Looking into the setting sun, I let my legs dangle off the edge of the building. The city spread...
Diamonds to Rust
- Thread starter 7734
- Start date
- Original
- Created
- Status
- Ongoing
- Watchers
- 53
- Recent readers
- 0
- Threadmarks
- 26
-
Statistics (26 threadmarks, 70k words)
User Total 7734 26
The City
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
Looking into the setting sun, I let my legs dangle off the edge of the building. The city spread across in front of me, windows glinting and shining in the evening light.
"Tomas." A voice from behind me said calmly, their clothes rustling. "It's time to stop running."
I snorted quietly, my long coat crinkling from the Faraday cage I'd woven into it. These days, it wasn't just enough to have armor protect you- it also had to have a modicum of style to it too. Thank Christ leather had come back in fashion at least: now I didn't look like some suburban cowboy.
"You never were good at the whole listening to suggestions thing, were you?" the voice asked rhetorically. "One last chance to make it easy, man."
I stayed silent.
"In the name of the Peacekeapers of Chicago, I, Basri Amar, do charge you with resisting arrest, evasion of charges, injuries of officers, grand theft, and the intent to destroy civic property. You are to be taken dead or alive before the Tribunal of Peace, where you will be judged and sentenced for your crimes."
Finally, I dignified him with a response.
"No."
Then I jumped.
---
The Renaissance Center, at its center tower, was seventy-three stories tall. The roof of the radio spire was seven hundred and fifty feet over the ground, or two hundred and thirty meters for the metrically inclined.
Normally when I had to jump off tall buildings, metric was better. Ten meters per second per second was a neat approximation, and made things so much simpler. One second, I fell ten meters. Next second, I fell twenty, making it thirty meters down in two seconds. Three seconds was thirty meters, meaning I'd burned sixty meters of altitude.
On the fourth second and some change, I took my life in my hands, and shifted my reality about three degrees to the left. The Peacekeepers of Chicago might have been full of shit, but they weren't wrong- I had acquired some things from them, including a few of their government science-fair projects my shady backers weren't sure they were getting the full and unabridged deal.
They were right, naturally, and in the process of getting the goods I'd accidentally attached them to me. Mama always said I was an approachable soul, but I don't think she meant it to the tune of getting covered in nanomachines that bound themselves to your nervous system and skeleton like a particularly angry case of cancer. Still, the result was a neat grab-bag of tricks I could use if I was in a do-or-die situation.
Being a hundred and seventy-something meters from the ground and closing fast qualified. Snapping my fingers out, I started trailing carbon fiber line, quickly throwing it against the skyscraper I was next to and charging it with a burst of bioelectricity. As it hit the window, the static differential between the building and the line locked them together tight, serving as an impromptu anchor while I played the line out of my arm port carefully. Soon, I'd come to a stop, about a hundred and twenty meters up along with a hell of an ache in my arm. If I wasn't wearing some future-war load-balancing exoskeleton or whatever they were calling it these days, I'd probably be less an arm right about now.
Good thing I'd grabbed one of those too.
Either way, I needed to get out of the wind before that Peacekeeper came after me again, and more importantly before I finished grounding to the RenCen and fell off from anchor failure. Crabbing my way over to a track for a power window washer, I pulled a static line from my belt and locked in quickly. Problem two solved, at least. Now I could start winding all that carbon fiber back up so I didn't end up eating a box of pencil leads again for the graphite.
The Peacekeeper was still a threat, though, and they never worked alone. Aside from a gaggle of generic minions with ARs and old ballistic plates, they generally had a sergeant or two they handed off the more energetic weapons to. Laser rifles, coil mortars, punt guns… no real standardization besides big, looked cool, and caused me all sorts of grief. Skippy McGee up there probably was just carrying a tag pistol, and maybe a raygun, so if at all possible I had to bag him and run so his goon squad stayed busy.
First, though, I had to climb off the tower.
---
By the time I'd gotten down to the glass skylights of the Wintergreen below me, the Peacekeeper's goon squads had gotten the Party Vans out and were shaking down anyone dressed in a coat past the waist. Four vans, eight to a van plus driver plus corporal, forty dudes who were breaking all sorts of laws and couldn't get arrested for it right in front of me.
"Down, boy." I muttered at my itchy trigger finger. "Later."
Right now, I just needed to get to my bike and bail. I wasn't getting paid to knock these goons down a peg in a gunfight, I was getting paid to give the State Police an excuse to bag them outside the city line. Chicago Peacekeepers could only operate inside city lines they had reciprocity agreements with, and Detroit was sadly still one of them. I was a wanted name to the bastards, though, and the boys in Lansing wanted to take the Fucking Illinois People down a peg after they'd refused aid to a Laker transport inside their territorial waters when the Detroit Pilot's Union was unable to reach it in time.
Federally, the Peacekeepers of Chicago were persona non grata after I'd gone on an examination slab at Fort Belvoir. They hadn't been stupid enough to lie to Uncle Sam, as my nifty new features proved, but they had hidden a whole pile of truths that made the shit they'd been selling as gold start to stink. With at least a billion dollars down the tubes of DoD money, the Feddies were pissed enough to write me a blank check to drop them down a few pegs. It was every government agent's dream and nightmare- a steady job. On one hand, the target never changed. On the other, they were gonna be gunning for you until the day you died.
All else failed, I'd probably just retire to Puerto Rico. Until then, I had a parking garage to raid.
The good thing about parking garages was they were pathetically easy to get into if you knew what you were doing. Since they were mostly open windows to let light in and fumes out, that meant easy ingress. Egress was likewise similar if you were shy a motor vehicle. Since pushing my old Polaris Indian out a window wasn't an option, I was stuck going out the front. Now, if the Peacekeepers were smart, that meant I'd be driving straight past a Party Van loaded for bear plus some motorbike jockeys to keep a close tail and try out those shock lances they were advertising.
In response to the planned threat, I needed something to even the score. Normally, if I needed to dissuade bad drivers, I'd just drop some pebbles in my wake, which would bounce up into their windshield. This being an extreme case, though, I loaded up a pair of smoke grenades I'd 'liberated' from the Detroit Light Guard, along with a quartet of flashbangs. If things got really tight, I had a cut-down 1901 handy for shooting off my bike. Not that I liked using it, considering the recoil was horrible even with my exoskeleton's assistance and the fact I had to do reloading spins like Schwarzenegger. Checking that everything was in place one last time, I idled on out of my spot, down the ramp, and straight for the exit. I was going to need to be racing right out the gate, hell for leather for the highway onramp.
---
I was halfway to the onramp when I realized that there was a distinct lack of Peacekeepers tailing me. Looking back over my shoulder, I goggled slightly before kicking up my helmet's magnification to get a closer look.
Still in full shakedown mode. What, did they think I was gonna walk out? In the Motor City? I knew they didn't like hiring the brightest peas in the pod, but damn this was insulting. Two lane changes and a turnaround later, I was cruising past the numbnuts trying to think of how I could get them tailing me without risking any civilians in a crossfire, and coming up blank. Chucking a 'nade would just get them to panic and bunker down, which meant they weren't chasing me. Squeezing a few rounds off, aside from being blatantly illegal and probably taking a chunk out of my paycheck, would have the same effect.
Time for some advanced chinerkry, then. Parking on the curb carefully, I locked the shotgun in its bike scabbard and dismounted, checking my backup pistols. For most people, carrying two guns is stupid; as you're only probably going to need one. Because I was in situations where I'd need to cross-draw and quick-draw on an unfortunately large basis, though, I kept a 1911 Super on my right hand side and a .357 Magnum on my left. Two separate calibers might normally have been bad, but most things that required me to cross-draw; IE shoot before standing up, had a hell of a lot more body armor that needed the fast, heavy wadcutter rounds to punch through. If I could afford to stand, draw, and then start shooting, it was probably a soft enough target that a jacketed .45 would take out reliably enough.
I really needed to stop thinking about my guns when the job was specifically worded to avoid shooting people. Besides, this part of the plan was very much gun-free. Just walk up, taze one of them, and wait for their reacted before running like hell. Breathing in to check my bioelectric stocks, I grumbled slightly- that stunt with the static line anchor had pulled a lot of juice from my metaphorical batteries, and that meant I might not have enough juice to reliably land a full tazer on my target. Pulling on a pair of wool and copper gloves, I felt the metal pads against my palms and clanked them together in a quiet clap. If I could get a solid punch to the head in, followed by an open-palm slap, then the physical shock plus the electric pulse should put 'em down.
"Excuse me, sir." One of the Goon Squad said to my back, tapping me on the shoulder. "We have a perpetrator of crimes on the premise, and need to see your state identification."
"Yes, of course." I replied politely, spinning around and getting the punch into his open-faced helmet like textbook. "You'll need to see my passport too." I continued, bitch-slapping him and feeling the discharge go straight into his head like a thunderbolt.
As he fell, I hissed as my back spasmed angrily. Shaking my head, I just swiped the goon's SMG with a practiced motion and his work belt too.
"Stop, thief!"
There was the reaction I was looking for! Breaking into a bad sprint, I threw my newest loot into a saddlebag, started the bike, and pulled out into traffic like an old pro. Behind me, three Party Vans started charging through traffic like drunken bulls, sirens and lights blaring. Keeping my speed low, I started heading Jefferson Avenue. In the distance, the rest of the Party Van sirens started up, but I couldn't be assed to care. Traffic was flowing pretty well for a Wednesday evening in the summer, so I could afford to drive safely as the goon squad tried to keep up. By keeping to the highways, I was making it easy for me to escape and evade the vans, while simultaneously letting them think they were at all in control of the situation. My State Police friends were at Exit 62, which was only twenty minutes of being tailed by the Party Vans. Considering they couldn't shoot thanks to the traffic, I was probably going to get out of this scot-free.
---
In retrospect, this plan kinda sucked because I made a critical mistake- I forgot to check for road construction off my planned route. Four blocks of Woodward were torn all to hell and back due to an issue in the water mains, which meant that traffic defaulted to the next major parallel road: I-75.
My escape route.
Now, normally this wouldn't be so bad. I could always get on the shoulder, pump the gas, and get the hell out of dodge.
Normally I wasn't a piece of bait for the mass arrest of one hundred plus mentally retarded Chicagoans who were a bargaining piece in the games of cities. Needless to say, this put a bit of a crimp in things. Finally, one of them worked up the nerve to get out and approach me on foot and-
CRUNCH!
Well, that was the sound of vehicular manslaughter. Not my fault the idiots thought traffic would stay clogged forever. Picking up a head of steam, I got moving out, eight vans following me in close-ish pursuit.
---
Now that my planned high-speed chase was up to high speed, I had a new issue. Apparently, the Peaekeepers of Chicago actually thought that they could box me in. Considering that I was riding a bike that I'd had souped up to hit three hundred before I slammed the boost, I really doubted their vans could catch me. The issue, though, was visibility. It was getting dark out, and I knew I could only safely ride over about a hundred and thirty in daylight. Their vans might be able to hit a hundred, but I wasn't wanting to take that chance as they pulled in closer.
Grabbing one of the smoke grenades I'd prepped for this, I pulled the pin and dropped it in a little metal grill cage down by the fender. Once the spoon flipped free, it started spewing dark purple smoke, going straight into my wash and turning into a giant vortex. Now that the area behind me was fairly well obscured, I dived right, watching the mile markers fly by as we approached the exit. A quick kick got the smoke grenade holder off my bike, as I started losing speed to take the offramp.
"Come in, State Police." I yelled into my helmet radio. "Target's in the basket, get ready!"
My response was static. They must have had a jammer in the vans- not good! Either way, I needed to get off the highway, and if those cops were asleep in their cars it might just dissolve into a shootout with or without them there. Flying down the ramp at the aproxamate speed of way too fast, I stood on the brakes as I heard the screaming of the Party Vans locking up their brakes. As I skidded out the bottom of the ramp and aimed at the nearest portion of the police cordon I could get through, two of the vans flipped in the turn and rolled into the medians. I didn't hear much after that, though, because I locked up a moment later, gracelessly ditching my bike in a flowerbed and taking a dive at about forty miles an hour straight over a chunk of parking lot.
By the time I'd sat up, ears hissing as the nanomachines counter-tinnitus protocols did things that were supposed to help me regain situational awareness faster, one of the state troopers came up to me with a smile and a bag of donuts.
"Heya, hotshot." He said, chuckling. "Have a nice ride?"
I groaned, holding my hand out straight to see if it was shaking. The answer being yes, I grabbed the gas-station bag of Little Debbies and popped off my own skull bucket.
"Yeah, except the landing wasn't so good." I replied, groaning. "Is my bike ok?"
"Front end is kinda fucked." The trooper said, stroking his thin beard. "Right side's not looking so good either."
"I'll bill Lansing for the repairs." I replied, sighing. "How'd the cleanup go?"
"Eighty five arrests, and tweleve of them matched existing bolos and convictions."
"Great." I muttered, popping one of the sugar-encrusted treats in my mouth. Pulling myself to my feet, I groaned loudly as my exoskeleton locked the right leg up solid, along with the left shoulder and some of the back support.
"Listen, you guys mind giving me a ride home?" I asked, sighing as I saw my hunched, battered form in the rear window of a paddy wagon. I looked like a goddamn scarecrow, my coat showing off more wires and ceramic plates than a tank shell, the exoskeleton forcing me to move like Quasimodo. "That spinout was pretty bad."
The state trooper laughed one last time. "Sure thing, buddy. We'll even get your bike straight home."
"Thanks."
When I got put in the back seat of some squad car, I didn't even blink before I fell into a half-asleep doze, the need to sleep warring with what was probably a concussion trying to keep me awake.
Not the worst way I'd drifted off to sleep, these last few years.
"Tomas." A voice from behind me said calmly, their clothes rustling. "It's time to stop running."
I snorted quietly, my long coat crinkling from the Faraday cage I'd woven into it. These days, it wasn't just enough to have armor protect you- it also had to have a modicum of style to it too. Thank Christ leather had come back in fashion at least: now I didn't look like some suburban cowboy.
"You never were good at the whole listening to suggestions thing, were you?" the voice asked rhetorically. "One last chance to make it easy, man."
I stayed silent.
"In the name of the Peacekeapers of Chicago, I, Basri Amar, do charge you with resisting arrest, evasion of charges, injuries of officers, grand theft, and the intent to destroy civic property. You are to be taken dead or alive before the Tribunal of Peace, where you will be judged and sentenced for your crimes."
Finally, I dignified him with a response.
"No."
Then I jumped.
---
The Renaissance Center, at its center tower, was seventy-three stories tall. The roof of the radio spire was seven hundred and fifty feet over the ground, or two hundred and thirty meters for the metrically inclined.
Normally when I had to jump off tall buildings, metric was better. Ten meters per second per second was a neat approximation, and made things so much simpler. One second, I fell ten meters. Next second, I fell twenty, making it thirty meters down in two seconds. Three seconds was thirty meters, meaning I'd burned sixty meters of altitude.
On the fourth second and some change, I took my life in my hands, and shifted my reality about three degrees to the left. The Peacekeepers of Chicago might have been full of shit, but they weren't wrong- I had acquired some things from them, including a few of their government science-fair projects my shady backers weren't sure they were getting the full and unabridged deal.
They were right, naturally, and in the process of getting the goods I'd accidentally attached them to me. Mama always said I was an approachable soul, but I don't think she meant it to the tune of getting covered in nanomachines that bound themselves to your nervous system and skeleton like a particularly angry case of cancer. Still, the result was a neat grab-bag of tricks I could use if I was in a do-or-die situation.
Being a hundred and seventy-something meters from the ground and closing fast qualified. Snapping my fingers out, I started trailing carbon fiber line, quickly throwing it against the skyscraper I was next to and charging it with a burst of bioelectricity. As it hit the window, the static differential between the building and the line locked them together tight, serving as an impromptu anchor while I played the line out of my arm port carefully. Soon, I'd come to a stop, about a hundred and twenty meters up along with a hell of an ache in my arm. If I wasn't wearing some future-war load-balancing exoskeleton or whatever they were calling it these days, I'd probably be less an arm right about now.
Good thing I'd grabbed one of those too.
Either way, I needed to get out of the wind before that Peacekeeper came after me again, and more importantly before I finished grounding to the RenCen and fell off from anchor failure. Crabbing my way over to a track for a power window washer, I pulled a static line from my belt and locked in quickly. Problem two solved, at least. Now I could start winding all that carbon fiber back up so I didn't end up eating a box of pencil leads again for the graphite.
The Peacekeeper was still a threat, though, and they never worked alone. Aside from a gaggle of generic minions with ARs and old ballistic plates, they generally had a sergeant or two they handed off the more energetic weapons to. Laser rifles, coil mortars, punt guns… no real standardization besides big, looked cool, and caused me all sorts of grief. Skippy McGee up there probably was just carrying a tag pistol, and maybe a raygun, so if at all possible I had to bag him and run so his goon squad stayed busy.
First, though, I had to climb off the tower.
---
By the time I'd gotten down to the glass skylights of the Wintergreen below me, the Peacekeeper's goon squads had gotten the Party Vans out and were shaking down anyone dressed in a coat past the waist. Four vans, eight to a van plus driver plus corporal, forty dudes who were breaking all sorts of laws and couldn't get arrested for it right in front of me.
"Down, boy." I muttered at my itchy trigger finger. "Later."
Right now, I just needed to get to my bike and bail. I wasn't getting paid to knock these goons down a peg in a gunfight, I was getting paid to give the State Police an excuse to bag them outside the city line. Chicago Peacekeepers could only operate inside city lines they had reciprocity agreements with, and Detroit was sadly still one of them. I was a wanted name to the bastards, though, and the boys in Lansing wanted to take the Fucking Illinois People down a peg after they'd refused aid to a Laker transport inside their territorial waters when the Detroit Pilot's Union was unable to reach it in time.
Federally, the Peacekeepers of Chicago were persona non grata after I'd gone on an examination slab at Fort Belvoir. They hadn't been stupid enough to lie to Uncle Sam, as my nifty new features proved, but they had hidden a whole pile of truths that made the shit they'd been selling as gold start to stink. With at least a billion dollars down the tubes of DoD money, the Feddies were pissed enough to write me a blank check to drop them down a few pegs. It was every government agent's dream and nightmare- a steady job. On one hand, the target never changed. On the other, they were gonna be gunning for you until the day you died.
All else failed, I'd probably just retire to Puerto Rico. Until then, I had a parking garage to raid.
The good thing about parking garages was they were pathetically easy to get into if you knew what you were doing. Since they were mostly open windows to let light in and fumes out, that meant easy ingress. Egress was likewise similar if you were shy a motor vehicle. Since pushing my old Polaris Indian out a window wasn't an option, I was stuck going out the front. Now, if the Peacekeepers were smart, that meant I'd be driving straight past a Party Van loaded for bear plus some motorbike jockeys to keep a close tail and try out those shock lances they were advertising.
In response to the planned threat, I needed something to even the score. Normally, if I needed to dissuade bad drivers, I'd just drop some pebbles in my wake, which would bounce up into their windshield. This being an extreme case, though, I loaded up a pair of smoke grenades I'd 'liberated' from the Detroit Light Guard, along with a quartet of flashbangs. If things got really tight, I had a cut-down 1901 handy for shooting off my bike. Not that I liked using it, considering the recoil was horrible even with my exoskeleton's assistance and the fact I had to do reloading spins like Schwarzenegger. Checking that everything was in place one last time, I idled on out of my spot, down the ramp, and straight for the exit. I was going to need to be racing right out the gate, hell for leather for the highway onramp.
---
I was halfway to the onramp when I realized that there was a distinct lack of Peacekeepers tailing me. Looking back over my shoulder, I goggled slightly before kicking up my helmet's magnification to get a closer look.
Still in full shakedown mode. What, did they think I was gonna walk out? In the Motor City? I knew they didn't like hiring the brightest peas in the pod, but damn this was insulting. Two lane changes and a turnaround later, I was cruising past the numbnuts trying to think of how I could get them tailing me without risking any civilians in a crossfire, and coming up blank. Chucking a 'nade would just get them to panic and bunker down, which meant they weren't chasing me. Squeezing a few rounds off, aside from being blatantly illegal and probably taking a chunk out of my paycheck, would have the same effect.
Time for some advanced chinerkry, then. Parking on the curb carefully, I locked the shotgun in its bike scabbard and dismounted, checking my backup pistols. For most people, carrying two guns is stupid; as you're only probably going to need one. Because I was in situations where I'd need to cross-draw and quick-draw on an unfortunately large basis, though, I kept a 1911 Super on my right hand side and a .357 Magnum on my left. Two separate calibers might normally have been bad, but most things that required me to cross-draw; IE shoot before standing up, had a hell of a lot more body armor that needed the fast, heavy wadcutter rounds to punch through. If I could afford to stand, draw, and then start shooting, it was probably a soft enough target that a jacketed .45 would take out reliably enough.
I really needed to stop thinking about my guns when the job was specifically worded to avoid shooting people. Besides, this part of the plan was very much gun-free. Just walk up, taze one of them, and wait for their reacted before running like hell. Breathing in to check my bioelectric stocks, I grumbled slightly- that stunt with the static line anchor had pulled a lot of juice from my metaphorical batteries, and that meant I might not have enough juice to reliably land a full tazer on my target. Pulling on a pair of wool and copper gloves, I felt the metal pads against my palms and clanked them together in a quiet clap. If I could get a solid punch to the head in, followed by an open-palm slap, then the physical shock plus the electric pulse should put 'em down.
"Excuse me, sir." One of the Goon Squad said to my back, tapping me on the shoulder. "We have a perpetrator of crimes on the premise, and need to see your state identification."
"Yes, of course." I replied politely, spinning around and getting the punch into his open-faced helmet like textbook. "You'll need to see my passport too." I continued, bitch-slapping him and feeling the discharge go straight into his head like a thunderbolt.
As he fell, I hissed as my back spasmed angrily. Shaking my head, I just swiped the goon's SMG with a practiced motion and his work belt too.
"Stop, thief!"
There was the reaction I was looking for! Breaking into a bad sprint, I threw my newest loot into a saddlebag, started the bike, and pulled out into traffic like an old pro. Behind me, three Party Vans started charging through traffic like drunken bulls, sirens and lights blaring. Keeping my speed low, I started heading Jefferson Avenue. In the distance, the rest of the Party Van sirens started up, but I couldn't be assed to care. Traffic was flowing pretty well for a Wednesday evening in the summer, so I could afford to drive safely as the goon squad tried to keep up. By keeping to the highways, I was making it easy for me to escape and evade the vans, while simultaneously letting them think they were at all in control of the situation. My State Police friends were at Exit 62, which was only twenty minutes of being tailed by the Party Vans. Considering they couldn't shoot thanks to the traffic, I was probably going to get out of this scot-free.
---
In retrospect, this plan kinda sucked because I made a critical mistake- I forgot to check for road construction off my planned route. Four blocks of Woodward were torn all to hell and back due to an issue in the water mains, which meant that traffic defaulted to the next major parallel road: I-75.
My escape route.
Now, normally this wouldn't be so bad. I could always get on the shoulder, pump the gas, and get the hell out of dodge.
Normally I wasn't a piece of bait for the mass arrest of one hundred plus mentally retarded Chicagoans who were a bargaining piece in the games of cities. Needless to say, this put a bit of a crimp in things. Finally, one of them worked up the nerve to get out and approach me on foot and-
CRUNCH!
Well, that was the sound of vehicular manslaughter. Not my fault the idiots thought traffic would stay clogged forever. Picking up a head of steam, I got moving out, eight vans following me in close-ish pursuit.
---
Now that my planned high-speed chase was up to high speed, I had a new issue. Apparently, the Peaekeepers of Chicago actually thought that they could box me in. Considering that I was riding a bike that I'd had souped up to hit three hundred before I slammed the boost, I really doubted their vans could catch me. The issue, though, was visibility. It was getting dark out, and I knew I could only safely ride over about a hundred and thirty in daylight. Their vans might be able to hit a hundred, but I wasn't wanting to take that chance as they pulled in closer.
Grabbing one of the smoke grenades I'd prepped for this, I pulled the pin and dropped it in a little metal grill cage down by the fender. Once the spoon flipped free, it started spewing dark purple smoke, going straight into my wash and turning into a giant vortex. Now that the area behind me was fairly well obscured, I dived right, watching the mile markers fly by as we approached the exit. A quick kick got the smoke grenade holder off my bike, as I started losing speed to take the offramp.
"Come in, State Police." I yelled into my helmet radio. "Target's in the basket, get ready!"
My response was static. They must have had a jammer in the vans- not good! Either way, I needed to get off the highway, and if those cops were asleep in their cars it might just dissolve into a shootout with or without them there. Flying down the ramp at the aproxamate speed of way too fast, I stood on the brakes as I heard the screaming of the Party Vans locking up their brakes. As I skidded out the bottom of the ramp and aimed at the nearest portion of the police cordon I could get through, two of the vans flipped in the turn and rolled into the medians. I didn't hear much after that, though, because I locked up a moment later, gracelessly ditching my bike in a flowerbed and taking a dive at about forty miles an hour straight over a chunk of parking lot.
By the time I'd sat up, ears hissing as the nanomachines counter-tinnitus protocols did things that were supposed to help me regain situational awareness faster, one of the state troopers came up to me with a smile and a bag of donuts.
"Heya, hotshot." He said, chuckling. "Have a nice ride?"
I groaned, holding my hand out straight to see if it was shaking. The answer being yes, I grabbed the gas-station bag of Little Debbies and popped off my own skull bucket.
"Yeah, except the landing wasn't so good." I replied, groaning. "Is my bike ok?"
"Front end is kinda fucked." The trooper said, stroking his thin beard. "Right side's not looking so good either."
"I'll bill Lansing for the repairs." I replied, sighing. "How'd the cleanup go?"
"Eighty five arrests, and tweleve of them matched existing bolos and convictions."
"Great." I muttered, popping one of the sugar-encrusted treats in my mouth. Pulling myself to my feet, I groaned loudly as my exoskeleton locked the right leg up solid, along with the left shoulder and some of the back support.
"Listen, you guys mind giving me a ride home?" I asked, sighing as I saw my hunched, battered form in the rear window of a paddy wagon. I looked like a goddamn scarecrow, my coat showing off more wires and ceramic plates than a tank shell, the exoskeleton forcing me to move like Quasimodo. "That spinout was pretty bad."
The state trooper laughed one last time. "Sure thing, buddy. We'll even get your bike straight home."
"Thanks."
When I got put in the back seat of some squad car, I didn't even blink before I fell into a half-asleep doze, the need to sleep warring with what was probably a concussion trying to keep me awake.
Not the worst way I'd drifted off to sleep, these last few years.
No Rest for the Weary
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
Groaning softly, I looked up from my bed into the cracks in my ceiling. The patterns danced in and out of my vision. Rolling over, I looked at my bedside clock. Ten AM, plus five minutes or so. Great.
Falling out of bed, I grabbed my cane and hauled myself to my feet. My bioelectric cells were along my spinal cord, and when I used it they got sore. When I used them all up, I had to deal with racking back pain and soreness everywhere. Yesterday had definetly spent that potential, so right now moving was hard. It didn't help I'd gotten to bed at something like three in the morning after peeling myself out of the exoskeleton and sorting the good bits from the bad bits. Unfucking it was gonna be a bitch, seeing as I needed to reconstruct one of the shoulder joints and hip. Then there was my coat… my revolver… my bike…
About the time I'd managed to drag myself to the kitchen with a brainless shuffle, the automatic coffee machine started. Once I had a cup of joe and a few boiled eggs from the fridge, my phone started ringing. Moaning, I picked it up.
"Jefferson residence."
The gruff reply almost cut through the haze of morning pain. "Archangelos, we know it's you. It's the State department."
"Which one?" I mouthed off gibly, peeling an egg and sipping my coffee.
"The Michigan one. We need to debrief you, and there's another job that's come up."
I groaned, and loaded up the toaster that sat on my dinette. "So that means I've gotta go to Lansing, right?"
"Yep."
"Nope."
"No?"
"I need a ride, and you're not getting me on a Grayhound."
The voice on the other end of the line sighed. "We'll send a car."
"Not if you want me to bring my kit, you're not. My shit's trashed, which means I need to pack some tools to fix it."
"We'll send a truck then."
I blinked. They hated sending trucks. More importantly, if they were sending a truck, it meant something big was up.
"What's the deal?" I finally asked, curious. A U-haul could carry all my shit, plus some stuff I probably didn't need, plus anything I wanted. It meant that the guys ate State were desperate. Really desperate.
"We found a match for you."
Well fuck.
---
After a lot of shoveling of parts into cardboard boxes, I groaned and sat down in my chair to eat a grapefruit. I'd never been formally tested in bioelectricity, but I had jumped Mack trucks a few times, and the end result was always the same- the next few days involved eating all the citrus fruit and chugging Gatorade like it was going on a fire sale. Slugging down half a green one I'd been working on polishing off before the last job, I spilled it all over my shirt when an airhorn went off outside my door.
Grabbing my cane, I stumbled out my front door to look a stuffed suit in the face, a moving man, and a reflection of myself in his sheriff's badge as the third part to this bad joke.
"What the hell?" I asked, looking the sheriff in the eye. "You with State?"
"Yeah, I'm with State." He said, grinning faintly. "They told me you looked like sloshed shit last night, but this is a new low I'm thinking."
"Take a picture, it'll last longer." I grumped, stumping on in. "You want some vino?"
The agent chuckled. "Can't drink on the job or before hauling you to Lansing."
"Well, I can." I muttered, digging around in the fridge for an open bottle of wine. "So what's the vig?"
"Protection, really. We've got a VIP that needs taking to Marquette, and it's expected that the Peacekeepers are gonna go for her."
"Great." I muttered, stumping off towards my gun safe. I'd been swiping illegal guns off the market for years, and I had a buddy in Boarder Services that shipped me up interesting guns they'd captured from the cartels down south. Considering I'd just ruined two perfectly good pistols and mangled the furniture of a shotgun last night without even touching the triggers, a cheap gun supplier was essential.
"Alright, I hate to ask, but how many of these guns are legal?" the sheriff asked, putting his head in his hands.
"Maybe the Mosin?" I replied, pulling out a pair of Glocks and the MP-9 I'd grabbed last night. Following it up was a Kalashnikov '74, as well as a spare ballistic plate vest.
"Christ."
"No, just friends in low places."
The cop grunted.
"Anyway, once I get this stuff stowed in the truck, we can get going."
---
It was a boring drive to Lansing, a more boring wait sitting in a Michigan State conference room waiting for a secure datalink, and most boring taking a nap when the other side of the line didn't pick up the goddamn video call. By the time the actual Important Shit was ready to start, I'd already demolished the snack plate, gone through my own not-inconsiderable pockets of food, and was about ready to bail out and find the campus Starbucks.
"Mr. Archangles?" a voice said from the video call, carefully modulated. Looking up from the remains of the cracker pack I'd just turned into crumbs, I brushed off my shirt and looked at the screen carefully.
"Speaking." I replied.
The voice, who's video feed seemed to be bugged to high hell and back, chuckled. "Oh, good. I was worried you might not be available."
"Please, ma'am. I might not be avalible for a job, but I can always spare time to quote you for the next."
Chuckling, the video feed finally cut in, showing the Secretary of State clearly. I'd met her before in person at one or two formal events I'd been press-ganged into before the black paper on my skills had been properly distributed. A nice enough woman, even if her hair did look like Frankenstien's Monster. Alopecia on a black woman was never flattering, even less so than it normally was.
"Alright, Tomas." She said, smiling slightly. "Before we begin, I need to ask you if you are willing to accept any and all repercussions of your actions outside our sphere of influence?"
Translation: We're gonna ask you to break the law a little on someone else's turf.
"This is gonna be one of those jobs, ain't it."
"I'll take that as a yes." The Secretary of State said, before pulling up a few documents on a secondary monitor. Moments later, her screen was quarter-sized, and I was looking at nanotechnology documents from the Institute of Chicago, the think-tank and company that armed the Peacekeepers.
"First, can you give us your knowledge of nanomechanical biological interface systems?" one of the minions physically with me asked, holding a notepad.
I groaned, stood up, and took advantage of the fact the room had a whiteboard on one wall.
"Alright, so we're on the same page here, nanomemes 101, as taught by the honorable Professor Archangeles. Also, great way to let me know I'm getting two paychecks for the price of one again."
First up was a bellcurve, which I quickly marked out with the sigma lines to indicate deviations from the mean.
"Everyone in the world can utilize nanotechnology to some extent or another, due to the fact that the nanomaterial structures are by themselves able to create an artificial tissue cell cover to remain homogenous with the host body. However, due to the need to have this shell and other factors which I don't know about nor want to learn, the nanotech has distinct limits to the amount it can modify and interact with the human body."
Marking out the sigma furthest to the left, I labeled it with an omicron and the number one.
"Normally, the Institute pukes call this Sigma-1, which is bullshit because Sigma whatever is distance from the mean and that isn't how science works, so say hello to omicron one. This is the 'you've got the nanomemes' level, and the system is mostly latent. Most of the utility here is very limited, due to the fact the nanomachines can't really do much outside their fake cells to interact with your body. What they can do, though, is basically performance enhancment. Lactic acid scrubbing, oxygen movement boosts, fast metabolic shifts, fat to carb transformation, muscle tension improvements, whole host of physical and kinetic stuff that makes the human body run at a new normal that's around what was a hundred and twenty percent of the former baseline."
Now I did the same to the second sigma to the left.
"Omicron 2, second verse same as the first. Very subtle effects, but still pronounced enough to get people up to above average. Everything from the first omicron now works superhumanly well, plus there's direct nanomachine-to-cell interaction. Your marrow makes more blood, bruises drain faster, cuts clot in seconds instead of minutes, broken bones calcify as strongly as before they were broken, organ degradation slowing and sometimes even reversing, and a whole host of things. This is the big thing that got Uncle Sam to shell out the research and Defense money for, but there's a catch- there's about a six-month lead time on it, plus the fact that the initial batches don't scale up, at all."
Much nodding of heads. Economies of scale were critical for government purchases.
"Here's where shit gets weird: Omicron 3. At this point the nanomachines have gotten the ability to deploy tailored retroviruses and other medical gobadigook to create semi-artificial organs in the human body. Aside from ramping up the second omicron's effects by a lot, we're talking about little parlor tricks like bioelectricity and enhanced muscle density and reinforced nerves and bones. I got in a motorcycle crash yesterday. Thanks to this, I've effectively walked it off. More importantly, though, anyone in the third omicron is either a Peacekeeper, or me. Good news is, cook time on these upgrades is only about a year from the second omicron."
As the small handful of the scientists who were in the room started drooling, I marked out the fourth omicron.
"Omicron 4. We've gone from artificial organs that wouldn't exist in the human body to nonorganic structures."
Spooling out some of my carbon fiber line, I snipped it off with my nails and threw it on a table.
"As of right now, it takes two years and change for the structures to form, plus another six months to actually understand how it all works. There's maybe six of us in the fourth omicron in existence, and four of 'em are still developing. More importantly, there's no universal standard like there is for the first three omicrons of development. I have carbon substance manipulation and a reel of fiber line, while the other known fourth omicron can form a limited selection of acids and bases in respectable qualities."
There was much nodding as the nerds all concensused, before I turned back to the important part of my audience. The Secretary of State nodded, satisfied by my explination.
"You're correct in most regards, Tomas. However, there's a third known omicron four in full possession of her abilities right now."
I shrugged. "And?"
"Well, it is pertinent to your coming job." The Secretary of State said, covering a smile with her hand."
"You know, I haven't actually gotten a description of said job." I replied glibly. "Kinda need that, y'know."
"Fair enough, fair enough."
A moment later, I coughed deliberately.
"Alright, here's the deal." The Secretary of State said, sighing. "The Peacekeepers of Chicago have officially blown their charter out of the water. We got this from the FBI, who's putting a six-month warning out while they make their case airtight."
"That's not a reason for us to go after them." I mentioned offhandedly. "Federal actions against a city's Charter Organization shouldn't bring a State into the picture, much less an outside state."
"Not incorrect." Was the reply. "However, the Detroit Pilot's Union has just about declared an embargo on the city of Chicago, and the State needs to be seen taking strong action against commercial interests there. Interests that once displaced have very few options on where to go."
"Like what?" I asked carefully. "Chicago's a trade nexus; we can't steal that. There's no real production there we can take and keep in Detroit. The taxes are all locked to the state of Illinois."
"But the academia isn't."
My jaw dropped. Steal the academia, and it would cripple the Peacekeepers. Cripple the Peacekeepers, and that would open the market on security concerns and advanced tech back up. And if there was any holdover tech production in Flint back from the big internet infrastructure projects back in the thirties, that would be enough to start bringing back big tech into the area. Bring back big tech, and suddenly you had a shot at being a contender again against the West Coast computer enclaves.
"I am suddenly regretting taking political science and economics classes ever." I responded.
"Yes, well, you can worry about that later. Right now, your job is to make sure one person in particular gets out of the city- Annabelle Hayes."
Onscreen, a picture of a mousy girl came up, along with a mug shot and a short file.
"Annabelle here, or more properly Professor Hayes, is the designer of the nanobot bioreactors responsible for mass production of the little devils that have been making such a splash with the Peacekeepers. Last week, we received communiqués from her to the Detroit Pilot's Union indicating she wants out."
"You know if I step one foot past the Illinois state line they're going to be on me like white on rice on a paper plate in a snowstorm in Pyongyang, right?"
"That's part of the plan." The Secretary of State said, grinning as she pulled up a set of documents. "You're going to be identified on a yacht departing Holland, which will cross into Illinois state waters and request a pilot from the Pilot's Union. It will then travel into Chicago, where you will stay in the Detroit Pilot's facility, being visible all the while. If they come for you, then you're on eminent territory and they need a State warrant to search it, which will give you enough time to bail. If they force the issue, then they're starting a turf war with the Pilot's Union, and the ghettos will explode. Either way, there's going to be enough time for another action group to get the VIP and bail."
I groaned quietly. "So I'm bait."
"No, you're plan B."
Sighing, I pulled out a notebook, and started totaling up the expenses I was gonna be running on this one. The answer wasn't good. Spouting off the quote, I tabbed over to where I kept my time estimates. Call it five days to get my exoskeleton fixed, two days to get ammo and fix my coat…
Tearing off the bill, I slid it across the table to the sheriff, while I looked at my boss. "Give me a week to get everything ready, and I'll be good to go."
"Not quite." Was the response. "You may not have noticed him, but I'd like Dean Abelard to introduce himself.
Out of the crowd of nerds, a balding man stepped forward. Making to shake my hand, I was pleasantly surprised at his firm grip.
"Hello." Abelard said, grinning. "My professors have been itching to get their hands on a functional exoskeleton, and we can get yours back in fighting trim inside three days."
I balked. "Three days? The only reason I can fix it in five is because I stole a box of parts last time I had to fight the Peacekeepers."
"We've got three laboratories and a tool shop on standby for this, and about two hundred grad students waiting in the wings. By the time we're done, we'll be making enough spares to build our own suits."
Shrugging, I looked over at the image of the Secretary of State. They'd never double-crossed me in the three years I'd been working with them, and a little trust went a long way. Reaching around in a pocket, I tossed Abelard a reinforced case about four inches by an inch by half an inch.
"That's the suit's haptic and synaptic response memory module, which means without it your suits are gonna be Mr. Roboto. Make sure not to copy over my settings or use my settings in your suits, because the distance between the articulators is gonna be different- think of it as a bespoke suit."
Abelard nodded, and the herd of nerds exited the conference room. To be honest, I barely remembered when they entered. Looking into the camera, I sighed.
"Anything else?"
"Yes. Your hotel room is in the Holiday Inn off the freeway, room 226, paid up for three days. The rental is a red Charger."
Nodding, I exited the conference room as the video cut out.
---
This wasn't the first time Michigan State University had been used as an intermediary between me and the state when I was getting ready for a job. Two hundred plus years old at this point, it served as the model for the land grant college, and more importantly was one of the ten biggest universities in the United States of America. Here, I was a tree in the forest of students.
Equally importantly, it was someplace I could load up on supplies. Most of my gear that the college wasn't dissecting and repairing was being kept in an unoccupied room in the same building. I'd already cleared it out, sorting and arranging my kit. My last job, I'd gone in light and came out the same way. This one, though, promised a lot more action, and therefore preparation. I had to rebuild the Kalashnikov I'd brought, strip down and fine tune the MP-9, make sure the Glocks were rated for high pressure rounds, acquire some blasting cord, spool up some of my carbon fiber line in case I needed it, acquire duct tape, and integrate the plate carrier I'd brought to work with my exoskeleton, among other things.
Needless to say, I was a busy beaver before they were done repairing my armor coat and exoskeleton. When I got them back, though, they were both in excellent condition and with engineer nerds attached. Fortunately, I could just throw my guns at them and say "make good" to get me some peace and quiet to do my ammo orders with.
When I hit the road to Holland at the end of my prep time, I was armed to the teeth, armored against anything short of an autocannon, and weighed almost a ton from all the ammo I was carrying. It was time to rock and roll.
Falling out of bed, I grabbed my cane and hauled myself to my feet. My bioelectric cells were along my spinal cord, and when I used it they got sore. When I used them all up, I had to deal with racking back pain and soreness everywhere. Yesterday had definetly spent that potential, so right now moving was hard. It didn't help I'd gotten to bed at something like three in the morning after peeling myself out of the exoskeleton and sorting the good bits from the bad bits. Unfucking it was gonna be a bitch, seeing as I needed to reconstruct one of the shoulder joints and hip. Then there was my coat… my revolver… my bike…
About the time I'd managed to drag myself to the kitchen with a brainless shuffle, the automatic coffee machine started. Once I had a cup of joe and a few boiled eggs from the fridge, my phone started ringing. Moaning, I picked it up.
"Jefferson residence."
The gruff reply almost cut through the haze of morning pain. "Archangelos, we know it's you. It's the State department."
"Which one?" I mouthed off gibly, peeling an egg and sipping my coffee.
"The Michigan one. We need to debrief you, and there's another job that's come up."
I groaned, and loaded up the toaster that sat on my dinette. "So that means I've gotta go to Lansing, right?"
"Yep."
"Nope."
"No?"
"I need a ride, and you're not getting me on a Grayhound."
The voice on the other end of the line sighed. "We'll send a car."
"Not if you want me to bring my kit, you're not. My shit's trashed, which means I need to pack some tools to fix it."
"We'll send a truck then."
I blinked. They hated sending trucks. More importantly, if they were sending a truck, it meant something big was up.
"What's the deal?" I finally asked, curious. A U-haul could carry all my shit, plus some stuff I probably didn't need, plus anything I wanted. It meant that the guys ate State were desperate. Really desperate.
"We found a match for you."
Well fuck.
---
After a lot of shoveling of parts into cardboard boxes, I groaned and sat down in my chair to eat a grapefruit. I'd never been formally tested in bioelectricity, but I had jumped Mack trucks a few times, and the end result was always the same- the next few days involved eating all the citrus fruit and chugging Gatorade like it was going on a fire sale. Slugging down half a green one I'd been working on polishing off before the last job, I spilled it all over my shirt when an airhorn went off outside my door.
Grabbing my cane, I stumbled out my front door to look a stuffed suit in the face, a moving man, and a reflection of myself in his sheriff's badge as the third part to this bad joke.
"What the hell?" I asked, looking the sheriff in the eye. "You with State?"
"Yeah, I'm with State." He said, grinning faintly. "They told me you looked like sloshed shit last night, but this is a new low I'm thinking."
"Take a picture, it'll last longer." I grumped, stumping on in. "You want some vino?"
The agent chuckled. "Can't drink on the job or before hauling you to Lansing."
"Well, I can." I muttered, digging around in the fridge for an open bottle of wine. "So what's the vig?"
"Protection, really. We've got a VIP that needs taking to Marquette, and it's expected that the Peacekeepers are gonna go for her."
"Great." I muttered, stumping off towards my gun safe. I'd been swiping illegal guns off the market for years, and I had a buddy in Boarder Services that shipped me up interesting guns they'd captured from the cartels down south. Considering I'd just ruined two perfectly good pistols and mangled the furniture of a shotgun last night without even touching the triggers, a cheap gun supplier was essential.
"Alright, I hate to ask, but how many of these guns are legal?" the sheriff asked, putting his head in his hands.
"Maybe the Mosin?" I replied, pulling out a pair of Glocks and the MP-9 I'd grabbed last night. Following it up was a Kalashnikov '74, as well as a spare ballistic plate vest.
"Christ."
"No, just friends in low places."
The cop grunted.
"Anyway, once I get this stuff stowed in the truck, we can get going."
---
It was a boring drive to Lansing, a more boring wait sitting in a Michigan State conference room waiting for a secure datalink, and most boring taking a nap when the other side of the line didn't pick up the goddamn video call. By the time the actual Important Shit was ready to start, I'd already demolished the snack plate, gone through my own not-inconsiderable pockets of food, and was about ready to bail out and find the campus Starbucks.
"Mr. Archangles?" a voice said from the video call, carefully modulated. Looking up from the remains of the cracker pack I'd just turned into crumbs, I brushed off my shirt and looked at the screen carefully.
"Speaking." I replied.
The voice, who's video feed seemed to be bugged to high hell and back, chuckled. "Oh, good. I was worried you might not be available."
"Please, ma'am. I might not be avalible for a job, but I can always spare time to quote you for the next."
Chuckling, the video feed finally cut in, showing the Secretary of State clearly. I'd met her before in person at one or two formal events I'd been press-ganged into before the black paper on my skills had been properly distributed. A nice enough woman, even if her hair did look like Frankenstien's Monster. Alopecia on a black woman was never flattering, even less so than it normally was.
"Alright, Tomas." She said, smiling slightly. "Before we begin, I need to ask you if you are willing to accept any and all repercussions of your actions outside our sphere of influence?"
Translation: We're gonna ask you to break the law a little on someone else's turf.
"This is gonna be one of those jobs, ain't it."
"I'll take that as a yes." The Secretary of State said, before pulling up a few documents on a secondary monitor. Moments later, her screen was quarter-sized, and I was looking at nanotechnology documents from the Institute of Chicago, the think-tank and company that armed the Peacekeepers.
"First, can you give us your knowledge of nanomechanical biological interface systems?" one of the minions physically with me asked, holding a notepad.
I groaned, stood up, and took advantage of the fact the room had a whiteboard on one wall.
"Alright, so we're on the same page here, nanomemes 101, as taught by the honorable Professor Archangeles. Also, great way to let me know I'm getting two paychecks for the price of one again."
First up was a bellcurve, which I quickly marked out with the sigma lines to indicate deviations from the mean.
"Everyone in the world can utilize nanotechnology to some extent or another, due to the fact that the nanomaterial structures are by themselves able to create an artificial tissue cell cover to remain homogenous with the host body. However, due to the need to have this shell and other factors which I don't know about nor want to learn, the nanotech has distinct limits to the amount it can modify and interact with the human body."
Marking out the sigma furthest to the left, I labeled it with an omicron and the number one.
"Normally, the Institute pukes call this Sigma-1, which is bullshit because Sigma whatever is distance from the mean and that isn't how science works, so say hello to omicron one. This is the 'you've got the nanomemes' level, and the system is mostly latent. Most of the utility here is very limited, due to the fact the nanomachines can't really do much outside their fake cells to interact with your body. What they can do, though, is basically performance enhancment. Lactic acid scrubbing, oxygen movement boosts, fast metabolic shifts, fat to carb transformation, muscle tension improvements, whole host of physical and kinetic stuff that makes the human body run at a new normal that's around what was a hundred and twenty percent of the former baseline."
Now I did the same to the second sigma to the left.
"Omicron 2, second verse same as the first. Very subtle effects, but still pronounced enough to get people up to above average. Everything from the first omicron now works superhumanly well, plus there's direct nanomachine-to-cell interaction. Your marrow makes more blood, bruises drain faster, cuts clot in seconds instead of minutes, broken bones calcify as strongly as before they were broken, organ degradation slowing and sometimes even reversing, and a whole host of things. This is the big thing that got Uncle Sam to shell out the research and Defense money for, but there's a catch- there's about a six-month lead time on it, plus the fact that the initial batches don't scale up, at all."
Much nodding of heads. Economies of scale were critical for government purchases.
"Here's where shit gets weird: Omicron 3. At this point the nanomachines have gotten the ability to deploy tailored retroviruses and other medical gobadigook to create semi-artificial organs in the human body. Aside from ramping up the second omicron's effects by a lot, we're talking about little parlor tricks like bioelectricity and enhanced muscle density and reinforced nerves and bones. I got in a motorcycle crash yesterday. Thanks to this, I've effectively walked it off. More importantly, though, anyone in the third omicron is either a Peacekeeper, or me. Good news is, cook time on these upgrades is only about a year from the second omicron."
As the small handful of the scientists who were in the room started drooling, I marked out the fourth omicron.
"Omicron 4. We've gone from artificial organs that wouldn't exist in the human body to nonorganic structures."
Spooling out some of my carbon fiber line, I snipped it off with my nails and threw it on a table.
"As of right now, it takes two years and change for the structures to form, plus another six months to actually understand how it all works. There's maybe six of us in the fourth omicron in existence, and four of 'em are still developing. More importantly, there's no universal standard like there is for the first three omicrons of development. I have carbon substance manipulation and a reel of fiber line, while the other known fourth omicron can form a limited selection of acids and bases in respectable qualities."
There was much nodding as the nerds all concensused, before I turned back to the important part of my audience. The Secretary of State nodded, satisfied by my explination.
"You're correct in most regards, Tomas. However, there's a third known omicron four in full possession of her abilities right now."
I shrugged. "And?"
"Well, it is pertinent to your coming job." The Secretary of State said, covering a smile with her hand."
"You know, I haven't actually gotten a description of said job." I replied glibly. "Kinda need that, y'know."
"Fair enough, fair enough."
A moment later, I coughed deliberately.
"Alright, here's the deal." The Secretary of State said, sighing. "The Peacekeepers of Chicago have officially blown their charter out of the water. We got this from the FBI, who's putting a six-month warning out while they make their case airtight."
"That's not a reason for us to go after them." I mentioned offhandedly. "Federal actions against a city's Charter Organization shouldn't bring a State into the picture, much less an outside state."
"Not incorrect." Was the reply. "However, the Detroit Pilot's Union has just about declared an embargo on the city of Chicago, and the State needs to be seen taking strong action against commercial interests there. Interests that once displaced have very few options on where to go."
"Like what?" I asked carefully. "Chicago's a trade nexus; we can't steal that. There's no real production there we can take and keep in Detroit. The taxes are all locked to the state of Illinois."
"But the academia isn't."
My jaw dropped. Steal the academia, and it would cripple the Peacekeepers. Cripple the Peacekeepers, and that would open the market on security concerns and advanced tech back up. And if there was any holdover tech production in Flint back from the big internet infrastructure projects back in the thirties, that would be enough to start bringing back big tech into the area. Bring back big tech, and suddenly you had a shot at being a contender again against the West Coast computer enclaves.
"I am suddenly regretting taking political science and economics classes ever." I responded.
"Yes, well, you can worry about that later. Right now, your job is to make sure one person in particular gets out of the city- Annabelle Hayes."
Onscreen, a picture of a mousy girl came up, along with a mug shot and a short file.
"Annabelle here, or more properly Professor Hayes, is the designer of the nanobot bioreactors responsible for mass production of the little devils that have been making such a splash with the Peacekeepers. Last week, we received communiqués from her to the Detroit Pilot's Union indicating she wants out."
"You know if I step one foot past the Illinois state line they're going to be on me like white on rice on a paper plate in a snowstorm in Pyongyang, right?"
"That's part of the plan." The Secretary of State said, grinning as she pulled up a set of documents. "You're going to be identified on a yacht departing Holland, which will cross into Illinois state waters and request a pilot from the Pilot's Union. It will then travel into Chicago, where you will stay in the Detroit Pilot's facility, being visible all the while. If they come for you, then you're on eminent territory and they need a State warrant to search it, which will give you enough time to bail. If they force the issue, then they're starting a turf war with the Pilot's Union, and the ghettos will explode. Either way, there's going to be enough time for another action group to get the VIP and bail."
I groaned quietly. "So I'm bait."
"No, you're plan B."
Sighing, I pulled out a notebook, and started totaling up the expenses I was gonna be running on this one. The answer wasn't good. Spouting off the quote, I tabbed over to where I kept my time estimates. Call it five days to get my exoskeleton fixed, two days to get ammo and fix my coat…
Tearing off the bill, I slid it across the table to the sheriff, while I looked at my boss. "Give me a week to get everything ready, and I'll be good to go."
"Not quite." Was the response. "You may not have noticed him, but I'd like Dean Abelard to introduce himself.
Out of the crowd of nerds, a balding man stepped forward. Making to shake my hand, I was pleasantly surprised at his firm grip.
"Hello." Abelard said, grinning. "My professors have been itching to get their hands on a functional exoskeleton, and we can get yours back in fighting trim inside three days."
I balked. "Three days? The only reason I can fix it in five is because I stole a box of parts last time I had to fight the Peacekeepers."
"We've got three laboratories and a tool shop on standby for this, and about two hundred grad students waiting in the wings. By the time we're done, we'll be making enough spares to build our own suits."
Shrugging, I looked over at the image of the Secretary of State. They'd never double-crossed me in the three years I'd been working with them, and a little trust went a long way. Reaching around in a pocket, I tossed Abelard a reinforced case about four inches by an inch by half an inch.
"That's the suit's haptic and synaptic response memory module, which means without it your suits are gonna be Mr. Roboto. Make sure not to copy over my settings or use my settings in your suits, because the distance between the articulators is gonna be different- think of it as a bespoke suit."
Abelard nodded, and the herd of nerds exited the conference room. To be honest, I barely remembered when they entered. Looking into the camera, I sighed.
"Anything else?"
"Yes. Your hotel room is in the Holiday Inn off the freeway, room 226, paid up for three days. The rental is a red Charger."
Nodding, I exited the conference room as the video cut out.
---
This wasn't the first time Michigan State University had been used as an intermediary between me and the state when I was getting ready for a job. Two hundred plus years old at this point, it served as the model for the land grant college, and more importantly was one of the ten biggest universities in the United States of America. Here, I was a tree in the forest of students.
Equally importantly, it was someplace I could load up on supplies. Most of my gear that the college wasn't dissecting and repairing was being kept in an unoccupied room in the same building. I'd already cleared it out, sorting and arranging my kit. My last job, I'd gone in light and came out the same way. This one, though, promised a lot more action, and therefore preparation. I had to rebuild the Kalashnikov I'd brought, strip down and fine tune the MP-9, make sure the Glocks were rated for high pressure rounds, acquire some blasting cord, spool up some of my carbon fiber line in case I needed it, acquire duct tape, and integrate the plate carrier I'd brought to work with my exoskeleton, among other things.
Needless to say, I was a busy beaver before they were done repairing my armor coat and exoskeleton. When I got them back, though, they were both in excellent condition and with engineer nerds attached. Fortunately, I could just throw my guns at them and say "make good" to get me some peace and quiet to do my ammo orders with.
When I hit the road to Holland at the end of my prep time, I was armed to the teeth, armored against anything short of an autocannon, and weighed almost a ton from all the ammo I was carrying. It was time to rock and roll.
Last edited:
Hell Follows
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
As my boat arrived in Chicago, I pulled my armor coat tighter around myself to hold out against the bitter wind. The Lake Calmut terminal was just ahead, our skiff battered by the light waves as the chop tried to send us down.
"You the fixer?" the pilot asked as the ferry I'd come in on originally kept going, heading for the International Trade Zone.
"Yeah." I replied, keeping one hand on the backpacks with all my ammo and spare parts so they didn't fall off when the boat rolled a little too much for my liking. "You sticking around for the fireworks show?"
"No way in hell am I missing it." He replied. "My brother was on the ship."
My brain turned over, before I remembered- the ship that had burned out without receiving aid. Nodding, I just grinned tiredly. "You got a good piece then?"
"Nah, I'm on fire support. We managed to ghetto up a pair of mortars, and we've dug in hard."
"You seriously think they're going to attack that hard?"
The pilot let loose a stream of chaw into the lake, along with a few choice explitives. I took it in the affirmative. We remained silent until the boat was docked, and I was handed off to a new guide to get to my post in the War Room.
As the name implied, the War Room was the operations center for the Lake Calmut terminal and grounds. Maps and screens coated the walls, and in the center of the room was a smart table- a real time tactical display tracking every fighter on the grounds. Behind it issuing commands was a battered face I barely recognized, so much had it paled from its early dusky tone.
"Yousif? Yousif, is that you?" I asked, moving in to wrap the man in a bear hug. "It's been years!"
Laughing, the émigré Syrian picked me up in return. Considering I weighed something like five hundred pounds in the full Zoot Suit of armor and exoskeleton, that was no mean feat!
"Tomas! It is good to see you!" Yousif yelled, before putting me down and reaching up to kiss my cheeks. "They did not tell me you were coming!"
"They barely told me I was coming!" I protested. "All they did was give me some bitcoins and orders to make them pay for the building!"
"Ah, Inshallah, we have a hope now!" Yousif said, looking over his tactical display. "Come, look at this!"
I gazed at the table carefully as my old friend manipulated it. We'd been in the hospital together, back before I'd gotten picked to go on that trip to Chicago, and I knew I wouldn't regret his friendship. Yousif had been Army, or so he'd said, injured by an IED on patrol in Iraq. I'd almost believe him too, if I hadn't figured out his service record was a piece of black paper in a bank box next to the Ark of the Covenant as far as I was concerned. Considering how thick his accent was, and how little time he'd actually been in America, I wouldn't have been surprised if he was a fighter for one of the dozens of groups there we'd gotten for some reason.
The hows and whys of Yousif Aberdeen would have to wait, though, until after this mission. Right now, it was time to focus.
"The good news so far is we know their avenue of approach." Yousif muttered, panning the map. "They probably won't cross the parking lot, and we know they can't handle the river. If they try, our marksmen will make them pay. The old docks will likewise be a deathtrap; they don't stand a chance. The park and grain elevator will be where they encamp thickest, that is where the weight of the battle will be held."
"So where will I be, in the thick of it?"
"Na, too risky." Yousif replied, shaking his hand. "Too many mines, other traps, bad terrain. Our defense will collapse around the grain elevator, then take a light boat away. A few rounds of smoke, and we will be gone. You will be in the far building, between lake and river."
"In case they try an end run around the lake's marksmen?" I replied sardonically.
"So when they set up their coil mortar you can steal it." He shot back, grinning.
"Why wouldn't they be firing from outside out counterbattery range?" I asked raising an eyebrow. "They can get two and a half miles out of those things when they're ranged in right, and they'll have enough guys here to get good ranging data."
"Legal issues. They can only use heavy weapons on our property, and the parks are too swampy for their generator trucks." Yousif said, smirking. "And if it isn't, then the cat-tail mines will reap a few fools."
"Do you at least have a few machine guns?" I asked. "Or something else for when they get their shit together and find their balls?"
"Ha! We have two, already emplaced."
"So why do you need me then?" I sighed, finally. "You made it sound like you were screwed!"
At this point, Yousif's smile fell through. "We expect five hundred to come. We have sixty three men, plus twelve women and eight officers. And you. If you can take out their artillery park and C3, then we might be able to make them pay for every inch. If not, it will be like Mosul."
"Yousif, we weren't alive when they were fighting over Mosul."
"So? The Franche and Germans still remember the Somme."
I nodded. I'd read my textbooks about the worst twenty years around the turn of the millennium; and there'd even been enough pictures to keep me awake. There were things I wouldn't wish any man to go through- Mosul and Aleppo, in the bad old days, would be two of them.
"Go get ready." I finally heard, before my friend turned back to the table. "Tomas, it will be bloody. I do not want to burry you at the end- Allah may not know where to put your machines!"
"Me neither." I replied, laughing. "Don't think the family graveyard knows how to bury Muslims yet."
"Then leave me a marker at the mosque next door, and go! The show starts soon!"
Throwing a wireless tether at the table and a wild grin, I bolted for the door. The time for war had come.
---
By the time I'd reached my assigned hiding place, I already heard trucks moving in. These weren't Party Vans, or anything subtle. No, these were technicals meant to carry the heavy weapons of the enemy and their own soldiers, including ones in power armor. God, I hated power armor.
The difference between myself and the hulking behemoths they were unloading was quite stark. While I had an exoskeleton meant to help someone move around in the bush while carrying about a hundred and twenty pounds of war load, these bastards were the war load. Nearly a thousand pounds apiece, they were covered in rolled steel armor across the extremities and composite armor around their torsos. I could forget my Kalashnikov penetrating them, or anything short of an elephant rifle. Speaking of rifles, they were packing some ungodly huge guns with spooled rounds that looked to be the size of my fingers on their belts. Designed to wade into urban warfare as an APC equivalent, they'd been built from day one to screw chumps in my position over.
Did they expect us to have a Katyusha or Grad laying around or something? That was at least ten million in equipment I was looking at right there, plus another twenty mil in the trucks and the coil mortar that started firing. On the plus side, those suits were moving out at least.
On the minus side, my war helmet already displayed that my comms were jammed, from radio to microwave to everything except a freaking point laser. So my mission just got expanded- destroy the Command, Control, and Communication unit, disable that coil mortar, and disable those damn power armor chumps. Shaking my head softly, I reached down to my belt and pulled out the air filter face plate for my helmet, locking the mandibles over it carefully.
If at first you doubt success, lower the bar. I'd considered the possibility of attacks en masse before coming, and I'd gotten my hands on some tear gas grenades as a way to help handle that eventuality. Now I was wishing I'd brought bleach and ammonia, but you got what you had. Putting my gun on a low ready sling, I took a grenade in each hand, breathed in, and hurled them right at the technicals.
A technical, for the uninitiated, is what happens when you strap a gun to the ass end of some poor defenseless Toyota truck and expect it to work as intended. Practically, since the trucks were running to keep the commo on and the hydraulics powered, it meant they hoovered up the tear gas and were effectively disabled for a few minutes. Gun up, I started putting bursts into whoever I could see moving, while trying to get to one of the gassed technicals. After chucking one screwball out of the truckbed, I groaned. They'd rigged this one up with twin Dushkas, which was terrible because they didn't even have the decency to use American guns for it. Still, spinning the turret after perforating the two screwballs in the cab, it served as a reasonable means to get the command trailers shot up and the fuel truck on fire. Ditching it and bolting for the shadows, I grimaced as one of the power armored troopers ran back, hosing the technical I'd been using a minute ago.
The difference before and after he was done with it was stark, his rifle punching clean through the body and setting off the fuel tank in a dramatic explosion. I just kept my head down, trying not to panic. I didn't know much about the suits in the details, like whether or not they had thermal optics or radar or NVG equipment.
"FIGHT ME!" he yelled, and I almost broke a smile. He was cocky- good. Now, if I could sneak through the low brush and behind the burning fuel truck, I could maybe get to the coil mortar and use it to cap this bozo's ass. If a sixty-one millimeter electrically-driven explosive charge didn't kill him deader than disco, then I needed to start packing anti-armor kit.
Hell, at this rate, I needed to start packing HEAT grenades anyway, which meant finding a gun that could launch grenades, which meant headaches. Oh joy.
"COWARD! COME OUT AND DIE!"
Geez, this was not the brightest glow plug on the engine block was he? No attempt to find me, no suppressing fire, no nothing! Chuckling, I got behind the command trailer on my way to the coil mortar, and stopped dead when a blast of buckshot hit me in the chest. I'd missed one, and he had a gun! More importantly, he gave the shitbird in power armor a target to hose down. As the bullets flew over my head in a cascade of firepower, I sighed as I noted the blood around my boots. Looks like he'd taken out his warning system in that display of firepower, and probably earning his ghost a hell of a chewing out. Crawling forward, I winced as another string of shots went through the command trailor, one of them hitting the jammer judging by how my comms cleared up.
"Tomas!" I heard a woman cry over the radio. "Come in, Tomas!"
"Kinda a bad time, sweetheart." I shot back, glad for the fact my helmet muffled my voice unless I turned on the speakers. "Got an asshole in a brick shithouse coming down on me here."
"Yousif was shot! They're coming through the field- we can't hold!"
"Fuck." I murmured. This farce needed to end. "What do you need me to do?"
"Get back to base, there was a mistake! The professor came here!"
My blood went cold. "Read back: the professor came here?"
"Yes! The giants are almost through the mines, and the grain elevator can't hold!"
Well then, it was time to grit these teeth and end it. "Give me three minutes."
"Go with Allah, Tomas- for I know I will be joining my husband in his arms!"
"Inshallah." I replied with the little Arabic I knew. Allah wills it.
There was nothing on the mike except silence as I prepared to finish this part of the job. It was time to slay a giant.
The Jungle
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
Squatting behind the command trailor, I considered my options carefully. I still had a smoke grenade, five mags for my rifle, and my pistol. None of it would reliably disable the titan in power armor, and the more I thought about it the less I liked the odds of the coil mortar punching into him and keeping him down. It was all I had, though, and I was on a strict timer. Popping the pin on the smoke grenade, I chucked it at the enemy and waited for the smoke to start clogging his vision.
I was taking a huge risk here. If that power armor had integral radar or microwave scanning modules, then my plan of running behind smoke and in front of the fire wouldn't work. At that point, he'd turn that automatic elephant rifle on me, and odds were that gun was specifically designed to eat through their own RHA carapaces, much less my squishy ass. Still, as the enemy soldier started making noises of trying to see through the smoke, I moved.
Taking off like a shot, I manages to sprint over past the fire, ducking past another vehicle and around a large capacitor before reaching the coil mortar. Checking the diode pin display, I sighed in relief. They'd managed to idiotproof this thing so soundly even I could use it- or more likely, to some buyer in the Sandbox who wanted a new shiny. The system had enough for one shot, tube was empty, and I could see the ammo stack. Each round was a heavy little bastard, but I got one in the tube without too much trouble. Aiming it was likewise simple: kick out the aim brace, drop it as low as it could go, make sure it was pointed at the target, and get ready for it to go flying because it wasn't designed to shoot at something like three degrees of elevation.
"HEY UGLY!" I called, grinning.
"AHA! THE RUNT DARES TO FIGHT!" he yelled back. I could almost smell the testosterone defiency from here, along with that boyish need to scrap.
"SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND!" I replied, before pulling the trigger. The tube bucked, flying end over end and leaving high voltage cables flying everywhere as the shell hurtled down range. I'd picked a contact fused shell hoping it would blast open that tin can on impact- and as a faint echo of a boom came through my helmet's earpro after the sonic boom of the mortar's supersonic report. Stepping up, I walked forward to inspect my carnage.
The round had, unsurprisingly, blasted away the outer shell of the power armor like it wasn't even there. Inside, though, I tried to contain my gorge as I looked at what I'd done. Meat and electronics were scattered everywhere, the insides of the mechanized trooper very much on his outsides. The edges of the suit were a mess, and as I watched the enemy soldier tried to breathe in. What was left of his lungs twitched, and his hands scrabbled at nothing.
"Well, ain't you in sorry shape." I said, smirking at the helmet. "They're gonna have a fun time piecing you back together in Hell."
Another rattling wheeze greated me. I just snorted, grabbed the oversized rifle that on closer inspection was more of a machine gun, and started hoofing it back to the main building. Sympathy for the dead was wasted on amatures. Inspecting the gun, I frowned. For such a heavy piece of Peacekeeper weaponry, it was amazingly basic. Functional trigger, no solenoid charger port, belt fed, and the rounds were marked .455 Commando on the back. Almost like a real weapon designer made it, not some over-caffeinated nerd. Either way, it would work for my purposes right now well enough.
Moving back until I was on the edges of the firefight around the centeral building, I noticed the first trooper in power armor easily. Unlike the now-deceased Private Mistake in the remains of their firebase, this one was crouching, not yelling, and making sure to have some buddies. It's a pity they designed their mecha rifles so well- if it wasn't, I'd have never hit him on the first pass of the stolen gun, before I started putting raking fire down on his infantry support. Once I was the only gun talking in the area, I proceeded to get good and ready for a bruised shoulder as I dumped the rest of the magazine into the enemy suit of powered armor and ditched the weapon. Moving up, I started policing weapons and butt-stroking cowering idiots who thought that the rules applied when you broke them first. It probably wouldn't kill them, mind, but the concussions and nausea would put them out of the fight.
After picking up a new giant-ass belt fed, I started moving out. It'd be rifle only until I spotted the next power armored screwball unless I though dual wielding MP-9s was a good idea. Thankfully, basic goddamn tactics hadn't been pounded into the Peacekeeper's heads as small recruits, so edge security was terrible as I made my way northwards. Pop the one guy pretending to cover the flank, move up twenty yards, crouch, whack the sergeant, whack the machine gunner, watch the rest fall into disarray while I crawled out. Two squads went down like this, before I found the commander of the little power armor trio. This one was painted up, joy of joys, and had what looked like extra armor on his torso. That just meant the first burst was mailed to his kneecaps, though, and after that it'd be second verse, same as the first- dump bullets at him until he stopped screeching for help, rake the rest of the squad, empty the gun back on the mobile bunker.
As the screams started, I thanked the fact I was fighting for the defenders for once. I never got nightmares about the men I'd killed; but I'd never forget the men I'd failed to save. It was half of what got me into the shadow service, and right now it was what got me to tune out the ghouls I'd made and start hiking for the main building.
---
The front lines of resistance at the boat headquarters had collapsed fairly quickly, and the main line had more holes in it than a pauper's smock. Getting through was painfully easy, before I reached what was left of the friendly-controlled areas.
"This is Tomas, come in Command."
"Command here." I heard, panting. "We've got almost everyone back to the fallback line, but the professor is still in the main building. She's in the-"
And there came the static. They must have brought in another goddamn jammer. Oh well- I knew where my objective was, roughly, so I could start moving. That's when I thought I heard a voice. Stopping and bringing up my gun, I listened carefully.
"-not like that's my problem, mon chere. You knew the terms…"
A woman's voice replied, angry. "The terms never talked about that!"
"We were allowed to renegotiate."
"That was never on the table!"
At this point, I was seriously considering my entrance. Fortunately, they came to me.
"What you think is available is immaterial-"
BANG BANG BANG
Three shots later, the guy was on the ground moaning. Oh well- that must have been body armor at work. Not like I was the only one to wear it, or even the only one to use multiple layers for best protection. Shaking my head, I just bent down and warmed up my bioelectrics.
"Night night, little buddy." I said, tazing the shit out of him. Flicking my fingers, I whipped off his helmet to see who was actually important enough to go off on his own. Moments later, I gasped.
"Aachen? Aachen, what the fuck?" I asked, looking at the blonde beard under the helmet. "Christ!"
As I started muttering to myself, the woman next to me glared at me. "I suppose you're part of the rescue attempt?" she muttered, taking the time to kick Aachen in the side. "Or do you just have a grudge, like everyone else this asshole works with?"
"Nah, Aachen's pretty decent when you get to know him." I replied, swiping his guns and taking the time to pull out his grease pencil to draw a cartoon toothbrush mustache on him, along with 'Whitehead was Here' on his forehead. "I'm just amazed he's on a combat op of all things- they'd normally never let him out unsupervised."
"Because he's a terrible conversationalist and boring as hell?"
"Because he's a freaking boot." I shot back, grinning under my helmet. "Anyway, Tomas Archangeles, and I believe I'm your ride out of here."
"Professor Hayes." She muttered, ticking out a hand to shake. I returned the gesture gingerly, careful of bruising her hand. "You're not what I was expected."
"Likewise." I said, raking over her long, lean form. The ID picture I'd been given to work with certainly wasn't a curvy redhead, so a little paranoia here was justified. "Unless you got some serious physical modifications from your 'bots, I'm seriously doubting you're my package."
Hayes chuckled. "Yeah, that was my friend. She's taking your people out on a spin, get her out too."
"I'm gonna need some proof that you're-"
As I spoke, the sound of nails on a chalkboard greeted me. Smiling widely, Hayes showed off the inside of her wrists and the two projecting blades. Tapping one carefully, I whistled. Ceramic carbide, and sharp as hell.
"Yeah, that's some pretty damn good proof." I said, grinning. "Can you shoot?"
"Sure, and you can create life under a sun lamp." Hayes shot back. "You think I asked for some goddamn help because I could Rambo my way out of here alone?"
"Eh, fair enough." I shrugged back. "Now be quiet and follow me."
Moving quickly through the terminal, I stopped several times to avoid contact with the Peacekeepers. Taking a car out wasn't an option, and they'd probably have a helicopter on station. I'd need a really good idea to get out of this one. Unfortunatly, I wasn't paid by the good idea- just by the execution.
"So we're probably gonna need to get a boat, cross the channel, and hotwire a car." I said, dead serious to Hayes. "How much do you know about any of that?"
I got a flat look, and no verbal answer. Great, looks like my VIP was about as useful as a self-mobile sandbag. "Just stay behind me." I muttered, before heading on down to the boat docks. Fortunatly, the flatboat I'd come in on not three hours ago was sitting there, and the better part was a distinct lack of guards. Shuffling Hayes down the dock, I got her in without scuttling the poor little boat. My weight in the stern, though, gave it a little grief until I chucked a sandbag forward. Starting the motor, I winced as the piddling fifty cc rig warmed up and started pushing us over. If they heard us, we'd be dead meat.
This is about the time a wave lapped over the nonexistent bows and got Hayes to screech, pushing herself up. Normally this would be fine, except those wrist-blade-things hadn't been retracted yet, and punched through the bottom of the aluminum boat quite nicely, which meant more water coming in, which lead to more screeching and flailing.
Right, after I got done with this mess I was going down to Sacred Heart Parish and leaving a few c-notes in the plate so they could do some renovations and God could stop making me the butt of the joke.
As the boat slowly rode lower in the water, I sighed and looked over the side for depeth. About eight feet, still too deep to swim. Rolling my eyes, I let a few seconds pass, and then looked over again. Six feet.
By the time we hit the other bank, the boat was just about all the way sunk and I had to haul Hayes onto shore by the scruff of her lab coat. As she tried to calm down, I just ghosted through the buildings looking for cars. Fortunately, there was one right in front of me- an old Civic, with all four tires low and a shining trail out the bottom of the chassis. Chariot of the heavens she was not, but it would get some separation between us and the Peacekeeper Party back at the terminal. Now all I needed was to find where I kept my copper rods, and lesse… left hand to red, right hand to ground…
CRACK!
Chuckling, I heard the car start coughing and spitting. Popping open the driver's door, I checked the gas gauge and oil temps- rock bottom and way too high, go figure. Getting out to drag Hayes into the passenger seat, I rolled down the windows and cranked the heater up to max before taking off. I'd lost my rifle in the boat, but I still had my Glocks and MP-9 if things went into the shitter. Teeth chattering, Hayes looked at me as we did a sedate thirty-five mile an hour until we turned onto 130th Street, picking up speed until we got on 94, heading south at a good clip. About a half hour later, she finally got her shakes under control.
"Sorry." She muttered, leaning out the window. "It's… I'm afraid of swimming. I can't really, I just sink like a rock."
"Tell it to the guy who's gonna get electrocuted if he gets submerged." I grunted, slapping the dash angrily as the engine temp tried to redline and I took my foot off the gas. "This junker ain't getting us anywhere quick, anyway."
Puttering off at the next exit, I grunted as I unfolded myself from the driver's seat once we'd pulled over. I needed to pop the hood for a damage report- and when I did, I had to hiss. It reeked of burning oil, and when I pulled the dipstick it was flat empty. Growling, I thumbed a few rounds from a now-useless rifle magazine and chucked them down the tailpipe, grinning slightly. Next person to crank that car up would get a blast in the ass once the muffler heated up, if the car lasted long enough.
"So we need a new ride?" Hayes asked carefully.
"Unless you want to try and fix that junker, yeah." I replied. "We're so far off the rails it's not even funny."
"There was a plan?"
"There's always a plan." I shot back. "I was the distraction part of that plan, and ideally you'd be halfway to Wisconsin by now. Hope your friend likes cheese."
"So what's the new plan?"
Rolling my eyes, I started walking to the sidewalk. "We're gonna find a truck stop or a rent-a-car station, and beg, borrow, or steal a ride."
"…you're serious."
"Yeah, well, can't exactly call home for a ride. The Peacekeepers are probably monitoring every cell tower in the county, I don't have any commo gear to put a call out they can't find, and I've only got three hundred in cash."
"Make that a thousand, then." Hayes muttered. "Would a ham radio work? I did a little bit of transmissions work when I was getting my Masters."
Scratching my chin, I pulled off my helmet and stuffed it in a drawstring bag I kept in my coat for this exact purpose. Blinking carefully, I considered it.
"What about CB?" I asked. "I know there's bound to be a monitoring station on the lakes."
"I can do CB." She said. "I just need a kit."
"Time to find that truck stop then." I replied glibly. "Let's get to it."
I was taking a huge risk here. If that power armor had integral radar or microwave scanning modules, then my plan of running behind smoke and in front of the fire wouldn't work. At that point, he'd turn that automatic elephant rifle on me, and odds were that gun was specifically designed to eat through their own RHA carapaces, much less my squishy ass. Still, as the enemy soldier started making noises of trying to see through the smoke, I moved.
Taking off like a shot, I manages to sprint over past the fire, ducking past another vehicle and around a large capacitor before reaching the coil mortar. Checking the diode pin display, I sighed in relief. They'd managed to idiotproof this thing so soundly even I could use it- or more likely, to some buyer in the Sandbox who wanted a new shiny. The system had enough for one shot, tube was empty, and I could see the ammo stack. Each round was a heavy little bastard, but I got one in the tube without too much trouble. Aiming it was likewise simple: kick out the aim brace, drop it as low as it could go, make sure it was pointed at the target, and get ready for it to go flying because it wasn't designed to shoot at something like three degrees of elevation.
"HEY UGLY!" I called, grinning.
"AHA! THE RUNT DARES TO FIGHT!" he yelled back. I could almost smell the testosterone defiency from here, along with that boyish need to scrap.
"SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND!" I replied, before pulling the trigger. The tube bucked, flying end over end and leaving high voltage cables flying everywhere as the shell hurtled down range. I'd picked a contact fused shell hoping it would blast open that tin can on impact- and as a faint echo of a boom came through my helmet's earpro after the sonic boom of the mortar's supersonic report. Stepping up, I walked forward to inspect my carnage.
The round had, unsurprisingly, blasted away the outer shell of the power armor like it wasn't even there. Inside, though, I tried to contain my gorge as I looked at what I'd done. Meat and electronics were scattered everywhere, the insides of the mechanized trooper very much on his outsides. The edges of the suit were a mess, and as I watched the enemy soldier tried to breathe in. What was left of his lungs twitched, and his hands scrabbled at nothing.
"Well, ain't you in sorry shape." I said, smirking at the helmet. "They're gonna have a fun time piecing you back together in Hell."
Another rattling wheeze greated me. I just snorted, grabbed the oversized rifle that on closer inspection was more of a machine gun, and started hoofing it back to the main building. Sympathy for the dead was wasted on amatures. Inspecting the gun, I frowned. For such a heavy piece of Peacekeeper weaponry, it was amazingly basic. Functional trigger, no solenoid charger port, belt fed, and the rounds were marked .455 Commando on the back. Almost like a real weapon designer made it, not some over-caffeinated nerd. Either way, it would work for my purposes right now well enough.
Moving back until I was on the edges of the firefight around the centeral building, I noticed the first trooper in power armor easily. Unlike the now-deceased Private Mistake in the remains of their firebase, this one was crouching, not yelling, and making sure to have some buddies. It's a pity they designed their mecha rifles so well- if it wasn't, I'd have never hit him on the first pass of the stolen gun, before I started putting raking fire down on his infantry support. Once I was the only gun talking in the area, I proceeded to get good and ready for a bruised shoulder as I dumped the rest of the magazine into the enemy suit of powered armor and ditched the weapon. Moving up, I started policing weapons and butt-stroking cowering idiots who thought that the rules applied when you broke them first. It probably wouldn't kill them, mind, but the concussions and nausea would put them out of the fight.
After picking up a new giant-ass belt fed, I started moving out. It'd be rifle only until I spotted the next power armored screwball unless I though dual wielding MP-9s was a good idea. Thankfully, basic goddamn tactics hadn't been pounded into the Peacekeeper's heads as small recruits, so edge security was terrible as I made my way northwards. Pop the one guy pretending to cover the flank, move up twenty yards, crouch, whack the sergeant, whack the machine gunner, watch the rest fall into disarray while I crawled out. Two squads went down like this, before I found the commander of the little power armor trio. This one was painted up, joy of joys, and had what looked like extra armor on his torso. That just meant the first burst was mailed to his kneecaps, though, and after that it'd be second verse, same as the first- dump bullets at him until he stopped screeching for help, rake the rest of the squad, empty the gun back on the mobile bunker.
As the screams started, I thanked the fact I was fighting for the defenders for once. I never got nightmares about the men I'd killed; but I'd never forget the men I'd failed to save. It was half of what got me into the shadow service, and right now it was what got me to tune out the ghouls I'd made and start hiking for the main building.
---
The front lines of resistance at the boat headquarters had collapsed fairly quickly, and the main line had more holes in it than a pauper's smock. Getting through was painfully easy, before I reached what was left of the friendly-controlled areas.
"This is Tomas, come in Command."
"Command here." I heard, panting. "We've got almost everyone back to the fallback line, but the professor is still in the main building. She's in the-"
And there came the static. They must have brought in another goddamn jammer. Oh well- I knew where my objective was, roughly, so I could start moving. That's when I thought I heard a voice. Stopping and bringing up my gun, I listened carefully.
"-not like that's my problem, mon chere. You knew the terms…"
A woman's voice replied, angry. "The terms never talked about that!"
"We were allowed to renegotiate."
"That was never on the table!"
At this point, I was seriously considering my entrance. Fortunately, they came to me.
"What you think is available is immaterial-"
BANG BANG BANG
Three shots later, the guy was on the ground moaning. Oh well- that must have been body armor at work. Not like I was the only one to wear it, or even the only one to use multiple layers for best protection. Shaking my head, I just bent down and warmed up my bioelectrics.
"Night night, little buddy." I said, tazing the shit out of him. Flicking my fingers, I whipped off his helmet to see who was actually important enough to go off on his own. Moments later, I gasped.
"Aachen? Aachen, what the fuck?" I asked, looking at the blonde beard under the helmet. "Christ!"
As I started muttering to myself, the woman next to me glared at me. "I suppose you're part of the rescue attempt?" she muttered, taking the time to kick Aachen in the side. "Or do you just have a grudge, like everyone else this asshole works with?"
"Nah, Aachen's pretty decent when you get to know him." I replied, swiping his guns and taking the time to pull out his grease pencil to draw a cartoon toothbrush mustache on him, along with 'Whitehead was Here' on his forehead. "I'm just amazed he's on a combat op of all things- they'd normally never let him out unsupervised."
"Because he's a terrible conversationalist and boring as hell?"
"Because he's a freaking boot." I shot back, grinning under my helmet. "Anyway, Tomas Archangeles, and I believe I'm your ride out of here."
"Professor Hayes." She muttered, ticking out a hand to shake. I returned the gesture gingerly, careful of bruising her hand. "You're not what I was expected."
"Likewise." I said, raking over her long, lean form. The ID picture I'd been given to work with certainly wasn't a curvy redhead, so a little paranoia here was justified. "Unless you got some serious physical modifications from your 'bots, I'm seriously doubting you're my package."
Hayes chuckled. "Yeah, that was my friend. She's taking your people out on a spin, get her out too."
"I'm gonna need some proof that you're-"
As I spoke, the sound of nails on a chalkboard greeted me. Smiling widely, Hayes showed off the inside of her wrists and the two projecting blades. Tapping one carefully, I whistled. Ceramic carbide, and sharp as hell.
"Yeah, that's some pretty damn good proof." I said, grinning. "Can you shoot?"
"Sure, and you can create life under a sun lamp." Hayes shot back. "You think I asked for some goddamn help because I could Rambo my way out of here alone?"
"Eh, fair enough." I shrugged back. "Now be quiet and follow me."
Moving quickly through the terminal, I stopped several times to avoid contact with the Peacekeepers. Taking a car out wasn't an option, and they'd probably have a helicopter on station. I'd need a really good idea to get out of this one. Unfortunatly, I wasn't paid by the good idea- just by the execution.
"So we're probably gonna need to get a boat, cross the channel, and hotwire a car." I said, dead serious to Hayes. "How much do you know about any of that?"
I got a flat look, and no verbal answer. Great, looks like my VIP was about as useful as a self-mobile sandbag. "Just stay behind me." I muttered, before heading on down to the boat docks. Fortunatly, the flatboat I'd come in on not three hours ago was sitting there, and the better part was a distinct lack of guards. Shuffling Hayes down the dock, I got her in without scuttling the poor little boat. My weight in the stern, though, gave it a little grief until I chucked a sandbag forward. Starting the motor, I winced as the piddling fifty cc rig warmed up and started pushing us over. If they heard us, we'd be dead meat.
This is about the time a wave lapped over the nonexistent bows and got Hayes to screech, pushing herself up. Normally this would be fine, except those wrist-blade-things hadn't been retracted yet, and punched through the bottom of the aluminum boat quite nicely, which meant more water coming in, which lead to more screeching and flailing.
Right, after I got done with this mess I was going down to Sacred Heart Parish and leaving a few c-notes in the plate so they could do some renovations and God could stop making me the butt of the joke.
As the boat slowly rode lower in the water, I sighed and looked over the side for depeth. About eight feet, still too deep to swim. Rolling my eyes, I let a few seconds pass, and then looked over again. Six feet.
By the time we hit the other bank, the boat was just about all the way sunk and I had to haul Hayes onto shore by the scruff of her lab coat. As she tried to calm down, I just ghosted through the buildings looking for cars. Fortunately, there was one right in front of me- an old Civic, with all four tires low and a shining trail out the bottom of the chassis. Chariot of the heavens she was not, but it would get some separation between us and the Peacekeeper Party back at the terminal. Now all I needed was to find where I kept my copper rods, and lesse… left hand to red, right hand to ground…
CRACK!
Chuckling, I heard the car start coughing and spitting. Popping open the driver's door, I checked the gas gauge and oil temps- rock bottom and way too high, go figure. Getting out to drag Hayes into the passenger seat, I rolled down the windows and cranked the heater up to max before taking off. I'd lost my rifle in the boat, but I still had my Glocks and MP-9 if things went into the shitter. Teeth chattering, Hayes looked at me as we did a sedate thirty-five mile an hour until we turned onto 130th Street, picking up speed until we got on 94, heading south at a good clip. About a half hour later, she finally got her shakes under control.
"Sorry." She muttered, leaning out the window. "It's… I'm afraid of swimming. I can't really, I just sink like a rock."
"Tell it to the guy who's gonna get electrocuted if he gets submerged." I grunted, slapping the dash angrily as the engine temp tried to redline and I took my foot off the gas. "This junker ain't getting us anywhere quick, anyway."
Puttering off at the next exit, I grunted as I unfolded myself from the driver's seat once we'd pulled over. I needed to pop the hood for a damage report- and when I did, I had to hiss. It reeked of burning oil, and when I pulled the dipstick it was flat empty. Growling, I thumbed a few rounds from a now-useless rifle magazine and chucked them down the tailpipe, grinning slightly. Next person to crank that car up would get a blast in the ass once the muffler heated up, if the car lasted long enough.
"So we need a new ride?" Hayes asked carefully.
"Unless you want to try and fix that junker, yeah." I replied. "We're so far off the rails it's not even funny."
"There was a plan?"
"There's always a plan." I shot back. "I was the distraction part of that plan, and ideally you'd be halfway to Wisconsin by now. Hope your friend likes cheese."
"So what's the new plan?"
Rolling my eyes, I started walking to the sidewalk. "We're gonna find a truck stop or a rent-a-car station, and beg, borrow, or steal a ride."
"…you're serious."
"Yeah, well, can't exactly call home for a ride. The Peacekeepers are probably monitoring every cell tower in the county, I don't have any commo gear to put a call out they can't find, and I've only got three hundred in cash."
"Make that a thousand, then." Hayes muttered. "Would a ham radio work? I did a little bit of transmissions work when I was getting my Masters."
Scratching my chin, I pulled off my helmet and stuffed it in a drawstring bag I kept in my coat for this exact purpose. Blinking carefully, I considered it.
"What about CB?" I asked. "I know there's bound to be a monitoring station on the lakes."
"I can do CB." She said. "I just need a kit."
"Time to find that truck stop then." I replied glibly. "Let's get to it."
Nail it Down
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
As we walked down the street towards a Stop-and-Go, Hayes rubbed her wrists sorely. When the nanomachines started implanting upgrades, they didn't accept suggestions from the thinking part of the brain. My bioelectric cells hadn't been planned, and judging by the way Hayes was rubbing her wrists her particular set of abilities hadn't come with a prep guide either. Such was life, I thought glumly. Lose one thing, gain another you couldn't use. Push through until you can use the new tools, and loose them again. Shove, thrust, force your way through the barriers until the heavens were in your grasp.
That was the theory, anyway. I just kept surviving.
"So…" Hayes muttered, looking over at your flapping coat of doom and the creaking squeaking exoskeleton under it. "Do you… need to fix that?"
"No." I grumbled, rolling my shoulders and hearing the servos scream. "Alright, maybe."
"Something tells me that you might want to work on that."
I shrugged and grimaced as a support strut popped out of the back architecture. Reaching around to whack it, I groaned as the strut jabbed my shirt.
"Alright, I might need some help getting it unfucked." I grumbled, sighing. "We'll worry about it once we've got a ride, though."
"You'd be surprised what I can do with metal." She said, grinning. "I wasn't just a biomechanical doctorate, you know."
I rolled my eyes. "Y'see, it's not that I don't believe you, but we kinda need a ride first. My suit isn't in critical condition yet."
"Somehow I don't believe you." Hayes shot back, grinning.
I huffed. "Believe what you want; we need to get the fuck out of this city."
Hayes just made a sad face as I kept walking. The gas station had a CB radio for sale for cheep, and after I bought it with my waterlogged cash we found a parking lot to squat in. Thankfully, my suit's nine-volt DC plug still worked, so we got the radio up and working.
That's about when said suit's main motive circuitbreaker slammed open because something important was shorting, and I found myself frozen still.
"neener neener neener~" Hayes said, laughing as I groaned. I'd at least had the foresight to get into a cross-legged seat, because I knew when this happened it would take a while to fix. Fortunatly, the arms had a no-power functionality, which meant I could peel out of them and yank the emergency dismount handle so I could get out.
About a moment after that, I grinned. Or Hayes could do it.
"Yeah, so, erm, this is exactly as bad as it looks." I began, sighing. "Could you do me a solid and go to my back?"
Hayes got back there, chuckling. "Okay, so now what?"
"Go to the top of my coat, and fish around under the lapel for a d-ring."
"Okay…"
"Now, yank really hard."
As Hayes yanked, the back panel of my armored coat fell down, catching both her feet. Yelling, she jumped back and started hopping around angrily. I just laughed- that coat weighed nearly two hundred pounds thanks to all the ceramic armor disks in it, and the back panel was at least eighty-five.
"That could have broken my feet!" she yelled.
"Says the woman wearing steel-toes." I shot back. "Now get back here and grab the big yellow lever."
Creeping back, Hayes took the lever.
"Now, you're gonna need to pull up, then pull out, then let it fall down." I said carefully. "After that, step back some because this thing's gonna fall over backwards."
Hayes grabbed the lever, and pulled out. The emergency latch was pretty simple- pull up to get it into position, pull out to assume Direct Control of the primary movement torsion cables and lock them tight until they past the latch point, and then let it fall down as the lines unspooled and connective seams disengaged. In theory, you could escape latch yourself and be out of the suit in a minute. Alone, I'd never made it in less than three because I did it with the suit fully unpowered and that meant I had to manually disengage an arm.
Today only took eight minutes, mostly because I still had to get out of my coat too. Standing in my polyester undersuit, I breathed heavily, sweating like a bitch. Damn thing was heavy when it was all the way off. Looking over pointedly at the CB, I got to work on pulling the coat off the suit and inspecting the damage. Good news was it wasn't much- just a few popped struts, loose cables, and some water in the fuel tanks and battery substrait.
Ok, that last one was actually kinda bad, to the tune of electrocuting my ass. Nothing a little drying time and surgical percussive matinence couldn't fix on the whole, though. Pulling the offending components apart, I started shaking the damp out while Hayes ran the CB trying to get ahold of the coast guard. She kept shooting me odd looks, though, as I heaved at getting the suit's front-end connector cable reset. The fact it projected from what was about the groin was hopefully unrelated, but not likely.
"This is Coast Guard CB station 259, come in?" a voice said, trickling out of the voice box.
"Come in Coast Guard station 259, this is callsign Hare, over." Hayes replied, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Call sign Hare was the unofficial "we're in the shitter" handle for any Michigan operatives out there. The fact I'd heard and used it way too many times was beside the point.
"Callsign Hare, be advised that crank-calling the Coast Guard is a criminal offense. Please use callsign CG259 from this point forward."
Hayes blinked, troubled. I just found one of my pistols, and checked it carefully. Still good.
"CG259, has something been a problem? We haven't been on air at all today."
"Hare, we've had at least five calls from Callsign Hare addressed to us today, and none of them are from the same location. It's suspicious."
Something tickled my brain, enough to get me to start tabbing my exoskeleton back together and slotting myself into it. Wet batteries be damned- I had about two years of this shit under my belt at this point, and the first thing I'd learned was to never let a hunch go untouched.
"CG259, this is Hare, and I don't know about any other callsign Hares. Do you have information about the tidal charts or bay flow, over?"
Tidal charts and bay flow- that meant public transit.
"Hare, we have no such information, and there's a call coming in on boating frequencies we need to take. CG259 out."
Snug down in my armor, I powered it on and felt the Wankel engine that provided the hydraulic power and some of the electric come to life with a characteristic sharp right kick. Standing up, the hydraulic boosters brought my mass up, while the torsion system controlled the weight distribution smoothly and organically. Drawing the MP-9 locked to the belt I hadn't needed yet, I racked the bolt professionally and glared at my surroundings. Nothing came out, so I snapped on my helmet and glared out.
"Tomas?" Hayes asked, nervous.
"The Coasties were tracking our signal." I growled, my helmet speakers leaving everything a flat electric tone. "If they were, the Institute could be too."
"What?"
"Direction/Frequency loops. Three or four of them, and they could triangulate us. Can you jack a car?"
"No!"
I sighed, the synth turning it into a robotic moan. "Then get my coat on and when shit happens get down."
"Are you sure-"
Before I could answer Hayes, a Peacekeepers van popped an e-break turn on the empty road in front of us, slamming onto it's side and having some very queasy troops pour out, barely able to train their guns on us. Stroking the trigger, I adopted the classic side-on duelist position as the reinforced wrists let me use the submachine gun as an autopistol while mowing down the enemy. Three bullets, and change targets. Mozambique drill, all day every day. Two for center of mass, one right through the open-faced helmet.
It was barely a minute before I was done. They couldn't suppress, they couldn't move under fire, hell not many of them had even taken solid cover. Moving up, I policed weapon from the grim remains of the corpses, delivering mercy to the ones who wouldn't make it back to a medical bay. I told myself it was a kindness, instead of letting them drown in their own blood from a "miss" that had cut open their throats, or landed two shots close enough to cleave body armor on the second round. Parabellum would kill a man, but I wasn't in the mood to leave it to doubt. Digging through the van for any real weapons, I growled softly. Just a vibro-sword, a crystalline jackknife upgraded to slice through most anything as long as nothing chined on it too hard. No matter, I could mag-lock it to the small of my back and keep moving. Coming up for air, I winced at the smear of lead on my coat.
They must have been aiming for Hayes, damnit. Going over, I pulled the coat off her carefully and grimaced. None of the shots had gone through, thank God, but four hundred and fifty-five foot-pounds of energy was still a fuckload of oomph.
I had to think for a moment why the hell I even knew the muzzle energy of a Peacekeeper round, until I remembered it was basically a Russian round and I had done a paper on Russian pistols as part of my degree so I'd get to Petty Officer. 7N31, except it was written with an H because fucking Cryllic. Didn't change the fact that Hayes probably felt like she'd been the central figure of a Taliban honor killing.
"You ok?" I asked tactlessly.
Hayes moaned pitifully. "No."
"Anything feel broken?"
"Hell if I know. Maybe my collarbone?"
I rolled my eyes under the helmet, and went in to check as carefuly as I could. Unfortunatly, she was right- that collarbone was pretty much broken. So was her tibia, radium, and a hell of a lot of abdominal bruising along the way. Considering that coat was a very ablative top armor layer deisgned to go over an exoskeleton, she actually came out pretty good. Going over to the Peacekeeper van, I considered my options carefully, sighed, and rolled my shoulders. This was gonna suck for the boys at State to fix, all right. Grabbing the side of the van, I dug my mechanical fingers in and heaved. I was lifting it all right- now time for the hard part.
The problem was, most of the time my hands were inside the option power gloves. However, for this next bit I needed to go into a pushing grip rather than lifting grip, which meant hoping the suit's palm disks were working. Sweating, I opened up the vocal command console, and directed all power into the operation. Tension systems, hydraulics, locking bar, solenoid movers, a dozen different systems all dedicated to getting this fucking heavy van back on its feet-
-THUNK!
Falling on my face after the van finally past the tipping point was well worth it. Picking myself and my suit off the concrete, I grimaced as I felt a wet stain forming on my ass. Must have blown out some of the radiator system, which meant I'd need to baby the suit carefully until I could do some duct-tape tricks and get some motor oil in it. Until then, though, it would be enough for me to put a shot-up scientist and my sorry ass over the border and into Michigan.
I hoped.
That was the theory, anyway. I just kept surviving.
"So…" Hayes muttered, looking over at your flapping coat of doom and the creaking squeaking exoskeleton under it. "Do you… need to fix that?"
"No." I grumbled, rolling my shoulders and hearing the servos scream. "Alright, maybe."
"Something tells me that you might want to work on that."
I shrugged and grimaced as a support strut popped out of the back architecture. Reaching around to whack it, I groaned as the strut jabbed my shirt.
"Alright, I might need some help getting it unfucked." I grumbled, sighing. "We'll worry about it once we've got a ride, though."
"You'd be surprised what I can do with metal." She said, grinning. "I wasn't just a biomechanical doctorate, you know."
I rolled my eyes. "Y'see, it's not that I don't believe you, but we kinda need a ride first. My suit isn't in critical condition yet."
"Somehow I don't believe you." Hayes shot back, grinning.
I huffed. "Believe what you want; we need to get the fuck out of this city."
Hayes just made a sad face as I kept walking. The gas station had a CB radio for sale for cheep, and after I bought it with my waterlogged cash we found a parking lot to squat in. Thankfully, my suit's nine-volt DC plug still worked, so we got the radio up and working.
That's about when said suit's main motive circuitbreaker slammed open because something important was shorting, and I found myself frozen still.
"neener neener neener~" Hayes said, laughing as I groaned. I'd at least had the foresight to get into a cross-legged seat, because I knew when this happened it would take a while to fix. Fortunatly, the arms had a no-power functionality, which meant I could peel out of them and yank the emergency dismount handle so I could get out.
About a moment after that, I grinned. Or Hayes could do it.
"Yeah, so, erm, this is exactly as bad as it looks." I began, sighing. "Could you do me a solid and go to my back?"
Hayes got back there, chuckling. "Okay, so now what?"
"Go to the top of my coat, and fish around under the lapel for a d-ring."
"Okay…"
"Now, yank really hard."
As Hayes yanked, the back panel of my armored coat fell down, catching both her feet. Yelling, she jumped back and started hopping around angrily. I just laughed- that coat weighed nearly two hundred pounds thanks to all the ceramic armor disks in it, and the back panel was at least eighty-five.
"That could have broken my feet!" she yelled.
"Says the woman wearing steel-toes." I shot back. "Now get back here and grab the big yellow lever."
Creeping back, Hayes took the lever.
"Now, you're gonna need to pull up, then pull out, then let it fall down." I said carefully. "After that, step back some because this thing's gonna fall over backwards."
Hayes grabbed the lever, and pulled out. The emergency latch was pretty simple- pull up to get it into position, pull out to assume Direct Control of the primary movement torsion cables and lock them tight until they past the latch point, and then let it fall down as the lines unspooled and connective seams disengaged. In theory, you could escape latch yourself and be out of the suit in a minute. Alone, I'd never made it in less than three because I did it with the suit fully unpowered and that meant I had to manually disengage an arm.
Today only took eight minutes, mostly because I still had to get out of my coat too. Standing in my polyester undersuit, I breathed heavily, sweating like a bitch. Damn thing was heavy when it was all the way off. Looking over pointedly at the CB, I got to work on pulling the coat off the suit and inspecting the damage. Good news was it wasn't much- just a few popped struts, loose cables, and some water in the fuel tanks and battery substrait.
Ok, that last one was actually kinda bad, to the tune of electrocuting my ass. Nothing a little drying time and surgical percussive matinence couldn't fix on the whole, though. Pulling the offending components apart, I started shaking the damp out while Hayes ran the CB trying to get ahold of the coast guard. She kept shooting me odd looks, though, as I heaved at getting the suit's front-end connector cable reset. The fact it projected from what was about the groin was hopefully unrelated, but not likely.
"This is Coast Guard CB station 259, come in?" a voice said, trickling out of the voice box.
"Come in Coast Guard station 259, this is callsign Hare, over." Hayes replied, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Call sign Hare was the unofficial "we're in the shitter" handle for any Michigan operatives out there. The fact I'd heard and used it way too many times was beside the point.
"Callsign Hare, be advised that crank-calling the Coast Guard is a criminal offense. Please use callsign CG259 from this point forward."
Hayes blinked, troubled. I just found one of my pistols, and checked it carefully. Still good.
"CG259, has something been a problem? We haven't been on air at all today."
"Hare, we've had at least five calls from Callsign Hare addressed to us today, and none of them are from the same location. It's suspicious."
Something tickled my brain, enough to get me to start tabbing my exoskeleton back together and slotting myself into it. Wet batteries be damned- I had about two years of this shit under my belt at this point, and the first thing I'd learned was to never let a hunch go untouched.
"CG259, this is Hare, and I don't know about any other callsign Hares. Do you have information about the tidal charts or bay flow, over?"
Tidal charts and bay flow- that meant public transit.
"Hare, we have no such information, and there's a call coming in on boating frequencies we need to take. CG259 out."
Snug down in my armor, I powered it on and felt the Wankel engine that provided the hydraulic power and some of the electric come to life with a characteristic sharp right kick. Standing up, the hydraulic boosters brought my mass up, while the torsion system controlled the weight distribution smoothly and organically. Drawing the MP-9 locked to the belt I hadn't needed yet, I racked the bolt professionally and glared at my surroundings. Nothing came out, so I snapped on my helmet and glared out.
"Tomas?" Hayes asked, nervous.
"The Coasties were tracking our signal." I growled, my helmet speakers leaving everything a flat electric tone. "If they were, the Institute could be too."
"What?"
"Direction/Frequency loops. Three or four of them, and they could triangulate us. Can you jack a car?"
"No!"
I sighed, the synth turning it into a robotic moan. "Then get my coat on and when shit happens get down."
"Are you sure-"
Before I could answer Hayes, a Peacekeepers van popped an e-break turn on the empty road in front of us, slamming onto it's side and having some very queasy troops pour out, barely able to train their guns on us. Stroking the trigger, I adopted the classic side-on duelist position as the reinforced wrists let me use the submachine gun as an autopistol while mowing down the enemy. Three bullets, and change targets. Mozambique drill, all day every day. Two for center of mass, one right through the open-faced helmet.
It was barely a minute before I was done. They couldn't suppress, they couldn't move under fire, hell not many of them had even taken solid cover. Moving up, I policed weapon from the grim remains of the corpses, delivering mercy to the ones who wouldn't make it back to a medical bay. I told myself it was a kindness, instead of letting them drown in their own blood from a "miss" that had cut open their throats, or landed two shots close enough to cleave body armor on the second round. Parabellum would kill a man, but I wasn't in the mood to leave it to doubt. Digging through the van for any real weapons, I growled softly. Just a vibro-sword, a crystalline jackknife upgraded to slice through most anything as long as nothing chined on it too hard. No matter, I could mag-lock it to the small of my back and keep moving. Coming up for air, I winced at the smear of lead on my coat.
They must have been aiming for Hayes, damnit. Going over, I pulled the coat off her carefully and grimaced. None of the shots had gone through, thank God, but four hundred and fifty-five foot-pounds of energy was still a fuckload of oomph.
I had to think for a moment why the hell I even knew the muzzle energy of a Peacekeeper round, until I remembered it was basically a Russian round and I had done a paper on Russian pistols as part of my degree so I'd get to Petty Officer. 7N31, except it was written with an H because fucking Cryllic. Didn't change the fact that Hayes probably felt like she'd been the central figure of a Taliban honor killing.
"You ok?" I asked tactlessly.
Hayes moaned pitifully. "No."
"Anything feel broken?"
"Hell if I know. Maybe my collarbone?"
I rolled my eyes under the helmet, and went in to check as carefuly as I could. Unfortunatly, she was right- that collarbone was pretty much broken. So was her tibia, radium, and a hell of a lot of abdominal bruising along the way. Considering that coat was a very ablative top armor layer deisgned to go over an exoskeleton, she actually came out pretty good. Going over to the Peacekeeper van, I considered my options carefully, sighed, and rolled my shoulders. This was gonna suck for the boys at State to fix, all right. Grabbing the side of the van, I dug my mechanical fingers in and heaved. I was lifting it all right- now time for the hard part.
The problem was, most of the time my hands were inside the option power gloves. However, for this next bit I needed to go into a pushing grip rather than lifting grip, which meant hoping the suit's palm disks were working. Sweating, I opened up the vocal command console, and directed all power into the operation. Tension systems, hydraulics, locking bar, solenoid movers, a dozen different systems all dedicated to getting this fucking heavy van back on its feet-
-THUNK!
Falling on my face after the van finally past the tipping point was well worth it. Picking myself and my suit off the concrete, I grimaced as I felt a wet stain forming on my ass. Must have blown out some of the radiator system, which meant I'd need to baby the suit carefully until I could do some duct-tape tricks and get some motor oil in it. Until then, though, it would be enough for me to put a shot-up scientist and my sorry ass over the border and into Michigan.
I hoped.
Last edited:
Poverty on Ice
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
Watching the tachometer in the dash of my stolen van wind angrily, I kept one eye on the road as my mind tried to race. We'd been found, shot at, and barely escaped; and I didn't know how they'd found us. The working assumption was they triangulated the radio after they heard what Hayes had said, but working assumptions weren't the truth. Occam's Razor tended to cut you more than the other guys when you were doing sneaky business, and even though this had resorted to guns in the deep twice now I still counted it as sneaking business. At least I had a good supply of spares for the zoot suit now.
Next to me, Hayes groaned as we went over a bump, coughing weakly. Getting shot a dozen or so times couldn't have been pleasant, and the giant mass of bruises that was her abdomen looked terrible on all of the levels. Pulling her hand down, Hayes gulped audibly as she looked at the blood there.
"Tomas…" she asked.
"Yeah that's pretty damn bad." I commented nonchalantly, mind racing for any ghetto doctors I could think of. 'Pretty damn bad' was an understatement par excellence; this was the sort of thing trauma centers were built for. Broken ribs, punctured lungs, internal bleeding, hemorrhage of the liver, all sorts of nasty things were running through my head. "Fortunately, I think I know a guy."
"I am filled with confidence." Hayes muttered, trying to lean back in the bucket seat. "I am also filled with blood that is presumably where it shouldn't-" she said, before a coughing jag took her and painted a good bit of her arm red. "-be." She finished lamely.
"How do you feel about veterinarians?" I asked, checking out the part of town we were in. "Because I honestly don't like our odds at a hospital right now."
"I like my odds less without one."
"To the ER it is then." I muttered, barreling across two lanes of traffic without a turn signal. Driving sane in a Peacekeeper van was the first ticket to trouble; the second would be actually following the rules. Luckily for me, the Chicago area was lousy with hospitals. We pulled into some vaguely Catholic-named joint, before I rather unceremoniously got Hayes out of the car.
"Alright, here's the deal." I muttered, making sure she could hold steady to get in the doors. "This is a case of spousal abuse, and your husband was about to rape you. You naturally shot the bastard with his own gun-" and here I gave one of the MP-9s to Hayes, magazine out and gun empty "-after which he started screaming and calling his friends."
Hayes glared at me, and her voice shifted gears sharply. "I knowing how to sell this shit, cracker. I did done grow up outa thems whitecoat's box, y'know."
I just raised my hands and nodded, the thick ghetto accent coming through loud and clear. I was rather surprised Hayes had such a strong Ebonic voice she could tap into, and she just smirked. "I don't never know why them white girls so scared of the hood. Half 'em be living there already- why not know everything else, no?"
"Seriously?" I muttered.
"No, not really." Hayes shot back, switching to what I thought was her normal. "But when you go to boarding school in a giant social experiment for the betterment of the city with enforced homogenization, you learn things real damn quick."
I just looked up to the sky, before tilting my head to the doors. "Right, well, time to go do your thing while I do mine."
"What that?"
"It's about time for me to play el chulo."
///
Seeing as Riverdale was right around the corner, I decided to go with the most obvious plan in the world to find a criminal element. Specifically, find a mall and cruise around. Took me about twenty minutes to find a drug deal going down, and another three to tail the car back to it's safe house. Knocking on the door politely, I grinned when a sawn-off double barrel pointed out the door towards me.
"Top of the evening, lads." I said, laughing the loaded weapon off. "Tell me, any of you interested in buying some lightly used guns?"
"Fuck off, creep." The gun holder said, glaring at me. First mistake- never be seen.
"Well, no." I replied, still chipper. "You see, I need some friends for a little get-together, and you all fit the description."
"I said, fuck off."
I sighed, before grabbing the gun and yanking it out of his hands before kicking in the cheap slat door. Coming in like a storm, the gun was pointed at another gangster before they even knew what happened.
"Now, seeing as I have your attention and your firearms, I'm offering a one-time deal. You come work with me for a little bit, I give you fine upstanding young gentlemen some free guns, and you'll loan me the use of your car."
The one in the back whom was on the business end of the sawn-off squinted. "How many gats?"
"About… at least twenty." I decided. "Probably more; depends on what was in the van."
"The van."
"Yes, the van I'm going to give you as a bonus for letting me use your car."
Say what you will about a Chicago ganger, but they weren't stupid. "So what's we got to do?"
"Well, first you're gonna watch me steal someone out of a hospital…"
Next to me, Hayes groaned as we went over a bump, coughing weakly. Getting shot a dozen or so times couldn't have been pleasant, and the giant mass of bruises that was her abdomen looked terrible on all of the levels. Pulling her hand down, Hayes gulped audibly as she looked at the blood there.
"Tomas…" she asked.
"Yeah that's pretty damn bad." I commented nonchalantly, mind racing for any ghetto doctors I could think of. 'Pretty damn bad' was an understatement par excellence; this was the sort of thing trauma centers were built for. Broken ribs, punctured lungs, internal bleeding, hemorrhage of the liver, all sorts of nasty things were running through my head. "Fortunately, I think I know a guy."
"I am filled with confidence." Hayes muttered, trying to lean back in the bucket seat. "I am also filled with blood that is presumably where it shouldn't-" she said, before a coughing jag took her and painted a good bit of her arm red. "-be." She finished lamely.
"How do you feel about veterinarians?" I asked, checking out the part of town we were in. "Because I honestly don't like our odds at a hospital right now."
"I like my odds less without one."
"To the ER it is then." I muttered, barreling across two lanes of traffic without a turn signal. Driving sane in a Peacekeeper van was the first ticket to trouble; the second would be actually following the rules. Luckily for me, the Chicago area was lousy with hospitals. We pulled into some vaguely Catholic-named joint, before I rather unceremoniously got Hayes out of the car.
"Alright, here's the deal." I muttered, making sure she could hold steady to get in the doors. "This is a case of spousal abuse, and your husband was about to rape you. You naturally shot the bastard with his own gun-" and here I gave one of the MP-9s to Hayes, magazine out and gun empty "-after which he started screaming and calling his friends."
Hayes glared at me, and her voice shifted gears sharply. "I knowing how to sell this shit, cracker. I did done grow up outa thems whitecoat's box, y'know."
I just raised my hands and nodded, the thick ghetto accent coming through loud and clear. I was rather surprised Hayes had such a strong Ebonic voice she could tap into, and she just smirked. "I don't never know why them white girls so scared of the hood. Half 'em be living there already- why not know everything else, no?"
"Seriously?" I muttered.
"No, not really." Hayes shot back, switching to what I thought was her normal. "But when you go to boarding school in a giant social experiment for the betterment of the city with enforced homogenization, you learn things real damn quick."
I just looked up to the sky, before tilting my head to the doors. "Right, well, time to go do your thing while I do mine."
"What that?"
"It's about time for me to play el chulo."
///
Seeing as Riverdale was right around the corner, I decided to go with the most obvious plan in the world to find a criminal element. Specifically, find a mall and cruise around. Took me about twenty minutes to find a drug deal going down, and another three to tail the car back to it's safe house. Knocking on the door politely, I grinned when a sawn-off double barrel pointed out the door towards me.
"Top of the evening, lads." I said, laughing the loaded weapon off. "Tell me, any of you interested in buying some lightly used guns?"
"Fuck off, creep." The gun holder said, glaring at me. First mistake- never be seen.
"Well, no." I replied, still chipper. "You see, I need some friends for a little get-together, and you all fit the description."
"I said, fuck off."
I sighed, before grabbing the gun and yanking it out of his hands before kicking in the cheap slat door. Coming in like a storm, the gun was pointed at another gangster before they even knew what happened.
"Now, seeing as I have your attention and your firearms, I'm offering a one-time deal. You come work with me for a little bit, I give you fine upstanding young gentlemen some free guns, and you'll loan me the use of your car."
The one in the back whom was on the business end of the sawn-off squinted. "How many gats?"
"About… at least twenty." I decided. "Probably more; depends on what was in the van."
"The van."
"Yes, the van I'm going to give you as a bonus for letting me use your car."
Say what you will about a Chicago ganger, but they weren't stupid. "So what's we got to do?"
"Well, first you're gonna watch me steal someone out of a hospital…"
Thunderstruck
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
Sitting down in my borrowed Ranger I'd recently acquired from the chulos, I checked the bolts on my submachine guns. Odds were that place was already swarming in "plainclothes" Peacekeepers, which means I'd need to run sneaky, then fast and hot. I had three mags for each gun, plus my pistol. Practically that meant I had six mags for one, and the other one got a flashbang tied to the side of the barrel with a loop of string tied to my wrist. Reloading two guns in a firefight was impossible, so I'd just chuck one when it ran dry and use it as a way to tomahawk the grenades into a crowd.
My suit was still holding up fairly well, even if I couldn't use it to enhance my strength past what was needed to move around my armor layers. Shouldn't be a problem, unless I needed to do a static rappel off the side of a building again. Really didn't want to do that again, let me tell you. Either way, I wasn't in danger of loosing my biggest asset. The truck, meanwhile, had a spare plate in the back for when I had five minutes, and a fake registration in the glove box. I was as set as I could ever be.
On approach to the hospital, I noted five Peacekeeper vans, plus one EWAR van that was "disguised" as a news broadcasting service. Panning through my helmet's radio sniffer, I groaned. Jamming, jammer, jammed. Everything was coming up static. Priority one, therefore, was knocking that jammer offline without getting detected. Priority two was creating a distraction to get the Peacekeepers to open up their cordon and let me through. Priority three was getting into and out of the hospital, ideally with as little fighting as possible. Priority four was getting out and on the highway, where ideally we'd be flying away at the fastest speed a Ford could do.
Parking on a curb (and paying the meter with a burner prepaid card; Peacemakers loved going after dodgy parking meters for some reason) I approached the news van as calmly as I could. The news reporter describing something was a pretty young thing, about twenty-two or so, and babbling on about a ecological disaster. Moving behind the van, I waited for her to launch into the next segment of her spiel, while getting ready. The light behind me was about to turn green any second now-
-and there we go! Throwing open the driver's side door, I threw him bodily into the oncoming traffic, a box truck going from forty miles an hour to isekai protag generator in a blink of an eye. I then popped off my helmet, and started screaming.
"Miss! Miss!" I yelled. "Someone call an ambulance!"
As the 'news crew' panicked and started pushing emergency calls in after getting out of the van, I snuck in through the passenger's side door. Three scary black consoles greeted me, with what looked like jammer controls and at least five sniffers. Rolling my eyes, I dug around in the normal behind the passenger's seat sling bag where they kept weapons until I found a thermite grenade, and popped the pin while rolling it into the back. Evaccuating the scene and dodging back into an alley, I grinned. There was the siren, right on time- trailing a Peacekeeper van right behind it. Four vans around the hospital, now, as I got in my truck and sped off to the building. Two were covering the drive-in entrences, one was covering the front of the building with what looked like a laser cannon on top, and one was on the emergency door with a dushka on the top of the van.
Glad to know they expected me to come in here with a BMP or something, Christ. I was good, but this was a lot of dakka. Parking by the staff entrance, I fried the electronic lock with a burst of bio-electricity, and grabbed a random clipboard off a desk. First rule of blending in: clipboards. It took about five minutes of wandering around to grab a secured tablet that was still logged in, and I smiled. Now I had data. A white labcoat was next, and I was about as doctor-ish as I was gonna get. Now it was time to find Hayes. Some searching later, and I had her diagnosis. Five broken ribs, broken collarbone, severe bruising, some bruising of the liver, one impact-traumatized kidney, and a pretty severe concussion. She'd been put on an IV, and her prescription list was already set. Sending a copy of it off to a bouncer E-mail address I had set up so my State Department knew Hayes would need a hospital when I got her over the line, I headed up to her room. It was unguarded, and more importantly Hayes was awake.
"Hey." She muttered at me. "You're an idiot."
"And you're a person of interest who's about to get busted out of this tin-can medical facility." I replied, unfolding a wheelchair, and moving her IV drip to it. "How mobile are you?"
"Not." Hayes grumped, shaking her red hair at me. "What's the plan?"
"It's called 'I bought a distraction' and we're at step 'no explosives were used'"
"I thought your job was to bring me back alive?"
I rolled my eyes. "Well, despite my best efforts, the Peacekeepers haven't found a chance to tie their shoes yet."
"Ha ha. Why are you grabbing the room phone?" Hayes asked, curious. I was dialing a number I'd very recently exchanged.
"Who is the hijo de puta calling my personal cell, asshat?" an angry yell came through the handset. I smirked back.
"Your employer. You've got three minutes from the end of this call to do your thing, and don't be dumbasses. They've got some decent hardware up if you're dumb."
"Ha! You're that gringo asshole, yeah? What makes you think we'll come charging in?"
"Porque tu no ataque, infrigo con molotoves la casa de tuya y voy a llamar ICE por mercado de drogos con chulos depravado."
I had a thick skin, but I was just as much a mestizo as the majority of those gangers. Just because Dad was a pale-ass Argentinian didn't change that. The other end of the line was quiet for a minute, before they finally hung up. I didn't need them, but it would help.
"C'mon, let's go." I muttered, pushing Hayes' wheelchair down to an elevator. Once we got in and the doors were shut, I checked my guns again and sighed. I gave those chulos about forty-five seconds once that laser cannon started firing, maybe a minute. It was designed to eat through technicals and VBIEDs at a kilometer- civilian cars were tissue paper in front of it. I checked my watch idly. Thirty seconds until they were going to nominally show up.
The elevator door opened, and I started casually wheeling Hayes out to the staff entrance where I was parked. Twenty seconds.
We were out in the parking lot, and I was hanging Hayes' bag up on the coathook while a Peacekeeper started approaching us on foot. Five seconds.
That's when the sound of trap music being blared out of the largest damn set of speakers I'd ever heard opened up. As the vocals started, both the Peacekeeper and I turned to look at the most garish E-500 van I'd ever seen roll down the street, speakers the size of my head decorating the outside. Then the gunner at the laser cannon rolled back, as if he'd been shot right on the beat, and I grinned. Those bastards had come up with a way to hide the fact they were starting the shooting! Pulling my own gun, I double tapped the Peacekeeper on the beat, and finished getting Hayes in the truck.
"You idiots, they're shooting-" one of the officers said, before he was shot too. At that point, a firefight was inevitable, which was when six low riders came out of the alleyways and I saw way too many muzzles sticking out the windows. Time to leave.
///
We had been on the road for about an hour, and had finally cleared Chicago proper when I finally pulled over to change the license plate. Once I was done, we kept going. Night had fallen, and exhaustion was trying to get to me. I wasn't having any of it, though, with a carafe of gas station coffee on my right. If Hayes would stop snoring and the radio played any good music, it would be perfect night driving, but I had the lull of a sleeping companion trying to push me to bed. We weren't over the boarder yet, though, and I wasn't willing to risk spending a minute longer on Illinois soil than I needed. Naturally, we were ten miles from the state line when an Indiana State Trooper flashed his lights at me, and I realized I was doing a hundred and five in a sixty. Normally I didn't care about speeding tickets, but normally I wasn't in a probably stolen vehicle with bad plates and no registration.
Being sleep-deprived and ten miles from the state boarder, I did the only sensible thing and slammed the gas pedal to the floorboard. We were doing too fast, the state police were on our tail, and I really should have seen this coming. Whizzing past mile marker 4, I considered my options carefully, and started rolling down the window so I could drop a smoke grenade. Grabbing one and popping the pin, I waited a moment and let it fall, obscuring our passage as we flew across the state boarder. We were safe and home free!
That's about the time I heard the buzzing. Looking up, there was an old Cesna with a searchlight on it, and it was scanning the road angrily. The hell? They couldn't be Peacekeepers, they didn't have an operating agreement to use Michigan airspace. Indiana only had the Racing and Motorsports Guild, and they didn't operate aircraft. That's about when I heard the BRRRT, and we lost the back left tire.
Yeah, those were fucking Peacekeepers. Snarling, I pulled out my cell and dialed 911- I knew they couldn't afford to try jamming cell signals here, or the Michigan FCC would be all over this with SWAT teams and warrants faster than you could say illegal broadcasting. As it picked up, I growled into it.
"Northbound I-94, Peacekeepers operating with deadly force off their alocted area, they have air assets. Send in whatever you've got, this is Tomas Archangelos-"
Which was about when I crashed into a ditch. Slamming the airbag out of the way, I got out and pulled my guns just in time to catch a bullet in the chest, driving me back into the hood of the truck. They were dropping paratroopers, of all the things, and I could see another response plane coming in. Fuck me. Slamming my dual MP-9s down on my legs to unlock the bolts I did the only start thing and start lining up shots under the chutes. My helmet had a (terrible) stereoscopic rangefinder from both the above-eye cameras, and the minute they closed to a hundred meters I was putting bullets out. Of eight parachutes, I got four probables and two empty mags. Reloading my right-hand gun carefully, I started putting bullets out again, hopefully cleaning off the other two before chucking the flashbang gun at them to make sure.
Idiots. Paratroopers were an antique idea, unsuited to modern warfare-
THUNK
-unless they were a distraction. Turning around to see another hulking suit of power armor, I swore. I wasn't penetrating that. At least he didn't have his gun-
CLONK
Yep, he had his gun, about fifty meters away. Fuck you, Peacekeepers. Pouring bullets into his head, I saw him chuck a grenade my way, forcing me to dive into the ditch in case it was a frag. As it exploded with a bang and a flash of light, I swore- cheap tricks like that meant this guy knew what he was doing. Reloading again would be a waste of time, since I couldn't punch through an inch and change of cemented composite armor. Nothing I had could, except maybe my knife through a joint.
I still had to stop him from getting that gun though. There was only one way to catch up with his lead, and I frantically payed out as much of my carbon line as I could. I could throw it, and maybe electrocute him long enough for me to catch up. He was almost there when I sent the bundle spinning, and I barely felt it caress his back when it landed.
That's when I swore a little, and flexed my back as hard as I could while releasing my charge. My Sachs and Hunter's organs were massive compared to an electric eel, and I knew I could put out a lot of power with their enhanced structures. A Mac truck ran on twenty-four volts, and I could make that much for at least a few milliseconds, although I had no idea what my amperage was like. Presumably putting it through forty meters of ultrafine carbon line wasn't going to help, but I at least had to try.
What I got, though, sure as hell wasn't what I expected. On the back of the power armor, two large banks of heat sinks started crackling, and then exploded violently knocking the armor forwards into the ground. Panting, I twitched my line- still connected. Good. Let's see what another shock would do!
Apparently, another shock brought out more sparks and an electronicized scream of pain, with black smoke edging out of the chassis. Good to know. Getting out of my ditch, I put periodic jolts down the line, still careful to stay walking. He was screaming constantly, now, his armor looking like something inside it was on fire or cooking off. Had I hit a battery or capacitator?
"Kill… me…" he muttered through the pain as I finally finished spooling up my line.
"No." I replied.
"Do it. I'm… dead… anyway…"
"Still no." I shot back. "You think your Institute knows how to let people die?"
"Hah. Pulled me… out of… a wheelchair… of hell… for this…"
I cocked an eyebrow. "Really?"
"Parkinsons… boy… no life… left in me."
I frowned. "So what you're telling me is that thing holds all of you?"
"Yes… everything I needed… for my brain to work…"
"And you can't leave it?"
"Affirmative."
I just shook my head, opening up the drop box that held the comically oversized rifle all these power armor jackasses were issued. Racking the bolt to chamber another round, I went over to what was left of the man.
"Aim… center of mass… head only… sensors…"
"Thank you." I replied graciously, and then shot him. Five rounds in the center of the back plate, and then another three a little lower just in case. As the corpse broke out into flames, I sighed and started looking for the helicopter that would be our ride.
They'd be here aaaaaany minute now…
My suit was still holding up fairly well, even if I couldn't use it to enhance my strength past what was needed to move around my armor layers. Shouldn't be a problem, unless I needed to do a static rappel off the side of a building again. Really didn't want to do that again, let me tell you. Either way, I wasn't in danger of loosing my biggest asset. The truck, meanwhile, had a spare plate in the back for when I had five minutes, and a fake registration in the glove box. I was as set as I could ever be.
On approach to the hospital, I noted five Peacekeeper vans, plus one EWAR van that was "disguised" as a news broadcasting service. Panning through my helmet's radio sniffer, I groaned. Jamming, jammer, jammed. Everything was coming up static. Priority one, therefore, was knocking that jammer offline without getting detected. Priority two was creating a distraction to get the Peacekeepers to open up their cordon and let me through. Priority three was getting into and out of the hospital, ideally with as little fighting as possible. Priority four was getting out and on the highway, where ideally we'd be flying away at the fastest speed a Ford could do.
Parking on a curb (and paying the meter with a burner prepaid card; Peacemakers loved going after dodgy parking meters for some reason) I approached the news van as calmly as I could. The news reporter describing something was a pretty young thing, about twenty-two or so, and babbling on about a ecological disaster. Moving behind the van, I waited for her to launch into the next segment of her spiel, while getting ready. The light behind me was about to turn green any second now-
-and there we go! Throwing open the driver's side door, I threw him bodily into the oncoming traffic, a box truck going from forty miles an hour to isekai protag generator in a blink of an eye. I then popped off my helmet, and started screaming.
"Miss! Miss!" I yelled. "Someone call an ambulance!"
As the 'news crew' panicked and started pushing emergency calls in after getting out of the van, I snuck in through the passenger's side door. Three scary black consoles greeted me, with what looked like jammer controls and at least five sniffers. Rolling my eyes, I dug around in the normal behind the passenger's seat sling bag where they kept weapons until I found a thermite grenade, and popped the pin while rolling it into the back. Evaccuating the scene and dodging back into an alley, I grinned. There was the siren, right on time- trailing a Peacekeeper van right behind it. Four vans around the hospital, now, as I got in my truck and sped off to the building. Two were covering the drive-in entrences, one was covering the front of the building with what looked like a laser cannon on top, and one was on the emergency door with a dushka on the top of the van.
Glad to know they expected me to come in here with a BMP or something, Christ. I was good, but this was a lot of dakka. Parking by the staff entrance, I fried the electronic lock with a burst of bio-electricity, and grabbed a random clipboard off a desk. First rule of blending in: clipboards. It took about five minutes of wandering around to grab a secured tablet that was still logged in, and I smiled. Now I had data. A white labcoat was next, and I was about as doctor-ish as I was gonna get. Now it was time to find Hayes. Some searching later, and I had her diagnosis. Five broken ribs, broken collarbone, severe bruising, some bruising of the liver, one impact-traumatized kidney, and a pretty severe concussion. She'd been put on an IV, and her prescription list was already set. Sending a copy of it off to a bouncer E-mail address I had set up so my State Department knew Hayes would need a hospital when I got her over the line, I headed up to her room. It was unguarded, and more importantly Hayes was awake.
"Hey." She muttered at me. "You're an idiot."
"And you're a person of interest who's about to get busted out of this tin-can medical facility." I replied, unfolding a wheelchair, and moving her IV drip to it. "How mobile are you?"
"Not." Hayes grumped, shaking her red hair at me. "What's the plan?"
"It's called 'I bought a distraction' and we're at step 'no explosives were used'"
"I thought your job was to bring me back alive?"
I rolled my eyes. "Well, despite my best efforts, the Peacekeepers haven't found a chance to tie their shoes yet."
"Ha ha. Why are you grabbing the room phone?" Hayes asked, curious. I was dialing a number I'd very recently exchanged.
"Who is the hijo de puta calling my personal cell, asshat?" an angry yell came through the handset. I smirked back.
"Your employer. You've got three minutes from the end of this call to do your thing, and don't be dumbasses. They've got some decent hardware up if you're dumb."
"Ha! You're that gringo asshole, yeah? What makes you think we'll come charging in?"
"Porque tu no ataque, infrigo con molotoves la casa de tuya y voy a llamar ICE por mercado de drogos con chulos depravado."
I had a thick skin, but I was just as much a mestizo as the majority of those gangers. Just because Dad was a pale-ass Argentinian didn't change that. The other end of the line was quiet for a minute, before they finally hung up. I didn't need them, but it would help.
"C'mon, let's go." I muttered, pushing Hayes' wheelchair down to an elevator. Once we got in and the doors were shut, I checked my guns again and sighed. I gave those chulos about forty-five seconds once that laser cannon started firing, maybe a minute. It was designed to eat through technicals and VBIEDs at a kilometer- civilian cars were tissue paper in front of it. I checked my watch idly. Thirty seconds until they were going to nominally show up.
The elevator door opened, and I started casually wheeling Hayes out to the staff entrance where I was parked. Twenty seconds.
We were out in the parking lot, and I was hanging Hayes' bag up on the coathook while a Peacekeeper started approaching us on foot. Five seconds.
That's when the sound of trap music being blared out of the largest damn set of speakers I'd ever heard opened up. As the vocals started, both the Peacekeeper and I turned to look at the most garish E-500 van I'd ever seen roll down the street, speakers the size of my head decorating the outside. Then the gunner at the laser cannon rolled back, as if he'd been shot right on the beat, and I grinned. Those bastards had come up with a way to hide the fact they were starting the shooting! Pulling my own gun, I double tapped the Peacekeeper on the beat, and finished getting Hayes in the truck.
"You idiots, they're shooting-" one of the officers said, before he was shot too. At that point, a firefight was inevitable, which was when six low riders came out of the alleyways and I saw way too many muzzles sticking out the windows. Time to leave.
///
We had been on the road for about an hour, and had finally cleared Chicago proper when I finally pulled over to change the license plate. Once I was done, we kept going. Night had fallen, and exhaustion was trying to get to me. I wasn't having any of it, though, with a carafe of gas station coffee on my right. If Hayes would stop snoring and the radio played any good music, it would be perfect night driving, but I had the lull of a sleeping companion trying to push me to bed. We weren't over the boarder yet, though, and I wasn't willing to risk spending a minute longer on Illinois soil than I needed. Naturally, we were ten miles from the state line when an Indiana State Trooper flashed his lights at me, and I realized I was doing a hundred and five in a sixty. Normally I didn't care about speeding tickets, but normally I wasn't in a probably stolen vehicle with bad plates and no registration.
Being sleep-deprived and ten miles from the state boarder, I did the only sensible thing and slammed the gas pedal to the floorboard. We were doing too fast, the state police were on our tail, and I really should have seen this coming. Whizzing past mile marker 4, I considered my options carefully, and started rolling down the window so I could drop a smoke grenade. Grabbing one and popping the pin, I waited a moment and let it fall, obscuring our passage as we flew across the state boarder. We were safe and home free!
That's about the time I heard the buzzing. Looking up, there was an old Cesna with a searchlight on it, and it was scanning the road angrily. The hell? They couldn't be Peacekeepers, they didn't have an operating agreement to use Michigan airspace. Indiana only had the Racing and Motorsports Guild, and they didn't operate aircraft. That's about when I heard the BRRRT, and we lost the back left tire.
Yeah, those were fucking Peacekeepers. Snarling, I pulled out my cell and dialed 911- I knew they couldn't afford to try jamming cell signals here, or the Michigan FCC would be all over this with SWAT teams and warrants faster than you could say illegal broadcasting. As it picked up, I growled into it.
"Northbound I-94, Peacekeepers operating with deadly force off their alocted area, they have air assets. Send in whatever you've got, this is Tomas Archangelos-"
Which was about when I crashed into a ditch. Slamming the airbag out of the way, I got out and pulled my guns just in time to catch a bullet in the chest, driving me back into the hood of the truck. They were dropping paratroopers, of all the things, and I could see another response plane coming in. Fuck me. Slamming my dual MP-9s down on my legs to unlock the bolts I did the only start thing and start lining up shots under the chutes. My helmet had a (terrible) stereoscopic rangefinder from both the above-eye cameras, and the minute they closed to a hundred meters I was putting bullets out. Of eight parachutes, I got four probables and two empty mags. Reloading my right-hand gun carefully, I started putting bullets out again, hopefully cleaning off the other two before chucking the flashbang gun at them to make sure.
Idiots. Paratroopers were an antique idea, unsuited to modern warfare-
THUNK
-unless they were a distraction. Turning around to see another hulking suit of power armor, I swore. I wasn't penetrating that. At least he didn't have his gun-
CLONK
Yep, he had his gun, about fifty meters away. Fuck you, Peacekeepers. Pouring bullets into his head, I saw him chuck a grenade my way, forcing me to dive into the ditch in case it was a frag. As it exploded with a bang and a flash of light, I swore- cheap tricks like that meant this guy knew what he was doing. Reloading again would be a waste of time, since I couldn't punch through an inch and change of cemented composite armor. Nothing I had could, except maybe my knife through a joint.
I still had to stop him from getting that gun though. There was only one way to catch up with his lead, and I frantically payed out as much of my carbon line as I could. I could throw it, and maybe electrocute him long enough for me to catch up. He was almost there when I sent the bundle spinning, and I barely felt it caress his back when it landed.
That's when I swore a little, and flexed my back as hard as I could while releasing my charge. My Sachs and Hunter's organs were massive compared to an electric eel, and I knew I could put out a lot of power with their enhanced structures. A Mac truck ran on twenty-four volts, and I could make that much for at least a few milliseconds, although I had no idea what my amperage was like. Presumably putting it through forty meters of ultrafine carbon line wasn't going to help, but I at least had to try.
What I got, though, sure as hell wasn't what I expected. On the back of the power armor, two large banks of heat sinks started crackling, and then exploded violently knocking the armor forwards into the ground. Panting, I twitched my line- still connected. Good. Let's see what another shock would do!
Apparently, another shock brought out more sparks and an electronicized scream of pain, with black smoke edging out of the chassis. Good to know. Getting out of my ditch, I put periodic jolts down the line, still careful to stay walking. He was screaming constantly, now, his armor looking like something inside it was on fire or cooking off. Had I hit a battery or capacitator?
"Kill… me…" he muttered through the pain as I finally finished spooling up my line.
"No." I replied.
"Do it. I'm… dead… anyway…"
"Still no." I shot back. "You think your Institute knows how to let people die?"
"Hah. Pulled me… out of… a wheelchair… of hell… for this…"
I cocked an eyebrow. "Really?"
"Parkinsons… boy… no life… left in me."
I frowned. "So what you're telling me is that thing holds all of you?"
"Yes… everything I needed… for my brain to work…"
"And you can't leave it?"
"Affirmative."
I just shook my head, opening up the drop box that held the comically oversized rifle all these power armor jackasses were issued. Racking the bolt to chamber another round, I went over to what was left of the man.
"Aim… center of mass… head only… sensors…"
"Thank you." I replied graciously, and then shot him. Five rounds in the center of the back plate, and then another three a little lower just in case. As the corpse broke out into flames, I sighed and started looking for the helicopter that would be our ride.
They'd be here aaaaaany minute now…
Category One
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
I always hated waking up in hospitals. Inevitably, there'd be an IV in one arm, with my pulse up on some medical display for a nurse to chuckle over as they made sure I wasn't about to die again. The places always smelled sterile, with a faint air of dismay as the patients struggled to get better through tooth and nail- if they were the type to get well at all.
You didn't mind at all when Alice came home from a shift smelling like the hospital, though.
Damn conscious acted up all the time in hospitals, too. Do this, don't do that, keep your hands to yourself even though I wasn't going to do anything. It was enough to drive me nuts.
A more formal analysis showed I was in a hospital gown, and judging by the view from the window I was in Lansing somewhere. Joy. Shaking my shoulders, I slammed the "nurse call" button, and leaned back to groan. Unsurprisingly, there was a nurse there- what was shocking, however, were the two young men holding P-90s and the most garish digicam I ever had the horror to lay eyes on. Making a quick sign of the Cross with my un-IV'd hand, I glared at them like I was back at my abuelo's bar and someone had tried to drink and drive.
"The hell are you doing, Private Chuckles?" I snarled. "Where's your rearguard?"
"Outside the door, sir!"
"I'm not a fucking Sir and you know it, jackass." I grumbled, before tilting my head to note there were, actually, more sins against uniforms and common sense covering my door from the outside. I warranted a full section now? Must be moving up in the world. As the nurse did her thing, she occasionally glared at me, and I had to prompt her to speak.
"You're an idiot, you know."
"Oh?"
"We had to pull nearly forty pieces of shrapnel out of you, and most of it was from your own damn suit!"
"Well, that's a lot more than normal." I replied, before I groaned. And that was the last round of pain meds wearing off, damnit. "Pain med me?"
"Nope." The nurse popped, grinning. "You're going to go sober today so you can sign whatever these boys are here for."
Looking over, I saw the open laptop one of them had set up, as well as the secure dongle. Rolling my eyes, a face popped up on screen- Colonel Dwight Badger, Michigan State Police and holder of way too many connections in Washington for me to really fully trust.
"Ike." I grumbled, propping myself up in my bed and raising a sloppy salute. "How'd we do?"
"Well, you've officially started a right shitstorm, and Chicago's thinking seriously about dragging Ohio into an open war with us with Indiana going Sweede, so I'd say you and the Pilot's Union did a pretty shitty job." Badger growled, chewing a vape pipe angrily. "Yousif went down, Bethula is MIA, and roughly four hundred illegal weapons just 'vanished' out of State Police impound."
"Bethula?"
"Yousif's wife, you dipshit." Badger growled again, before letting loose a presumably flavored plume of smoke. "We've also got video proof of them operating unlicensed planes, flying in restricted airspace, littering, trespassing, illegal gunplay, assault and battery, and dozens of other crimes."
I just rolled my eyes. "Littering?"
"Lot of brass on the ground, skippy. All theirs."
"You're sure it ain't mine?" I asked. "I went through a hundred, hundred fifty rounds of nine mil there."
"The two oh three brass is all theirs, and we're blaming them on the nine mil too since we found an Institute gun with suspicious scorch marks on it there that shot it."
I coughed a few times before continuing. "So what's the problem then?"
"Wisconsin folded like a wet paper sock last morning when a Peacekeeper column deployed on the steps of their capitol building with twenty laser pointers and enough heavy weapons to make the Muscovites blush. We're on our own unless the Federals mobilize, and we're alone otherwise. The Coasties went with us, thank God, but other than that we're on our own."
I swore violently, starting another coughing jag. "How long we got?"
"Three days until the first Peacekeeper columns move out of Toledo and Gary, sixty until the Feds step in. There's still enough reactionaries in Congress to fuck things up, so they'll have to swing to us before the Fibbies make their case and tie the Reds hands'. We've already got the Guard mobilized, and we're not sure how much the Illinois Guard is going to hew to the Peacekeepers. Fortunately, we've got landmines and Reapers, while they have Cesnas and a few odd duck prototypes."
"So our own limp dicks and a sack of hazardous materials, gotcha." I grumbled, stretching out my fingers. "What's my job then?"
Badger grinned, and my veins went cold. "We're gonna counterstrike the sons of bitches, of course. You might have only been gone five days for this little adventure, cumulatively, but the boys in green have some upgrades for you, and a few wingmen too."
"I don't need wingmen." I said, sighing. "Learning the basics of a D-type suit like I use takes weeks to calibrate, and you've had at most three days."
"You'd be right, if we hadn't slammed together an automatic calibration program and had most of a spare suit to start with. They've had nearly a thousand grad students burning midnight oil on this, between parts fab and assembly."
I started laughing. "Next thing you know, you're gonna tell me Dearborn opened their doors to start spewing out copycats from their School of Mass Production, and Michigan Tech sent their finest beards here into Troll Country to hand-craft the Wankel engines?"
"Yes."
I seized up for a second. Everyone was burying the hatchet on this, it looked like.
"It's going to be a war, isn't it?" I asked carefully, the seriousness finally sinking in on me. I'd slunk around in the shadows for nearly four years now, stealing and killing on the sly. Hack a database, potshot a scientist, firebomb a van, set up an ambush… small change. Practically banditry, in the modern era. Now, though, other people were getting dragged in and I was starting to get afraid. What had I done? What, exactly, had I agreed to with getting Hayes out of Chicago?
"You thought it was anything else?" Badger said, coughing. "You've got the rest of the day on R&R, then you're meeting your team and getting briefed on your next operation. Pay for the last one went through, don't worry."
I sighed. "We're going straight into Hell, then?"
"Might not even be a CBRN zone, even!"
///
After a long day getting outproccessed, my emergency pain medication, and a clearance to go get some beer, I ended up camped out in some campus dive bar until I was totally blitzed and halfway into some girl's panties. She was pretty, in that dusky, mulato sense, but I didn't really give a damn through the mental shields of alcohol and the residual shock that there was a very good chance everyone around here was going to have some damn high chances of kicking it. This was a central production and nerve center for the coming shindig, so naturally they'd try and take it off the map first. For all I knew, the bastards had nukes up their sleeves.
That's when midnight plus a minute hit, and what looked like the combined important bits of a robotics and lacrosse team poured in through the door, with one particularly curvaceous redhead planting a kiss on me hard enough to make me not notice her three nose guard friends bodily lifting me up to get me in the backseat of a methelox Dodge Charger."
"Quien eres?" I asked carefully, focusing through the haze of the better part of a fifth of Jack.
"We're your team, man!" the driver said, laughing. "Will Black, technical expert. Riding shotgun is Antoine LeBeck, point man and general mechanical expert. The guy you were macking on is Eon Julian, and doesn't get to resume until we get back to the dorm-"
"Wait." I said eloquently, feeling out of my depth for a second, before looking at the red- no, strawberry blond in the moonlight- 'girl'. "You're a guy?"
"Yep!" Eon popped, 'her' lips smirking upwards. "Need to check yourself?"
"Oh shut it you colossal man-whore" Will said, groaning. "He's got too much of a five o clock shadow to be gay enough to fuck you."
"I can try." The now, rather obviously, male who was half on top of me said as I finally got a chance to loop an arm around him and subtly feel his pelvis. There was a very specific line I was looking for, and… yep. That was a dude, according to the bone structure. Considering my state of inebriation, though, and the fact Eon was smoking hot, though, a dude was fine too.
It was a moment later when all three of them stared at me that I realized I said that out loud. Coughing, Will continued his intros. "Anyway, Eon is our 'face' for anything that needs that sort of things, but don't get confused. He's probably the best shot of any of us, except Tami."
"Let me guess," I groaned. "Sniper?"
"Yep." Will said, proud. "She can blast a deer apart at a kilometer and a half with her fiber laser rifle."
"Great, well at least she's a girl so she's used to getting fucked."
A simultaneous "what" went out from around me, and I facepalmed slowly.
"The Institute uses retroreflective camera detectors on just about everything these days." I explained. "The minute a situation goes hot, anything pings off them and BAM it eats a mortar volley. A commercial prismatic eight or twelve mag scope trips them every time, and so do fiber lasers in general."
The car was silent, and I put my head in my hands. "Cyka blyat, we are going to have a long way to go tomorrow."
"Tommorow?" Antoine asked, gravely.
"Tonight I'm still on libo, and will remain on libo until six hundred hours tomorrow. After which, it'll be very educational for you. Y'all got power suit quals?"
"B-class across the board."
"Good. We're gonna be busy then. Until I teach you the way I learned, though," I said, smirking and groping Eon's ass a little "I've got part of my free time booked up right here."
You didn't mind at all when Alice came home from a shift smelling like the hospital, though.
Damn conscious acted up all the time in hospitals, too. Do this, don't do that, keep your hands to yourself even though I wasn't going to do anything. It was enough to drive me nuts.
A more formal analysis showed I was in a hospital gown, and judging by the view from the window I was in Lansing somewhere. Joy. Shaking my shoulders, I slammed the "nurse call" button, and leaned back to groan. Unsurprisingly, there was a nurse there- what was shocking, however, were the two young men holding P-90s and the most garish digicam I ever had the horror to lay eyes on. Making a quick sign of the Cross with my un-IV'd hand, I glared at them like I was back at my abuelo's bar and someone had tried to drink and drive.
"The hell are you doing, Private Chuckles?" I snarled. "Where's your rearguard?"
"Outside the door, sir!"
"I'm not a fucking Sir and you know it, jackass." I grumbled, before tilting my head to note there were, actually, more sins against uniforms and common sense covering my door from the outside. I warranted a full section now? Must be moving up in the world. As the nurse did her thing, she occasionally glared at me, and I had to prompt her to speak.
"You're an idiot, you know."
"Oh?"
"We had to pull nearly forty pieces of shrapnel out of you, and most of it was from your own damn suit!"
"Well, that's a lot more than normal." I replied, before I groaned. And that was the last round of pain meds wearing off, damnit. "Pain med me?"
"Nope." The nurse popped, grinning. "You're going to go sober today so you can sign whatever these boys are here for."
Looking over, I saw the open laptop one of them had set up, as well as the secure dongle. Rolling my eyes, a face popped up on screen- Colonel Dwight Badger, Michigan State Police and holder of way too many connections in Washington for me to really fully trust.
"Ike." I grumbled, propping myself up in my bed and raising a sloppy salute. "How'd we do?"
"Well, you've officially started a right shitstorm, and Chicago's thinking seriously about dragging Ohio into an open war with us with Indiana going Sweede, so I'd say you and the Pilot's Union did a pretty shitty job." Badger growled, chewing a vape pipe angrily. "Yousif went down, Bethula is MIA, and roughly four hundred illegal weapons just 'vanished' out of State Police impound."
"Bethula?"
"Yousif's wife, you dipshit." Badger growled again, before letting loose a presumably flavored plume of smoke. "We've also got video proof of them operating unlicensed planes, flying in restricted airspace, littering, trespassing, illegal gunplay, assault and battery, and dozens of other crimes."
I just rolled my eyes. "Littering?"
"Lot of brass on the ground, skippy. All theirs."
"You're sure it ain't mine?" I asked. "I went through a hundred, hundred fifty rounds of nine mil there."
"The two oh three brass is all theirs, and we're blaming them on the nine mil too since we found an Institute gun with suspicious scorch marks on it there that shot it."
I coughed a few times before continuing. "So what's the problem then?"
"Wisconsin folded like a wet paper sock last morning when a Peacekeeper column deployed on the steps of their capitol building with twenty laser pointers and enough heavy weapons to make the Muscovites blush. We're on our own unless the Federals mobilize, and we're alone otherwise. The Coasties went with us, thank God, but other than that we're on our own."
I swore violently, starting another coughing jag. "How long we got?"
"Three days until the first Peacekeeper columns move out of Toledo and Gary, sixty until the Feds step in. There's still enough reactionaries in Congress to fuck things up, so they'll have to swing to us before the Fibbies make their case and tie the Reds hands'. We've already got the Guard mobilized, and we're not sure how much the Illinois Guard is going to hew to the Peacekeepers. Fortunately, we've got landmines and Reapers, while they have Cesnas and a few odd duck prototypes."
"So our own limp dicks and a sack of hazardous materials, gotcha." I grumbled, stretching out my fingers. "What's my job then?"
Badger grinned, and my veins went cold. "We're gonna counterstrike the sons of bitches, of course. You might have only been gone five days for this little adventure, cumulatively, but the boys in green have some upgrades for you, and a few wingmen too."
"I don't need wingmen." I said, sighing. "Learning the basics of a D-type suit like I use takes weeks to calibrate, and you've had at most three days."
"You'd be right, if we hadn't slammed together an automatic calibration program and had most of a spare suit to start with. They've had nearly a thousand grad students burning midnight oil on this, between parts fab and assembly."
I started laughing. "Next thing you know, you're gonna tell me Dearborn opened their doors to start spewing out copycats from their School of Mass Production, and Michigan Tech sent their finest beards here into Troll Country to hand-craft the Wankel engines?"
"Yes."
I seized up for a second. Everyone was burying the hatchet on this, it looked like.
"It's going to be a war, isn't it?" I asked carefully, the seriousness finally sinking in on me. I'd slunk around in the shadows for nearly four years now, stealing and killing on the sly. Hack a database, potshot a scientist, firebomb a van, set up an ambush… small change. Practically banditry, in the modern era. Now, though, other people were getting dragged in and I was starting to get afraid. What had I done? What, exactly, had I agreed to with getting Hayes out of Chicago?
"You thought it was anything else?" Badger said, coughing. "You've got the rest of the day on R&R, then you're meeting your team and getting briefed on your next operation. Pay for the last one went through, don't worry."
I sighed. "We're going straight into Hell, then?"
"Might not even be a CBRN zone, even!"
///
After a long day getting outproccessed, my emergency pain medication, and a clearance to go get some beer, I ended up camped out in some campus dive bar until I was totally blitzed and halfway into some girl's panties. She was pretty, in that dusky, mulato sense, but I didn't really give a damn through the mental shields of alcohol and the residual shock that there was a very good chance everyone around here was going to have some damn high chances of kicking it. This was a central production and nerve center for the coming shindig, so naturally they'd try and take it off the map first. For all I knew, the bastards had nukes up their sleeves.
That's when midnight plus a minute hit, and what looked like the combined important bits of a robotics and lacrosse team poured in through the door, with one particularly curvaceous redhead planting a kiss on me hard enough to make me not notice her three nose guard friends bodily lifting me up to get me in the backseat of a methelox Dodge Charger."
"Quien eres?" I asked carefully, focusing through the haze of the better part of a fifth of Jack.
"We're your team, man!" the driver said, laughing. "Will Black, technical expert. Riding shotgun is Antoine LeBeck, point man and general mechanical expert. The guy you were macking on is Eon Julian, and doesn't get to resume until we get back to the dorm-"
"Wait." I said eloquently, feeling out of my depth for a second, before looking at the red- no, strawberry blond in the moonlight- 'girl'. "You're a guy?"
"Yep!" Eon popped, 'her' lips smirking upwards. "Need to check yourself?"
"Oh shut it you colossal man-whore" Will said, groaning. "He's got too much of a five o clock shadow to be gay enough to fuck you."
"I can try." The now, rather obviously, male who was half on top of me said as I finally got a chance to loop an arm around him and subtly feel his pelvis. There was a very specific line I was looking for, and… yep. That was a dude, according to the bone structure. Considering my state of inebriation, though, and the fact Eon was smoking hot, though, a dude was fine too.
It was a moment later when all three of them stared at me that I realized I said that out loud. Coughing, Will continued his intros. "Anyway, Eon is our 'face' for anything that needs that sort of things, but don't get confused. He's probably the best shot of any of us, except Tami."
"Let me guess," I groaned. "Sniper?"
"Yep." Will said, proud. "She can blast a deer apart at a kilometer and a half with her fiber laser rifle."
"Great, well at least she's a girl so she's used to getting fucked."
A simultaneous "what" went out from around me, and I facepalmed slowly.
"The Institute uses retroreflective camera detectors on just about everything these days." I explained. "The minute a situation goes hot, anything pings off them and BAM it eats a mortar volley. A commercial prismatic eight or twelve mag scope trips them every time, and so do fiber lasers in general."
The car was silent, and I put my head in my hands. "Cyka blyat, we are going to have a long way to go tomorrow."
"Tommorow?" Antoine asked, gravely.
"Tonight I'm still on libo, and will remain on libo until six hundred hours tomorrow. After which, it'll be very educational for you. Y'all got power suit quals?"
"B-class across the board."
"Good. We're gonna be busy then. Until I teach you the way I learned, though," I said, smirking and groping Eon's ass a little "I've got part of my free time booked up right here."
Rollout
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
Rolling over and slapping my alarm, I groaned thematically and considered rolling out from under Eon and getting breakfast. He was a heavy sleeper, and more importantly dead tired after five rounds in the sack last night. He'd been pretty good, but I had a job to do. Fucking could wait until after I made sure my baby's first commando group didn't get killed inserting into someplace with more machine guns than fire discipline. Crawling out of bed, I pulled on a pair of faded cammies that definitely weren't mine, and got to cooking breakfast. Two dozen scrambled eggs, three bags of hash browns, five packs of smokey links, three carafes of coffee, and two gallons of orange juice went on the table, followed by me calling the local pizza place and putting an order in for six pies at two PM.
"UP AND AT 'EM!" I yelled, grousing in the kitchen as I munched on a slice of toast. The motely crew I'd been given slowly trickled in around the table, and I groaned. Everyone was in PJs, nobody looked more than half alive, and it was easy to tell these were all squishy college students who were well versed in power equipment and had shot a gun before. Sighing, I plopped down in a chair, and glared at them.
"You've got forty-five minutes, and then we're getting our suits on for fun and entertaining shit." I declared, and then proceeded to start scarfing down food. They all tried to eat, but none of them seemed to have any apatite. Oh well, that was a fixable problem. Throwing the leftovers in the fridge, I grabbed one of the carrafes of coffee, before swiping the keys on the key peg to what looked like a robotics van in the driveway. Since they weren't moving so fast, I went out to start the van.
Still no mooglet trainees. Grabbing a broom, I sighed, and waded back into the den of sloth and college to start hurrying them out to the van with a broom and angry yelling in Macedonian. Once they were all piled in with seat-belts buckled, I got driving over to the campus where our armor supposedly was. When I got there, and got parked, it looked like that most of them had fallen back asleep, with Will and a girl who was probably Tami nuzzling Antoine's chest. How cute, but I had only had half the carafe of coffee and Mr. Broom was riding shotgun with me.
"Yah! Yah! Andele!"
Once they were in the tech shop, I took a moment to ditch the ducklings and appreciate the new exoskeleton they'd made me. It was a standard full-body rig, with my old '57s emergency release system intact and the floating shoulder supports for if I needed to lock in a pack or shoulder mount. The helmet was pretty standard- full face hard plate, no mandible, blast visor, radio ridge on the top… basically my old helmet with a new paint job and no fixed visor. Dragging my newbies over to each one of their own suits (thank you name plates on the stands) I got to explaining how to put one on. Picking up the cardboard box next to each one, I chucked them at my 'volunteers' and grinned.
"First step is putting on your second skin. These suits are designed to make sure the big boy set doesn't rub you raw, and more importantly that you can use some of the military-spec features in them."
Taking my own, I undid the neck, then started undoing the flat frogs on the back. Looking around for sensitive types to complain about sexual harassment, I didn't notice anyone who would probably be offended, then shucked off my stolen pants and sat down to make sure my feet went into the legs right ways right.
"Dude, really?!" Will complained, before I rolled my eyes. Pansies.
"There's probably a bathroom somewhere if you're gonna be shy about it." I griped.
"Yeah, but in the middle of the room? There's like forty techs around here!"
Shrugging, I stood up and pulled the legs up snug, then stuck one hand down the front so I could get everything in front lined up. "I was in the navy for four years, man. Lots of group showers, and that was before BUD/S. Modesty is for chumps."
"There's a girl here though!"
As a pair of panties flew through the air and smacked Will in the face, I took a moment to laugh as Tami struggled to get her arms into the sleeves. "She gets it." I said, chuckling. "Piece of advice, though?"
"Yeah?" Tami grunted, shaking her chest twice to settle the suit just right to the underside of her breasts.
"Go up a band and cup size and you can totally wear a bra over these. A suit like this offers next to no support, and neither does the power armor."
She nodded, and I got a muffled 'thanks' out of her for my troubles. Nodding back, I started doing up the frogs in the back, and smirked when Antoine needed Will to do up the back few of his suit. That kid needed to get better at his flexibility, or else he'd hate the next few weeks with having to put on and take off a suit every few days.
"Next up is actually getting into your exo. First step is to pop the neckline seal like so-" I said, demonstrating with a clunk, "and then undoing the centerline securing straps. After that, you unlock the hip bars like so-" CHUNK went the suit "-and then the arm assemblies lean down. After that you do the belt opener-" which then let me shift aside the front pelvic assembely to get at the legs, and start undoing ratchets there. "Now that you've got access to the legs, you can either start by popping out the front thigh supports, or just open the top loops. Incidentally, before you do either, set your exos out flat on their back. Getting onto an exo while it's standing is impossible. Don't hurt yourselves."
Laying mine down by the shoulders, I stepped in and scooched my legs all the way down, grabbing a pair of loops to jack my feet in under the horseshoe-shaped arches that helped support so much of the suit's weight. Then came locking my legs in, and settling my but into the hips arrangement. Locking the front retainer shut, and then the fore hip plate, I smiled. My left sleeve went on first, then my right, then my chest locks and rockers. Finally, I shut the neck loop, and grabbed the two pull-start handles behind the shoulders and heaved. Dozens of hydraulic and tension links snapped shut, the last inch of heave locking the master switch on.
"hrrrrrrrrrrrrrngggggggggg…"
My little class of novices looked at me, vaguely concerned. Antoine was the first to speak, looking mildly concerned. "Did he…"
"No, but it's close." Eon replied. "Last night it was smoother, like he was just unwinding."
"So you're telling me our teacher didn't just cream his full-body condom by powering on his exo. Good." Antoine said, looking about as pale as I'd ever seen a black guy look.
Tami just stayed silent, but as I sat up she shot me a look that I knew well. Too well- maybe I'd need to go shopping for her later. I didn't know many people who knew, were instantly comfortable, with the sort of feeling I was getting. Most people didn't think murder was a job perk, after all, and the ones who did were usually too far around the bend to really help out much. She knew, though, if that same face I saw in the mirror looking back at me said anything though.
Standing up, I felt the suit's electric motors hum artfully, the hydraulic hip actuators purring me forward without the old three-speed click of my old exo. Stretching my arms out to the side, I felt a larger range of motion, the shoulderblade wing tanks folding in tight over the new engine that was currently turned off on my back. Leaning forward, I gasped in shock- I could even touch my toes! This wasn't a '57 anymore, that was for damn sure!
Once everyone else was suited up, I moved over to a stack of large part wrenches, and picked one up at random. Tree inch head, weighed about…. Forty pounds. Just about right. Then I chucked it to Eon, who squeaked and tried to catch it. The iron bar disgused as a wrench hit him square in the chest, and he blinked idly.
"The fuck was that for?" Will asked angrily, netting him a wrench. He caught it, glaring at me.
"Will, how much does a three inch wrench weight? What would happen if I threw it at somebody who wasn't in equipment?"
"You'd smear them into a wall, because it's a giant… lump of steel…" Will said, trailing off.
"And Eon, who I do not imagine is much one for recreational caber tossing, didn't get knocked over by a third his body mass catching him high in the chest."
A chorus of "oh" followed this statement.
"Fact is, this stuff makes you stronger, and more importantly, heavier. My old exo alone brought me up from two hundred sixty five pounds to a little over five hundred. When I was done armoring up, I weighed nearly a half ton. Mass, and your own sense of self, takes on an entirely new definition when you're in one of these. Right now, we'd total out your van, and as it is when we're all in armor we need a heavy duty pickup truck to take the combined weight of ourselves."
"So how we learning this, then?" Antoine asked, stepping up to me.
"Simple!" I said, smiling. "You're not taking these off for the next two days."
The dawning looks of realization I got were priceless, so I continued. "You're going to learn to eat, sleep, cook, crap, and dance in these suits before I so much as think of handing you a gun, and more importantly think of bringing you along as support on a mission. Half the reason the Institute only hands these out to NCOs is because when you wear them, your words and actions carry infinitely more weight- and because you become a titan on the field. I'm not taking out a batch of baby titans, though- I don't want to watch you fall."
"UP AND AT 'EM!" I yelled, grousing in the kitchen as I munched on a slice of toast. The motely crew I'd been given slowly trickled in around the table, and I groaned. Everyone was in PJs, nobody looked more than half alive, and it was easy to tell these were all squishy college students who were well versed in power equipment and had shot a gun before. Sighing, I plopped down in a chair, and glared at them.
"You've got forty-five minutes, and then we're getting our suits on for fun and entertaining shit." I declared, and then proceeded to start scarfing down food. They all tried to eat, but none of them seemed to have any apatite. Oh well, that was a fixable problem. Throwing the leftovers in the fridge, I grabbed one of the carrafes of coffee, before swiping the keys on the key peg to what looked like a robotics van in the driveway. Since they weren't moving so fast, I went out to start the van.
Still no mooglet trainees. Grabbing a broom, I sighed, and waded back into the den of sloth and college to start hurrying them out to the van with a broom and angry yelling in Macedonian. Once they were all piled in with seat-belts buckled, I got driving over to the campus where our armor supposedly was. When I got there, and got parked, it looked like that most of them had fallen back asleep, with Will and a girl who was probably Tami nuzzling Antoine's chest. How cute, but I had only had half the carafe of coffee and Mr. Broom was riding shotgun with me.
"Yah! Yah! Andele!"
Once they were in the tech shop, I took a moment to ditch the ducklings and appreciate the new exoskeleton they'd made me. It was a standard full-body rig, with my old '57s emergency release system intact and the floating shoulder supports for if I needed to lock in a pack or shoulder mount. The helmet was pretty standard- full face hard plate, no mandible, blast visor, radio ridge on the top… basically my old helmet with a new paint job and no fixed visor. Dragging my newbies over to each one of their own suits (thank you name plates on the stands) I got to explaining how to put one on. Picking up the cardboard box next to each one, I chucked them at my 'volunteers' and grinned.
"First step is putting on your second skin. These suits are designed to make sure the big boy set doesn't rub you raw, and more importantly that you can use some of the military-spec features in them."
Taking my own, I undid the neck, then started undoing the flat frogs on the back. Looking around for sensitive types to complain about sexual harassment, I didn't notice anyone who would probably be offended, then shucked off my stolen pants and sat down to make sure my feet went into the legs right ways right.
"Dude, really?!" Will complained, before I rolled my eyes. Pansies.
"There's probably a bathroom somewhere if you're gonna be shy about it." I griped.
"Yeah, but in the middle of the room? There's like forty techs around here!"
Shrugging, I stood up and pulled the legs up snug, then stuck one hand down the front so I could get everything in front lined up. "I was in the navy for four years, man. Lots of group showers, and that was before BUD/S. Modesty is for chumps."
"There's a girl here though!"
As a pair of panties flew through the air and smacked Will in the face, I took a moment to laugh as Tami struggled to get her arms into the sleeves. "She gets it." I said, chuckling. "Piece of advice, though?"
"Yeah?" Tami grunted, shaking her chest twice to settle the suit just right to the underside of her breasts.
"Go up a band and cup size and you can totally wear a bra over these. A suit like this offers next to no support, and neither does the power armor."
She nodded, and I got a muffled 'thanks' out of her for my troubles. Nodding back, I started doing up the frogs in the back, and smirked when Antoine needed Will to do up the back few of his suit. That kid needed to get better at his flexibility, or else he'd hate the next few weeks with having to put on and take off a suit every few days.
"Next up is actually getting into your exo. First step is to pop the neckline seal like so-" I said, demonstrating with a clunk, "and then undoing the centerline securing straps. After that, you unlock the hip bars like so-" CHUNK went the suit "-and then the arm assemblies lean down. After that you do the belt opener-" which then let me shift aside the front pelvic assembely to get at the legs, and start undoing ratchets there. "Now that you've got access to the legs, you can either start by popping out the front thigh supports, or just open the top loops. Incidentally, before you do either, set your exos out flat on their back. Getting onto an exo while it's standing is impossible. Don't hurt yourselves."
Laying mine down by the shoulders, I stepped in and scooched my legs all the way down, grabbing a pair of loops to jack my feet in under the horseshoe-shaped arches that helped support so much of the suit's weight. Then came locking my legs in, and settling my but into the hips arrangement. Locking the front retainer shut, and then the fore hip plate, I smiled. My left sleeve went on first, then my right, then my chest locks and rockers. Finally, I shut the neck loop, and grabbed the two pull-start handles behind the shoulders and heaved. Dozens of hydraulic and tension links snapped shut, the last inch of heave locking the master switch on.
"hrrrrrrrrrrrrrngggggggggg…"
My little class of novices looked at me, vaguely concerned. Antoine was the first to speak, looking mildly concerned. "Did he…"
"No, but it's close." Eon replied. "Last night it was smoother, like he was just unwinding."
"So you're telling me our teacher didn't just cream his full-body condom by powering on his exo. Good." Antoine said, looking about as pale as I'd ever seen a black guy look.
Tami just stayed silent, but as I sat up she shot me a look that I knew well. Too well- maybe I'd need to go shopping for her later. I didn't know many people who knew, were instantly comfortable, with the sort of feeling I was getting. Most people didn't think murder was a job perk, after all, and the ones who did were usually too far around the bend to really help out much. She knew, though, if that same face I saw in the mirror looking back at me said anything though.
Standing up, I felt the suit's electric motors hum artfully, the hydraulic hip actuators purring me forward without the old three-speed click of my old exo. Stretching my arms out to the side, I felt a larger range of motion, the shoulderblade wing tanks folding in tight over the new engine that was currently turned off on my back. Leaning forward, I gasped in shock- I could even touch my toes! This wasn't a '57 anymore, that was for damn sure!
Once everyone else was suited up, I moved over to a stack of large part wrenches, and picked one up at random. Tree inch head, weighed about…. Forty pounds. Just about right. Then I chucked it to Eon, who squeaked and tried to catch it. The iron bar disgused as a wrench hit him square in the chest, and he blinked idly.
"The fuck was that for?" Will asked angrily, netting him a wrench. He caught it, glaring at me.
"Will, how much does a three inch wrench weight? What would happen if I threw it at somebody who wasn't in equipment?"
"You'd smear them into a wall, because it's a giant… lump of steel…" Will said, trailing off.
"And Eon, who I do not imagine is much one for recreational caber tossing, didn't get knocked over by a third his body mass catching him high in the chest."
A chorus of "oh" followed this statement.
"Fact is, this stuff makes you stronger, and more importantly, heavier. My old exo alone brought me up from two hundred sixty five pounds to a little over five hundred. When I was done armoring up, I weighed nearly a half ton. Mass, and your own sense of self, takes on an entirely new definition when you're in one of these. Right now, we'd total out your van, and as it is when we're all in armor we need a heavy duty pickup truck to take the combined weight of ourselves."
"So how we learning this, then?" Antoine asked, stepping up to me.
"Simple!" I said, smiling. "You're not taking these off for the next two days."
The dawning looks of realization I got were priceless, so I continued. "You're going to learn to eat, sleep, cook, crap, and dance in these suits before I so much as think of handing you a gun, and more importantly think of bringing you along as support on a mission. Half the reason the Institute only hands these out to NCOs is because when you wear them, your words and actions carry infinitely more weight- and because you become a titan on the field. I'm not taking out a batch of baby titans, though- I don't want to watch you fall."
Dirge for the Nation
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
Watching my baby ducklings stumble about in their powered exoskeletons, I sighed quietly and put my head in my hands.
"You're recording this, right?" I asked one of the test engineers as Antoine and Tami backed into each other and fell into a heap, with Eon dragging the later out as they slid themselves back upright.
"Well yeah." The engineer said, chuckling. "Your boys are gonna break something, and we need proof for the school's insurance to pick it up."
"Shoot me a copy?"
"Get me ten loonies and a coffee, and you're on."
Going over to the van, I gently popped the back door open and started digging around for the large armored box I used as a wallet for when I was all armored up. Once I had it, though, I proceded to go back to the engineer, and sighed when I cracked it open.
"Can I get you like… two fifty in tostaguacs and a pair of tacos?" I asked, shrugging. "I'm fresh out of real money, or food for that matter."
"Eh sure."
Forking over the coupons and cash, I looked back to see Will accidentally clothesline Eon into the floor, cracking the cement under his landing. Might as well get in there and sort some of this out, and even though uncoordinated flailing noises were to be expected, we needed to actually get things done today. Backing the van up to the garage door carefully, I proceded to load everyone up with a surplus of manhandling and then went out to the universal training range for the important bits- namely, learning how to run.
When I was in a fight, there were three things I had to know how to do. Run, shoot, and dive. Running got me from Over Here to Over There so I wasn't in the same postal code as incoming fire, grenades when they found out even superhot Soviet surplus Parabellum would get the job done, or more exotic weapons. Shooting wasn't nearly as easy as it looked, since the way the adaptive movement control system in the armor worked meant I'd need to do the same thing the same way a few dozen or hundred times. Fortunately, I had arranged a procurement of a chunk of woods with a convenient backstop, five dubiously legal Kalashnikovs, and a lot of 7.62x39 for blasting dirt with. The kids didn't need to be good shots, but they did need to be adequate and that meant practice. A powered exoskeleton like they were used to using had a very gradual and constantly set strength amplification curve, a prebuilt matrix of adjustments based on leverage and moment arm lengths, and a whole pile of other hoodoo that the computer boys mathed out.
By contrast, what I wore and what they were now wearing was totally different. By using adaptive matrices and nonlinear amplification, it took the starting position that was a boring, stock power suit, and molded itself into a second skin and operational marvel that knew what you were doing, how you were going to do it, and how to help adjust the suit on a sub-control level that meant everything you were doing was done with the gravity of a hundred and fifty horsepower transferred into a four liter a minute pump to power dozens of hydraulic actuators as your entire body braced or relaxed into a task. I was taking Will, Antoine, Eon, and Tami out to shoot a garbage rifle, and today I'd be proud if they didn't hit the ground.
By the end of a month with me, they'd be able to hold and fire two rifles at the same time, their suits eating the recoil as they unleashed death wherever they were willing to point their hands. Pity we only had three days, which meant I'd need to re-write my instinctive training schedule.
After we reached the destination and everyone fell out the back of the van, I went over to our gun supply and started checking them over. Five bog-standard Kalashes, five mags each, one hundred spam cans of bullet-shaped joy. Forking over a wad of stained dollars, pesos, and euros around a USB stick to the deliveryboy that should still add up to three bitcoin, I took possession of my new gear and started Teaching.
"Alright, alright, everyone. Raise on hand if you've ever shot a gun before."
All the hands went up. Good! That meant I could get to the fun questions.
"Alright, who's shot something on full auto?"
Tami and Eon lowered their hands.
"Legally?"
All the hands went down, and I grinned. "Well, considering the fact what we're doing is highly illegal anyway, screw that. Serious question, though- anyone ever loaded a magazine?"
No hands raised. Crap.
"Alright." I said, sighing. "So first thing we're learning is loading mags. Everyone grab five magazines and a spam can."
Squatting down, heels to the ground, I put the spam can in front of me and pulled a knife from the front of my left bracer. Working it into the side of the can just below the lip, I pushed in carefully, then walked the blade around a few times. Once I had a good hole going, I gripped the bottom of the can, and pulled up with knife, ripping the top off and exposing the neatly packed rows of paper packages, each full of bullets.
"Welcome to Soviet surplus, comrades." I said, jokingly picking up one of the packets. "Each paper packet is having thirty rounds, each can has ten packets. Each magazine holds thirty rounds, unless you're in People's Republic of California, in which they of holding fifteen on good day and five when ghost of Lenin is not feeling so good. On getting a paper container of bullets out, take magazine, and holding in the right hand with the front facing your palm, put your thumb on base of pushing plate. Then push down, and with left hand insert bullet base first. Is simple, da?"
Nods all around, and as I held out my demo magazine with one round in it I grinned. "A catch, though! Old feed lips on magazines that keep rounds in when not in gun are not as new and proud as your thumbs! If you are of bending feed lips, gun will not fire true! Do not abuse them, comrades!"
Groaning, my students got to work with me to load magazines. As I squatted down to the work, it wasn't long before everyone filled up their magazines. Taking them up to the line, it wasn't long before the kids- no, Tomas, they weren't kids, they were students, damnit- it turned out pretty quickly to be not terrible shots. That made sense, though, considering the fact they were in powered exoskeletons with combat modifications. One of the major issues with marksmanship was the fact that recoil and fatigue degraded people's ability to shoot straight. With the exos, those weren't a factor. Now it was down to raw skill.
Which meant after everyone was done shooting off their four magazines, I had them reload and do it again. And again. And again. All the technology in the world wouldn't stop you from feeling beat to shit after six hours at the range!
///
When we got home, I was laughing my ass off as everyone flopped around and randomly broke furniture as they all forgot they weighed twice as much as they normally did. Fortunately, I had some nice sheet and tube steel chairs and a table in the garage that had been delivered by the college because I knew this was going to happen. Back when I'd still been in the Navy, learning how to use the PRETZLE systems had been a headache enough, and I'd had six months in stevedore school to learn my way around the now-archaic servomotor systems. There'd been another, smaller hiccup when I applied for and somehow got into the BUD/S program and SEAL school with the new Amaterasu model combat exoskeletons. The PRETZLE was a brute of a system designed to let an ords tech pick up a Sidewinder on one arm and hump it across the deck of a supercarrier; the Amaterasu was a much more delicate system designed to allow for precision force delivery after getting shot out of a torpedo tube with me in it.
God, that had been a fun few days.
Things had matured since then, though, and now what I lacked for in time I had in spades with the machinery themselves. Civil exoskeletons were now close enough to military models I felt confident in getting the four screwballs I'd been handed up to speed so we could conduct commando actions and possibly covert operations. If I used smaller words, it would be planting bombs on bridges and planting bombs on people, respectively.
"Hey, Tomas." Wil said ccarefully. "Your phone is ringing."
Rolling my eyes, I moved away from the fridge and the possibilities of something to drink to pick up my cell phone from Wil. Tapping at it a few times to set the wireless link, I dropped it into a pocket in my armor and went back to the fridge to consider the benefits of getting a coke.
"Archangeles speaking." I said bluntly, getting out a can of generic store coke.
"Change of plans, Tomas." I heard a female voice say, and I stiffened up. It was the Secretary of State again, and she sounded serious. "I need a readiness report for your little band of saboteurs."
Frowning, I cracked the tab on my drink and shook a hand back and forth. "Well, they're not incompetent, but they're kids. What are we looking at here?"
"West Virginia just declared war on Ohio, and Kentucky's militia is mustered and moving in from Covington, and while I don't have word yet it looks like Missouri is mobilizing everything they've got. There's reports of civil unrest in northern New York too, and everything west of Colorado's just gone totally off the map." She said bluntly.
I just set my coke down. "Well then." I said carefully, sighing. "Cowabunga it is."
That got a chuckle out of my employer. "Yes, Tomas. Cowabunga it is."
As a moment of silence passed, I took a sip from my drink and smiled. "So what's my mission, then? Since the kindergarteners aren't ready to go yet, I'm your best single asset."
"Decapitation strike."
"Oh?" I asked facetiously.
"The Ohio National Guard is trying to stay neutral in this, and has deployed most of their forces along the Pennsylvania and West Virginia boarders, with command in Akron and a backup station in Canton. There hasn't been a lot of fighting, and we need to change that."
I pursed my lips. Why the hell was I growing a conscious right now?
"After talking with General Cartwright and the Governor, the decision was made to escalate the boarder situation. We'll have some Coast Guard trainers move in here to handle them, while your mission is to destroy the command center in Akron and the operational station in Canton. Casualties are immaterial, and you are to conduct yourself as an agent at war."
Drinking again, I sighed. "So what you're telling me is that we're fucked."
"Yes. If we can force the Institute's forces to split up, we can take them down. As it is, though, they'll bull through us unless we can lure them into a deep battle according to Cartwright."
"I'll do when I can. Can you guys prep a flight?"
"Already one waiting on the tarmac; Capitol Region International is expecting you."
"I love a good plan." I said, moving back over to the fridge to get another coke.
"Incidentally, since I have more important demands on my time now, your driver will be your future handler; Captain Eric Granger. He should be there in a few minutes."
"Thank you for your time, then."
I heard a faint chuckle on the other end of the line. "You always were a gentleman, weren't you? Either way, Tomas, good luck until we speak again."
"You too, Secretary. I hope it's sooner than we expect."
With that the call ended, and I went to grab and put on my helmet. My vacation was over, and I'd be back at work soon.
"You're recording this, right?" I asked one of the test engineers as Antoine and Tami backed into each other and fell into a heap, with Eon dragging the later out as they slid themselves back upright.
"Well yeah." The engineer said, chuckling. "Your boys are gonna break something, and we need proof for the school's insurance to pick it up."
"Shoot me a copy?"
"Get me ten loonies and a coffee, and you're on."
Going over to the van, I gently popped the back door open and started digging around for the large armored box I used as a wallet for when I was all armored up. Once I had it, though, I proceded to go back to the engineer, and sighed when I cracked it open.
"Can I get you like… two fifty in tostaguacs and a pair of tacos?" I asked, shrugging. "I'm fresh out of real money, or food for that matter."
"Eh sure."
Forking over the coupons and cash, I looked back to see Will accidentally clothesline Eon into the floor, cracking the cement under his landing. Might as well get in there and sort some of this out, and even though uncoordinated flailing noises were to be expected, we needed to actually get things done today. Backing the van up to the garage door carefully, I proceded to load everyone up with a surplus of manhandling and then went out to the universal training range for the important bits- namely, learning how to run.
When I was in a fight, there were three things I had to know how to do. Run, shoot, and dive. Running got me from Over Here to Over There so I wasn't in the same postal code as incoming fire, grenades when they found out even superhot Soviet surplus Parabellum would get the job done, or more exotic weapons. Shooting wasn't nearly as easy as it looked, since the way the adaptive movement control system in the armor worked meant I'd need to do the same thing the same way a few dozen or hundred times. Fortunately, I had arranged a procurement of a chunk of woods with a convenient backstop, five dubiously legal Kalashnikovs, and a lot of 7.62x39 for blasting dirt with. The kids didn't need to be good shots, but they did need to be adequate and that meant practice. A powered exoskeleton like they were used to using had a very gradual and constantly set strength amplification curve, a prebuilt matrix of adjustments based on leverage and moment arm lengths, and a whole pile of other hoodoo that the computer boys mathed out.
By contrast, what I wore and what they were now wearing was totally different. By using adaptive matrices and nonlinear amplification, it took the starting position that was a boring, stock power suit, and molded itself into a second skin and operational marvel that knew what you were doing, how you were going to do it, and how to help adjust the suit on a sub-control level that meant everything you were doing was done with the gravity of a hundred and fifty horsepower transferred into a four liter a minute pump to power dozens of hydraulic actuators as your entire body braced or relaxed into a task. I was taking Will, Antoine, Eon, and Tami out to shoot a garbage rifle, and today I'd be proud if they didn't hit the ground.
By the end of a month with me, they'd be able to hold and fire two rifles at the same time, their suits eating the recoil as they unleashed death wherever they were willing to point their hands. Pity we only had three days, which meant I'd need to re-write my instinctive training schedule.
After we reached the destination and everyone fell out the back of the van, I went over to our gun supply and started checking them over. Five bog-standard Kalashes, five mags each, one hundred spam cans of bullet-shaped joy. Forking over a wad of stained dollars, pesos, and euros around a USB stick to the deliveryboy that should still add up to three bitcoin, I took possession of my new gear and started Teaching.
"Alright, alright, everyone. Raise on hand if you've ever shot a gun before."
All the hands went up. Good! That meant I could get to the fun questions.
"Alright, who's shot something on full auto?"
Tami and Eon lowered their hands.
"Legally?"
All the hands went down, and I grinned. "Well, considering the fact what we're doing is highly illegal anyway, screw that. Serious question, though- anyone ever loaded a magazine?"
No hands raised. Crap.
"Alright." I said, sighing. "So first thing we're learning is loading mags. Everyone grab five magazines and a spam can."
Squatting down, heels to the ground, I put the spam can in front of me and pulled a knife from the front of my left bracer. Working it into the side of the can just below the lip, I pushed in carefully, then walked the blade around a few times. Once I had a good hole going, I gripped the bottom of the can, and pulled up with knife, ripping the top off and exposing the neatly packed rows of paper packages, each full of bullets.
"Welcome to Soviet surplus, comrades." I said, jokingly picking up one of the packets. "Each paper packet is having thirty rounds, each can has ten packets. Each magazine holds thirty rounds, unless you're in People's Republic of California, in which they of holding fifteen on good day and five when ghost of Lenin is not feeling so good. On getting a paper container of bullets out, take magazine, and holding in the right hand with the front facing your palm, put your thumb on base of pushing plate. Then push down, and with left hand insert bullet base first. Is simple, da?"
Nods all around, and as I held out my demo magazine with one round in it I grinned. "A catch, though! Old feed lips on magazines that keep rounds in when not in gun are not as new and proud as your thumbs! If you are of bending feed lips, gun will not fire true! Do not abuse them, comrades!"
Groaning, my students got to work with me to load magazines. As I squatted down to the work, it wasn't long before everyone filled up their magazines. Taking them up to the line, it wasn't long before the kids- no, Tomas, they weren't kids, they were students, damnit- it turned out pretty quickly to be not terrible shots. That made sense, though, considering the fact they were in powered exoskeletons with combat modifications. One of the major issues with marksmanship was the fact that recoil and fatigue degraded people's ability to shoot straight. With the exos, those weren't a factor. Now it was down to raw skill.
Which meant after everyone was done shooting off their four magazines, I had them reload and do it again. And again. And again. All the technology in the world wouldn't stop you from feeling beat to shit after six hours at the range!
///
When we got home, I was laughing my ass off as everyone flopped around and randomly broke furniture as they all forgot they weighed twice as much as they normally did. Fortunately, I had some nice sheet and tube steel chairs and a table in the garage that had been delivered by the college because I knew this was going to happen. Back when I'd still been in the Navy, learning how to use the PRETZLE systems had been a headache enough, and I'd had six months in stevedore school to learn my way around the now-archaic servomotor systems. There'd been another, smaller hiccup when I applied for and somehow got into the BUD/S program and SEAL school with the new Amaterasu model combat exoskeletons. The PRETZLE was a brute of a system designed to let an ords tech pick up a Sidewinder on one arm and hump it across the deck of a supercarrier; the Amaterasu was a much more delicate system designed to allow for precision force delivery after getting shot out of a torpedo tube with me in it.
God, that had been a fun few days.
Things had matured since then, though, and now what I lacked for in time I had in spades with the machinery themselves. Civil exoskeletons were now close enough to military models I felt confident in getting the four screwballs I'd been handed up to speed so we could conduct commando actions and possibly covert operations. If I used smaller words, it would be planting bombs on bridges and planting bombs on people, respectively.
"Hey, Tomas." Wil said ccarefully. "Your phone is ringing."
Rolling my eyes, I moved away from the fridge and the possibilities of something to drink to pick up my cell phone from Wil. Tapping at it a few times to set the wireless link, I dropped it into a pocket in my armor and went back to the fridge to consider the benefits of getting a coke.
"Archangeles speaking." I said bluntly, getting out a can of generic store coke.
"Change of plans, Tomas." I heard a female voice say, and I stiffened up. It was the Secretary of State again, and she sounded serious. "I need a readiness report for your little band of saboteurs."
Frowning, I cracked the tab on my drink and shook a hand back and forth. "Well, they're not incompetent, but they're kids. What are we looking at here?"
"West Virginia just declared war on Ohio, and Kentucky's militia is mustered and moving in from Covington, and while I don't have word yet it looks like Missouri is mobilizing everything they've got. There's reports of civil unrest in northern New York too, and everything west of Colorado's just gone totally off the map." She said bluntly.
I just set my coke down. "Well then." I said carefully, sighing. "Cowabunga it is."
That got a chuckle out of my employer. "Yes, Tomas. Cowabunga it is."
As a moment of silence passed, I took a sip from my drink and smiled. "So what's my mission, then? Since the kindergarteners aren't ready to go yet, I'm your best single asset."
"Decapitation strike."
"Oh?" I asked facetiously.
"The Ohio National Guard is trying to stay neutral in this, and has deployed most of their forces along the Pennsylvania and West Virginia boarders, with command in Akron and a backup station in Canton. There hasn't been a lot of fighting, and we need to change that."
I pursed my lips. Why the hell was I growing a conscious right now?
"After talking with General Cartwright and the Governor, the decision was made to escalate the boarder situation. We'll have some Coast Guard trainers move in here to handle them, while your mission is to destroy the command center in Akron and the operational station in Canton. Casualties are immaterial, and you are to conduct yourself as an agent at war."
Drinking again, I sighed. "So what you're telling me is that we're fucked."
"Yes. If we can force the Institute's forces to split up, we can take them down. As it is, though, they'll bull through us unless we can lure them into a deep battle according to Cartwright."
"I'll do when I can. Can you guys prep a flight?"
"Already one waiting on the tarmac; Capitol Region International is expecting you."
"I love a good plan." I said, moving back over to the fridge to get another coke.
"Incidentally, since I have more important demands on my time now, your driver will be your future handler; Captain Eric Granger. He should be there in a few minutes."
"Thank you for your time, then."
I heard a faint chuckle on the other end of the line. "You always were a gentleman, weren't you? Either way, Tomas, good luck until we speak again."
"You too, Secretary. I hope it's sooner than we expect."
With that the call ended, and I went to grab and put on my helmet. My vacation was over, and I'd be back at work soon.