by M. D. Cooper
The sniper’s chest exploded, and he fell from his perch.
Without wasting a moment, Rika leapt over the shipping container and fired a trio of projectile rounds into the back of the enemy perched in the docking cradle’s armatures.
Two hit, but the third missed as he jerked to the side and spun toward her, firing a salvo from his rifle. Rika’s armor registered three impacts before she hit the deck, dodging around the docking cradle’s struts, looking for a clear line of sight on the enemy.
When she got one, he had moved. Rika circled back, ready with both weapons.
As she sidled up against an angled strut, she heard the Persephone Jones’s main cargo deck’s door open, and a signal from the team’s combat net reached her. Rika Linked up and fed her drone’s data to them while resuming the search for her foe.
A scraping sound from behind alerted Rika to danger a second before a burst of kinetic rounds streaked toward her. The sound gave her enough time to pivot and fire her JE84 at the attacker.
He had moved again, and her shot missed; Rika knew she had to take this chucklehead out fast. Too much longer, and one of his friends was bound to show up.
Taking a risk, she leapt into the air, flying over the struts and armatures she and her enemy had been using for cover to come down on his position from above.
Apparently, assisted by his powered armor, he had the same plan. Rika took a moment to consider the guts it took to drop down onto a mech—though she had performed similar maneuvers in the past.
Neither of them reacted as quickly as they should have, and they passed each other in the air. Rika had to move her GNR out of the way to bring her JE84 to bear, and her opponent was below her, aiming where he expected her to be.
At the last second, Rika swung her GNR’s barrel at the man’s right side, clipping his shoulder and sending him off course.
The action spun her as well, and Rika landed facing back the way she had leapt, not pausing before springing over the docking cradle and opening up with her JE84, firing on full auto.
An entire magazine of bullets slammed into the man’s head and shoulders, dropping him to his knees before Rika crashed into him, her clawed feet grasping his shoulders and flipping him backward into the deck.
Rika kicked him in the head, breaking his armor’s seal, and snapping his neck.
Rika pulled the team’s feeds and saw that Basilisk had not used the Jones’s main cargo door. Leslie and Barne had exited from the airlock on the ship’s starboard side, near Rika’s position, and Chase had ridden in atop the ship, laying down fire from behind one of its sensor arrays.
Rika noted that Patty and Amy were still inside the ship’s airlock, and she moved from cover to cover until she was at the base of the ramp in position with Barne.
Now that Basilisk had disembarked, the enemy was showing their full force; not counting the two Rika had already disabled, there were nine active enemies in the bay. They were armed as well as the Marauders—probably better, since the team was running low on ammunition.
Patty rushed down the ramp without further prodding, clutching Amy in her arms. The woman crouched beside Rika and Barne wearing a stoic expression.
“You guys in Basilisk sure know how to have fun,” she muttered.
“It’s in the rulebook,” Barne stated matter-of-factly as he lobbed a grenade toward a source of enemy weapons fire.
Rika glanced at Amy I wish we didn’t have to put the poor girl through all this.
Barne followed a moment later, leading Patty and Amy on a more circuitous route.
Rika didn’t watch their progress; instead, she turned toward the opposite side of the bay and laid down suppressive fire with her JE84, then moved to new cover. She repeated the action and sent the signal for Chase to follow.
She looked up to see him leap from the top of the Persephone Jones down into the docking cradle surrounding it. A burst of weapons fire came from amongst the struts and armatures, followed by a resounding crack!
Chase emerged from the docking struts on her left and moved into cover, giving her a jaunty wave once he was behind a stack of crates.
Rika shook her head.
She proceeded to lay down suppressive fire with both her weapons as Chase rushed past her, leapfrogging to new cover.
Now that Amy was clear, the enemy was intensifying their attacks. The projectile fire had switched to kinetic slugs, which tore away any cover Rika and Chase moved to in moments.
They were almost at the row of containers lining the edge of the bay when Rika’s probe picked up a telltale whine.
They hit the deck as a blue-white electron beam flashed overhead and burned a hole through a docking cradle’s support strut.
The cradle groaned, and the support armature fell free, coming straight for Rika. She scrambled out of the way, certain she wouldn’t make it, when something grabbed her GNR’s barrel and yanked her forward.
As they ran, the container behind them exploded, spraying shrapnel in every direction. Rika knew that type of impact—it was a depleted uranium sabot.
They passed between two crates, and Rika fired her electron beam toward the origin of the uranium round.
She harbored a strong suspicion it was the SMI-2 mech she had spotted down on Faseema. She didn’t want to shoot at a mech—especially not one of her model—but if it came down to the enemy or her, there was no question in Rika’s mind which one would survive the encounter.
As she backed through the bay�
�s exit, Rika caught sight of the enemy SMI-2 as it leaped into the air and landed atop the Persephone Jones. The mech stood in the open, her helmet facing Rika—the direction of its gaze evident by the grey skull painted the black oval.
Rika paused, trying to determine by the enemy mech’s stance if she knew her; she wondered if the death’s-head mech was thinking the same thing.
Rika backed down the passageway she had entered until she reached the first cross-corridor, where she took aim at the bulkhead on the exterior side of the station. She fired a shot with her electron beam, burning away the plas and steel and exposing the rock behind.
Asteroids were never as dense as planets, and she guessed that one sabot round would do the trick—bringing her down to just three.
Rika fired the shot, and the rock exploded, opening a hole into space. The WHUMP of explosive decompression thundered through the corridor.
Klaxons blared, and pressure doors began to lower. Rika turned and raced down the corridor toward Chase, who was crouched at the next intersection, waving her onward.
Rika thanked the stars that some considerate soul had configured the doors to lower slowly, and she slid under with only a few centimeters to spare.
Chase shook his head.
Rika nodded as she rolled over and pushed herself up.
Chase gave a soft laugh over the Link.
Chase shook his head and made a tsk-ing sound.
Rika took the lead as they moved down the corridor, following the route the rest of the team had taken. After turning at the next intersection, she spotted Patty and Amy crouched down behind a conduit stack.
Rika gestured for Chase to lead Patty and Amy toward the bay, but not before she reached out and gave Amy’s arm a reassuring squeeze.
Rika held her position at the intersection as the team fell back. Movement to her left caught her eye, and she saw a group of station security guards swing into the corridor.
“Dammit,” she swore aloud, and fired a shot with her electron beam into the overhead a half-dozen paces ahead of the lead guard. The ceiling exploded; lights, ductwork, and rock spilled out into the corridor.
Rika turned and fired another shot at the overhead back in the direction from which they had come. Hopefully, if the enemies from the docking bay follow this route, they’ll end up in a firefight with station security.
<’Bout time they showed up. Slackers,> Barne commented.
Rika chuckled at the annoyance in Barne’s voice. The surly sergeant seemed genuinely annoyed that station security had taken so long to respond.
Rika sent an affirmative. Holding this intersection for two minutes should be a breeze.
On her left, the station security guards were taking positions behind the overhead’s rubble. Rika took aim with her JE84 and fired a shot into one man’s shoulder, then pinged a shot off another’s helmet.
That’ll teach them to stay low. No wonder these people lost to Stavros’s Politica; either that, or their good soldiers all died in the war.
A minute later, the enemies from the docking bay showed up on the right and took up positions behind the pile of rubble Rika had made for them.
Shit! Rika swore internally. Giving the mercs cover had not been one of her brighter moves. They were using it well and mopping the deck with the station security. Rika decided to even the odds and fired a few shots into the merc’s ranks, taking one out and forcing the others back.
The bulkhead exploded in a shower of plas, steel, and rock, and Rika prayed it would be enough of a distraction to get to the ship in time.
She burst into the bay and saw the commandeered vessel highlighted on her HUD. It was a fast-looking pinnace on the far side of the hangar. Patty and Amy were rushing up the ramp while Chase and Leslie held positions beside the cradle.
The bay was half a kilometer across, and Rika pushed herself to her top speed, weaving between shipping containers and docking cradles.
She was only one hundred meters in when something swung out from behind a stack of crates and struck her squarely in the chest.
The impact made her feel like she’d been hit by a starship. As Rika flipped over, her feet describing a long arc through the air before she landed on her back, her JE84 slipped from her grasp.
Rika struggled for breath, wondering if she had a collapsed lung. Readouts on her HUD showed that the wound on her back had torn open, and one of her previously bent ribs had snapped and was pushing halfway through her chest.
Biofoam sealed the internal wound, and her systems deadened the agonizing pain. All of this happened as Rika flipped over. She backpedaled away and spotted a two-meter beam lying on the deck, but there was no sign of the enemy—until she fell onto Rika from above.
The enemy SMI-2 hit Rika like a meteor, slamming into her shoulders and firing at her helmet with a Messier-Orion pulse rifle.
A pulse rifle?
Rika reached up for it, grabbed the barrel, and pulled down hard. By some miracle, she managed to tear it from the enemy’s grasp. Then she fell backward, trying to get enough space between them to manage a shot with her GNR.
The other mech read Rika’s intentions and leapt to the side, firing a projectile round from her own GNR—a 41B model, Rika noticed—into the top of Rika’s head.
Rika’s helmet bore the brunt of the round, but her ears rang like she was the clapper in a bell. She ignored the pain and rose to a crouch, firing two rounds at the enemy mech. One hit her in the chest, and the other in the left arm, blowing off a piece of armor—the round lodging in the elbow joint.
Rika struggled to her feet just as the other mech barreled into her, slamming her into a shipping container, rocking it backward as the combined half-ton of mech drove a deep dent into its side.
The metal of the container had folded around Rika’s left arm, and she tried to wrench it free, but with the other mech bearing down on her, she couldn’t get it to budge.
As Rika waved her GNR, trying to catch it on the edge of the container to pull herself forward, she found she was staring into the death’s head painted on her enemy’s helmet. Even if they had never known one another, she and this mech had once fought on the same side, suffered the same indignities, shed Nietzschean
blood, and watched their comrades die.
We should be friends, not enemies.
Rika gave up struggling, and the other mech pulled back her fist, driving it into Rika’s face. Rika’s visuals died, and everything went black; she felt panic surge up within her.
Is this how it ends? Killed by another SMI-2 mech?
Then light flooded in as her helmet was pulled free, and split in half in the process.
“Rika?” a stunned, robotic voice said. “You’re…you’re Rika…”
Rika’s eyes adjusted to the bright light of the bay, and she watched the other mech take a step back, taking the opportunity to finally wrench her arm free.
“Who are you?” she demanded angrily.
The other mech turned her head—though Rika knew it didn’t matter. The SMI-2’s three-sixty vision wouldn’t allow her to stop seeing, not so long as the helmet was on.
“No one…” the other mech whispered. “I just saw your picture once.”
“Liar!” Rika shouted. “I know you! Who are you?”
In the back of her mind, Rika knew that anyone could have looked her up after the war, seen what her face had looked like before it was taken away. But this mech…she’d had a personal reaction. Rika knew that the person before her had once been a member of team Hammerfall.
Not all the women of Hammerfall had survived the war; only four others during Rika’s tenure. She knew three of them to be dead.
“Silva,” Rika whispered. “You’re Silva! How could you…show me your face,” Rika commanded, taking a step forward.
“I…I don’t have one,” Silva admitted, hanging her head.
Rika shook her head. “I don’t care. Show me your eyes, then. I’ll know.”
The other mech—Silva—paused for a moment, and then the black oval surrounding her head split open. She reached up slowly and pulled the front half away, exposing the featureless grey face of an SMI-2 mech.
No mouth, a stunted nose, no ears…but two eyes, wide and unblinking, stared back at her.
Rika knew those eyes. It was Silva.
She wanted to rush forward, to embrace her old friend, to ask her where she’d been, whether she’d seen her children since the war, what she was doing this far into Praesepe….but she did none of those things. Instead, she lifted her GNR, taking aim at Silva’s head.
