‘Air force,’ I said to Mudge. Mudge looked at me quizzically. I nodded at Pagan. ‘He was air force, not army.’ I had no idea why it was suddenly important to me.
‘You want to talk about this now?’ Mudge asked.
I shook my head. ‘Let’s go.’
If we were lucky we could get out of here without another contact. We’re never lucky. Even so, this was taking the piss.
Tailgunner took a hit first. A lump of his armoured combat jacket superheated and blew off. He went down, his chest steaming. Cat hit the ground, hiding behind the stone lip of the roof she was on. Morag cried out as she took a hit to the back, knocking her to the ground again. There was a smoking hole in the back of her armour. It had stopped most of the beam but I could see blackened and blistered skin through it. Mudge and Pagan were a two- for-one. Red steam jetted out of Pagan’s leg, the beam almost severing it. The beam then went through Mudge’s shoulder. Mudge cried out and dropped Pagan as he stumbled forward, his shoulder steaming red. The laser took me in the right shoulder, almost severing my cybernetic arm.
Rapid and accurate laser fire. I got a sinking feeling. I managed to bring the shotgun up to my shoulder, though it felt like my arm was about to fall off. There’s nothing like smelling your own cooked flesh. More painkillers, more stims, more red warning icons.
‘Fall back, now!’ I barked.
Morag was helping Mudge get the badly bleeding Pagan up and over his unwounded shoulder.
‘I can’t see them.’ Cat from above.
I was looking down the barrel of the shotgun. Where had the fire come from?
A figure was moving fast and low in the main thoroughfare. I triggered a burst from the shotgun but the figure had gone, disappeared into one of the cave-like buildings next to the ruins of the mouth of the alley. Above me Cat leaped over the alleyway to check on Tailgunner. It had all been going so smoothly. Well, it hadn’t really.
Mudge had Pagan over his shoulder now and was moving as quickly as he could manage. Morag was staying level, covering them. I was backing down the alleyway looking for the figure, knowing who it was but not wanting to admit it to myself. Above us, Cat hefted Tailgunner onto her shoulder and started jogging across the rooftops, easily keeping pace with us. What a fucking mess. How did they get to us so quickly?
The sound of gauss fire from behind. A shout of surprise from Cat. The sound of a body being dropped onto a rooftop. Answering laser fire from Morag. I started to turn.
Someone grabbed my shotgun. I shouldn’t be this easy to sneak up on. Not when I’m operational. The weapon was twisted, then wrenched from my grip and thrown away.
‘Hello, Jakob.’ Josephine, the Grey Lady, still wouldn’t look me in the eye. She was standing in front of me. Small wiry build, nondescript to the point of drabness. She wore an inertial armour suit and had the laser carbine she’d just used on us slung across her back. I just stared at her as I went through the cliches of my blood running cold and my mainly mechanical heart skipping a beat.
‘Run!’ I screamed at the others.
I took a step back and went for the Mastodon and my laser pistol. She moved too fast. Steely fingers hit my right wrist hard enough to affect a nerve point through subcutaneous armour and my laser pistol flew out of my hand as I lost all feeling in my fingers. Then she locked up my right hand, elbowed me in the face and bent the Mastodon out of my grip and threw it away. She chopped my neck with both her hands and kneed me in the chest, knocking me back into a wall.
I clenched my fists and all eight of my knuckle blades slid out of their forearm sheaths.
‘How’d you know?’ I asked, trying to buy time.
She just shook her head as if she was sad that I’d even asked.
I punched at her with the blades. She batted one bladed fist aside. She wasn’t even where I’d aimed the other. I stabbed air.
Fighting other operators, you don’t attempt kicks above knee height. Your legs may have the strongest muscles on your body, but kicks are slow and anyone with decent reactions who knows what they are doing will avoid or counter them. Josephine kicked me in the head, which snapped to the left as I explosively spat blood out. I felt bone and armour crunch and I went down on one knee.
I swung blindly with the claws at where I thought she was. She seemed to roll over my arm. She was now so close it felt intimate as she hit me hard enough to hurt through the armour in the chest, stomach, kidneys and groin. She was moving so fast I could barely register where she was going to hit next.
I tried to hook the blades on my right arm, the cybernetic one, into her kidneys. She stepped back, took my right arm by the elbow and wrist, and used my own momentum to push it up. Then she hooked one of her legs behind mine and stepped forward. I felt myself starting to fall back. She leaped up, adding her weight to my momentum, lodging her leg horizontally across my throat, and rode me to the ground. As I hit the rock, her leg crushed my windpipe. I was now using my internal air supply. My claws, held in place by her seemingly unbreakable grip, were stabbed into the ground with enough force to shatter the carbon-fibre blades.
I stabbed at her with the blades on my left arm. She leaned back, and I missed. Josephine grabbed the arm. I screamed as she struck my elbow, shattering it. My left arm was now useless and limp. Black scalpel-like claws shot from the fingertips of her right hand and she dug them into the wound in my right shoulder. More screaming, mine again. I tried to punch her with the broken blades on my right fist until she’d severed enough connections to the cybernetic arm and it went limp as well.
She was sitting atop me, leg still crossed over my neck. The only real option I had left was to try and buck her off. She was too far forward to hook with my legs, and I knew that would be ineffective and only cause me pain. I knew when I was beat, or maybe I didn’t, but I was beat now. She’d walked all over me. I hadn’t even landed a blow. Being beaten by a better opponent is one thing, but I felt helpless. She still wouldn’t look at me directly.
‘I don’t suppose you’d kill me?’ I managed through blood, grit and broken teeth.
‘I’m sorry, Jakob.’ She sounded like she meant it.
I was peripherally aware of a firefight and managed to turn my head. Further down the alley I could see Cat, Morag and Mudge firing at opponents who were out of view, their lasers and assault rifles being answered by what sounded like gauss carbines. There was the occasional explosion of a grenade. I watched as Morag went down in a hail of fire. The spray of blood told me that her armour was compromised. She hit the ground but I could see she was still moving. I had to help.
When the Grey Lady had hit me in the shoulder with laser fire and then dug her claws in, she’d torn the combat jacket. There was just about enough room to bring my shoulder laser to bear.
I think when the laser slid out on its servos Josephine was surprised enough to almost have a facial expression. For a moment I had her in the laser’s cross hairs superimposed on my IVD. The red beam stabbed out. Superheated air exploded. She grabbed the laser and shifted it slightly as she moved her head to the side. It missed. Then she tore it off my shoulder.
‘That’s the closest anyone’s come for a while,’ she mused.
I could still hear the gunfight. I guessed my friends were too busy to kill me like we’d agreed. I had the presence of mind to trigger the kill switch on my internal memory. Virtual flames burned away electronic data, hopefully leaving them nothing for the inevitable system violation.
Josephine took me by the hair and pulled my head up. On the wall behind her I could see a peeling thinscreen poster of Mudge. It was a screenshot from when we’d taken over the media node on the Atlantis Spoke. He was grinning, had a spliff in his mouth and was holding his AK at port. Across the poster, written in red, was the word R ESIST. The Puppet Show had been disseminating the information we’d given them on the Cabal, the Black Squadrons and what had happened on Earth. I couldn’t help but smile. Mudge was the unacceptable face of the resistance. You had to laugh really, didn’t you?
I tried to move my head so I could see Morag but Josephine held me still. I felt her push the coma jack into one of my plugs. Felt the click as it slid home. The fight my security software put up was depressingly brief. Darkness.
15
