Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire (53 page)

Click, whine. Click, whine. There it was again. The corner was just a meter away, and the noise maybe five meters beyond that. Most likely it was an AQ-9 through 12. Chancelry didn’t make them—that was Dhamsel Corp’s department—but they did use them. Humanoid robot, ideal for sentry duty in urban environments, could climb stairs, open doors, all the things a wheeled street bot couldn’t. Very fast, very tough, and heavily armed. She didn’t like them within the same postcode as the kids. Federation pop culture had whipped up almost as much of a fearful frenzy about them as they had about GIs. Steel-skulled and unemotional, they looked the part.

Sandy waited until it came right to the corner. It put its gun around first, looking on armscomp vision. Sandy pressed herself flat in the doorway. It couldn’t see her here. Then the bot took a step around, and she went low, knowing their balance was weakest when changing face. She took a leg, pulled an arm down, and it spun rather than fell, trying to decapitate her with a reverse swing. Sandy caught it, broke the arm, smashed its head into the wall, bent its lower spine with her knee, then tore its head off.

“Quickly!” she called to Danya and Svetlana, reaching into the bot’s spinal cavity to pull out connections where her memory implant schematic told her the locator beacon was. She pulled, and it came out in a shower of sparks and shuddering limbs.

The kids came out running, with a wide-eyed look at the dead bot, but Sandy was already up with rifle out, scanning the corridor, then running on to the stairwell. But shit, even a bot could read a schematic, and AQs didn’t operate alone.

Near the bottom of the stairwell she punched a hole in the wall to the corridor and dropped one of her grenades through it. It blew the corridor to hell, doing very little to the bot waiting there at the stairwell door, but disorienting it considerably. She needed her weapon to cover down the corridor, so she knocked its weapon arm aside as she went through the door and leaped for a spin kick at its head; very fancy, but it allowed her to point her rifle somewhere else whilst hammering the bot into a wall.

Sure enough, the second bot was waiting there, Sandy shot it through the eye, then landed as the first one came back at her, despite its caved-in head. Its swing smashed the wall as she ducked, then kicked it in the chest, knocking it flying, then ducking sideways and returning fire as the second bot shredded the air where she’d been, her own fire putting holes through eyepieces and armoured faceplate until it lost armscomp and began spraying wildly, tearing apart the walls and ceiling. But it didn’t protect its face, so Sandy put another ten rounds through the right eye until the head casing came apart and it fell in a jerking heap.

The first one aimed at her, point blank and flat on its back, and Sandy just sidestepped whilst emptying the rest of her mag up under the chin plate, into the brain case. Big armoured beasts that they were, no personnel-sized armour really stopped a Teller 9 rifle at this range, least of all with accuracy like hers. When armour contested firepower in modern warfare, firepower always won, and for all the bots’ fearsome reputation, they were no match even for a lot of regs.

“Sandy!” she heard a shriek from the stairwell, and peered inside, back up the stairs. Svetlana was being restrained by Danya from rushing down—half the stairwell wall had been caved in by the bot’s last swing. Svetlana had seemed to think she might be dead . . . well, it must have sounded from the stairs like the corridor were being torn apart.

“Come on,” she beckoned them from amidst the smoke. “I’m too advanced for a walking dishwasher. Let’s go.”

They continued downstairs until they reached Gunter, at the side entrance where the crashed aircar made cover to the neighbouring building.

“Everything will be coming down on us now,” said Gunter, barely looking at them, his attention on the road outside. “We’d have a chance if we sprinted, maybe we could carry the kids.”

Sandy shook her head. “Even I can’t target very well while running at speed, especially not with one arm occupied.” And if we can’t shoot what’s trying to shoot us, she didn’t need to add, we’re dead. The tech here might be no match for a high-des GI in a close fight, but it could certainly hit a moving target on a road. “You take the kids back the same way, move fast and stay hidden. I’ll give you cover and make a distraction up top.”

“Two would make a better distraction.”

“No,” said Sandy, very firmly, and grabbed Gunter by the shoulder. “Guard the kids,” she told him. “With your life. Promise me.”

Gunter considered her for a moment. He liked Danya and Svetlana, Sandy was certain, but a lot of mid-des GIs just didn’t get why kids were special, on that emotional level that straight humans did. But he could see the look in her eyes, and nodded.

“With my life,” he assured her. “I promise.”

“No, Sandy!” Svetlana protested. “Come with us, it’s safer!”

“If I go with you we’re all dead,” Sandy said firmly, peering out the doorway. “Trust me Svet, this is what I do. Danya, go with Gunter.”

Danya nodded, and followed Gunter in a fast dash out the door, pulling Svetlana with him. Immediately a hover UAV appeared between buildings, homing on that noise. Sandy shot it through the CPU. It veered into a building side with a crunch of shattering fan blades, then vanished. They’d get smarter now, she thought, as she dashed after the others and into the next building. Even a dumb AI network could figure out it was facing high-designation GIs and stop using small units at close range. Now it got interesting.

Gunter, Danya and Svetlana ran through the abandoned restaurant opposite and into the building’s lower corridor, heading for the rear. To cross to the next building behind without UAVs getting them, they’d need a distraction. As Sandy took up cover in the abandoned restaurant, she could see that distraction rolling quickly up the road outside, with six wheels and an angular armoured turret.

Rotary cannon opened fire on the restaurant floor as it saw her, and she rolled neatly for cover behind a concrete wall corner as high velocity rounds tore whatever was not already destroyed on the restaurant floor to pieces. Sandy checked her rifle settings amid flying splinters and glass. The instant the firing paused, she put her rifle around the corner, aiming by rifle armscomp, and emptied the rest of her magazine directly onto the tank’s main vision sensors—it had three of them, heavily reinforced, but they’d now be cracked and blurred.

It opened fire again, and she pulled back to a safe distance from the corner, and waited. Even tank bots knew when they couldn’t hit something, and against infantry in urban environments, the textbook said use explosives, not guns. A rocket screamed in, and blew the restaurant to hell. It would have knocked a straight human senseless where she was, but Sandy just shielded her face, closed her eyes, and with her ears still popping from the pressure shock, ran straight out into the dissipating explosion.

Half the ceiling nearly fell on her as she ran, chemical flames scorching skin and clothes, and then she was out, streaking at full acceleration toward the tank. It tried to declinate its turret to hit her, but with damaged vision and the explosion smoke and debris covering her for half the distance, it couldn’t adjust fast enough. She slid in on one hip, got directly under the tank’s front wheels, lifted and flipped it onto its side with a crash.

Something launched missiles at her, she couldn’t see from where, but she got a clear sense of homing frequencies squealing in her inner ear as they came in . . . but no way they could track an unarmoured person, and she leaped for a nearby building rooftop. It was eight stories tall, and she was at the fourth when the tank exploded. The shockwave blew her trajectory off, and now she was falling off the edge . . . only she caught the lip one-handed, and hanging there, shot another hover UAV as debris rained around. Just one shot to the head—these things weren’t armoured, just relied on stealth.

She flipped back onto the rooftop and ran, crouched low, knowing that somewhere high a recon UAV would be locked onto her, circling well out of range, coordinating all of Chancelry’s slowly awakening firepower down onto her. And she was right on top of the building that Danya, Svetlana and Gunter were in. She zagged right, leaped low for the adjoining building rooftop, hit the building edge rather than the top, not wanting a high trajectory that would get her blown from the sky. Even then, something shot at her from a nearby window, bullets whipping past. She flipped and rolled onto the rooftop, nearly swearing—she wasn’t armed or armoured for this.

She lay flat a moment, just waiting, hearing mostly the ammo from the tank cooking off in the street below. For the first time, she had a good view of the Chancelry Sector buildings here. Nothing too tall—there was no need in a relatively small city like Droze. But wealthy, flash rooftop pads, with com gear, weather shielding. Lots of them, a real city, if a little functional on the architecture.

A UAV hummed beneath the wall to her side. She saved ammo by pulling her pistol, aiming briefly downward by sound alone and firing a single shot. And pulled back as she drew fire from that window again, followed by a crash as the UAV hit the ground.

Then she heard the next one, only this was much bigger, huge fan blades cutting the air. And not a UAV, she realised, looking right. Perhaps a kilometer off and coming her way over the Chancelry wall, a combat flyer, much like she used in SWAT.

She moved immediately, running across the rooftop as even now a sensor squealed in her ear at the active tracking. She selected a window two floors down on the next building, jumped, shot out the glass, then tucked into a little ball to smash through remaining shards without hitting the rim. Hit the bed in the abandoned apartment, bounced sideways into a closet with force enough to smash it, rebounded off and out the door.

Missiles blew out most of the building wall behind her, knocked her momentarily off her feet as half the corridor collapsed, but she smashed through it, broke down an inner door into another abandoned apartment, then kicked and punched herself a new hole in that wall, into an adjoining apartment. The corridor beyond was at the building core, safe from missiles unless they decided to bring the whole building down. She reckoned they’d need authorisation for that. Unless someone figured out who she was in the next few seconds. Maybe they already knew.

A howl of engines overhead. Flyers operated in pairs; if she exposed herself on the rooftop to shoot at the first one, the second would nail her. She bounced off walls in her haste to reach a window on the far side. Once there she didn’t have a clear angle, so she dashed to the far end, furthest from Chancelry Sector. The flyer was turning clear of there; Home Guard had reasonable anti-aircraft weapons, and concentrated them here near the Chancelry wall. They’d all be awake over there now, hearing all this commotion in the neutral zone. But the flyers weren’t hovering, they were making strafing runs—hovering made pilots nervous, and she was pretty sure these were flown by real people, two standbys kept waiting for situations to arise. Strafing runs made flyers harder to target with modern weaponry . . . but it was risky of them. She only had a rifle; if they hovered out of range she couldn’t hit them. And then they’d struggle to hit her, with all these buildings for cover. Strafing runs gave them a chance to get her, but brought them into her own range, and created patterns. Sandy liked other peoples’ patterns.

She could hear one of them coming in from the non-damaged building side, and skipped away from the window, back into the building core as cannon rounds tore holes through that wall across several stories.

“Not that side,” she said to herself, visualising it as she sprinted across, and then bounced up two flights of stairs to the top floor. She sprinted down that corridor, sections of right wall missing from the missile strike, was nearly surprised by a walking floor bot on four legs that she shot before it could shoot her, hurdled it and crashed through a door to a Chancelry-side apartment. Skidded over a bed and took up brief residence by the window. “Come on. This side, just once.”

A flyer roared overhead, coming the wrong way. But given neither of them were game to overfly Home Guard territory, they had to circle this way eventually, back to Chancelry Quarter. One curled across in front of her, exposing its canopy, and she put fifteen rounds right onto the pilot’s head from four hundred meters. The canopy was armoured, of course, but no pilot enjoyed that, seeing the armoured glass fracture and crack all across their eyeline.

The flyer jerked away like a frightened bird, and now his buddy was coming around to support.

Sandy sprinted back the way she’d come, out of the apartment and back down the corridor. The next explosions took out the whole building front, and would have knocked a regular human unconscious. Then came the strafing cannon, tearing through the wreckage and dust. Sandy hit the first intact stairwell, bounded up it, smashed through the door to the rooftop. It was booby-trapped, but the mine was only big enough to blow a limb off a straight, and damaged only her clothes.

Up on the rooftop, she had a lovely view of the flyer breaking off its attack run and roaring in right past its target. Sandy shouldered her rifle and sprinted. She took off like a bullet, hit the flyer’s exposed underside, and stuck on with sheer force of synth-myomer fingers. Then she overhanded her way to the wing root, got a leg over in the slipstream, and smashed a fist through the canopy. It stuck in the hole, so she pulled, and a whole chunk of canopy came away. She pulled herself up to the canopy, tore the pilot’s harness off, threw him out, then climbed into his seat. The front seat weapons officer protested, so she kicked him in the head.

Controls weren’t that different from what she was used to. The flyer was now falling into a dive, so she pulled it up and banked back the way it’d come, eyes narrowed and hair blowing in the gale. Her brain kept trying to catch up with what she’d just done. She’d not even been aware it was possible until now, although she’d heard tales of other GIs doing it during the war to low-flying, slow-moving aircraft.