Rikas Marauders
Page 26
Kelly replied.
The team fell silent after that, other than Rika announcing that her drones—except for the one that wouldn’t take a charge—were ready to go. She sent them up into the sky while Silva pulled hers down.
Rika regretted snapping at Kelly, but she didn’t know what to say to smooth things over. She was afraid that Kelly was fuming, ready to lash out the moment Rika tried to talk to her. She went around and around in her mind, preparing defenses should the argument occur, worried that Kelly would hate her now, and that she would lose one of the only two friends she had in the whole damn universe.
A part of her knew it was silly. Kelly would be fine—though she was capable of holding a grudge for a good while.
Eventually, the river came out of the hill country, widened, and slowed. Rika began to doze off as the languid current carried the three submerged women downstream. She knew it would be another hour until they reached the point where they would leave the water’s cover and begin the fifty-kilometer overland trek to the battalion HQ, so she set an alarm to wake her before they arrived.
Rika never fell fully asleep; her combat stims wouldn’t let her. But she managed to drift into a peaceful half-doze, which was rudely interrupted by the alarm in her mind that warned of their approach to Silva’s designated debarkation point.
Silva said with a chuckle.
Rika had to agree. Giving birth to mech babies was a recurring dream she had; one that would have woken her up in a cold sweat, if she could still sweat. At least she could still wake up when she wanted to…most of the time. She had heard that mech-meat, like that poor sap in the K1R, couldn’t even control their own sleep cycles.
The three women of team Hammerfall emerged from the river like a trio of mechanized dryads, water sloughing off them, their matte grey armor gleaming in Parson’s light before their active camo systems kicked in and they shimmered out of view—except for Rika’s thigh, and Kelly’s arm, which she cradled against her body to hide from view as much as possible.
Rika bounded up the low slope at the river’s edge to view the plains beyond. The drones overhead had already given her a picture of what lay before them, but she wanted to see it from her own vantage.
The river at the point of their exit was running almost due east, and they stood on the north shore. Stretching for hundreds of kilometers in every direction was a lush plain covered in tall grass, dotted with copses of trees. The beauty was marred by columns of smoke rising from several locations; one corresponding with where the battalion HQ should be.
They began to move across the prairie, traveling in the open and avoiding the trees, counting on their camo to shield them from prying eyes. The tall grass rose over two meters in some places, and gave enough cover to hide Rika’s thigh and Kelly’s arm.
Overhead, the drones spotted a Nietzschean patrol to the south, and the women moved north to give it a wide berth. Other than that one sighting, it was as though Naera was devoid of all human life. Rika began to imagine that maybe it was. Maybe both the Nietzscheans and Genevians had left, and they could finally relax.
She allowed herself to indulge in this fantasy for several minutes, until it was interrupted by a brilliant flash of light on the southern horizon and the sight of a mushroom cloud rising into the afternoon sky.
Ahead, Kelly turned her head and Rika imagined that the other woman was smiling.
Kelly’s mental tone was sincere, and Rika wished she could hug her. A strong need to have some, just a tiny bit, of human contact crashed into her like a towering wave.
Fuck it, she thought, picking up her pace to catch up with Kelly. She reached out and touched her teammate on the right shoulder; a gentle stroke, barely perceptible through the layers of armor they wore, but contact.
Kelly shifted as they walked, moving closer to her, and Rika wrapped her arm around Kelly, her mechanical hand resting on the other woman’s shoulder. Rika was glad to just feel close to another human—even if it wasn’t her real hand that was making contact.
They leaned into one another for a minute, before separating and turning their featureless heads toward each other.
She reached out and tapped Kelly’s chest above where she knew their augmented hearts beat, beneath layers of armor and tech. Beneath the mech.
Kelly stopped and her body sagged.
l minutes before they heard a footfall nearby.
Both women snapped out of their reverie and realized that Silva stood a meter from them.
They took off at a quick trot again as the sun began to set on the western horizon, and Kelly told a rather embellished story of how Rika all but tore the K1R limb from limb to save her.
Eleven minutes later, they approached the coulee where the battalion HQ once lay. They had a pretty good idea of what they were going to see long before they reached it. Their rad-counters had been registering increasing levels for some time, and before they got within five klicks of the camp, they passed into an area where the tall grass had been burned away completely.
The coulee was a shallow depression in the prairie, only forty meters deep in the center, with a small stream winding its way through—or what had once been a small stream. Now it was a slow flow of sludge and ash.
The broken skeletons of trees and transport vehicles were scattered through the coulee with no small number of corpses lying among them.
The women wordlessly split off, and Rika jogged through the ashen terrain to the edge of the coulee above the eastern end of the camp. The slope’s incline was gentle here, and she worked her way down, ignoring the bodies she passed.
Most looked like they had been fleeing the camp—she supposed the battalion HQ probably had some advanced warning before they were taken out. Rika wondered how the Niets had fired a tacnuke at the HQ that the air-defense systems didn’t detect and shoot down. Maybe it was a high-velocity artillery round, or maybe it was a high altitude drop, or a captured K1R turned rogue…she would probably never know, but it didn’t stop her from wondering.
The eastern end of the camp was the motor pool, and she passed a long row of troop transports, several light tanks, and an H82 mech, one that allowed for a regular human pilot. She eyed it, wondering if her SMI-2 body could fit within the massive mech’s cocoon. The extra protection would be nice, but it would also make for a dangerously large target out on the prairie.
Stealth was team Hammerfall’s most powerful weapon—one that she wasn’t going to trade for all the 50mm cannon, tacnukes, and ablative armor in the world.
Just beyond the H82, she spotted a spare cannon for a K1R and a gatling gun mount for a J22 model laying on the ground near a toppled stack of crates.
Silva called over the link.
Rika added.
Rika looked over the crates, trying to find one that was the right size for SMI-2 parts. Normally she would have scanned the RFIDs, but the nuke had hosed those and burned off the shipping plas labels as well.
She pulled down a few crates that were far too heavy, digging into the stack, then found one that looked right. She unlatched it and prised the lid off.
Bingo!
Inside the case lay a right arm for an SMI-2 mech, plus the toolkit to pull off the old arm and attach the new one. She rifled through several more cases until she finally came upon a fresh set of SMI-2 armor plating.
She cast about, knowing that the squishies would need a hover sled to move this equipment. She rounded the crates and saw a smaller case lying on its side. The words ‘Advanced Field Biological Repair Kit M7.1 – Limbs’ were stamped into its metal shell.
Rika wasn’t familiar with any Mark 7 repair kits. The one she had used to re-enforce her missing thigh muscle—which still throbbed—was a Mark 5 field kit.
She popped the case open and saw two hollow cylinders. One looked about the right size to fit around her thigh, and the other would encompass an arm. A single card sat in the case and she picked it up. The instructions were simple: they directed the user to clear out any biofoam and other repair tech from the wound, and then slide the cylinder over the limb.
Rika looked down at her leg and frowned. This was probably going to hurt. A lot.
Using her field knife, Rika cut out the biofoam until she got to the re-enforcement rod. She took a deep breath and gave it a twist, unlocking it from its mounts, and carefully pulled it out, whimpering in her mind as the waves of pain tore through her leg and up her body.
She quickly scooped the rest of the biofoam out while she had the nerve. When the crater in her thigh was reasonably clear, she opened the cylinder up into its two halves and then closed it around her thigh.
The pain was instant and excruciating. The only other time Rika had felt anything like it was when her limbs were being sawed off—though somehow this felt even worse. She fought it for a moment, terrified it was simply cutting off the limb, then blessed darkness rolled over her and she knew no more.
* * * * *
Something was shaking her, and Rika fought against consciousness as it returned. Couldn’t she just sleep in a bit longer?
Rika’s vision snapped back on as her augmentations forced her to full awareness. Her right thigh felt like it was on fire, and Rika looked down to see the metal cylinder still wrapped around it. As she tried to focus on what was happening, an indicator on the cylinder flashed green, and then it split into two pieces and fell off.
Rika looked down, and saw that Kelly was right. Where there had been a gaping wound exposing muscle and bone, there was now just the smooth matte grey ‘skin’ all the SMI-2 sported under their armor.
She inserted it into a slot near where Kelly’s artificial limb met the mounting socket set into her arm, and gave a solid twist. The tool caught for a second
, and then the anchor bolts popped out. Rika pulled them out and twisted the cybernetic arm off. She then unlatched Kelly’s armor around the shoulder and pulled the plates off, exposing her grey skin underneath.
Kelly complied, and Rika fitted the cylinder around her stump of a limb, watching as it clamped down and began to hum.
Rika was impressed that Kelly didn’t pass out, though the repairs the kit performed on her were far less extensive. Five minutes later, the cylinder came free and Kelly held up her arm, which looked as good as new—well, new for a mech.
Silva attached the new arm to Kelly’s socket, and they quickly used pieces from the full armor set that Rika had found for repairs. Ten minutes later, they were ready to get on the move, rearmed, restocked, and eager to get out of the coulee and away from the corpses filling it.
The base of the tower was hardened and contained a communications computer that should have survived the blast. Silva opened the cover, and Rika and Kelly shared a glance as the soft glow came from its holoscreen.