If only I could warn them, she thought. If only I could send some kind of message to the Council.
Everyone was alert and content at first, but after a few hours passed and there was still no Council response, they started to get restless.
“Come on, how long’s this gonna take,” she heard one complain.
“Shut up,” the man in charge of the party barked. “It’ll take however long it takes.”
“It’s starting to get late. Are we going to take shifts while some of the people rest? What about food?”
“I said shut up!”
But once the first day transitioned into night, then into the second day, even the boss guy was starting to moan about fatigue and hunger. Some people took watch for over eight hours at a time. Just sitting in one position, with their guns in their laps or on the ledges in front of them, eyes peeled for any kind of motion. She could see it was getting to them. They would shake their heads, trying to keep themselves awake. On the second day, Tera started to understand the Council’s tactic.
They’re deliberately delaying response, she thought, looking at the exhausted raiders around her. They knew the bandits would be prepared for them, so they wanted to wait them out until they were tired and hungry. Until their guard was down.
She was sure she was right. It was exactly something she could see the Council doing. It was cold and calculated, taking only the logical approach. They didn’t care if the raiders deleted her in the meantime.
It made sense.
Then, when so much time had passed that she started to doubt herself and the second night was beginning to fall, the raiders stirred.
“On the ridge!” one of the lookouts shouted.
Everyone went into action. The listless eyes and bored faces became intense with concentration. There was a commotion of plastic and metal as guns were moved, loaded, and aimed. Magazines were clicked into place and sights were raised. They all seemed to know where the lookout saw the incoming party and faced in that direction.
Then she spotted them. A dark line of bodyshells marched on the ruins in formation, their weapon attachments already deployed. The metal components caught the sun and glinted at her. Even she had to be impressed at the look of them.
Even if I had a whole army on my side, I wouldn’t want those Council soldiers after me, she thought.
A gunshot rang out in the air, splitting the tense silence that was gathering. It rang off the ruin walls and the nearby cliffsides before reverberating back to them.
Only a second of quiet followed the initial pop before the atmosphere was torn by a staccato of gunfire. Electrified bullets and tracer rounds zipped through the evening sky like a violent fireworks display.
From where she was tied up, Tera could see two bodyshells drop on the ridge as the E.M.P. rounds crashed through their armor. Once the Council soldiers fell to the dirt, the others turned to the source of the bullets and opened fire themselves. There was no panic in the mob of bodyshells like there would be if they were human. Instead, they stayed rooted to the spot, only strafing out of the way to avoid incoming rounds.
They must be built with combat enhancers, Tera thought. Security measures that kept them from panicking but allowed them to use the emotional surge of battle to drive them.
She ducked as a stray round ricocheted off one of the boulders near her. The last thing she wanted was a hole in her head courtesy of the people sent to rescue her.
An explosion shook the ground. Tera couldn’t discern if it was triggered by the raiders or the Council soldiers. Another one followed it.
They must have set traps, Tera realized.
The bodyshells started to circle the clearing in a wide, slow berth. They walked around the buildings where all the snipers were posted, keeping a persistent barrage of fire on their ambushers. Truck’s Raiders spun around to compensate with the movement, but they were at a disadvantage. There were too many things for the Council soldiers to hide behind as they made their advance.
Tera was watching one of the raider snipers try to trace the bodyshells with his rifle when a small shape was flung from below, landing beside the human. He noticed it and panicked. He threw down his weapon and tried to leap away from the object, but it was too late. The grenade exploded with a concussive shockwave and the shower of shrapnel tore the sniper to shreds. His mutilated body tumbled off the roof and down into the clearing.
Shouts echoed off the walls as Truck’s Raiders tried to figure out where the soldiers had gone. Somehow, in the thick debris of the ruins, they lost track of them. But the same was not true of the soldiers. Tera heard two more explosions ring out, the bodies of more snipers flying off the buildings or tumbling to the concrete in bloody heaps.
“They’re surrounding us!” Tera heard the boss man shout. She couldn’t see him, but it sounded like he was behind a rock down in the clearing, just ahead of her. “They’ve got us on all sides!”
Looking around, Tera could see it was true. The bodyshells from the city started to emerge from behind heaps of rubble and cracked walls to reveal the ring they had formed around the encampment. The gunshots from their wrist-and-shoulder-mounted weapons never let up. They never gave the raiders a moment to recuperate.
“Fall back!” she heard the guy in charge cry. “They’ve got the upper hand! Fall back, you bastards, if you wanna live!”
Panicked shrieks and pounding feet came from all around Tera. The humans and I.I.s that made up the group of Truck’s Raiders rushed past her line of sight. In the blur of everything, she
