Tantalum needles cracked off my armor, no single one of them able to penetrate, but the combined effect of hundreds of the things was enough to wear my protection down and kill me, given time. Thankfully, even though my plasma gun wouldn’t penetrate the mecha’s armor over anything vital, there was one target I was fairly confident about servicing.
I blasted the thing’s right-hand KE gun with a plasmoid, the ionized gas melting the infantry-defense weapon to slag. The Tahni pilot must have really liked that gun because he seemed to take its loss personally. His leg was the size of a tree trunk, and when it impacted the left shoulder of my suit, it threw me four meters, straight through the back wall of the building.
It didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would, if I could honestly say I had a coherent thought at all. Stars filled my vision, and even the HUD in my helmet couldn’t penetrate them to tell me where I was or what was happening, and everything felt numb. Drugs. I was drugged, the pain-killers were kicking in. That was why it didn’t hurt, though it damned well should have. I was propped on a knee, though I didn’t remember getting up, and someone was screaming into my ear. Several someones, and I couldn’t separate them into anything comprehensible.
“Alvarez!” It was Geiger, and she didn’t seem happy. “The Recon troops are pinned down! Two platoons of Shock-troopers came out of the bunker to intercept them. There’s no way they’re going to get those charges set!”
Well, shit. Should have known better than to count on straight-legs. When the hell had they ever accomplished anything except grabbing the glory? I somehow managed a reply to Geiger, though I can’t recall the specifics of it. It was something reassuring, I suppose, some promise that Delta would get the job done. That was what the Skipper would have said, or at least my drug-addled mind hoped it was.
“Vicky!” I said, the word half a command, half a prayer. “Status report!”
The mecha was coming. It took the thing two steps to come through the wall.
Her reply was staticky, slipping in and out, the laser line-of-sight comms interrupted by particulate debris.
“…taking casualties!” she said. “We have linked up with First and Fourth Platoon and we’re pushing them back…”
And then I was too busy to talk. The mecha swiveled on its jointed hips, trying to line up its remaining KE gun and I gave it a plasma blast because why the fuck not? I wasn’t saving the gun for a special occasion. It hit something on the mecha, though I couldn’t tell what. Probably nothing important, because it was still taking giant, swooping steps towards me, determined to stomp me into the ground if it couldn’t shoot me.
Where was I? The question bounced back and forth in my brain; the part numbed by the pain-killers laughing at the inanity of it. I was on Point Barber, in Deltaville, at the spaceport, getting my ass kicked by something three times my size and ten times my weight. The part that was still trying to accomplish this mission understood the importance of the question.
Where was the liquid nitrogen pump house? Where was I in relation to it? I was the only one left who could take it out. The Recon troops were pinned down, Geiger was pinned down, the rest of Delta was tangled up with the High Guard. If I had concentrated—if I’d been able to concentrate—I could have seen them on my sensor readout, somewhere behind me and off to my left. They were fighting for their lives and Vicky was leading them when I should have been, and I felt like I’d failed them, but there was still work to do, and I could feel sorry for myself later.
I turned and ran. Or rather, limped. Not from any injury to me, though there were plenty of those, but from damage to the suit. Just a bad motivator in my left hip joint, but the timing was worse than the problem.
The liquid nitrogen fill valve. It was there, only fifteen meters away. The transmission dishes loomed behind it like a boundary marker, making sure I wouldn’t miss it even in my drug-addled state. I knew the odds were against me reaching it before the mecha reached me, but I ran, just the same, because there was no other choice.
So close, so close I could touch the wire fence, and that damned thing reached down with an arm meant to dig fortifications and swatted me aside like a bug. Drugs or no, the pain was too much and I blacked out for the half a second it took me to plow into the dirt. My eyes opened just in time to watch that stupid-ass mecha, unable to stop with all the built-up momentum he’d used to catch me, barrel right through the coolant pumphouse.
I thought for one, pain-clouded second that I was back on Hachiman, with its white-out blizzards and its freezing fogs coating every metal surface with ice. But it was no snowstorm that sprayed ice across the legs of the mecha, it was a high-pressure stream of liquid nitrogen. And the armor on those legs began to crack and splinter away…
I had, perhaps, ten seconds until the combination of the pain and the armor’s attempts to fight it made my fight to stay conscious a losing battle. I don’t know how I aimed, because my vision swam with stars and double-images, but the thing was so close, how could I miss? I pointed my plasma gun at the joint of the mecha’s left leg and hip and touched the trigger.
Normally, it
