Platt hissed as his fingers separated from his hand in a flash of silver. He turned, groping for his carbine left-handed. Another flash and his helmet toppled down the shaft, his head still inside, neck spurting steaming red blood. A block of plastic bricks followed Platt’s dead body down the hole, a red light blinking in the darkness.
Matt fired a burst up the shaft and pulled his feet back, falling the last twenty feet before impacting hard on the concrete floor. He leapt. With a spin he just managed to pull himself behind a metal door before the room erupted.
Heat washed over him in a deafening, blinding white, crushing him between the wall and the door. His armor crackled, the HUD went dark. He held his breath for as long as he could, then gasped in air that seared his throat, scorched his lungs. Gagging, he stumbled to his knees and tore off his helmet. His hair shriveled in the fading heat, and he kept his eyes squeezed tight.
A moment passed, and a breeze tickled his skin as more air rushed back into the room. He gasped in a breath, cleaner now, and opened his eyes.
Flecks of blackened skin fell from his hands, the only part of his body exposed to the explosion. He flexed his fingers as the skin knitted over and through the damaged tissue — he’d have to cut it away later to let blemish-free skin grow. If there was a later.
Dust and smoke obscured his vision, but from his vantage point he could just make out the pile of demolished concrete that had once made up the shaft, and next to it the smoldering remains of one of Platt’s boots, a chunk of bone sticking out of the ruined meat. Matt stood and looked down at the bandoleer of drum magazines for the AA-12. The smoking leather had protected the munitions just enough. Had they detonated, he’d be a dead man.
He rounded the corner, weapon up, and left the room, his useless helmet lying next to Platt’s boot. “Hurya, do you copy?”
Static burst through his ear bud, intermingled with what might have been al-Azwar’s voice.
“I’m on your six. Platt’s dead.”
“—ay again, Rowley.” Karle’s deep voice reverberated through his ears. “Y— king up.”
“Karle, Platt’s dead, hostile unknown. We’re underground.” He rounded a corner and snarled at the uselessness of his IR; the floor and walls glowed a uniform red, an afterimage from the explosion, or perhaps from a subterranean heat source. “al-Azwar, I’m on your six, copy.”
The indecipherable noise that followed left him no idea whether or not they’d understood, or if Hurya had heard him at all.
Bullets pinged off of the bus-gate as Conor leapt through the holes left by the trio of AGM-176 Griffin missiles, the drone-capable, candy-ass little brothers of Hellfire missiles designed to limit collateral damage. His ears filled with the melodious sounds of rifle shots and screaming panic, and in his mind his katana sang of unending bloodshed as he drew it from its sheath.
He ignored the scattering civilians, and the whispers’ nagging encouragement to cut them down. They didn’t tell him anything he didn’t already know, and there were bigger, more challenging prizes to pursue.
Karle and Washington took position behind the gate and fired short, controlled bursts from their M4s, letting the IFF targeting system guide the electronically-controlled flechette rounds to their targets. They couldn’t shoot around corners, but in Conor’s opinion, 300-meter shots without bothering to aim just scoured all the joy out of combat.
Conor leapt, taut muscle launching him twenty feet in the air and straight at the bonk charging their position.
Smaller than Pointy, the nine-foot monstrosity wore full body armor, matte black carbon fiber over enormous metal plates, and wielded a battered stop sign like an axe. A mane of black hair flowed down her back from a topknot that gave her a vaguely Mongolian look, though she bore the extended brow and thick facial structure of bonks everywhere. Enormous claws extended from her left hand, the gleaming metal bolted to or through the bone and stretching half a meter from her fingertips.
Conor swung, two-handed, but without purchase he couldn’t put enough force into the blow to threaten such a creature. She didn’t take the feint. Faster than he believed possible, Scratchy sidestepped and swung. He twisted to take the blow on his hip as the stop sign swatted him from the air. He took the landing on his left hand, cartwheeled, and came up swinging.
The monofilament blade sparked against the sign inches from his head, skittering up the handle to bite into the reflective sheet metal. Scratchy twisted, tearing the blade from Conor’s hands, and swiped low with her claws.
Laughing, Conor stepped into the swipe, using her elbow for a foothold to spin-kick her in the face. The steel toe caught her in the temple, the shock of metal on thick bone reverberating up Conor’s left leg as the blow arrested his momentum. The reinforced steel in his boot crumpled with the impact, crushing his toes.
Scratchy dropped the sign and stumbled back, shaking her head like a dog.
Conor dove into a roll, grabbing the hilt of his blade on the way by. The metal shrieked as he wrenched the sword free. He spun, weapon up, and gave her a nod of respect.
“C’mon, lassie. You’ve got some fight in you.”
Scratchy swept up the sign and advanced, makeshift axe and claw whirring almost too fast for his augmented eyes to follow. Metal clanged against metal as he backpedaled, limping, sword flashing to deflect the blows before either crushed or sliced him to pieces.
His back hit the wall. Scratchy swung.
Hurya al-Azwar closed her eyes, but heard only the soft trickle of water in the distance, the echo washing it out to white noise in the sewer tunnels. She muttered a soft prayer of thanks that sanitation services had long-since failed in this part of the city, and only the ghosts of odors remained to haunt her senses. All said, the sewers smelled much better than the mall above.
Her COMMs produced nothing but occasional static, like her GPS and the IFF linked through the network of Dragonflies, though because of intervening metal or deliberate jamming she couldn’t say. Pointy — despite Conor’s childishness, a lack of known identity had ensured that the name stuck throughout operational planning — had vanished down the twisting corridors, and the heat from the walls kept her from tracking him with IR vision.
The tunnels had rocked a few minutes earlier, in what she’d hoped had been a deliberate explosion set by Platt or Rowley, and since then her world had condensed to long, dark corridors rendered bright by augmented eyes, dripping water, and the desiccated memories of ancient shit.
She waited. Rats squeaked in the distance, their feet scrabbling across the stone-and-mortar hallways, too far and too quiet for human ears to hear.
Something Pointy’s size couldn’t move through these corridors without making noise, and her augmented ears could pick up a pin dropping at ten meters. A scrape of boot on the floor, a shoulder brushing against the wall. If he moved, she’d hear it, and she’d have him.
A bead of sweat trickled down the back of her neck, tickling from her hairline until it hit the collar of her undershirt, the white cotton soaked under her armor in the oppressive heat. She tightened her grip on the carbine, textured handle proof against her sweaty palms, and took one careful step, rocking from the ball of her foot to her toes. Silent, she regulated her breathing to the barest motion, letting not even that betray her presence.
Her ears pricked at a soft scrape. She turned, rotating soundlessly on the balls of her feet, breath held. It came again, closer, from a hall on the left. She lifted the REC7 and crept two careful steps back. The FoF highlighed a potential target, blue for an unconfirmed type. Another step back, and–