Spitting polluted water out and sitting up in about two feet of water, I saw that the room had been burnt from the fiery explosion that had thrown me under, but it was only actually on fire in a few parts. The thing that had landed on me was floating nearby. It took me a moment or two to work out that it was the badly charred headless corpse of one of the cyber alligators.
I staggered to my feet. Outside the water was covered in a sheet of fire. It was strangely beautiful. The patrol craft had gone. Presumably one of the alligators had penetrated the zippo’s fuel supply.
Another explosion shook the house and sent me to my knees. It sounded like a man-portable, light anti-armour missile detonating, Laa-Laas as we used to call them. I hoped that was the mech being taken out. I lurched out of the room, eager to get away from the heavy munitions.
The shot took me full in the chest, knocking me off my feet and sending me back beneath the Humber. I didn’t think it’d pierced my coat. It felt like a shotgun. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I shouldn’t have been caught like that. No excuses, just a long time since I was in combat this intensive.
I was back up on my feet. It seemed like it took for ever but I was moving faster than anyone. The Mastodon was in my hand. I saw the two feet of muzzle flash from the revolver’s barrel before I recognised that the guy with the shotgun wasn’t a Fortunate Son.
As our mutual friendly fire incident escalated, time slowed down and with my boosted reflexes I could almost see the bullet. It took him in the chest, piercing his second-rate armour. It seemed like an age as he fell back into the water. Still I didn’t know him.
‘I’m on your side, you stupid fucking cunt!’ I screamed at his corpse, angrier with myself for being caught out despite just having experienced multiple concussion waves.
As I staggered away from the corpse I could see into another room across the hall. Again it was large, with a high ceiling and about a foot and a half of water in it. Inside were three people surrounding a fourth. The three were obviously locals. The fourth was a small man with his back turned to me. He had dark hair and wore a black combat jacket and trousers. Not the kind you would wear on active duty but the kind you’d buy in a shop and wear on the street, or some people would.
The small man had his hands clasped together above his head, a shotgun pointed at his face; a lever-action hunting rifle on one side and an SMG older than I was on the other. My blue-on-blue incident had distracted the two men and a woman covering the small man. My boosted reflexes allowed me to assimilate this data very quickly. I could see what was coming as the small man began to move.
‘No!’ I shouted as I tried running through the water towards the group. The small man pulled his hands about ten inches apart and brought them down in front of him so quickly I could barely follow -he was at least as fast as I was. The barrel of the shotgun held by the woman in front of him fell into the water, as did her forearm, and then the front of her face slid off. It took me a moment to realise he had some kind of monofilament weapon.
He swung his arms out as my boosted leg muscles carried me into the air, and I made yet another serious mistake in this league. The top of the man with the SMG’s skull came off, bisected by the weighted monofilament. That meant the weapon was in his right hand now. Committed to the kick I moved myself into position in mid-air, the sole of my boot aiming for the base of his spine. Hopefully with enough power to damage even a reinforced skeletal structure.
From the left-hand sleeve of his combat jacket a compact 10-millimetre Glock appeared. He triggered a quick burst from it and the man with the lever-action rifle’s face disappeared.
The small man’s three victims were falling away from him and I was about to catch him square in the base of his spine when he appeared to flip backwards without even bending his legs. Suddenly he was inverted in the air, his boot travelling at my face with some velocity.
He kicked me so hard my internal visual display jumped. My nose disappeared into my face and I felt my facial dermal plating and reinforced skull give slightly. I had no idea how he’d powered the kick. He stopped the momentum of my flying kick and the pair of us plummeted into the water, and I went under. Again.
I raked up with my blades but he was gone. I sat up in the water, my blades withdrawn back into their forearm sheaths, my pistols suddenly in my hands. The small man was running away from me towards a window in the back of the room. He had a compact Glock in each hand and he was firing alternate bursts from them. I think it was supposed to be suppressing fire but it was disturbingly accurate as I felt bullets penetrate my coat, lodge in my dermal plate and then explode, knocking me back into the water. I was not going to be able to take much more of this. All over my internal visual display were red warnings from internal diagnostics.
I rolled, tried not to think about getting the Humber into my wounds and then sat up. The little man was gone but I’d seen his face. He was Nepalese, an ex-Ghurkha and either a member of 22 SAS or an ex-member reactivated like I’d been. His name was Rannu something or other. The other thing I remembered was that he’d been the regimental kick-boxing champion. I groaned and lay back in the water. I’d never met him but I’d heard stories about him taking money off people in illegal fights in the cargo hold of troop ships bound for Proxima Centauri.
Rolleston must’ve sent him but I couldn’t work out why they hadn’t come with more operators. Why just him and the Fortunate Sons? If they’d wanted the job done properly then three or four like Rannu would’ve done it. What got me about this was everything I’d heard about Rannu suggested he was sound, and we’d been pitted against each other by a bunch of wankers. A guy I’d probably rather buy a drink had just beaten the shit out of me.
12
I managed to stagger to my feet. I had to find Morag and get out of here. There was no chance that the Fortunate Sons hadn’t reported the situation. Reinforcements would be en route. I was in a bad way but I didn’t have time to revisit the doc, assuming he was still alive and his facilities hadn’t been destroyed.
I tried not to think about the humans I’d killed. It was easy killing Them. They looked different and were normally pretty enthusiastic about killing us. Obviously I’d killed people before: in the regiment we went after ‘terrorists’ or people who disagreed sufficiently with the powerful. Terrorists like the people who lived in the Avenues, I guessed. We weren’t supposed to war against each other. That was what we were supposed to have learnt from the Final Human Conflict and the havoc we’d wreaked on the world. Not that that ever stopped us from feeding off each other on the streets.
From the other Avenues I could hear more gunfire. The Fortunate Sons must have been trying to clear all the Avenues, not just Westbourne. My communications icon was flashing. I was receiving an encrypted message. The code was an old special forces one that I had fortunately kept the key for. It would give whoever was running signals for the Fortunate Sons pause but they’d crack it quickly. It was like everything else about me, I thought, remembering the effortless kicking I’d received at the hands of Rannu moments before: obsolete.
‘Yes?’ I said tersely, answering the comms message.
‘Where are you?’ Pagan’s icon asked.
‘Still on Westbourne, not far from where I started. Be aware there is at least one operator on the ground. What is your situation?’ I asked as I began climbing up the creaking, damaged stairs in the house, hoping to find a way across the roofs and out of the Avenues. I left the bodies where they had fallen, floating. Those that had a face were all staring up at the ceiling.