by G. R. Cooper
The wreck of its leg had slowed it considerably, but it still came toward him. Now five yards away, Duncan could see its hands. Human-like, but with short fingers that ended in a nightmare of claws. He put two more bursts into it. Finishing it.
He wondered how many shots he’d fired. Enough. He pressed the magazine release on the rifle with his right hand while his left moved to the ammunition pouch on his belt.
As if waiting for this moment, a dark grey blur erupted from the door of the building. Duncan knew he wouldn’t have time to reload the rifle, so he dropped it and drew his pistol. Pulling onto target, he began firing as fast as he could. As the slide slammed open after his eighth and final shot, he stepped to the left to avoid the now lifeless corpse that slid through where he’d been standing a moment before. He was pretty sure he’d only hit it once, but the .45 caliber bullet seems to have been sufficient. He released the empty magazine, put a fresh one in and thumbed the slide release. Loaded, he replaced it in its holster, and bent to retrieve his M4.
He stood, put a fresh magazine in the rifle, and pulled the charging handle; startling himself as the bullet he’d forgotten was still in the chamber was ejected past his face.
He turned. “Well that wasn’t so …”, he choked on the rest of his sentence. The area behind him had turned into an abattoir floor; parts of Matt and Vince strewn among the corpses of their opponents. Clancey, on the ground, was pushing a dead werewolf off his legs. His left leg was a horror of ground meat, bone and spurting blood. A claw’s rake across his chest added to the gore.
“Wasn’t so … what?” laughed Clancey.
“I’ll help you get back to the ship.”
“Screw that,” said Clancey. “Just give me their rifles and pistols and haul ass. You got the loot, right?”
“A piece of paper.” Duncan gathered the weapons, some magazines from the corpses, and tossed them to Clancey, who began reloading them and placing them on the ground next to his legs.
“Yeah, could be anything.” The clicking began again, beginning in the north this time.
“Run,” said Clancey.
Duncan moved off to the south, quickly. As he reached the southernmost building, he slowed, crouched and moved his way around to the outermost wall. The tapping was still localized in the northernmost buildings, but he wasn’t taking any chances. The wall was clear of werewolves, so he began sprinting, south, toward the ship.
He hadn’t covered more than twenty or thirty meters when howls once again cut the air. Shortly thereafter, he heard two M4’s open up. Clancey must have one in each hand, he thought. Then the flat boom from pistols. Then silence. Too quickly.
The howling picked up in intensity. It was answered to his left, to the east, from the woods. It got louder as he ran. He could see the shuttle in the distance, but he could also see the red pulsing on his map from behind and to his left growing in intensity and rapidity. They were getting closer, but he didn’t pause to look. He just kept running.
As he approached the shuttle, the red pulsations on the map had nearly converged onto the center. He thought he could hear grass rustling, or maybe heavy breathing, from behind. Then he was through the automatic door, which closed shut behind him. Within a second or two he heard tapping on the bulkhead.
“Clive! Get me the fuck out of here!”
Chapter 4
Duncan exited the shuttle, once again in the hangar bay of the space station. Vince and Matt stood there, slow clapping. Clancey was approaching the group, laughing. A message flashed across the top of his field of view;
Mission partially complete. 34% of goals reached.
“What the hell does that mean, ‘thirty four percent of goals reached’?” asked Duncan.
“It means,” said Matt, “that there’s a shit-ton of bad guys left. More or less. Maybe there were other goals we’d have discovered if we’d got further along, or maybe it was ‘kill ‘em all’”.
“It also means,” added Clancey, “that any rewards provided by the mission creator won’t be given until all of the mission goals are met. Money will be split according to percentage complete,” he continued, “so far we’ve got a third. Any special items added as payment go to the group that has the highest percentage of completeness.”
“Let’s make that be us,” said Vince, “Let’s gear up and go back.”
“Are you serious?” asked Duncan, “We got slaughtered.”
Matt laughed. “We weren’t equipped. We will be this time, it’ll be fine.”
“Plus you’ll have me!” said Shannon, joining the group. “Someone’s got to keep you dorks alive.”
“Hey,” said Clancey, “what was the loot?”
Duncan had forgotten all about it. He opened his backpack, and pulled up the paper.
“It says it’s a Pearlite Conduit Rail Gun with a Hawkeye.”
Everyone was quiet.
“What?” asked Duncan. “Is it good?”
“Everything you just said,” said Clancey, “is the best. Pearlite means it’s very, very tough. It also disperses heat very well.”
Vince continued. “The Hawkeye is the highest magnification, highest resolution scope you can fit on a personal weapon. Having one on a Rail Gun means you can reach out and touch someone far away indeed.”
“And a conduit means that you can feed it power directly from the shuttle, like our body armor does. Usually a rail gun is such an energy hog, you need an extra backpack battery just to power it. And even so, you’ll only get a few shots out of a battery. As such, rail guns aren’t really usable outside of a few isolated cases. Running a conduit from the shuttle? Shit, you could probably fire it all day long.”
Duncan received a dialog box from Clancey, 20 rounds of rail gun slugs. Disintigrating sabot, he read. An inner, tungsten spear encased in a lighter bullet. On impact, the spear would continue through just about any target while the outer coating would come apart, ripping through the target like a point blank shotgun blast. He accepted.
“Thanks.”
“No problem,” said Clancey, “I just grabbed them from a player auction. They ain’t cheap, so shoot straight,” he laughed.
A point of light began flashing on his map overlay.
“In order to retrieve your rail gun, proceed to the kiosk on the map,” said Clive, “or you can place the plans into a player auction. Of course, you can always just give it away.”
Duncan walked to the standalone booth, pulled the paper out of his backpack and inserted it into a slot labeled ‘Manufactory’. After a moment, the top of the manufactory lifted, revealing his new weapon. He grabbed it, turned, and trotted back to his group.
“Why all the steps,” asked Duncan. “Why not just give me the gun in the loot box?”
“Sometimes they do,” responded Clancey.
“But most often,” interjected Vince,” you get a blueprint for the item. Trust me, if you’re ever close to being loaded, weight wise, you’ll be glad to get a nice little blueprint instead of some massive object.”
Clancey nodded, “Plus, if you decide to sell something in the auction, the buyer pays shipping costs. So if your gun gets bought by some guy on the other side of known space, he’d have to add a shit ton of money to get it there. The blueprint can be sent cheap, it really opens up your market possibilities.”
“You can also reverse the process. Put the gun into the manufactory, add a bunch of credits, and it munches up the gun and spits out a blueprint. It really just depends on how far and wide you want your purchasing audience to be whether you sell the object or the plans.”
“And that gun would start an insane universal bidding war.”
“C’mon,” said Matt “I’ve got a C and C 5. Shannon’s up. Time to get some werewolf payback.”
They crowded into a transport that had a slightly larger interior, as well as a door on the far bulkhead. Shannon went through that door as the rest grabbed four seats. Duncan made sure to grab one away from the door. He didn’t want to be fir
st out this time. He remembered that tapping all too well, and didn’t want to be the first to encounter them again.
“What’s a ‘C and C’ 5?”
Matt answered, “C and C means command and control. That’s what Shannon does. It’s our version of an RPG healer. She controls the power; the power feeds our armor suits and, thanks to the conduit, your gun.”
“She’s also got access to a much better map,” said Vince, “and can feed us much better information than we get on our own.”
“She’s also got control of the communications,” shouted Shannon from forward, “so she decides what playlist gets used. And, today, like it or not, you bitches get some Beastie Boys!”
As She’s Crafty’s Zeppelin-esque guitars and pounding drums filled the interior of the transport, Vince, Matt and Clancey all started putting on heavy armor.
“Since you’ve got that new toy,” said Matt, “I think we should play this one a bit differently. We’ve got our heavy weapons and armor, so the rest of this mission really should be a piece of cake. We’re going to leave you here. Just climb up on top of the shuttle and cover us. With that Hawkeye, you’ll have no problem keeping them off our asses.”
“I’ve never shot it,” protested Duncan, “I have no idea how much lead, drop and all that long range shooting crap to use.” He took one magazine of ten and put it into the lower part of the rail gun receiver.
“It’ll be about half a kilometer, max,” said Clancey. “The muzzle velocity of that thing isn’t anything like you’d get with a rifle, it’s way higher.”
“Plus,” said Vince, “that scope will take care of all of the calcluations. Just put the pipper on the target and pull the trigger. You’ll be close, if not dead on.”
“Ok,” said Duncan, “Remember that forest to the east? You guys might want to move over there first. A bunch of werewolves came at me as I was running back to the shuttle.”
“How many?”
“Dunnno, Vince. I was more worried about not getting eaten than counting the diners,” laughed Duncan.
“Ok, Ok,” laughed Vince. “We’ll head up into the forest. You keep an eye out ahead of us, but mainly on that colony. I don’t want those fuckers to get between us and the shuttle this time.”
“Are you girls ready yet?” Shannon’s voice came over the radio. She cut the music.
Duncan watched his three heavily armored friends exit the shuttle. He stood, followed and, once outside, looked up to the roof of the craft. Leaping, he grabbed onto a stanchion and pulled himself onto the roof. The stanchion supported a meter wide disc, some kind of radar dish he thought. He sat next to it, feet dangling off the side of the shuttle, and heaved his rail gun onto to the dish.
He lowered the bipod on the end of the barrel and pulled the butt into his shoulder. The weight of the gun now supported, Duncan fine-tuned the aspect toward the east end of the colony and put his eye to the scope.
“Nothing in the village,” he said. “Scanning back through the trees to you guys.”
“Nothing on the ‘dar,” said Shannon, “and no heat or sound signatures. Yet.”
Matt, at the head of an arrowhead formation, was heading northeast towards the woods. Duncan swiveled the gun and put his scope on the tree line. He started experimenting with the controls; zooming in then out and cycling through the infrared, low light and normal visual modes. He stopped on infrared. He’d noticed a smudge, a blur, back into the trees.
“Is there any reason to assume anything out there is friendly?” he asked. “I’ve got a heat signature back in the woods.”
“Shit,” said Shannon. “I’ve got nothing on broad scan. That scope rocks. Switching to focused scan. Northeast?”
“Yeah.”
“Ok, got it,” she said. “The temperature is 40 degrees. Too hot for a human. 300 meters.”
“’K.” Duncan centered the scope on the mass, breathed in, and squeezed the trigger. The gun roared, jumped in his arms. The slug ripped through the air, unerring, into the woods, leaving a visible wake of disturbed air.
His three friends involuntarily ducked as the slug tore through the air above their heads and the report of the gun cracked the entire area.
Duncan resettled the gun and put his head back down. On the left of the scope’s screen, he saw a vertical bar had dropped to nothing, then raise back to full in the next second. The power gauge. Shannon had connected the gun’s conduit to the shuttle power supply. Duncan thumbed a button above the grip, reloading the weapon.
“Holy shit,” said Matt. “Now I know what being almost hit by lightning sounds like.” The three began running toward the target, highlighted by Shannon on their maps. They got to the site. Vince laughed.
“Good thing we don’t worry about trying to skin the hides off of these things. All that’s left of this guy is a splash of werewolf soup. A big splash.”
“Really?” asked Duncan.
“No shit,” answered Clancey. “That round went through and exploded a tree behind the ‘wolf. A few dozen grams of thirteen millimeter tungsten travelling at a few thousand meters per second blows shit up real good.”
“And that’s just the slug round,” he continued, “you can get all sorts of special kinds of really evil stuff to shoot out of that thing.”
The three began moving through the woods, parallel to the treeline, northward toward the village. Duncan shifted the gun and centered the scope on the circle of huts. He could just make out one part of the chest he got the rail gun plans from. He then noticed the first wisps of smoke coming from behind one of the buildings. It looked to him like it was coming from the dead center of the colony. He told the guys, they slowed and spread further apart. They were now about a hundred meters from the easternmost building. They stopped and all three dropped prone.
“Ok. I can just see into the middle of the town square,” said Matt. “It looks like they have a colonist tied up and are lighting a fire underneath him. Can you see anything Duncan?”
“Nope.”
“Try moving around a bit to the northwest.”
Duncan rose, picked up his gun, and moved to the other side of the shuttle. He raised the stock to his shoulder and looked through the scope. He still couldn’t see anything, so he jumped down and ran to a small hill, about thirty meters away. Shannon came to him over the radio.
“Duncan, if they start getting chopped up, I might have to turn off your guns power and focus on regenerating their armor.”
“Fine,” he said as he cleared the hill’s crest. He dropped to prone, and looked through the scope.
“Ok. I can see into the colony now. Yeah, there are a few ‘wolves there. One really big one. And they do have one human over a fire. Another tied up on the ground near them.”
“Good,” said Matt. “We’re almost to the outside of the village. Once we’re in place, you shoot the big guy. That’ll be our signal to charge.”
“They must be freakin’ deaf,” said Vince, “not to have heard that rail gun.”
Duncan kept his sight squared on the large werewolf while watching, on his map, his three friends move slowly toward the buildings. He cycled through the scope modes and noticed that the large wolf disappeared while in infra-red mode. It stood out fine in visible light mode; his fur a ready contrast against the white of the village buildings. But he didn’t have an IR signature. Interesting, he thought; the other werewolves showed up fine on IR. A moment after his friends reached the outer perimeter of the village, he heard them say, in turn, “Ready.”
He changed the view back to visible light and focused back on the scope’s target reticle. The large werewolf had moved, so he re-centered it, dropped the sight onto the center of the beast’s torso. He fired.
The gun kicked again, and once he got the gun back under control and refocused the big bad wolf was gone. Vince, Clancey and Matt, running full speed, charged into the square. The crackle of their weapons came through the radio. He saw nothing more of any werewolves, then saw his friend
s reach the two captives. One of them pulled the first colonist out of the fire and cut his binds. Another was releasing the second.
“Clive, can you turn on my friend’s names?”
He could now see, through his scope, that it was Clancey freeing the first colonist, Vince the second, and that Matt was now opening up the chest in the center.
“No new loot,” said Matt, closing the chest. He moved toward what was left of the werewolf boss.
Duncan reloaded the gun, then began to stand.
“I don’t understand why we haven’t seen the ‘Mission Over’ message yet,” said Clancey.
Matt answered, “Must be …”
“SHIT!” shouted Shannon.
Running up the hill from the northwest, a werewolf was yards away from Duncan. Teeth bared, it leaped toward him. Duncan fell, backward, pulling the trigger as much out of reflex as conscious thought. The werewolf’s torso disintegrated as the slug tore through it. Unslowed, the tungsten spear left a vapor trail as it sped into the sky.
Shocked, Duncan sat and looked around, disoriented. He saw across the top of his view:
Mission Completed.
Chapter 5
“I’m so sorry, Duncan,” said Shannon. They’d returned from the mission and were hanging around Matt’s place. “I have no idea how I didn’t see him. His movement must have been masked by you.”
“Again, no problem,” Duncan laughed. Shannon had been pleading forgiveness since the mission wrapped. “That makes sense. I was between him and the shuttle. I also didn’t get any sound indications on my map. He must have wandered off in that direction when the shuttle lifted off after our first mission, and then my shooting brought him back.”
