Kelly said with a wicked grin visible over the Link, <we thought of that, too.>
<Rika, fire on targets of opportunity,> Silva announced, and picked off one of the scouts that was slowly moving to a new position on the hillside.
Rika sent several rounds toward the enemy, killing two before she ran out of clear targets. She was considering moving to a new position, when Gunnery Sergeant Myer’s voice broke into their minds.
<Where the fuck are you bitches? We’re getting torn up, here!>
<We’re coming, sir,> Silva replied. <Just have a ‘toon of bad guys on our tail that we didn’t think you wanted joining in.>
<Fine, get rid of them ASAP. I expect to see your skinny asses here in five minutes. Or else.>
Rika knew what the ‘or else’ meant. Even from this range, it was no problem for the gunnery sergeant to trigger Discipline, something that could get them killed if they were in combat. The gunny also wasn’t afraid to use the chip’s max setting—something that hurt worse than getting shot. Rika could safely make this comparison; she had experienced both.
<Kelly, you’re on bait duty. Run up the hill behind us and see if any of them get excited enough to follow you,> Silva ordered.
<Fiiine,> Kelly replied. <But next time, Rika gets to hide behind the small rock when the nuke goes off.>
She stayed low, moving up the slope from cover to cover. Rika appreciated her caution. There was a difference between playing bait and getting your ass shot off.
Just as they’d hoped, a few of the enemy scouts picked up the movement and leaned out of cover to fire. Five shots lanced out from Rika’s and Silva’s GNR-41Bs, and there were five fewer enemies.
<What do you estimate?> Rika asked. <Ten total?>
<Could be more, from the blasts in the ravine,> Silva replied. <We haven’t seen any movement in there since this started.>
<A third of their platoon dead in five minutes seems suitably demoralizing,> Kelly said. <I think we can move on—we have the drones watching.>
<Cover me,> Silva said to Rika as she moved up the hillside.
Rika nodded and moved to a new position before sliding her GNR-41B’s barrel over a rock and firing a trio of depleted uranium rounds at locations where her drones had spotted movement. By the time the rods slammed into the rocks on the far side of the valley, Silva was halfway up the slope. A few seconds later and the corporal was over the ridge with Kelly.
<OK,> Rika replied, and slipped out from her cover, carefully moving up the slope as Silva fired a quartet of rounds from above her. She was almost over the ridge when a SNAP sounded nearby, and she felt a searing pain in her right leg.
She looked down and saw a chunk of her left thigh missing. Great, I just have to get hit in the tiny part of my leg that’s not steel. She dropped down and clawed her way over the hilltop before rolling onto her back, wishing she could do something like wince or grind her teeth, as biofoam spilled out of her armor and sealed the wound.
Silva rushed to her side and grabbed a field kit from her pack.
<This is going to hurt a bit,> the corporal said.
<Just do it already,> Rika hissed in response.
Silva pulled a support rod from the field kit and pushed it into the biofoam. Once it picked up its location and read her biostats, the support rod expanded in her wound with explosive force. One end anchored into an internal mount at the top of her artificial knee joint, and the other sank into her hip.
Rika clenched and unclenched her left hand while Kelly grabbed the barrel of her GNR-41B to keep it from flailing and hitting Silva.
<Faaaaaaawk! I thought this thing was supposed to dampen the nerves before it did that!> Rika swore.
<From what I can see on your readout, it did,> Silva replied. <I had to do this once before on my arm. Your hip is going to be stiff, and move weird. The rod has a ball-joint in it, so you can still bend your leg, but I bet your range of motion is going to be limited.>
Rika nodded as the biofoam hardened around her leg. Once it set, she struggled to rise. Standing didn’t hurt as much as she thought it would, but she wasn’t anticipating the two-kilometer hike to where their company was duking it out with the Nietzscheans.
Not to mention going head-to-head with another couple hundred of those bastards.
<Today, soldier,> Silva barked. <Gunny’s not going to wait forever.>
The thought got Rika moving, and she followed Silva and Kelly down the slope as quickly as she could.
Above, her drones kept an eye on the other side of the hill, where the scouts had not yet moved beyond the minefield. Rika was glad to see that they wouldn’t be hit from two sides. Then she tapped into Silva’s drones, which had ranged to the edge of the company’s beleaguered position.
Upon spying Alpha Company’s location, Rika wished that she could let out a frustrated sigh, or scream, or something…. The squishies were supposed to be the professionals. She and the other members of team Hammerfall had only been out of indoctrination for less than a year, and they got into way fewer binds than the regular soldiers in the Genevian military.
<Wow, look at those tools,> Kelly commented, apparently on the same train of thought.
<I guess it takes a criminal to know how to fight dirty,> Rika said with a rueful chuckle.
Alpha Company was pinned down at the end of a narrow valley with high, steep slopes. How they’d gotten themselves in that spot, Rika didn’t even want to know. They bore heavy casualties, but over a hundred soldiers were still able to pull a trigger.
<Gunny wants us to circle behind the enemy so we can catch ‘em in a crossfire,> Silva said.
<What, he didn’t go all-comms again to call us bitches? I’m crushed,> Kelly replied.
Rika chuckled. <You’re just going to have to manage without the gunny’s abuse.>
Fireteam Hammerfall slipped around behind the Nietzschean troops, who were taking their time wearing down the Genevians. Rika didn’t blame them. Nothing worse than a cornered enemy. Best to keep one’s distance in a situation like this.
Rika settled in behind a wide granite slab a half-kilometer behind the Nietzscheans, and twisted her wounded leg under her so that her functional camo could keep her concealed. Silva was positioned up a hill to her right, and Kelly, whose AR97 lacked the ability to fire accurately over a half-klick, was a few hundred meters closer to the enemy, below their position.
Rika watched the countdown Silva had placed on her HUD, ready to bring fire down on the enemy.
It reached zero, and she waited as Kelly lobbed in a couple of parties that Silva had passed out; when the enemy began the traditional dance, Rika fired five of her uranium rods—noting that she only had ten left—before switching to the electron beam and burning a hole through three enemy soldiers who had lined up nicely for her.
Silva followed a similar strike pattern, and while the two snipers moved to new positions, Kelly fired at close-range targets with her AR97 before ducking back behind cover and lobbing another party into the mix.
<That should give them something to think about,> Kelly laughed over the Link, while Rika watched the enemy rush to find cover that would protect them from the new threat.
On the far side of the Nietzscheans, the soldiers of Alpha Company surged from behind their cover, launching a counterattack on the enemy, taking advantage of their temporary disarray. After less than a minute in the crossfire, the Nietzscheans broke and ran, the Genevians and the three members of team Hammerfall picking off another dozen as they fled.
<Well, that seemed too easy,> Kelly said. <I mean…they’re just squishies, but usually they put up more of a fight before they cut and run.>
Then one of Rika’s drones caught a flash of motion high in the sky, and she screamed at Kelly, <Run!>
CHANGE OF FATE
STELLAR DATE: 12.01.8941 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Western plains of Naera
REGION: Parson System, Genevian Federation
The nuke detonated directly over Alpha Company, b
urning the squishies to ash in seconds. Rika crouched behind her cover, praying that Kelly, who was much closer to the explosion, had weathered this second attack.
Seconds ticked by as she waited for team Hammerfall’s combat net to come back to life. When it did, Kelly’s mental voice was a welcome sound.
<What’s with the nukes?> Kelly called out. <The way the Niets fight, there won’t be anything left to fight over.>
Rika peered out from behind her cover, once again thanking the strange blue-green granite on Naera for being so damn hard. The Geiger counter on her HUD was spiking, and she knew that if they didn’t wash the radioactive dust off their armor soon, it was going to irradiate their entire bodies.
Rika looked past Kelly, down to the narrow end of the valley where Alpha Company had been rushing out after the Nietzscheans. Charred corpses were all that she could see. No one would have survived a blast at that range.
<We gotta move,> Silva ordered. <Those Niets will wonder if they cooked us, too, and they’ll be back here to find out before long. I prefer not to get crispy, so hop to it!>
<You have such a way with words,> Rika commented.
<That I do, private. Kelly, anything else melted off this time?>
<Funny, Silva,> Kelly said as she trotted up the slope to where Silva waited. <I thought I might have to tear my right boob off to get out of that little crack in the ground, but it looks like I’m all here.>
<Good,> Silva nodded as Rika approached. <You look all in one piece too, Rika. What’s your ammo situation look like?>
<Ten sabot rounds for the GNR, plus two full magazines of projectiles. My antimatter bottle is down to sixty percent, and I’ve only got ten more mags for my AR97.>
<I’m down to four mags for my AR,> Kelly added. <But my weapons mount has two dozen sabots and four mags of projectiles for the GNR.>
<I’m close to Rika’s counts,> Silva said. <Kelly lay out your extras, and we’ll give you a mag each for the AR.>
The women quickly swapped their ammunition around, and Silva handed out a pair of parties, just in case things got dicey.
<Looks like they’re getting curious,> Rika said as her drones updated her feed to show a platoon of fully-armored Nietzscheans moving in from the west.
Rika eyed the Nietzschean weapons lying near the corpses of their kills and wished they could grab some. There just wasn’t time to disable the safety locks—and if they didn’t, the weapons could detonate when the women picked them up.
<OK, let’s move out. We’ll head east toward the battalion HQ. I’ll try to make a hookup to their net when we get out from under this radioactive cloud,> Silva announced, and took off at an easy lope.
Rika followed, wincing as the support rod in her leg pulled at her shredded flesh and made her gait ungainly. For the first time, she wished that the Genevian military had taken just a bit more of her body.
She remembered wondering, after she came out of the assembly facility, why so much of her remained organic. Some models of mechs were little more than brains in jars; nothing more than cheap AI replacements that the government had scooped up off the streets.
The answer had come from one of the drill instructors during her all-too-short time in boot. He explained that human twitch reflexes were honed over decades of use. Whole sections of the brain were dedicated to pulling on the right muscles to get the right movement. Replacing knees and elbows to strengthen those joints was relatively simple, but hips were a lot trickier. It was easier to re-enforce the bones and replace the hip socket with a mechanical joint than to take out all the muscles and nerves.
Plus, it was cheaper and faster.
Rika pushed the memories from her mind, pushed everything from her mind, as she followed Silva and Kelly over the hills and valleys. After fifteen minutes of running—which put over twenty kilometers between them and the site of the tacnuke’s explosion…and the remains of Alpha Company—they came down a steep slope into a ravine with a fast-flowing river at its bottom.
Silva called a halt, and Rika leaned on a rock, taking the pressure off her right leg.
<We’ve probably left a trail a moron could follow,> Silva said. <I’m going to scale the far slope and then continue east another klick. Terrain is rockier there, so I can double back and hide my tracks.>
<Downstream or upstream?> Rika asked.
<Downstream,> Silva replied. <I’ll meet up with you two klicks to the south.>
Rika and Kelly nodded before glancing at one another—something that was pointless with their featureless helmets, but they still seemed to do it anyway. Rika knew what Kelly was thinking. They had five hundred kilometers to cross before they got to the battalion HQ, and Silva hadn’t said whether or not she had managed to raise them on the comms.
It wasn’t a good sign.
Silva placed rubber plugs in the barrels of her weapons before wading the river. The weapons could still dry themselves out and fire when wet, but the women had all picked up the rubber plugs awhile back, after they realized—in the middle of a firefight—that it took almost a minute for the weapons to become combat ready after being completely submerged.
Kelly and Rika followed suit, but stayed in the river while Silva climbed the far shore and the ravine’s steep eastern slope. The pair took a moment to splash water over their helmets and scrub their armor as best they could with moss and brush from the banks. After a minute of cleaning, Rika’s rad-counter began to tone down, and she felt a lot better knowing that her insides wouldn’t liquefy anytime soon.
Once she and Kelly satisfied themselves that they were clean, they both pulled a small pouch from their packs. Within each pouch were four bags. Rika and Kelly pushed a button on each bag, which filled with air before their shells solidified. They attached the bags to their arms and legs, and then the bags pumped out all the air, creating near-perfect vacuums. It wasn’t enough to lift their 215kg bodies by any means, but it would allow them to float down the river without dragging on the bottom. The pumps would adjust their buoyancy to ensure they remained below the water’s surface and out of sight.
<It’s kinda relaxing,> Kelly commented as they floated downstream.
<Don’t fall asleep, there are some big rocks down here,> Rika replied.
Kelly managed to make a snorting sound over the link. <Eh? What? Sorry, I dozed off there.>
<Funny.>
Rika wondered how Kelly could joke at a time like this. Just over ten minutes ago, they had watched their entire company get killed by a tacnuke. Sure, most of them were assholes—especially Gunny—but some had treated the mechs with respect. There was a particular staff sergeant named Tony who had always been more than cordial to Rika.
Now Tony was a charred husk left on the battlefield.
Kelly had never made a connection to anyone in the company. She rarely spoke to anyone other than Rika and Silva. It was probably a good thing, since her mouth tended to get her in a lot of trouble when she opened it—metaphorically speaking, of course.
Rika would also miss Lance, the company AI. He wasn’t terribly bright, and probably not actually sentient—though the military claimed all their AIs were—but he still treated the mechs with respect. Maybe he was in a similar situation. Rika had a suspicion that most of the AIs in the military were not there of their own free will. It made no sense otherwise; why would an AI—a being of pure logic and reason, with an eternity ahead of them—join a war?
A splash sounded nearby, and Silva’s voice came to them. <Hold up a sec, let me wash off and get buoyant.>
<Any sign of them?> Rika asked as she gripped a large rock with her tri-clawed feet.
<Who, the Nietzscheans, or a signal from battalion HQ?> Silva asked wearily.
<Both, I guess,> Rika replied.
<Nothing from the battalion. Atmospherics are a mess—that wasn’t the only nuke that went off around here. I can’t get a signal anywhere,> Silva said. <The Niets, on the other hand, are after us like hounds sniffing out a bone. This river bends southeast after a while, though. It’ll take us close to where the battalion had their HQ. We’ll see if we can find them, but if not, we’ll carry on downstream to Denmar.>
<Denmar…> Kelly murmured. <Think it’s still standing? It’s a pretty big city…. I wonder if there are any good med-techs there.>
<Stop that line of thought,> Silva ordered. <Gunny doesn’t need to be around for your Discipline to trigger. It’s in there till the military docs take it out. You know what happens to mechs that try to mess with it.>
<I just want to—>
Kelly’s voice snapped off, and Rika’s augmented hearing could hear frantic splashes nearby.
<Told you,> Silva said a minute later when Kelly’s flailing had ceased. <Now lock that thinking down. If the Niets had been nearby, we’d all be dead.>
Rika appreciated Silva’s sentiment, even though they knew no Niets were within a klick, thanks to the feeds from their few remaining drones. Rika knew those eyes in the sky wouldn’t last much longer; most had burned up when the final tacnuke went off. The five still up there only had another few hours before their batteries would run dry.
Silva must have been on the same train of thought. <Rika, Kelly, pull your drones down and charge them up. When they’re back up, I’ll pull mine down.>
<My charging sockets are knackered,> Kelly said, her mental tone wavering in the aftershock of the compliance chip’s Discipline. <Rika, I’ll slave mine to you so you can pull ‘em.>
<You got it,> Rika replied as control of Kelly’s two drones passed to her.
She pulled down the miniscule robots, waiting for them to come into their final approach before stretching her left arm out of the water and registering their insertion into her charging sockets.