“Rebekah, get down!” Herbert shouted as he pushed his companion into an alley with a powerful shove. Then he grabbed his spitter, slinging it upward as the concentrated fire of four guns tore up the pavement around him. Bullets ripped through his armor plating, powerful shells poking holes clean through as the street crumbled to dust around his feet. He fired one last shot before dropping to his knees.
The plasma grazed the dropship, cleaving off an engine. The others compensated quickly, the ship wobbling in the air as it maintained its balance.
I ran toward Rebekah, loosing a few shots from my pistols as facets rained out the side of the ship.
A smoker turned the corner behind me, Murka on point. He howled something unintelligible as he fired into the dropping facets, blowing three apart as each hit the ground.
I made it to the alley as a hail of fire tore up the wall at my back, ducking behind the corner, pistols raised and ready. I spun back around, firing at two approaching facets, my shots sizzling against their matte-black metal plating.
One staggered, my shots hitting true enough to fry some systems.
The other kept coming.
I pulled the trigger twice more before he got to me, the shots taking off his head.
But he kept coming, grappling with me, his incredibly strong hands gripping both my arms above the elbow.
I fell backward, hitting hard, head banging against the ground, the facet falling atop me, kneeing me as we went down.
I put both my pistols in his belly. Pulled the trigger as many times as I could. His insides sizzled, body going limp. Dead.
I pushed his wreck off me, letting it roll lifelessly onto the pavement, then hopped to my feet. “Come on, Rebekah!” I shouted. The translator cowered on the ground, staring up at me, a terror in her eyes she couldn’t express. “Come on!”
The smokers pushed forward, clearing out the remaining facets as the dropship slipped away into the sky, bullets tearing pieces away in jagged chunks. Smoke trailed from two of its remaining engines, the third struggling to keep the whole thing aloft. It sputtered, hung lazily in the air for a moment, stalled, and dropped straight down with a tremendous crash a few blocks over.
There were only two ships left. No more than forty facets remained. How the hell did we get this far? I wondered.
“You aren’t going to get much further,” said Madison. “This was bound to fail.”
I tried to ignore her and stick to the plan, shit or not.
Engines swept overhead, both ships strafing the street, unloading their guns, each tilting, passing within inches of each other before flying off to turn around and do it again.
I looked up at the smokers, the wrecks of half the madkind hanging dead over the railing, the other half scrambling to man the guns to keep the ships from repeating their run. Murka was on his knees, riddled with holes but still functioning. Barely. The Cheshire King, on the other hand, smoked facedown, a large smoldering hole in his back, his severed legs twitching at the other end of the smoker.
I quickly changed out the cartridges in my pistols, held them close, steadied myself for the next run.
The dropships turned around, screaming back toward the smokers.
“Give ’em hell, boys!” screamed Murka.
And the chain guns let loose hell.
Facets poured out of the sides of the dropships as they made their final pass at the smokers.
The ships came apart. The smokers came apart. It was a fog of fire and shrapnel.
It was . . .
. . . the skies darkened. Black. A pitch-black sky. Fires burning in the distance. The humans had us pinned down. Our drones shrieked through the skies, but it was hard to keep them from advancing. There were just too many of them.
This was supposed to be a recon mission, but our intel was bad. Now the four of us were holed up in a building with a hundred howling humans charging our position. Fire pounded our shelter. We were goners.
I’d had enough. If I was going to die, I wasn’t going to sit helplessly waiting for the end.
I stood up. Pointed my flamethrower into the black outside. And I lit up the night. “Let’s give them hell,” I said.
Humans we hadn’t even seen yet went up like torches. Screaming. So much screaming.
I waded out into the open, a gout of flame rippling, licking the air. The ground beneath me flickered. Fractals. The wailing, dying flaming bodies. Fractals. The skies, roiling, tumultuous smoke. All fractals.
Screaming. So much . . .
<Drive failure. Drives 2, 3, 5, 7 shutting down. Memory deleted or corrupt.> I snapped awake from my dream. Found myself standing in the street, surrounded by the wrecks of a dozen facets, the empty cartridges of my pistols beeping, alarms in my head telling me I was moments away from total failure. Instructing me to shut down and await assistance from my manufacturer.
I was operating almost solely on my RAM now, very few of my long-term memories still intact in the handful of drives left.
How long had I been out? How the hell had I killed so many?
I looked around.
The dropships were nothing but fire and nigh unrecognizable bits. The smokers were torn to pieces, the wrecks of the madkind scattered along with them.
Murka sat atop the remains of one of them, guns still spinning but nothing coming out.
“You still ticking, Murka?”
He looked down at his guns, confused. They spun down as he realized what was going on.
“You can’t kill a legend,” he said. “But what the hell are you still doing upright? Shouldn’t you be dead by now?”
“I should be.”
Murka tried to push himself to his feet with his gun arms, but couldn’t manage it. “I think I’ll just sit here for a minute.”
I scanned the Wi-Fi.
The Miltons were down, Wi-Fi running hot with CISSUS chatter. Doc!
“Rebekah!” I called out.
The shaken translator emerged from the alley, still out of it and not altogether there.
“This way,” I said, pointing toward the edge of the city.
I didn’t know how many facets were left, how many I’d actually killed in my daze, how many had slunk into the city attempting to triangulate the Miltons, hunting down anyone else that might be left.
I listened close, sensors cranked, our footsteps pounding like a headache. Fires crackled in the distance, wind whistled through doorways and shattered windows, but little else stirred.
I heard a few padded steps in a building over to my left.
I turned and fired without hesitation.
The chest of a facet burst and he clattered face first onto the ground.
We kept walking. And I kept listening.
A soft step on broken glass to my right.
Again I fired several shots.
A facet dropped.
They knew where I was. They knew who I was with. However many of them were left, they were all going to be coming my way any moment now.
I heard their clanging feet hundreds of meters away. They were closing in. There were four, maybe five of them.
We might pull this off after all.
I raised my pistols.
The first one emerged firing full burst.
My shots caught it right in the face and chest as its fire strafed nearby. It stumbled, fell to its knees before tumbling onto its side.
I stepped ten feet to my right, making sure they’d start firing at the wrong place.
Another came from around a corner.
My shots struck its chest, picking it up off its unsteady feet, and knocking it wrecked on its ass.