On the far side of the Nietzscheans, the soldiers of Alpha Company surged from behind their cover, launching a counter attack 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, burning 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.
Down the slope, Kelly was extricating herself from a narrow crevasse, and gave Rika a short wave. <Seriously, next time I get the good cover.>
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 before long to find out. 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 scooped up off the streets.
The answer had come from one of the drill instructors during her all-to-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.
Her internal bio-systems had already dosed her with a cocktail of chemicals to keep her innards safe, and her nano was scrubbing her blood; but not walking around covered in radioactive dust was still the best way to live a long life.
Once Rika and Kelly satisfied themselves that they were clean, they each 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 AI were—but he still treated the mechs with respect. Maybe he was in a similar situation. Rika had a suspicion that most of the AI 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 awhile, 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.
<Ten minutes to charge,> Rika said to the team. <Damn, one of mine is on the fritz; it won’t take a charge. I’m seeing if it can be repaired.>
<Next time we take more drones,> Kelly groused.
<And a spare arm?> Rika asked with a laugh.
<They may have a spare at the battalion HQ,> Silva said. <Weapons too.>
<If it’s still there,> Kelly said. <I bet they just cut and run.>
<Or they met a nuke,> Rika said somberly. <Though the mech resupply pods are hardened; there may still be something for us to salvage.>
<Good call, Rika. Having Kelly fully operational would be a boon,> Silva replied.
<A boon?> Kelly replied. <What the hell is that? Sounds like a type of monkey.>
<Fuck, Kelly, do you like being dumb?> Rika swore. For some reason Kelly’s comment had pushed her over the edge and she didn’t know why. The ambush, the K1R, the nukes—it was more than she could even process. Rika considered holding back, but she was too tired, scared, and angry. <A boon is the fucking opposite of bane. Bane bad, boon good. And baboons aren’t even fucking monkeys, for fucksakes.>
<Kay, fine…I get it,> Kelly replied, her mental tone more meek than defensive.
The team fell silent after that, other than Rika announcing that her drones—except for the one that wouldn’t take a charge—were ready to go. She sent them up into the sky while Silva pulled hers down.
Rika regretted snapping at Kelly, but she didn’t know what to say to smooth things over. She was afraid that Kelly was fuming, ready to lash out the moment Rika tried to talk to her. She went around and around in her mind, preparing defenses should the argument occur; worried that Kelly would hate her now, and that she would lose one of the only two friends she had in the whole damn universe.
A part of her knew it was silly. Kelly would be fine—though she was capable of holding a grudge for a good while.
Eventually, the river came out of the hill country, widened, and slowed. Rika began to doze off as the languid current carried the three submerged women downstream. She knew it would be another hour until they reached the point where they would leave the water’s cover and begin the fifty-kilometer overland trek to the battalion HQ, so she set an alarm to wake her before they arrived.
Rika never fell fully asleep; her combat stims wouldn’t let her. But she managed to drift into a peaceful half-doze, which was rudely interrupted by the alarm in her mind that warned of their approach to Silva’s designated debarkation point.
<Have a nice nap?> Silva asked.
<Kinda,> Rika replied cautiously, worried Silva would be upset.
<I think Kelly’s still asleep,> Silva said with a chuckle. <I caught a few winks, too. Hard not to, with the river rocking us like babies.>
<Hah,> Kelly snorted. <I just got the image of little mech babies.>
Rika had to agree. Giving birth to mech babies was a recurring dream she had; one that would have woken her up in a cold sweat, if she could still sweat. At least she could still wake up when she wanted to—most of the time. She had heard that mech-meat, like that poor sap in the K1R, couldn’t even control their own sleep cycles.
<Looks clear out there,> Rika said, changing the subject.
<It does…too clear. You’d think there’d be Niets around here somewhere. They are trying to take the planet, last I heard,> Kelly added.
<Doesn’t matter,> Silva replied. <We can’t float around all day. Let’s go check out the HQ.>
The three women of team Hammerfall emerged from the river like a trio of mechanized dryads; water sloughing off them, their matte grey armor gleaming in Parson’s light before their active camo systems kicked in and they shimmered out of view—except for Rika’s thigh, and Kelly’s arm, which she cradled against her body to hide from view as much as possible.
<Too bad we don’t have the right kit to just remove that,> Silva commented, as the stood on the river’s shore and looked around at the landscape.
<I’ll manage,> Kelly replied. <My armor is torn up almost to the shoulder anyway, and that part doesn’t come off.>
Rika bounded up the low slope at the river’s edge to view the plains beyond. The drones overhead had already given her a picture of what lay before them, but she wanted to see it from her own vantage.
The river at the point of their exit was running almost due east, and they stood on the north shore. Stretching for hundreds of kilometers in every direction was a lush plain covered in tall grass, dotted with copses of trees. The beauty was marred by columns of smoke rising from several locations; one corresponding with where the battalion HQ should be.
<Doesn’t look promising,> Rika said.
<Still need to go,> Silva replied. <I haven’t been able to link up with the division command, or the fleet either. It’s like my comm signals are just going into the ether.>
They began to move across the prairie, travelling in the open and avoiding the trees, counting on their camo to shield them from prying e
yes. The tall grass rose over two meters in some places, and gave enough cover to hide Rika’s thigh and Kelly’s arm.
Overhead, the drones spotted a Nietzschean patrol to the south, and the women moved north to give it a wide berth. Other than that one sighting, it was as though Naera was devoid of all human life. Rika began to imagine that maybe it was. Maybe both the Nietzscheans and Genevians had left, and they could finally relax.
She allowed herself to indulge in this fantasy for several minutes. Until it was interrupted by a brilliant flash of light on the southern horizon, and the sight of a mushroom cloud rising into the afternoon sky.
<Seriously, this is getting ridiculou,> Kelly said with a shake of her head. <They might as well just nuke this rock from orbit and be done with the whole deal.>
<Don’t give them any ideas,> Silva responded.
<Hey, Kelly,> Rika said privately. Now was as good a time as any to apologize. <I’m sorry about how I snapped back there. It was….>
<It was nothing,> Kelly replied too quickly. <We’re all under a lot of pressure, got a lot of shit going on. For you more than me, since you actually liked some of the dickwads in our outfit.>
<Seriously, Kelly. I really am sorry. You and Silva are all I have. You’re my best friends—Hammerfall is my family. I don’t want to lose family.>
Ahead, Kelly turned her head and Rika imagined that the other woman was smiling.
<It’s OK, Rika, seriously. Families fight—it happens—but what we have is thicker than blood. We’ll always be team Hammerfall.>
Kelly’s mental tone was sincere, and Rika wished she could hug her. A strong need to have some, just a tiny bit, of human contact crashed into her like a towering wave.
Fuck it, she thought, picking up her pace to catch with Kelly. She reached out and touched her teammate on the right shoulder; a gentle stroke, barely perceptible through the layers of armor they wore, but contact.
Kelly shifted as they walked, moving closer to her, and Rika wrapped her arm around Kelly, her mechanical hand resting on the other woman’s shoulder. Rika was glad to just feel close to another human—even if it wasn’t her real hand that was making contact.