The Hunter Killers fired at the Hydras indiscriminately, as did the energy turrets that topped Aradne’s walls, but the attacks seemed mostly perfunctory, because at best they only momentarily stunned their targets. One Hunter Killer swooped too low and was knocked out of the air by a Hydra; the craft created a fireball when it struck the ground. To Rhea, even that seemed for show, so that when news and videos finally leaked to the citizens of Aradne, the rulers could claim they had tried their utmost to save the slums. “We sacrificed some of our own units!” they would say.
Rhea shook her head.
Someone is going to pay for this.
She let go of the wall to unholster her pistol and fired a few times into the fray. As usual, she caused no damage. The Hydra she targeted didn’t even seem to notice the impacts at that range, and it didn’t even bother to look up at her, intent as it was on destroying one particularly sturdy set of cargo containers. According to the map, those containers belonged to the sheriff’s office.
She holstered the weapon and continued descending the wall. She occasionally passed other residents who were climbing up. Usually they were Robos, or otherwise had cybernetic enhancements of some kind to increase their strength. Some appeared steroid-enhanced.
“Why are you going down?” a man asked her as she passed near. He was one of the few not augmented by machines or drugs, driven mostly by fear, and the will to survive. His lean build certainly helped as well. He wore thin gloves to prevent his fingers from getting cut up by the metal. It seemed to be working, though several tears had developed in the fabric.
“I want to save more,” she answered. She considered throwing him into her pack and carrying him the rest of the way to the top, as there was no guarantee the man would make it, especially without enhancements of any kind. But she decided instead to continue descending.
More and more people were climbing the wall below. Another person fell to his death as she watched, and she looked away, wondering if she should aid the man above her after all. But when she looked up, she saw that rescue flyers had begun to arrive from Aradne; they helped some of the climbers higher up, loading them aboard, including the man she had passed. There were so few of them it seemed a token effort to Rhea—a mere public relations show meant to soothe the coming citizen outrage.
She continued descending, unsure of what she was going to do. Perhaps she’d try to help some of the climbers below, by choosing two more of them to take with her.
The wall traffic increased the closer she came to the bottom, so that by the time she was ten meters from the ground, she had to pick her way through a literal mass of climbing people. Her handholds were all taken, so she was forced to improvise a new path, feeling out new recesses and crevices between the climbers with the tips of her feet.
She kept an eye out for someone to help. She wanted to find a climber who didn’t have gloves, and thus whose hands would get cut up along the way, making it difficult for them to maintain a grip when their fingers became covered in blood. While some wore gloves, or had wrapped ripped cloths around their hands, there were actually quite a few people who didn’t have any hand protection at all, so now it was simply a matter of choosing someone.
But before she could do that, a group of Hydras suddenly surged forward. Their roars drew Rhea’s gaze, and she watched them rake the walls with their mouths and talons, ripping away people in clumps. Those men and women who were crowded around the base of the wall scattered away in all directions, screaming as they scrambled over the broken lean-tos and bodies.
Apparently, now that the majority of the buildings in Rust Town had been crushed, along with much of the population, the bioweapons had turned to the next most obvious targets: the people who had fled to Aradne’s walls.
Whatever instinctual programming or inherited memory prevented the Hydras from climbing the city’s walls certainly didn’t stop them from stomping the people cowering at its base, nor from swiping climbers from its surface. A single Hydra could cause whole clusters of men and women to fall away with one swat of a taloned paw.
As the rampage continued, Rhea was forced to let go, lest she be torn from the wall as well—with no guarantee her body would arrive in one piece.
She fell the remaining meters to the surface below and hit hard, landing on the rooftop of a partially collapsed lean-to. When she impacted, the lean-to completely caved under her.
She pushed herself up from the rubble and performed a quick damage check. All systems were still fully operational, including every servo, however she had taken some bad dents in her left arm that limited mobility. She could work around it.
She spared a moment to take in her surroundings. She was surrounded by the wreckage of lean-tos, which hid her from the view of the Hydras rampaging nearby—just as long as she remained crouched. The base of Aradne’s wall was directly behind her. She saw others cowering behind the ruins nearby. Men and women of all ages. Some, including the children, had recently been climbing, judging from the strips of cloth wrapped around their hands. None of them dared move, not while the bioweapons scavenged the debris nearby, looking for them.
Rhea ducked as a Hydra’s long, taloned paw swiped past overhead, scraping off a man who had tried climbing again.
She wasn’t going to be climbing that
