“Stop talking bull,” Lotti whispered. “I won’t allow it. If you jump out there, I’ll fight next to you all, you proper assholes! Haven’t you learned anything! I taught you how to win and survive, not how to get killed in stupid gestures!”
Nerd rejected her words. “Circumstances have changed. You see, Boss, turns out you’re a space princess now,” he looked at all the gangers in the eyes. “You know what that makes of your humble boys and girls?”
Smiles spread as the gangers slowly caught his meaning.
“It makes us your goddamn knights,” Nerd said.
By all accounts, the gangers were street prowlers, thieves and murderers, hustlers and general zeroes to the right of the dot of society’s equation. Hirsen watched Nerd’s words transform them, though. They found something that eluded Hirsen. A secret meaning that gave even people like them an air of nobility. Their backs straightened, their faces brightened, arms and rifles rose as a defiant roar spread among them.
Lotti, in the middle of it all, looked pale and defeated as the ganger’s battlecry drowned her pleas.
On the rooftops, snipers took aim and were repelled by a veritable storm of ganger’s fire. The gangers were motivated enough to try to board the Mississippi for Lotti had they needed to. Maybe they’d have succeeded.
Nerd and Lotti exchanged brief words that Hirsen couldn’t hear. Lotti shook her head. Nerd grinned, told her something else. He stepped away from his Boss and joined the roar. “Let’s do our thing! Lotti’s knights…Charge!”
HOVERCYCLES RUSHED at the blockade at full speed, Mohawks swaying in the wind, rifles spouting full-auto sprays that hit everywhere but their intended target.
The roaring charge of Lotti’s knights took the enforcers by surprise. From their perspective, it must’ve been like staring down a stampede, all guns and noise and battlecries, the gangers throwing everything they had in their mad dash.
Enforcers and security officers fell everywhere, wounded or dying, with drones bursting in flames above them and raining fire on their heads.
Nerd led the charge, first among many, dual-wielding a rifle and an automatic pistol, both hitting absolutely nothing, but making one hell of a flashy scene.
The knights almost made it. That was the worst of it. Enforcers crumbled, men and women threw themselves to the floor and covered their heads. Shock and awe was the name of it, and Lotti’s knights knew a thing or two about those. Their hovercycles reached halfway to the blockade, and at that distance, even their crappy aim got lucky eventually, and they carried plenty of cheap, plastic bullets.
Then the automated turrets started firing.
Nerd was the first to fall. His chest crumpled and burst when a bullet of a ridiculously high caliber hit him, spewing blood and bone at his brothers and sisters around him. He died with defiance in his face, having died so fast he probably didn’t realize it. His hovercycle clashed against another one and brought the ganger down with it.
The ganger charge broke as charges tend to do when confronted by accurate return fire. Automated turrets cared not a bit about shock and awe, and neither did drones. The miniature helicopters darted and danced among wounded gangers, shooting their tasers before the kids could defend themselves, leaving them easy prey for the enforcers’ counterattack.
And the enforcers, indeed, counterattacked. Short, accurate bursts of rifle fire from behind the cover of the armored patrols cut a bloody swath among the gangers, mixing dark red with neon purple, pink, and green.
The hovercycles did almost as much damage as the turrets when the gangers stumbled over the rides of their fallen comrades. Many lost balance, crashed, and once on the floor, the enforcers made short work of them, while leaving their spastic hovercycles to bring down other gangers.
Lotti stifled a roar as her knights died, one after the other. She tried to go to them, to die with them, killing as many enforcers as they could.
Hirsen caught her, pushed her rifle away, covered her mouth with his palm. She bit at him, kicked, spat, tried to claw his eyes out.
“Stop it,” Hirsen hissed. “If you die now, their deaths are for nothing.”
The ganger squirmed against his arm and shook herself free. Above their heads, the enforcers kept shooting, more carefully now that they had less targets.
“You knew this would happen,” Lotti whispered. If looks could kill, Hirsen’s face would’ve burned as if bathed in napalm and lighted. “You did this on purpose, didn’t you? To save your own ass. You told him. I heard you. You told him, motherfucker, and I’ll kill you for that. I—”
“Try to do it later, OK?” Hirsen whispered back. “I’m busy right now. And I still have to pilot the ship, remember?”
“You—”
“Move!” Hirsen said as he ushered her forward. The enforcers’ attention would never be as dispersed as it was now.
Together, ganger and agent bypassed the enemy lines and entered the tunnels.
Both of them knew the maintenance tunnels well. They knew the hiding spots, the blind corners, the basic layout that Alwinter’s entrails shared. And the tunnels were lightly defended, with none of the enforcers and few of AlSec wanting to miss on the action happening outside.
“It’s a party for them,” Lotti muttered. The gunshots traveled down the compact corridors no matter how far in they got. “My family is dying and those enforcers act like they’re playing a videogame. They must be keeping score.”
“Let them think whatever they want,” said Hirsen. “You want revenge? Survive. You can come back later, when you own the Edge, and feed them all to a firing squad.”
“Own the Edge?” Lotti’s eyes were red, but she wasn’t crying. Hirsen doubted she could—vat-grown eyes didn’t mesh well with natural tear ducts.
“Just a figure of speech. Keep moving.”
THE TINY RECEIVING room seemed empty, the airlock unguarded. Behind its sealed hatch, the prehensile tube extended all the way to Dione’s surface, where the enforcers’ unregistered corvette waited for Hirsen to claim.
The sweet relief of triumph spread across Hirsen’s brain, a rush of endorphins courtesy of his pituitary gland. For so long he had been trapped on Dione, in more than one sense of the word. All for the angry, murderous ganger next to him. Almost died, several times, most of those while the construct had been in control. His stomach tingled as he remembered the pain of the bullets.
Hirsen could understand, now, the suicidal tiredness that had taken Delagarza in the end. It wasn’t a physical sensation, but an almost spiritual one. They had been through so much, the two of them, and the constant paranoia of a long deployment had taken its toll on Hirsen’s mind.
He wanted nothing more than to take a hitch on one of those EIF destroyers. To get as far away from Dione as possible. Perhaps he’d take a vacation—the gods knew he’d earned one. Maybe on Parmenides Station. A month of gambling and whores could do wonders for one’s soul.
Powerful drugs, endorphins. An elephant could spear a man, end to end, and the man wouldn’t realize it until it was too late.
Newgen didn’t like that. The end of a mission, corporate studies proved, was more dangerous than any other part. Even in years-long deployments. Because, at the end, even agents got sloppy. Made mistakes. Got distracted.
So Newgen had added an automated cut-out to endorphins in all their agents’ custom-built pituitary glands.
Hirsen’s pleasure diminished, his satisfaction rushing out of him like a kid popping a balloon. He wanted to race after it, to bring back that happiness he was biologically altered to feel only in small dosages.
To no avail. His kidneys worked in overdrive to flush the hormonal remains, his heart pumped away purified blood across his body, like a cold shower to an excited brain.