by M. D. Cooper
Right before impact, the bike exploded.
The blast gave Rika the extra push she needed to make it up to the building’s roof. Unfortunately, the force also sent her cartwheeling through the air, so when she landed, it was on a skylight.
A thousand kilograms of mech, steel, and high-density glass fell into the room below just as the remains of the bike smashed into one of the room’s windows and fell to the ground.
Huh…the window did hold up.
Rika looked around, her locator systems finding her on the building layout she had saved that first night when she had reviewed Basilisk’s intel on the operation.
This was the room; the president should be there.
One more look around the room now that the dust had settled revealed that something had been going on. Holosheets were still on the table, along with glasses of water, and some jackets were still draped over chairs.
The president had been here just moments before.
She plotted the most expeditious route through the Capitol, and took off, smashing through the door and rushing down the corridor beyond. Several men and women were approaching, all armed and wearing medium armor. Rika pulled her JE78 rifle off her back, and fired four rapid pulse shots, knocking two people over, and pushing the others aside. One tried to grab at her as she ran past, but she slapped his arm out of the way; the crunch of his bones snapping reached her augmented ears even over the general din of her passage.
She turned left at the next intersection and kept running, while firing pulse blasts at anyone who got in her way. Her plan didn’t require a return trip; the squishies could chase after her as fast as they wanted, they weren’t going to catch her.
Rika passed under a large archway and into the capitol’s main atrium. She was running along a balcony toward a door at the far end, when she saw a soldier in heavy armor step through a doorway across the atrium. She recognized the weapon in his hand, and dove to the ground as a blue streak of lightning flashed overhead, blowing a hole in the wall beside her.
Debris fell on her, and Rika struggled to get free—fighting her robe as much as the wall. She tore the robe asunder, and scurried free as a second electron beam hit where she had been a moment earlier.
Rika took off running, taking a moment to fire a return shot from her own electron beam before leaving the atrium.
Her rear vision revealed that her shot hit the soldier center mass. She wasn’t certain if his armor could withstand the beam, but she wasn’t going to stick around to find out.
Inside the next corridor, she pushed past several men and women in highly ornate robes. One called out, hurling insults that Rika barely heard as she raced on.
Rika continued her mad dash, wishing the Marauders had secured drones for her armor. She constantly had to slow at intersections to see if anyone was lying in wait, and one time almost got her head shot off as a group of soldiers opened fire on her.
She didn’t bother engaging them; instead she raced back to a nearby lift, prised the doors open, and leapt down the shaft. The elevator car was on the main floor, and she crashed through the ceiling, narrowly missing a terrified woman who spilled coffee down her robe.
“Sorry ‘bout that,” Rika said as she took off once more.
Again, the incongruity of what she was doing hit her. She had no issue with the Thebans. Aside from the possibly corrupt police up north at Cheri’s villa, all her dealings with them had been pleasant and enjoyable.
And here she was, barreling through their capitol building, hell-bent on taking out their president.
She was close now to the ‘mop closet’, and as she rounded a corner, she caught sight of a group of people rushing down the hallway ahead.
Rika surged forward, banking up onto a wall, and came around the corner to see a woman—the president, her HUD confirmed—being ushered into a lift.
There were too many people around for Rika to take a shot. She’d have no way to know if she’d hit the president. No way to confirm the kill.
The action caused her to lose forward momentum, and she dropped fast. The doors were half a meter apart, and Rika gave one final push to break free of the dozen hands on her, and slipped through into the elevator.
She struggled to her feet, and a pulse rifle fired into her torso. Rika reached out, grabbed the weapon, and pulled it free from the shooter. Four hostiles, as well as the president, lit up on her HUD. Two were without armor—one of which was the man she had just disarmed—and the other two were in heavy armor.
One of the heavily armored guards pushed the president into the back corner, and protected her bodily while the other opened fire on her. Rika stepped in close, past the man’s short rifle, and punched him in the throat.
His armor cracked, but didn’t break. Rika was about to hit him again when she felt her right arm pulled back. She saw that the other two guards had grabbed the barrel of her GNR, and were trying to pull her away from the president.
In the close quarters of the lift, Rika could barely maneuver her left arm—but she was able to swing it enough to lift the two men into the air, and slam them into the elevator’s ceiling.
The armored guard took advantage of her distraction to pull out a sidearm and unload a magazine into her helmet. Rika gasped in surprise as her visor cracked, but it held against the point-blank fire.
She lifted her left leg up and sunk her claws into the elevator’s wall, and then punched the man again, straightening her leg at the same time.
This time, the man’s gorget broke; so did his neck. As he fell, the two unarmored guards were rising. They scrambled to their feet just as the lift doors opened. Rika reached for the president as the armored guard rushed her out, but the two men pulled Ariana back.
“Enough!” Rika yelled. She unslung her JE78 rifle and unloaded a quartet of pulse shots into the two men, before spinning and chasing the president and her guard across a foyer and through a massive blast door that was slowly closing.
She slipped in with plenty of room to spare, only to come face-to-face with a pair of Assault Mechs. She had met some of these guys during the war. Mostly, they were made from large men; like a tank version of a scout mech, but not large and clumsy like a K1R. Unless she missed her guess, these two were model threes.
Rika surveyed the room and saw that it was a large foyer with thick pillars, five-meter high ceilings, and a number of desks and consoles along two walls. The fourth wall had a number of crates stacked against it.
The guard all but carried the president past the two mechs and through a door amidst the consoles. Rika wondered for a brief moment—during which the AM-3s raised their chainguns—if they were under compliance, or were still making war with their freedom. Like she was.
“Guys…do you really want to do this? We were on the same side once,” she said, smiling pleasantly—even though they couldn’t see it behind her helmet.
“Stand down, SMI-2,” one of the AM-3s said in a sharp tenor.
“Or don’t,” the other shrugged, his voice gravelly and deep.
Rik
a knew that if she backed down now, death would be the best possible outcome she could hope for.
“No can do,” Rika said, and fired one of her uranium bolts at the AM-3 on her right. He saw her GNR rise, and moved to the side—but not far enough.
The bolt hit his left arm where the chaingun was mounted, and blew it clear off. The AM-3 models, unlike the SMI-2s, did not have any organic limbs remaining, and the man only grimaced as the stump of twisted metal sticking out of his left shoulder twitched and sparked.
Rika knew that a fight against two of these mechs would be one of the most difficult she’d ever had; but a part of her reveled in the opportunity to test her mettle against them.
She closed with the one she had wounded, knowing that the best way to keep the other from bringing his formidable ordnance to bear was to have him run the risk of shooting his teammate.
Hopefully these two like one another.
She remembered hearing that the AM-2s had a weak spot on the edges of their chest plates, where the armor connected to the hard mount on their bodies—hopefully it hadn’t been fixed on the 3s. She toggled her JE78 rifle to kinetic slugs, and fired a rapid burst of the two-centimeter rounds at the weak spot, spinning the already-wounded AM-3 to the side, and driving him back.
Though Rika tried to keep the one-armed AM-3 between her and his gravelly voiced companion, she wasn’t entirely successful, and he fired off a trio of blasts from his pulse rifle, pushing her back into the open.
The whine of the chaingun got her moving, and Rika dove behind a pillar as rounds chased after her. Two struck her in the side, and one in the ass, but her armor registered no penetration—though the plate on the side of her ass was fractured.
Luckily, the Marauders didn’t believe in playing fair—Team Basilisk, even less so—and Rika pulled a burn-stick from the pouch strapped to her left thigh, and primed it for an impact ignition.
The burn sticks were thermite incendiaries modified to stick to their targets for maximum damage. One stick may not make it through an AM-3s armor, but it certainly would scare the shit out of them.
Rounds poured past the pillar, chipping away at its sides, as the two AMs spread out, narrowing the cone of safety behind it. Rika considered her options and then leapt, twisting in the air so that her feet were up and her head was down.
She prayed her aim was true, and she almost shouted out in triumph when her feet clamped onto a decorative capital on the top of the pillar. She twisted around the pillar, threw the burn stick at the already-wounded AM-3, and then twisted around the other way, and aimed her GNR at the other AM-3.
He had anticipated her move, and let loose with another barrage from his chaingun.
It would have hit, too, if the capital hadn’t torn off the top of the pillar. Rika fired her round as she fell; the depleted uranium bolt struck the AM-3 in the head and snapped his neck back, but not enough to have broken it.
The front of the mech’s helmet was a ruined mass, and he tore at it with his other hand, desperate to pull it off and regain sight.
Rika wasted no time, and fired her electron beam at the struggling mech, burning a hole clear through his head.
She hadn’t heard any screaming from the other AM-3, and assumed her burn stick had missed—but when she peered around the pillar, a pulse blast hit her square in the face, and threw her backward, exposing her again.
As she struggled to her feet, she saw the second AM-3 was limping toward her, his right hip a mess of melted steel and blood.
“Gonna fuck you up,” he said, his voice filled with rage. “Benny was a good friend. You’re going to regret this.”
Rika sprinted away as the AM-3 fired kinetic rounds from his rifle at her. Three bullets traced a line down her thigh and shattered the armor plating, then a fourth hit and tore through the front of her leg.
Rika fell to the ground once more, her gun-arm twisted under her body. The AM-3 held out his rifle and pulled the trigger.
CLICK!
In the time it took him to switch his rifle’s firing mode, Rika rolled over, straightened her GNR, and fired her third uranium rod into his torso.
Her aim was good, and the shot penetrated the armor where the burn stick had melted it away. The upper half of his body exploded outward, blood, bone, and armor spraying across the room.
Rika looked around, amazed that no other guards were present. Maybe these two had been the only ones down here when the president arrived.
Biofoam was filling her wound, and Rika noted that the med-readout on her HUD showed her femur as intact. She grabbed a shard of nearby armor—one of the AM-3s, by its color—and stuck it into the biofoam filling her wound.
It wouldn’t offer any significant protection, but something was better than nothing.
She got her left leg under her, picked up her JE78 rifle, and rose up, leaning on her GNR’s barrel as she tested her right leg’s strength. Her armor and mods dulled the pain, but it still hurt like a fucker when she put weight on it.
Rika glanced back to see that the massive blast door at the foyer’s entrance was sealed. Rika knew that it would not open easily, so any pursuit was a ways off. Still, there could be a rear exit, and she had to find the president before she and her remaining guard reached it.
Rika turned and limped in the direction the guard had taken the president. She passed through the door on the far side of the foyer, and into a maze of hallways filled with offices and meeting rooms.
She scanned the ground and saw a trail of blood. She wondered if the president had been wounded at some point, or if the blood was from the guard—or even someone else.
Still, it was all she needed.
Rika ignored the pain in her leg, and began to lope through the halls, following the trail of blood. It passed through the nicer portion of the bunker and into a rear area filled with supply rooms and environmental systems.
The droplets were decreasing in frequency, but so were the available paths to take. After five minutes, Rika heard voices, and she slowed her approach.
“Can you open it?” she heard a woman’s voice say, and she recognized it as the president’s. She sounded scared, terrified, and Rika felt a pang of guilt. The worry that she was doing something terribly wrong assaulted her once more.
She peered around a corner and saw President Ariana and her guard at the far end—twenty meters away. Before them was a large door. One that either led deeper into the bunker, or out to an exit. Given that it was sealed, Rika suspected it was an exit that had closed at the same time as the main door by the lift.
“Nowhere left to run,” Rika said as she stepped into the corridor, her GNR-41C extended and aimed at the president’s head.
The guard spun, raised his rifle, and fired it full auto at Rika. She twitched her GNR to the side, and fired an electron beam that melted his armor, followed by a trio of ballistic rounds that tore his right arm off.
The man screamed in pain and collapsed, and Rika pulled her JE78 off her back and shot a pulse blast; pushing him back, away from the rifle still held by his severed, twitching arm.
She kept the JE78 trained on him as he whimpered in pain, and she leveled the GNR at the president once more.
“Why are you doing this?!” the woman shrieked. “Who’s paying you? We can double it! Please!”
Rika shook her head. “I guess it’s easy to see I’m Genevian, which makes me a merc. Funny thing is, I don’t get paid for this. I’m a slave.”
“A what?” the president asked. “You’re doing this under compliance? We can help you, we can free you!”
“Those two AM-3s, were they under compliance?” Rika asked.
“No!” the president shook her head emphatically. “What your people did to you was barbaric. We would never do that to any living being.”
Rika felt sick to her stomach. Though she was still technically a slave, she was no longer under compliance. She was about to murder this woman of her own free will.
“I’m sorry,” Rika
said. “I have to do this.”
“You can fight it,” the woman said. “Others have! Fight the Discipline, please!”
Rika felt tears on her cheeks. “I don’t have to…. I’m not currently under Discipline. My compliance chip is offline.”
“Then why are you doing this?!” Ariana shrieked. “You have no reason to kill me!”
“I have to belong somewhere…” Rika said, her voice cracking. “I need a home, I can’t make it on my own. I tried, I really tried.”
“I’ll help you, Thebes can help you! Just please don’t kill me!”
A sob tore through Rika’s body and she lowered her GNR. She couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t do it. Basilisk team had been kind to her—more than they had to be—but she just couldn’t kill this woman in cold blood as she pleaded for her life.
“I won’t…” Rika said quietly. “I won’t kill you. I’m done.”
She fell to the ground as Ariana began to weep with relief.
“What happens now?” Rika asked—knowing that things were unlikely to play out well for her no matter what.
President Ariana wiped her cheeks dry and pushed her hair back out of her face. “I don’t know…you just killed a lot of people.”
Rika sighed. “I tried not to…as much as I could.”
The guard beside Ariana shifted, and Rika suspected that he had passed out and was just coming to.
“Madam President!” he called out turning his head toward her. “You’re…you’re OK?”
Ariana nodded solemnly, glancing up at Rika, “For no reason other than my would-be assassin’s conscience striking at the last moment.”
Rika could tell that the president had meant the words to be kind—at least to a degree—but they cut her to the core.
The president glanced back down at her guard. “Are you OK, John? Other than the arm….”
The guard—John—nodded. “Yeah, I’ll live. You, there; if you really mean no further harm, put down your weapons…if you can.”
Rika pulled herself back to her feet, wincing as pain lanced up her injured leg. John tried to rise as well, but fell back against the wall.
