip.
Rika clenched and unclenched her left hand while Kelly grabbed the barrel of her GNR-41B to keep it from flailing and hitting Silva.
Rika swore.
Silva replied.
Rika nodded as the biofoam hardened around her leg. Once it set, she struggled to rise. Standing didn’t hurt as much as she thought it would, but she wasn’t anticipating the two-kilometer hike to where their company was duking it out with the Nietzscheans.
Not to mention going head-to-head with another couple hundred of those bastards.
Silva barked.
The thought got Rika moving, and she followed Silva and Kelly down the slope as quickly as she could.
Above, her drones kept an eye on the other side of the hill, where the scouts had not yet moved beyond the minefield. Rika was glad to see that they wouldn’t be hit from two sides. Then she tapped into Silva’s drones, which had ranged to the edge of the company’s beleaguered position.
Upon spying Alpha Company’s location, Rika wished that she could let out a frustrated sigh, or scream, or something…. The squishies were supposed to be the professionals. She and the other members of team Hammerfall had only been out of indoctrination for less than a year, and they got into way fewer binds than the regular soldiers in the Genevian military.
Kelly commented, apparently on the same train of thought.
Rika said with a rueful chuckle.
Alpha Company was pinned down at the end of a narrow valley with high, steep slopes. How they’d gotten themselves in that spot, Rika didn’t even want to know. They bore heavy casualties, but over a hundred soldiers were still able to pull a trigger.
Silva said.
Kelly replied.
Rika chuckled.
Fireteam Hammerfall slipped around behind the Nietzschean troops, who were taking their time wearing down the Genevians. Rika didn’t blame them. Nothing worse than a cornered enemy. Best to keep one’s distance in a situation like this.
Rika settled in behind a wide granite slab a half-kilometer behind the Nietzscheans, and twisted her wounded leg under her so that her functional camo could keep her concealed. Silva was positioned up a hill to her right, and Kelly, whose AR97 lacked the ability to fire accurately over a half-klick, was a few hundred meters closer to the enemy, below their position.
Rika watched the countdown Silva had placed on her HUD, ready to bring fire down on the enemy.
It reached zero, and she waited as Kelly lobbed in a couple of parties that Silva had passed out; when the enemy began the traditional dance, Rika fired five of her uranium rods—noting that she only had ten left—before switching to the electron beam and burning a hole through three enemy soldiers who had lined up nicely for her.
Silva followed a similar strike pattern, and while the two snipers moved to new positions, Kelly fired at close-range targets with her AR97 before ducking back behind cover and lobbing another party into the mix.
Kelly laughed over the Link, while Rika watched the enemy rush to find cover that would protect them from the new threat.
On the far side of the Nietzscheans, the soldiers of Alpha Company surged from behind their cover, launching a counterattack on the enemy, taking advantage of their temporary disarray. After less than a minute in the crossfire, the Nietzscheans broke and ran, the Genevians and the three members of team Hammerfall picking off another dozen as they fled.
Kelly said.
Then one of Rika’s drones caught a flash of motion high in the sky, and she screamed at Kelly,
CHANGE OF FATE
STELLAR DATE: 12.01.8941 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Western plains of Naera
REGION: Parson System, Genevian Federation
The nuke detonated directly over Alpha Company, b
urning the squishies to ash in seconds. Rika crouched behind her cover, praying that Kelly, who was much closer to the explosion, had weathered this second attack.
Seconds ticked by as she waited for team Hammerfall’s combat net to come back to life. When it did, Kelly’s mental voice was a welcome sound.
Kelly called out.
Rika peered out from behind her cover, once again thanking the strange blue-green granite on Naera for being so damn hard. The Geiger counter on her HUD was spiking, and she knew that if they didn’t wash the radioactive dust off their armor soon, it was going to irradiate their entire bodies.
Down the slope, Kelly was extricating herself from a narrow crevasse, and gave Rika a short wave.
Rika looked past Kelly, down to the narrow end of the valley where Alpha Company had been rushing out after the Nietzscheans. Charred corpses were all that she could see. No one would have survived a blast at that range.
Silva ordered.
Rika commented.
Kelly said as she trotted up the slope to where Silva waited.
Silva nodded as Rika approached.
Kelly added.
Silva said.
The women quickly swapped their ammunition around, and Silva handed out a pair of parties, just in case things got dicey.
Rika said as her drones updated her feed to show a platoon of fully-armored Nietzscheans moving in from the west.
Rika eyed the Nietzschean weapons lying near the corpses of their kills and wished they could grab some. There just wasn’t time to disable the safety locks—and if they didn’t, the weapons could detonate when the women picked them up.
Silva announced, and took off at an easy lope.
Rika followed, wincing as the support rod in her leg pulled at her shredded flesh and made her gait ungainly. For the first time, she wished that the Genevian military had taken just a bit more of her body.
She remembered wondering, after she came out of the assembly facility, why so much of her remained organic. Some models of mechs were little more than brains in jars; nothing more than cheap AI replacements that the government had scooped up off the streets.
The answer had come from one of the drill instructors during her all-too-short time in boot. He explained that human twitch reflexes were honed over decades of use. Whole sections of the brain were dedicated to pulling on the right muscles to get the right movement. Replacing knees and elbows to strengthen those joints was relatively simple, but hips were a lot trickier. It was easier to re-enforce the bones and replace the hip socket with a mechanical joint than to take out all the muscles and nerves.
Plus, it was cheaper and faster.
Rika pushed the memories from her mind, pushed everything from her mind, as she followed Silva and Kelly over the hills and valleys. After fifteen minutes of running—which put over twenty kilometers between them and the site of the tacnuke’s explosion…and the remains of Alpha Company—they came down a steep slope into a ravine with a fast-flowing river at its bottom.
Silva called a halt, and Rika leaned on a rock, taking the pressure off her right leg.
Silva said.
Rika asked.
Silva replied.
Rika and Kelly nodded before glancing at one another—something that was pointless with their featureless helmets, but they still seemed to do it anyway. Rika knew what Kelly was thinking. They had five hundred kilometers to cross before they got to the battalion HQ, and Silva hadn’t said whether or not she had managed to raise them on the comms.
It wasn’t a good sign.
Silva placed rubber plugs in the barrels of her weapons before wading the river. The weapons could still dry themselves out and fire when wet, but the women had all picked up the rubber plugs awhile back, after they realized—in the middle of a firefight—that it took almost a minute for the weapons to become combat ready after being completely submerged.
Kelly and Rika followed suit, but stayed in the river while Silva climbed the far shore and the ravine’s steep eastern slope. The pair took a moment to splash water over their helmets and scrub their armor as best they could with moss and brush from the banks. After a minute of cleaning, Rika’s rad-counter began to tone down, and she felt a lot better knowing that her insides wouldn’t liquefy anytime soon.
Her internal biosystems had already dosed her with a cocktail of chemicals to keep her innards safe, and her nano was scrubbing her blood, but not walking around covered in radioactive dust was still the best way to live a long life.
Once she and Kelly satisfied themselves that they were clean, they both pulled a small pouch from their packs. Within each pouch were four bags. Rika and Kelly pushed a button on each bag, which filled with air before their shells solidified. They attached the bags to their arms and legs, and then the bags pumped out all the air, creating near-perfect vacuums. It wasn’t enough to lift their 215kg bodies by any means, but it would allow them to float down the river without dragging on the bottom. The pumps would adjust their buoyancy to ensure they remained below the water’s surface and out of sight.
Kelly commented as they floated downstream.
Rika replied.
Kelly managed to make a snorting sound over the link.
Rika wondered how Kelly could joke at a time like this. Just over ten minutes ago, they had watched their entire company get killed by a tacnuke. Sure, most of them were assholes—especially Gunny—but some had treated the mechs with respect. There was a particular staff sergeant named Tony who had always been more than cordial to Rika.
Now Tony was a charred husk left on the battlefield.
Kelly had never made a connection to anyone in the company. She rarely spoke to anyone other than Rika and Silva. It was probably a good thing, since her mouth tended to get her in a lot of trouble when she opened it—metaphorically speaking, of course.
Rika would also miss Lance, the company AI. He wasn’t terribly bright, and probably not actually sentient—though the military claimed all their AIs were—but he still treated the mechs with respect. Maybe he was in a similar situation. Rika had a suspicion that most of the AIs in the military were not there of their own free will. It made no sense otherwise; why would an AI—a being of pure logic and reason, with an eternity ahead of them—join a war?
A splash sounded nearby, and Silva’s voice came to them.
Rika asked as she gripped a large rock with her tri-clawed feet.
<
br /> Silva asked wearily.
Rika replied.
Silva said.
Kelly murmured.
Silva ordered.
Kelly’s voice snapped off, and Rika’s augmented hearing could hear frantic splashes nearby.
Silva said a minute later when Kelly’s flailing had ceased.
Rika appreciated Silva’s sentiment, even though they knew no Niets were within a klick, thanks to the feeds from their few remaining drones. Rika knew those eyes in the sky wouldn’t last much longer; most had burned up when the final tacnuke went off. The five still up there only had another few hours before their batteries would run dry.
Silva must have been on the same train of thought.
Kelly said, her mental tone wavering in the aftershock of the compliance chip’s Discipline.
Rika replied as control of Kelly’s two drones passed to her.
She pulled down the miniscule robots, waiting for them to come into their final approach before stretching her left arm out of the water and registering their insertion into her charging sockets.