down.
Around him, the three others in the booth had just begun sucking in their breaths to scream. His gun was already in his cybernetic hand. He brought it to bear so fast that he could feel the air itself pulling against his artificial flesh.
The sniper’s accidental victim had yet to fall as Nickolai pushed himself upright with his free hand. Another blast from the sniper tore through the air, but his reaction time was much slower than Nickolai’s, the beam punching into the corner of the table where Nickolai’s head had been.
But, to Nickolai’s enhanced sight, the heat from the plasma gave a momentarily persistent trail pointing right back to the shooter. The 12mm in his hand spoke, spitting a meter-long tongue of flame that spoke in the voice of a wrathful God. The gunshot echoed thought the massive space, briefly silencing every other sound.
And as in the BMU’s training, when Nickolai fixed his new eyes on something, he hit it. There was a brief flare in the infrared as the sniper’s weapon vented plasma, then a shadowy human-shaped form fell from the ceiling.
“Shit!” Kugara yelled, throwing herself against his chest. At first he thought it was fear, the smell of it was rank in the bar.
But it wasn’t from Kugara.
She wasn’t cowering. She was bracing herself against him to give herself cover and steady her aim at the trio of men pushing toward him through the screaming crowd. Her left arm grabbed his side as she held her right out across his chest. In her right hand, braced against the inside of his left elbow, she held a dull gray handgun.
One of the three men pointed his weapon vaguely in their direction. She fired, and he heard a high-pitched buzz as a near-continuous razor-thin stream of silver erupted from the weapon. The smell of molten metal made his nose itch.
Kugara’s nasty little weapon was a hyper-velocity needlegun that fired flechettes at an obscene rate of ten or twenty thousand rounds a second, a speed that essentially vaporized the ammo into a tiny burst of superheated plasma on impact. The thing probably could only sustain fire for two seconds, but a two tenths of a second was enough to decapitate her target.
Around them, the patrons were surging out the exits of the bar in a panic. The two remaining hostiles were caught in the chaos, unable for the moment to close on them or level their weapons.
Nickolai scanned the scaffolding above them and didn’t see any sign of other snipers. The engraved 12mm icon Mr. Antonio had provided weighed heavy in his hand. He sucked in deep breaths of air scented with smoke, burned plastic, and human sweat.
He lowered his gun and fired at the hostile on the left. His head snapped back with the force of the 12mm slug and he fell into the mass of the exiting crowd. The deadly silver thread of Kugara’s weapon touched the side of the other’s face, melting it into a red mist.
“They’ll have exits covered, whoever they are,” Kugara whispered.
“Good,” he told her. “They’ll have their hands full, then.” He rolled to his feet on the bench seat next to the corpse of the sniper’s victim. He held out his left hand about a meter above the table. “Over the wall.”
Kugara nodded, pushing herself upright. She stepped up onto his offered hand, pulling herself up on top of the wall with her left hand. She stood on top and crouched, aiming the needlegun alternately left and right. “Clear,” she whispered, then dropped down on the other side.
Nickolai spared a glance at the barroom behind him, looking for any other hostiles. The place had cleared out, the last stragglers pushing out the normal exits, leaving the floor a wreck of overturned tables, splintered chairs, and at least three corpses.
He heard Kugara’s voice, “Shit!” Followed by the highfrequency whine of her needlegun. He whipped around and leaped up at the top of the wall, cursing his brief division of attention.
He landed on top of the wall, his tail whipping for balance. The sounds of boots on the ferrocrete floor directed his aim down the alley between the bar and the next establishment.
A half dozen men in helmets and body armor had come around from the back of the bar. While they had caught Kugara by surprise, she had likewise surprised them. Two bodies lay sprawled in the alley, helmets trailing wisps of steam. The four others were scrambling for cover around the corner of the buildings as they brought their weapons to bear on Kugara, who was exposed in the middle of the alley.
Prone, she let another burst rip from her gun, emptying quicksilver plasma into the faceplate of the man closest to her. Her latest victim shot wildly, burning a smoldering groove in the wall next to him as he collapsed backward.
Nickolai braced the wrist of his mechanical hand and started pumping the trigger. The first shot hit one in the chest, throwing an electric ripple across his light ballistic armor—the sign of a dying Emerson field cycling down through the visible spectrum. It would have been good against an energy weapon like these men were armed with—and in a fire-team like this, having that protection would prevent friendly fire incidents—but it was useless
