by M. D. Cooper
Rika replied.
Leslie gave a rueful laugh.
The pair backtracked and found a storm grate that they would fit through. Rika pulled it up as quietly as possible, and, once in, lowered it over them.
There wasn’t enough room to stand, so the two women crawled on all fours—all three, in Rika’s case, with her GNR draped over her back. Leslie was in the lead, and she reached the spout into the canal first.
It sat halfway out of the water, and Leslie glanced back at Rika.
She slithered out of the spout and down into the dark waters, with Rika right on her tail. They fell to the bottom of the canal, which was just over four meters deep at this point, and lay still in the mud.
No weapons fire came, and Rika wished she had a drone feed to be certain that a hundred Niets wouldn’t be waiting for them on the far shore—but the EM signals would have given them away.
It took the pair over ten minutes to cross the canal, staying low, crawling across the muddy bottom, and angling across to the inlet. When they finally reached their exit point, Rika sent a drone to the water’s surface and passively scanned the area.
The drone picked up two Niets nearby, and a motion sensor to their right. However, nothing appeared to be covering the route they needed to take to get to the Withermere Tower, which rose up on the water’s edge like a great glass reed only a dozen meters to the east.
Rika motioned for Leslie—who was also tapped into her drone feed—to follow. They slowly rose, taking care not to cause too much of a disturbance on the water’s surface.
Leslie moved ahead, her armor’s camo systems giving her the edge, and she signaled to Rika when the coast was clear.
Rika kept expecting weapons fire to rain down on them at any moment as they moved from cover to cover, but none came. Five minutes later, they finally reached the entrance to the Withermere tower.
Rika peered through the glass doors and saw a dozen guards. Leslie saw them, too, and she glanced back at Rika.
Both women knew that if they breached the building and took out the guards, it would alert the enemy to the possibility of an attack down the center. However, if they waited for the Marauders’ artillery to strike, they wouldn’t get to the weapon emplacements in the tower fast enough.
Rika noted a small patio, wrapping around the Withermere Tower and hanging over the water. Chances were that another entrance would be on the far end of the patio.
She signaled to Leslie, who gave a nod, and the two Marauders began to creep alongside the building and around the corner onto the patio. They had a clear view of the canal and the park beyond—which would still be teeming with Niets. If just one enemy soldier peered back across the canal, their little surprise would be over.
The far end of the patio was occupied by a dozen tables with umbrellas; many of which were still holding the remains of food. Rika spotted a door that led into a small café. Leslie checked the entrance for any active monitoring, and, when none was revealed, she opened the door and slipped inside—Rika trailing right behind her.
Within, more tables—most covered with discarded food and drinks—filled the space. Overturned chairs and a smashed interior window showed the signs of a struggle. The door leading into the interior of the tower was closed, so they stepped through the broken window, and slowly walked down the hall to the bank of elevators.
The first door was open, with an elevator car within. The second was closed, and Rika prised her fingers into the gap and pulled the doors apart.
She peered inside and saw a ladder to the right. Rika stretched a leg out and clamped her clawed foot around the vertical rail on one side of the ladder, and then swung out into the shaft, clamping her other foot on the other side. She’d learned long ago not to trust her weight to ladder rungs—most weren’t rated to hold her two hundred and thirty kilos.
Rika proceeded to walk up the ladder, her body perpendicular to the elevator shaft, while Leslie swung out behind her and pulled the door shut.
Rika laughed.
Leslie accepted the cable that Rika spooled out from her armor, and clipped it onto a hook at her waist.
Rika picked up the pace, while still trying to climb as quietly as possible. As they passed the closed doors to many levels, muted voices could be heard. Most likely the Theban populace, being kept in the towers to make them less appealing targets.
Their destination, the sixtieth floor—where I&A had placed the first of the Niets’ heavy weaponry—took three minutes to reach. When they arrived, Leslie unhooked from Rika, pulled herself over to the door, cracked it a centimeter, and passed out a drone.
She reached the top of the shaft less than a minute later, and pulled herself up to the a-grav emitter in the machine room that sat atop the building. There was a service hatch on one side, and Rika carefully maneuvered herself through it and onto the roof.
Rika surveyed her surroundings. There were no Niets on the south side of the roof, but she could see several on the tops of the nearby buildings, clustered around railguns that were set up a few meters back from the northern edge of the buildings. She imagined the same setup was on the Withermere—the guns out of view, but ready to slide forward and rain down punishing kinetic fire on any attackers across the canal.
Rika logged the locations of the guns. Once the assault began, she would relay the weapon coordinates to the artillery platform; perhaps they had airburst options that could at least blind the enemy weapons.
If not, she would take them out the hard way.
She passed a drone around the side of the elevator machine room to get a clear view of what she faced before the assault began. As the drone peeked around the corner, it caught sight of a pair of Niets walking around to the south side of the tower’s roof.
Shit! Rika whispered. She considered her options. She could circle around to the west side of the machine room, but the two patrolling Niets would probably make a full circuit, anyway. That would force her into full view of the rest of the Niets on the roof.
Her best bet was to take them out when they reached the south side, as quietly as possible. Five nearby towers were as tall as the Withermere, and the Niets on their roofs would easily spot anything more than a quick takedown.
Of course, the enemy was wearing heavy, powered armor, so taking them out quietly was going to be easier said than done.
Damn, I’m an idiot, Rika thought, realizing that she could just climb onto the machine room’s roof and stay out of view. She clambered up to the top with only a second to spare, and lay prone, hoping that the patrol hadn’t spotted her.
The fact that the Niets didn’t have drones covering every rooftop, elevator shaft, and stairwell was a testament to the losses their assault craft had suffered when dropping to the surface of Pyra.
With her drones withdrawn, Rika had little visibility onto the roof around her, and she didn’t dare move until she heard the footfalls of the patrol move away. Slowly, they passed around to the east side of the roof; but something was wrong. There was just one set of steps.
A thud sounded behind her, and Rika flipped onto her back to see a Nietzschean soldier in heavy armor standing over her.
“Gotcha,” he said aloud.
“Get this!” Rika said, and swung her gun-arm up and
fired a high caliber projectile round into his groin. The man’s armor dented and cracked, and he fell back with a shout.
A few seconds later, the scream of incoming shells obliterated the silence of the early evening.
Explosions a kilometer along the canal to the east and west flared brightly, throwing entire trees and clouds of debris into the air. Rika rose up on the elevator house’s roof, and noted that the Nietzscheans on other towers were sliding their railguns forward, training them to the east and west, assuming assaults would come from those directions after the artillery ceased pounding the park.
All the Niets were occupied, except the team on the Withermere; they were spinning their gun to fire on Rika. She dove off the top of the elevator’s machine room as the railgun fired, blowing it to pieces, and sending the a-grav generator falling down through the shaft to the base of the building.
She reached the far southwest corner just as the Niets locked onto her with the cumbersome weapon, and she fired her GNR.
The uranium bolt flew from her gun’s muzzle, and she sighed with relief as it hit the railgun, tearing it in half and causing the weapon’s energy coils to discharge into the soldiers nearby.
Rika unslung her JE78, and sent a series of pulse blasts into the Niets, pushing them back as she charged forward. One tripped after getting hit by a pulse, and fell off the roof of the building; another nearly followed, but managed to hang onto the edge.
Airbursts from the artillery platform began to shower the adjacent buildings with EM and shrapnel, further lighting up the sky as Rika fired several high-caliber rounds into two more Niets. Then she kicked the hanging one off the roof.
Leslie’s words were punctuated by explosions several floors down; Rika smiled, knowing that the Withermere Tower no longer posed a threat to the Marauders.
As Rika emptied a magazine from her JE78 into the last Nietzschean on the roof, she looked around at the other towers.
The team on the tower to the west of the Withermere was in disarray, but the one to the east was braving the artillery fire, and had slid one of their railguns to the edge of the tower.
It fired at the advancing Marauders in the park, getting off two shots before one of Rika’s uranium rounds slammed into the weapon, tearing it in half and showering the gun’s crew with shrapnel.
Rika glanced down as beamfire erupted from lower floors in the adjacent building, lancing out into the night. She gauged the distance to the next tower, and backed up ten paces before taking off, running toward the edge of the building.
She pushed off with her right foot, moving at over one hundred kilometers per hour, and sailed between the buildings. The gleaming side of the adjacent building rushed toward her, and Rika fired four ballistic rounds, shattering the plas, and a desk beyond.
Arms folded before her, Rika landed, rolled, and was up and running across the floor toward the Niets who were firing electron beams out into the night.
The first Nietzschean soldier flew from the building before she knew what hit her, and the second followed suit shortly after. The next two were firing at Rika, and she dove to the side, firing her JE78’s pulses on full power.
One of the remaining two flew out the window, but the other managed to grab onto the edge of the sill, hanging on for dear life as Rika approached.
“You guys need to learn when to quit,” Rika said as she stepped on his hand, crushing it beneath her foot. The Nietzschean screamed in response, and Rika lifted her foot, not even watching as the man fell to his death.
She stooped down, grabbed his crew-served beam rifle, shouldered its battery pack, and walked to the east side of the floor.
Rika kicked the window and it shattered, giving her an unobstructed view of the next building. She steadied the beam weapon and took aim. Then she held the weapon’s trigger down, firing a continuous beam into the next building—targeting the floors from which the Nietzscheans were firing on the advancing Marauders.
The offending building was set back a dozen meters from the one Rika was in, and she had a clear shot. She hit one of the enemy positions, then another. She was sweeping the beam across the building, when an enemy beam fired back, catching the side of her building half a meter from where she stood.
Rika collapsed, her limbs convulsing as the electrical discharge overcame her motor controls. She couldn’t get her legs to respond, so she pulled herself back with her left arm while her robotic limbs ran a full reset. Several primary controllers were shorted out, and she switched over to secondary systems.
Rika looked back at the Withermere Tower and saw beamfire raining down into the park.
Rika saw weapons fire lance out from the building that had fired on her, and she rose to her feet once more. She set off for the stairwell. She didn’t bother with the stairs; she leapt from landing to landing until she reached the door at the top, and burst out onto the roof.
Two Nietzscheans were still alive next to the railgun that Rika had shot previously. She fired her pulse rifle at them as she ran by, and didn’t even look back before jumping off the edge of the roof and into the next building.
Rika landed one floor too high, and debated the best way to get to the floor below. She opted for speed, and shot out a window before sliding over its edge and down to the next floor. She came down right on top of a pair of Niets, and she pushed one of them, and the crew-served weapon, out the window. Then Rika turned her purloined weapon on the remaining Nietzscheans and incinerated them.
With the floor clear, Rika turned back to the windows and laid the platoon’s combat net over her vision. The locations of Nietzschean troops in the park appeared, and she fired into them, her barrage joining in with Leslie’s and creating a clear path for the platoon to reach the canal.
Eight minutes later, the entire platoon had made it across the water. The artillery platform flattened the rest of the park, clearing the way for third and fourth platoons, who were not far behind.
Fighting lit up the streets at the base of the towers at the water’s edge as the Marauders engaged the Nietzscheans. Rika and Leslie brought their beams to bear in those conflicts, and, meter-by-meter, the Nietzscheans fell back under the Marauder assault.
DROP
STELLAR DATE: 12.23.8948 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Pyran S
pace, Above Jersey City
REGION: Pyra, Albany System, Theban Alliance
Chase clamped down on his bite-guard as the drop ship fell through Pyra’s atmosphere toward Jersey City. He looked around at the other members of his platoon, noting that many had their eyes closed, while others were staring at the overhead. A small number were chatting with their squadmates.
The Old Man hadn’t been able to take his pick of drop ships, and some, like the one the second platoon rode down in, had seen their share of abuse. Luckily, the pilot seemed competent, and they were still in one piece—which was the most any soldier could hope for in a drop.
He looked at the fourteen soldiers in his squad—squad four in the platoon. They were organized into three fireteams. He was short a few troops, so his two extras were assigned to first and second fireteam.
He would stick with his third fireteam to give the squad three teams of five. A bit large for his liking, but he didn’t think it was wise to reorganize the teams too much. They were still getting used to him, and he to them.
Chase noted that everyone’s eyes were open now, and glued to Sedis as she spoke.
Chase chuckled and looked across the aisle at Casey who mouthed ‘shit fuckers’. Ten seats down, Ralph just shook his head slowly.
Ralph began to say on the squad leader’s net, when Chase was nearly torn from his harness as something struck the drop ship.
