Crap! The Sean bot would be caught in the crossfire.
Powered by my suit’s repulsors, I launched myself from the wall towards the tall man, grasping for the judder knife at my belt.
At the same time Ana-Zhi started blasting at the guy at the front of the corridor, but her angle was all wrong.
The second I hit the ground, I rolled. With bolts flying over my head, I sprang up and plunged the judder knife right into the space between my enemy’s chest plate and shoulder armor. The knife bucked in my hand as the sonic blade cut through the crimson-colored ceramlar body armor.
The guy howled in pain and slapped at my hand, dropping his shaker in the process. But he was not down by any means. In fact, he retained enough presence of mind to launch a savage kick at my balls—which I barely dodged. Instead, the kick connected with my thigh and his augmented muscles were powerful enough to send me careening into the side bulkhead.
My vision darkened as my head slammed against the bulkhead and all the air was driven from my body. I willed myself not to pass out, but I was stunned—unable to move or even breathe.
Then I heard the blast of Ana-Zhi’s Kinesis and her shouting “Move! Move! Move!”
The next few seconds were a blur. As I charged down the corridor I glimpsed the tall man with the shaker slumped against one wall unmoving.
One down.
But before I knew it, another crimson-armored crew member popped out from a doorway and showered us with a volley of blaster fire.
Where the hell was the Sean bot?
The air became smoky and filled with sparks, and I could barely see Ana-Zhi in front of me. This was messed up. We had to get out of this crossfire.
As we turned a corner, I saw the Sean bot, toppled over and flailing, enmeshed in a web of sticky plexus strands. He was trying to free himself, but it was taking a while.
In the meantime one of the crew members abruptly swung out from around a corner, and brought up some sort of shoulder-mounted missile launcher.
The Sean bot, still half-covered with suppressor strands, managed to track the crew member’s movement and was able to get off two blasts at him, but not before the man got a shot off.
“Down!” the Sean bot yelled, and both Ana-Zhi and I jumped behind structural columns as a projectile the size of my hand shot down the hallway. I heard a muffled explosion down the hall in back of us, but there was no sensation of a serious impact. It was like our attacker had fired a dud.
But then a cacophony of low buzzing echoed throughout the corridor. I peeked around the column to see a half dozen tiny drone grenades flying back towards us. They seemed to be ignoring Ana-Zhi and me and all converged on the Sean bot, affixing themselves to his metal frame with a barrage of clangs.
Shit. They could be anything from frag poppers to sonic grenades. Or—
“Shiver-spikes!” the Sean bot yelled, as he tried to pluck the parasites off his body. There was genuine panic in his mechanized voice. I didn’t blame him. Shiver-spikes were smaller, more localized versions of EMP jigglers. And these were drone-based and intelligent.
Within seconds the hallway filled with a discordant series of loud whines as the spikes’ EMP circuits began to overload.
And, to make things worse, the crew member with the RB danced out of his hiding place and started blasting in our direction.
“Cover me!” I called to Ana-Zhi as I dove at the Sean bot. Even still tangled in strands, he had managed to remove all but one of the spikes, flinging them away down the corridor. The last spike had lodged itself on his back between his arms where he couldn’t reach it.
Without thinking, I leapt forward, snatched the device from the Sean bot’s back, and fell on to it, trying to contain it with my body. It was a stupid, dangerous thing to do, but I knew what kind of devastation an EMP shiver-spike would wreak on a bot.
Time seemed to stop as the air above me sizzled with bolts of energy, showering the hallway with sparks and fragments of half-vaporized wall plating.
Then the shiver-spike detonated beneath me, and I felt my body buckle as the shock wave hit. A sickly pain radiated out from my gut and then blackness closed in on me.
I awoke slowly, like I was being dragged from a cold pit. My body shivered and convulsed in pain and I couldn’t see anything. I coughed at the acrid air still stuck in my lungs and realized that I was in a different room and out of my suit.
“Jannigan, you’re okay.” It was Chiraine’s voice. “Just breathe.”
I tried to rise, but my head spun and I felt like I was going to vomit.
“Move aside,” Ana-Zhi’s voice said. “It’s safe to give him this now.” Then I felt the prick of an injector at my neck.
It felt like she had shot me up with boost juice. I jolted awake and my head cleared like a hurricane had blown through it.
“You’re fine, kid,” Ana-Zhi said, helping me sit. “Just a little bruising. Nothing broken. You’re lucky those spikes aren’t loaded with much of a charge.”
“They did, however, trash your exosuit pretty badly,” Chiraine said. “It was pretty scary cutting you out.”
“Uh, thanks.” I looked around. I was sitting on the edge of an exam table in some sort of med-bay. “Where’s the bot?”
“He was doing some clean-up, but that was a few hours ago.”
“What?”
“After you got that spike off him, he went kind of berserk,” Ana-Zhi said. “Ran off down the corridor shouting at us to take care of you. He came back twenty minutes later dragging a bunch of bodies. I’m happy to say that one of them was Yates. I am pretty pissed off that
