by M. D. Cooper
Both of the Niets pulled up short when they found themselves staring down the barrel of Rika’s GNR.
“Going somewhere?” she asked.
“The fuck?” one of the Niets swore.
She fired a round from her GNR into one of the Niets’ heads, and punched the other in the face, crushing his skull.
Behind her, a few hostages cried out in alarm, but some cheers rose up as well. She heard someone say, “Look it’s a mech!” while another asked, “Are you here to save us?”
Rika turned and held out a hand. “Yes, we are, though we didn’t know there would be so many of you. Are the Niets holding others in the hotel?”
The young man who had first spotted her nodded. “Yes, at least a dozen, maybe more. We came here from up north, hoping to find refuge….”
“How did you get here?” Rika asked, looking around at the vehicles to see if any were not from the lodge.
“We hoofed it,” one of the others said. “Skis and a-grav snow shoes.”
“Damn,” Chase said as he emerged from behind a stack of crawler treads toward the back of the building. “You people have moxy.”
Chase rolled his head around on his shoulders before replying.
Chase nodded.
Rika surveyed the former hostages, seeing the fear and uncertainty in their eyes. The people of Albany had been through the wringer over the last year. She wondered how many of the men, women, and children huddled on the floor were here on vacation from Pyra, trying to get back to normal after everything that had happened.
She didn’t even want to know.
Signaling the flow armor to recede from her head, she pulled off her helmet to show the people a friendly face. More than a few smiles emerged from the Thebans when they saw that they were dealing with a human, not a killing machine.
“OK, folks, this is what we’re going to do. We have to take out the remaining Niets up at the lodge and free the last of the hostages. But you’re all just one shoulder-fired rocket away from death out here, so we have to get you on the move.”
“The move?” a woman asked as she rose to her feet, a young boy in her arms. “Move where?”
Rika pointed to the crawlers. “Get in the crawlers and drive into the canyon. You’ll be safe there until we clear things out.”
“In the storm?” the young man asked.
Rika gave him a reassuring smile and a wink, attempting to lighten the mood. “Oh, I thought you were all hardcore, having ‘hoofed’ it here.”
“There wasn’t a blizzard raging around us, then,” another man said.
“Here’s the long and short of it,” Chase said as he walked around the group, peering behind the final row of vehicles. “Even if we all just sit tight, those Niets up at the lodge are going to wonder why their people haven’t checked in. They might already be asking themselves that. When they come down to investigate, there’s going to be a firefight, and that’s not something you want to be here for.”
One of the men heaved himself to his feet and looked at the other Thebans. “You heard them, get on the crawlers. I can drive one of these things, anyone else?”
Three other hands went up, and the man directed them to their own crawlers.
“Thank you,” Rika said as she approached the man. “Chase is going to escort you to the road through the trees. Once you’re there, you should be in enough cover.”
Chase walked behind the Thebans and windmilled his arms. “OK, people, get aboard, we don’t have all day. We need to be in that tree line in five minutes, tops.”
Rika nodded to the man who was directing people to the crawlers. “Be careful.”
With that, she put her helmet back on and walked to the building’s door. She considered putting the EV suit on again, but decided against it and only grabbed her JE-84 before slipping out into the storm.
The blizzard had picked up—something Rika would not have believed possible—with winds gusting over two hundred kilometers per hour.
As the powder got into her joints and melted against Rika’s skin, she began to regret her decision to leave her EV suit back in the equipment building. It was only two hundred and twenty meters to the lodge, but it took her almost ten minutes to make it there. When she arrived in the lee of the building, she was nearly covered in ice. The fact that her joints weren’t half-seized was only thanks to the flow armor that coated her.
Niki said after a moment.
Rika nodded as she crept alongside the lodge, wishing she was capable of shivering to warm up.
Just another five meters to that side door.
It felt like the final steps took forever, and by the time Rika reached the entrance, her feet were covered in centimeters of ice that kept sticking to the ground.
The door was half-buried in snow, so she placed a hand on the access pad, allowing Niki to deploy a breach drone, before digging away at the obstacle.
Three minutes later she was inside the lodge, pulling the door shut behind her, half-afraid that the wind would tear it off its hinges before she got it closed.
Then it was shut, and the howl of the storm dropped to a dull roar, punctuated by high-pitched whistles where the wind worked its way through the door’s seals.
Rika sagged against the wall, and her HUD showed that the temperature was only ten degrees inside. Not exactly comfortable, but far enough above freezing for the ice on her body to begin to melt.
Pulling up the controls for flow armor placement with a few eye-flicks, Rika attempted to do as Niki suggested, but the armor registered an error.
Niki gave a quiet laugh.
Rika replied as she knocked the ice off her shoulders and released a drone to scout down the long, dark hallway.
The drone showed the hallway to be clear, not picking up any heat signatures, though it was a bit hard to see, with the building’s heating systems working on overdrive to keep the place warm.
Hot air blew from vents, and the heated floors glowed brightly, making IR almost useless.
She deployed two more drones to help with fidelity, and then grabbed her JE-84 rifle from her back. The weapon was still folded up, and she gave it a shake before the barrel slid out and the stock unfolded.
Rika said.
Rika gave a mental snort.
Rika rolled her eyes as she completed checking over her JE-84. It read ready on all firing modes, and she slid it onto her back. Her GNR-41C was sheathed in ice, and Rika carefully knocked it free, checking that the ammo feeders for the ballistic rounds and DPUs were functioning properly. The electron beam was a completely sealed system, a little cold wouldn’t bother it.
Still, I’ll wait ‘til that thing’s warmed up before firing it.
Niki guided the drones down cross corridors, scanning the building for life and finding none.
Rika shrugged.
Ignoring Niki’s pessimism, Rika crept down the hall, ice and water still falling off her, though to a much lesser extent. Her flow armor’s status indicator flipped from orange to green for movement and kinetic deflection, but stealth systems were still offline.
Rika felt a moment’s worry but brushed it off. She’d survived this long without flow armor; she could make it another mission.
The wing of the lodge she’d entered was only three stories tall, but the central block was seven. Rika found herself wondering if the building really was wooden, but decided it couldn’t be—no wooden structure this tall could withstand the storm that was tearing at it.
Or, she considered, it’s about to come tumbling down around me.
She reached the main hall that ran toward the central lobby and waited while her drones scanned the passage. They picked up two Nietzschean surveillance bubbles attached to the roof, and disabled them before moving on.
The two forward drones reached the building’s main lobby, which was filled with huge sofas, trees, and tables from a restaurant on the far side. The furniture was all arranged around a massive central fire pit that was currently raging with green flames which leapt high into the air, casting the atrium in an unearthly light.
High above, the storm raged, and Rika realized that the main lobby had no ceiling—just a grav shield to keep out the elements.
Rika pulled the feed and saw fifteen Thebans with only two Niets guarding them. Her flow armor still listed stealth as offline, and she silently cursed herself for not wearing the EV suit.
The drones flagged the rest of the room as clear, though they only found four surveillance devices, which seemed sparse to Rika—then again, the Niets were stranded on Hudson; it wasn’t like they had intended to take the Trigger Ridge Lodge when they had first set down.
For a brief moment, Rika wondered how the Nietzscheans felt about their situation. They had been abandoned by their people, stranded on a ridiculously hostile world, probably only with whatever resources they were carrying….
Well, if they were decent, they’d surrender. Not take hostages and stick most of them in an equipment shed.
With that thought firmly in mind, Rika eased around the corner and stepped into the main lobby. She kept to the shadows, silently willing her flow armor to count itself satisfied with its situation so that she could re-enable stealth.
Its ‘stealth effectiveness’ number was still below fifty percent, and she told herself that once it crept over that line, she’d enable it for whatever cover it could provide.
She kept moving forward, working her way around the fire, when a voice came from behind her.
“Nice try, mech.”
“You’re a sneaky one,” Rika said aloud as she raised her arms and began to turn.
“Stop! I’m not stupid, either. You move, I fire a shot through your head.”
Niki said.
Then Rika saw another soldier step out from an alcove further down the wall, and a third beyond him.
All with their weapons trained on her.
Rika decided that this was a good time to break EM silence.
Rika clenched her teeth. If the Niets got a visual on the stuck crawler, it would just take a few shots with one of their railguns to destroy it.
With little time to spare, Rika concocted a plan to use her a-grav boost to jump into the air, spin, shoot the closest Niet, and then get back to the dubious cover of the hallway.
Just as she folded her double-jointed legs to get extra lift for the initial leap, a single word hit her mind.
Rika knew the speaker’s voice and hit the floor, rolling onto her side as an electron beam flashed over her head and struck the closest Nietzschean in the face. He fell back, and Rika didn’t waste any time wondering if he was out before firing on the next closest Nietzschean with her electron beam.
She hit him center mass, as a trio of ballistic rounds streaked overhead and hit the first Nietzschean. Rika’s drones provided a feed of his head exploding.
The second enemy soldier was moving back toward cover, his armor smoking, and Rika fired another electron beam at his chest, burning away the rest of his armor before another ballistic round came from above, and tore a hole clear through his body.
The last Nietzschean had dropped behind cover, and was firing at Rika’s miraculous savior, who she had pinpointed as being behind and above herself, firing from a balcony on the third floor.
an instant, only dimly aware that her ally was taking out the Nietzscheans near the hostages.
Rika’s target leapt up to fire a rail shot at her, and she twisted to the side as she saw him raise his rifle. The round hit her chest at a low angle and ricocheted off, blowing the top off one of the potted trees next to her.
She leapt across the space between herself and the Nietzschean, dropping her JE-84, and wrapped her left hand around the barrel of his rifle. Rika wrenched it from his grasp and then swung it into his right shoulder.
He fell to the ground, his helmeted head turning up toward her.
The barrel of her GNR hovering ten centimeters above his helmet was the last thing the Nietzschean ever saw.
On the fifth floor, the railing tore free, and Rika nearly fell, but she managed to hook her GNR mount on the balcony and pull herself up.
A few seconds later, she was on the seventh floor, her drones rising with her, scanning the rooms for signs of the weaponry.
Then she saw it. Four rooms down and across the hall. Rika leapt from balcony to balcony, the swirling storm only a few meters above her head, glowing angrily in the light of the green fire far below.
Rika reached the fourth room and smashed through the balcony doors, racing through. She fired a round at the door leading into the corridor before bursting through, and then followed suit on the door across the hall.
As she entered the room with the missile launcher, everything seemed to slow down. It was stationed by the window on an automated mount. It had been facing the sky, but was pivoting to aim at the ground where Rika knew Chase and the Thebans to be.
