The other consideration was that the hallways leading to the main hangar from the inside were long and narrow. The prospect of dueling with a Jaylen, or God forbid, a mech, in close quarters, trapped on one end of a hallway, those red energy blades cutting everything to shreds, did not appeal to him at all.
So fly in he would, and have the entire floor of the main hangar to move about. The killing floor, he thought. His internal counter read 0:23. He took a deep breath, both hands gripping the end of the charge cable, then he took a running start and leapt off the edge of the cliff.
The heat rising up from the ravine hit him like he’d jumped into a fire. The cable fed out like it was supposed to and his body turned and he could see the mouth of the main hangar, a dark rectangle against the orange cliff face. The line fed down and started to tighten and Jolo clutched the cable, his hands slipping down to the metal coupling. When the line finally went taught and he started to swing towards the cliff he knew instantly that he was coming in lower than he thought. He tried to pull himself up a little but the weight of his body was pulling him down. He got a quick glimpse of the inside and spotted two Jaylen near the a shiny, black BG transport. They hadn’t noticed him.
Jolo crashed into the cliff face about five meters below the lip. The impact shook him and it took a moment to recover. His body bounced back off the wall and he started scurrying up the sticky black cable, his hands slipping a few centimeters each time he pulled himself up. The heat made it difficult to breathe, difficult to think. When he’d climbed up one handhold away from the edge he heard the girls coming, one high-pitched scream to alert the others and then a series of rapid, light footfalls. He reached a hand up to the lip of the hangar and a Jaylen came down with a boot on his fingers as another peered down over the edge at him.
He pulled his hand down, throbbing with pain and pushed back against the cliff with his feet and started running to the side. He wrapped his leg around the cable and reached for the Colt. A Jaylen popped her head over the edge again and suddenly there was a small dark hole in her forehead and she fell down into the ravine. The other Jaylen screamed and stepped back, and Jolo started to swing back and forth along the wall hoping to vault himself onto the deck of the hangar. He almost made it on the Jaylen’s left side and as he rose up he could see her reaching out with her knife trying to cut the cable and send him down into the ravine to meet her sister.
Jolo countered by kicking off the edge of the wall so the cable extended out further than the red blade, the synth’s blond hair flying around her head, caught in the wind and the updraft of heat. Jolo came up with the Colt again but the Jaylen was too quick and darted back out of range. But when he swung over to the right side he had enough lift to bring him up to the level of the hangar floor. He scrambled up on one side and the Jaylen was on him instantly.
He kicked at the girl, bought a split second of time and leveled the Colt at her. She went limp and fell, her arm dangling in the air off the edge of the hangar, the red blade, still lit, skittered across the floor. Three more descended on him, two from the hangar bays on the right and one coming down from the rear hatch of the black transport.
Suddenly Jolo had three red blades flashing, cutting, angling towards his neck. One he took down with the Colt, at the same moment kicking at another and reaching out for the third to prevent the blade from finding his throat. One Jaylen fell, but not before a blade cut into his thigh. He could feel the warm blood dripping down into his boot.
The one who cut him tried to come at him again but a bullet found her chest and she fell back, then another in the forehead. The third girl, who had brown hair and one arm, the one Merthon caught, started running back toward the other end of the hangar. She was the one who’d just come out of the transport. Jolo limped after her, a smear of red trailing behind his leg, his eyes darting back and forth. The girl leapt up on to a large container and was angling towards another, trying to get back to the black transport, when Jolo stopped and took aim. He caught her in mid-air between two Fed boxes. She hit the
