Out on the first-floor landing things were no better. Pagan was gone, I didn’t know where, and he’d taken Morag with him. I didn’t have time to think about that as the house shook from an explosion beneath us. I assumed it was the front door being blown in. I could hear the splashes of Fortunate Sons wading through water. I looked over the banisters and fired both my pistols down into the waterlogged ground floor, my independently targeted shoulder laser quickly joining in. The smartgun links showed me where bullet and beam were going to hit the body-armoured soldiers. The murky steam of the Humber mixed with the red steam of blood where my lasers penetrated through armour and flesh and into the water below, superheating it.
I was peripherally aware of Jess laying fire down the stairs as well. To their credit the Fortunate Sons didn’t panic, despite leaving some of their mates face down in the murky water. Instead they knelt or took cover. Parts of the walls and stairs around me exploded as I was forced back by accurate, presumably smartlink-guided, fire.
I moved away from the edge of the landing. Holes were appearing in the floor from the gunfire below me. I reloaded the Mastodon and fired back through the floor, moving back towards the top of the stairs. The carpet began to smoulder from the heat of my lasers. The Mastodon was empty again. I ducked down, emptying the spent cartridges and reloading from a speed loader, and then I holstered both my pistols. From outside I could hear the mixed gunfire of the Avenues’ dwellers become more intense. They had managed to mount a counter-attack.
Jess changed the clip in her Kalashnikov and fired down through the floor. I took advantage of this and sprinted towards the top of the stairs and threw myself down the stairwell. My shoulder laser targeted and fired independently as I extended the four knuckle-claws from each arm.
I hit the lead Fortunate Son, and the pair of us went sliding into the dirty brown waters of the Humber on the partially submerged ground floor. I repeatedly ran him through with the nine-inch long ceramic blades before he could grapple me. I barely registered his blood changing the colour of the water.
The next Fortunate Son was moving rapidly, trying to get a clear shot to help his mate. I burst out of the water, sweeping my left-hand blades up with sufficient power to destroy the Vickers ACR he was trying to bring to bear on me. The blades penetrated his armour and slid into his stomach and I forced them up into his chest cavity, lifting him off his feet.
The next soldier’s fear overcame concern for his dead squad mate and the first of the 9-millimetre long rounds caught me in the side, knocking me back. One penetrated the armour of my coat and was only just stopped by my dermal plating. I spun away from him into one of the ground-floor rooms, moving as quickly as I could in the foot and a half of murky water.
I swung my claws through the door frame of the room, sending plaster and rotting wood flying as the ends of my claws caught the Fortunate Son hiding behind it in the face. It was a superficial wound but enough to cover her face with blood, hurting and shocking her. I continued swinging, catching another one, hiding on the opposite side of the door opening, in the shoulder. He screamed and dropped his Vickers, but tried to draw his sidearm. I repeatedly punched him in his unarmoured face with the claws on my free right hand.
My shoulder-laser stabbed out twice, the split-screen targeting system showing me a third Fortunate Son on the other side of the high-ceilinged room. The walls all around me were being chewed away by automatic weapons fire, more and more rounds were finding me. I staggered back, bleeding into the water as a couple penetrated my dermal plating.
The Fortunate Son I’d blinded with her own blood staggered to her feet, her back to me. I stepped behind her, using her as cover, as her squad mates fired into her. As she fell back into me I grabbed 30-millimetre grenades from her webbing. The grenades could either be fired from the underslung grenade launcher on the Vickers or activated manually. Holding her now dead body up with one hand I armed the grenades. I threw one behind me against the external wall, the rest through the door and the holes in the wall towards the front of the house. I could hear swearing, commands and panic as the Fortunate Sons tried to get away from the grenades.
‘Jess, get out now!’ I shouted, but there was no reply.
Someone tried to jump in through the window, silhouetted by the flickering red light behind him. There was a momentary ruby-red connection between him and my shoulder laser and he fell into the water. I hunkered down next to the wall and pulled the two nearby dead Fortunate Sons over me as the first of the grenades I’d thrown went off. It blew a hole through the wall from this house to the next. The explosion soaked me and covered me in debris. The compression wave created a small tidal wave that rammed me against the interior wall, which bulged from the force but didn’t quite give way.
Fragmentation from the grenades tore into the corpses I was using for cover, some of it embedding in my armoured coat.
I pushed the two corpses off me and ran towards the newly made hole between this building and the next as gunfire rained all around me, blowing holes through the walls and making contrails in the water. Another bullet caught me square in the shoulder but I continued to stagger through the water as quickly as I could manage. I dived through the hole as the other grenades began going off behind me in quick succession.
I waded as rapidly as I could away from the explosions. I went through the room I found myself in as I heard the structure of Pagan’s house begin to creak. The grenades as well as the rest of the considerable damage done to the old house were beginning to take effect on the building, and with the roof garden it was top heavy.
I made my way towards the window and glanced out. It seemed like the entire Avenues were on fire. The patrol craft was just about level with me but receiving fire from multiple positions as people from the Avenues fought back hard. As I watched, a Fortunate Son standing waist deep in the water was snatched under. Moments later a huge steel-toothed reptilian maw erupted out of the water and tore a chunk out of the side of the patrol craft and a Fortunate Son standing on the deck.
In front of the house I’d just left I could see the Walker still firing its rotating-barrelled, rapid-fire railgun, raking it up and down the terraces. It had long, thin, powerful legs that made the armoured barrel-like torso, containing the jacked-in operator, look like it was perched on stilts. Around the torso the various weapons systems moved. Its head was the mech’s sophisticated sensor array.
The crash would’ve been deafening for those who didn’t have audio filters, as the front of the house collapsed. The weight of the soil from the roof garden caused it to tip forward, engulfing the Walker. I watched the servos and gyroscopes on its legs try to compensate but failed, and it collapsed under the earth. That wouldn’t hold it but it would slow it down.
There was a huge explosion, and I was thrown across the room, slamming hard into the back wall, cracking it and some of my armour. I fought for air, my head ringing and my ears popping as the room turned orange. I got another mouthful of the Humber and realised I was looking up through water at a room filled with flame.
I screamed and inhaled more water as something heavy landed on me. I fought my way to the surface, stabbing whatever was on top of me repeatedly with my blades, though I was having problems penetrating the thing’s hide.