Out of the corner of her eye, as she struggled to right the drone in spite of the cascading damage alerts that filled her earpiece and flashed on her wrist controls, the agent saw Uri pull his cycle up short and turn to pursue her. Another shot struck the drone, this time from a different weapon. The report was lighter in tone than the first and the impact was less potent as well, though the damaged drone did not have much left to give. Aeomi bought herself a few seconds by rapidly firing several more shots at Uri, forcing the ganger to drive his cycle through one of the massive cargo doors that led into the starport itself.
The agent swiftly adjusted the limping drone’s course, and followed the cycle into the starport; the last thing she wanted was to be on foot out in the open. She thought of Trask and Lovat running after her without cover, and knew she had to find a way to occupy the shooters and pursue Uri. The enforcer turned agent cursed at herself for the reckless bravado of her pursuit, she was a bond recovery agent not some elite mercenary from Merchants Militant and had no business assaulting a hardened position. Well, you’re in it now, Aeomi, she laughed grimly at herself, might as well just grit your teeth and do the job.
“Unknown shooters in the starport, be advised,” snapped Aeomi as she piloted the drone through the cargo doors, “Raptor Two is down, continuing pursuit on foot.”
“Disengage, Aeomi! That’s an order!” boomed Trask in her earpiece, his breath labored, likely from the dash out of the city and towards the starport. “If he gets dug in with his gang we back off and get a raid team from the Spire.”
“I’m over-committed, Boss,” said Aeomi as she scanned the interior of the cargo hangar a few seconds before using her controls to slow the drone, only to find it not responding. “Oh, great.”
Aeomi looked up and saw Uri driving his solo-cycle up a wide flight of stairs, the man not caring how badly he was damaging the building or the cycle’s undercarriage. The agent took a deep breath and grasped the quick release on her rappel harness. An instant later she pulled it, and the drone roared over her head as she fell to the ground. She’d been going at speed, and though Aeomi had anticipated a tough landing, visualizing it and doing it were quite different.
The agent managed to land on her feet and tuck into a roll to slow her momentum, though after the first rotation she lost control and her careful roll became a painful tumble through the debris-laden cargo hangar. At last, she smacked into a stack of empty crates, knocking a few over as her body finally came to rest. Her cheek was cut from either broken glass or a sharp piece of concrete, and her head felt as if she’d taken a bump or two, but the combat armor had protected her from the worst of it.
The agent scrambled to her feet and looked up just as Raptor Two crashed into the cross beams that propped up the second floor. The already badly damaged drone fell in a smoking heap, smashing into the ground and breaking into several pieces. Before she had a moment to consider the drone’s fate, gunshots sounded from above, and as no bullets cut through the air to meet her she could only assume that they were shooting at Trask and Lovat.
“Contact high and right!” came Lovat’s voice, and though Aeomi was happy to hear him, she was furious that he’d pressed onwards to reach her. For a warden, the man was hopelessly romantic, and unless Trask ordered him to continue the pursuit, his sentiments were going to get him penalized by the after action review board. Not that her overly ambitious move with the drone had been any better, especially now that it lay shattered on the cargo hangar floor.
“I see them,” said Trask, and though he said more, Aeomi tuned him out immediately when she saw Uri, having now abandoned the solo-cycle at the top of the stairs, running up a catwalk to the third floor.
The agent sprinted after him, taking the stairs two at a time, pumping her legs as fast and hard as they would go to close the distance between them. She cleared the first set of stairs and almost considered taking the solo-cycle, though she could see once they reached the top why Uri had abandoned it. In his haste, the man hadn’t cut the turn sharp enough, and the entire front of the cycle had crunched itself into the base of a display kiosk.
Aeomi sprinted across the terminal as she cranked the output of her force pistol to maximum, vaulting a toppled over a brace of passenger chairs, and took a hasty shot at the base of the catwalk Uri had gone up.
The first hit shook the entire catwalk as it dislodged the base of it from the support screws set into the wall. Aeomi caught sight of Uri as the catwalk started to come down, and she turned and ran the opposite direction she’d been heading, now following the man above her. She fired several more times, each shot blasting apart the thin metal cables that held the catwalk in place. Their tensile strength was tremendous, but the sheer force of the energy discharge unraveled the tightly coiled wires so swiftly and profoundly that they appeared to simply burst apart.
Aeomi reloaded as she ran, then fired again, destroying the catwalk section by section, causing the large metal pieces to fall to the floor in waves behind her. Uri was only one segment ahead of her, and Aeomi raised her pistol. She squeezed the trigger and sent a tightly focused discharge plowing through the cable holding the segment in place.
Uri leaped from the falling segment and thanks to his anti-grav injection his muscles were boosted just enough to help him clear the gap. The ganger’s fingers strained as his grip tightened on the ragged metal, the broken pieces biting into his hands when his considerable weight pushed his palms against the edge.
Still determined to make good his escape, Uri flexed his shoulders and began to lift himself up, his biceps bulging from the effort.
“Just give it up already!” shouted Aeomi in frustration as she reloaded again, slotting her last charge pack into the nearly overheated weapon while she kept running towards him.
“Nobody owns me, debt collector!” growled Uri as he worked hard to pull himself up over the edge. “Live free or die.”
Aeomi was about to make a clever retort, to needle him about his unionist slogan despite him having abandoned his worker comrades at the first sign of trouble, but she never got the chance. As the agent toggled down the potency of her weapon’s output and raised the pistol to take the shot, something moved out of the corner of her eye. In a split second the agent realized it was a person, perhaps one of the shooters, and attempted to sweep her pistol around to defend herself. Before she could, the attacker bashed a homemade weapon into her shoulder.
It was a ganger, that much she could see from the man’s spiral tattoos in the brief moment in between seeing him and the impact of his wicked tool. The force of the blow would have been enough to spin her around and take her off her feet, but because of the incredibly sharp spike affixed to the two-handed bludgeon, it turned out much worse. The ganger’s stroke put Aeomi on her knees, though he pushed forward, using the spike to drag her across the floor a few feet so that he could drive her head into another display kiosk. The agent stopped moving and wasn’t aware of how painful it was when the ganger unceremoniously ripped the spike out of the hole he’d made in her armor and flesh.
Everything was dark, but at least Aeomi knew who she was, and that was a start. The feeling came back in waves as her body woke up around her sense of self. After wakefulness came the pain, and horrible as it was, the trauma of it jerked her out of the darkness. The agent’s eyes fluttered open, and the first thing she saw was the silhouette of a large armored figure, lines of glowing orange inlaid throughout the armor to make it appear like some kind of unearthly apparition. Her eyes sharpened slightly as the being came into focus, though when Trask spoke she barely heard it, as the pain of the gaping hole in her shoulder washed over her senses.