“Thieving scum!” shouted Trask. He leveled his weapon at Martin as the ganger turned his weapon toward Trask.
Trask was dimly aware of more rounds passing into the crowd behind him, as the ganger made it perfectly clear he cared little for the collateral damage he caused.
The agent ignored the pain in his leg and side as a few rounds struck home, each failing to penetrate despite sending damaging shockwaves through Trask’s body. The agent squeezed the trigger of his force shotgun. Now that he was closer, the energy field discharge was still somewhat compact when it reached Martin.
The blast displaced the falling rain as it moved. When it hit Martin, the force of it sent the water beading on his poncho hurling in all directions. The ganger’s body was picked up off his feet by the discharge and hurled several meters away, landing in a tangle of limbs as he slid through the mud and debris of the street.
Trask already could tell that he’d broken several of the man’s ribs, and there was a risk that some irreparable internal organ damage had occurred. Normally he’d have stood his ground, not approached any further, and taken the man down with several lesser potent shots, to make it a show for the onlookers. That was before the quarry had produced the machine pistol, which was a significant step up from the 3D printed homemade guns the brothers had used to fight their way off Yin.
Lovat’s attention strayed from Uri for only the briefest of moments when Martin cut loose with the machine pistol, the sigh of Aeomi going down causing his heart to leap into his chest.
Fraternization between co-workers was frowned upon by Grotto corporation in general, though Trask was too much of a hardened veteran to care so long as the pair did their job.
Lovat couldn’t help crying out as he saw Aeomi’s body hit the ground, the rain and splatters of blood from the people around her making it impossible for him to tell if she’d been wounded or not. That was all the opportunity that Uri needed to roll onto his back and produce his own pistol.
The distinct sound of the heavy revolver’s hammer being pulled back snapped Lovat back into focus. The agent twisted his torso to the side and away from Uri, extending his force pistol at the prone ganger.
Uri’s revolver was a thud gun, high mass low-velocity rounds meant to maximize knock down power and mitigate penetration. They were designed for shipboard combat, used mostly by space pirates that couldn’t get their hands on high-end tech, and were tremendously effective at killing unarmored humans.
Thankfully, for Lovat, he was outfitted with the best body armor Grotto had available, outside of the armor used by the hereditary stormtroopers, and the thud round only knocked him onto his back instead of killing him. Lovat’s weapon discharged kicking up a gout of mud as it struck Uri in the leg, propelling the man’s prone body across the ground nearly a meter.
Trask racked the slide of his shotgun and turned it on Uri. Before he could fire, the ganger used his off hand to point and fire a phos-flare at the oncoming agent. Trask’s discharge went wide and put a huge dent in the metal of a shipping container building just above Uri’s position as the agent hurled himself to the ground. The deadly white phosphorous flare round streaked past Trask and bit into the wall of a building on the opposite side of the street. No sooner had it done so the flare’s fire slagged a portion of the building easily the size of a transit vehicle.
Trask was furious as he scrambled to his feet and pumped his weapon again. These men were bond skippers, former factory workers, and long haulers, and yet they were fighting like devils. Either someone at Recovery command failed to properly assign the threat level, or he and his team had the bad luck of engaging two men whose talents were blossoming only now that they were out in the larger world. He had encountered such a thing only once before, where a Grotto man who had once been a line cook in one of the great factory cafeterias had skipped his bond and ended up becoming a rather dangerous and disturbingly effective anti-corporate terrorist. Trask had been in his first year as an agent when that happened, and his mentor had died in the fight to bring Metis Anders to heel.
Trask caught a glimpse of Uri dosing himself with a hypo and clambering to his feet.
Trask had only risen to a crouch but managed to fire his force shotgun once more. Uri took the full force of it to the chest. The distance to target had caused the discharge to double in size and lose half its potency, but it was still sufficient to send the ganger over an intersection and into a far wall.
Trask stood and chambered another charge but was quickly forced into cover behind the rusted out ruin of a stripped vehicle as Uri started firing his pistol.
The ganger laid down suppressing fire with the thudder as he ran backward, exchanging fire with Lovat, who had managed to get to his feet and take up position beside a building on the opposite end of the street. Uri was somewhat exposed at the intersection, and the ganger appeared to realize this.
Lovat’s jaw dropped as he watched the big man sprint down the street, shoving his way through fleeing onlookers as if they were mere children. Uri was a walking slab of muscle, but even someone that tough could not withstand the kind of force blast that Trask had hit him with.
“How in the verse is that man standing?” rasped Lovat over the recovery channel, his breath ragged from the impact of the thudder, before firing several times into the alley. The agent’s force pistol had a better range than the shotgun, though Uri’s bracketing fire was making it too risky for Lovat to patiently line up a shot.
“Hit himself with a hypo,” growled Trask as he temporarily ignored Uri and keyed in commands for the raptor drone to scoop up Martin’s unconscious form. “With all that pirate tech he’s carrying it’s likely the gang he belongs to has access to other tricks of the trade.”
“Combat drugs?” asked Lovat as he attempted to line up a shot only to be forced back as a thud round tore out some of the cement where his face had just been.
“Anti-grav boosters most likely, gives your muscles a serious infusion that keeps them from atrophying,” answered Trask as he watched the raptor drone descend from the rainy, gray sky, prompting him to get back to his feet and heft his shotgun. “If used planetside it makes you one tough customer for about ten minutes, but the hangover will put you out for a week easy. I’m moving around, let’s flank this bastard.”
As the agents prepared to give chase, Raptor One streaked down and landed right over Martin Chiodo’s prone form. The drone resembled a bird, hence the name, in that it had fixed wings and an oblong body, though in place of a head it had a sensor array, and where its talons might have been there was a human-sized stasis cage.
When the drone landed it scooped up the ganger’s body with the cage, the metal articulating around him as though it was a net thanks to the multitudes of magnetized ball bearings serving as joints, then stiffening again once the body was secured. Compared to most other corporations the technological sophistication of Grotto Corporation was sub-standard, being much less complex even if it was considerably more rugged. Grotto placed a high value on its human capital and factored the labor of the bonded population into almost every aspect of its system. The exception, however, was Bond Recovery. Trask and teams like his were equipped similar to authority operatives in other corporations. The shock and awe of tech such as Raptor One and the forceguns were part of the show meant to keep the population in line.