86th District, Eastern Ward
August 2nd, Stellar Year 2146
—
"You're a little bitch, you know that?" Shiden hissed at the kitten. "Sorriest excuse for a cat I ever saw! With your tiny ugly face and your stupid stubby legs! You look more like a rat! Get outta here!"
The kitten, black-coated except for four white socks and a frost-tipped tail, looked placidly up at her. It sat relaxedly on its rump, little tail swaying in languid arcs behind. It meowed.
"Shoo! Scram! Nobody wants you! Your mama didn't even like you enough to stay alive!"
The kitten meowed again before standing up, stretching its back with a little cat yawn. It took small steps toward her. Shiden shied back and the kitten paused, looking up at her accusingly. For a second, she thought it might have understood her somehow, and was now mad at her for saying something even she thought was a little bit offensive. Then she shook it off. That was dumb.
It resumed its small steps until it was brushing up against Shiden's combat boots, rubbing its side against the hardened rubber as it walked between her feet. Shiden was annoyed by this.
"Aw… c'mon! Look, buddy, you really gotta go, okay? I mean it!" she shouted at the kitten, who was now perched on her toes. "The Legion's coming, and if you're with me, you're in danger. So you have to go and find some, I dunno, fish or something. Cats like fish, right? Go look for a river!"
Unfortunately the kitten did not seem to understand spoken language. It climbed its way to the top of her boots and pawed at the sleeve of her combat pants, like it was trying to find a way in. Shiden seethed breath through clenched teeth.
She found the kitten two days ago - the same day she left the house in search of food Kaie could eat.
She no longer remembered why she had stopped outside that ruined suburban house, only that she had. It had been hit by a stray shell. She found the kitten sitting on the yard, staring helplessly at the collapsed ruin of the house's front porch. Shiden caught the iron tang of blood beneath the smells of splintered wood and loose soil, and knew what happened. The kitten's mother, and probably all its siblings, had been living under that house.
But she didn't stop for the poor thing, not at the time. She had too much on her hands to take responsibility for a stray, so she told herself to find those concentrates first, and if the cat was still sitting there on her way back, she'd help it out. And that had been enough. Though she left the thought unspoken, in the back of her mind she believed there was no way the animal would still be there after however many hours it would take her to loot the nearby stores. It would wander off for food, or get bored, or something like that. It wasn't her problem, and it wouldn't become her problem.
Except the kitten had still been there when she walked back. And now it very much was her problem.
Shiden stooped down and picked the kitten up. It meowed delightedly, nuzzling her hands as she raised it up to the window, close enough that it could see the rainy sky but far enough that no water would splash it.
"Look, do you see that you little shit? You see those metal specks gathering in the sky over there? Those are called Eintagsfliege, and that means the Legion is coming. Big metal spiders with guns! And you don't want to be anywhere near me when they get here, got it?"
The cat squirmed in her hands, turning itself around in her grip until it was face-to-face with her. Its wide yellow eyes seemed to ask why this big creature was making so much noise. Shiden noticed there was a chunk taken out of its right ear, like an animal had bitten it.
"Look, buddy. You're a survivor type, right? You gotta be, if a tiny thing like you got into a scrap with something and managed to make it out with just the scar. So you gotta keep surviving. I'm gonna put you down, and you're gonna scurry off into the dark, and the Legion won't find you, 'cause they don't care about cats and they'll be too busy with me anyway."
She put the kitten down. It sat immediately at her feet and meowed at her indignantly, like it was offended to be placed on the dirty ground.
"Ah, shit. So much for that."
She figured had ten minutes, maybe fifteen at most, before the Legion got here. They weren't looking for her. She was sure enough of that; she was just one person, and she'd been careful not to leave traces. But they were looking for something in the area - maybe a Squadron of 86 she had no way to contact, since both her and Kaie's Para-RAIDs had been busted in the fight. And even if she wasn't the target, they would still find her. The Legion always cast a wide net. The headhunters would register her vital signs. Or maybe one of the self-propelled mines that always swept the empty buildings would see her, and the tide would find her, and that would be it. Game over.
At this point, Shiden didn't much care if she lived or died. Kaie was her only concern.
Her Captain woke up yesterday. The medicine had done its job, and the fever broke on the first night, rising worryingly higher for awhile, and then abruptly breaking at some godforsaken hour. By sunrise she had been sweat-soaked and shivering, but her forehead was no longer burning at the touch. Kaie had opened her eyes shortly after. She had stared around for awhile, blinking at the light.
Shiden had been sitting at an angle to her, able to see her face in profile, but Kaie was unable to see her. She said good morning. Kaie hadn't responded. Shiden said it again, and Kaie turned - but not turned like she had heard her. She turned like she'd been idly looking around and just so happened to see Shiden sitting there.
"Shiden!" she had said, but her voice sounded slightly off in pitch and volume, and Kaie had frowned immediately.
"Uh, hey, Kaie. Glad you're awake," Shiden had replied.
And Kaie started to cry.
"Hey, hey, what's wrong Cap? You okay? Is it the diaper? Sorry, I know it doesn't exactly flatter your figure, but unconscious people still gotta use the bathroom, so it was the best I could-"
"Oh God," Kaie had moaned in her strange voice. "I've gone deaf."
Shiden looked out the window at the gradually thickening swarm of silver butterflies. They shone a distinct shining silver amidst the wet gray of the surrounding rainclouds. That realization had been a very fun time for them both, she reflected.
Kaie would probably be able to survive if Shiden died here. She was still very weak, and damn near emaciated despite Shiden's best efforts with all the canned soup and concentrates she had managed to find. That would be a problem for her, but Shiden had left her with all the food she'd managed to scavenge, and Kaie was at least strong enough to use a can opener. She could eat and rest until she was strong enough to move again on her own power, and as long as she kept the wounds clean (Shiden left her with firewood and a boiling pot too, and clear instructions to build any fires outside the house; she had nearly burned the whole place down when she was heating her knife for the surgery), the infection should sort itself out eventually.
But that was only assuming the Legion didn't find her first.
And that was why Shiden was out here halfway across town, on the second floor of a classic brownstone townhouse, stairs barricaded with all the furniture she could find and her RPG leaning up against the window. If she made enough noise, it should keep the Legion's attention away from Kaie. Then she might stand a chance.
Kaie had protested the plan bitterly. She had tried to convince Shiden not to go through with it using every word she could think of, and as her emotions got the better of her and she lost what control she had left over her voice, that strangeness in her tone had grown and grown, until she was shouting with a voice that seemed to belong to someone else altogether.
And Shiden had not been convinced. She tried to tell her Captain that if they both tried to hide, they'd just end up sharing the same grave. Someone had to make some noise and draw the Legion's attention, because otherwise they wouldn't leave even one lousy stone unturned. She tried to tell Kaie it was better for one person to live than none, but Kaie hadn't understood. She tried with desperate effort to read Shiden's lips, but after Shiden had finished speaking, the confusion had been all too clear in those wide black eyes.
In the end Shiden left her with just four words written in rough chicken-scratch on the closest paper she could find.
'You have to live.'
"And so do you, little guy," she told the cat sternly. "I know you're small, but you're smart and fast! You gotta be, if you made it this long without your mama. So I know you can make it just fine on your own. If you stay with me, you're gonna die, and… and you just can't. You have to live."
Her voice trailed. The cat maintained its steady, slightly curious gaze back up at her.
Don't say what you don't believe.
That statement resounded in Shiden's mind. If someone had told her it was the cat's voice speaking through telepathy, she would have believed them. It did not occur to her in the moment that her highly stressed, tense state probably contributed to that.
"Look!" she said. "I know I'm a hypocrite for saying shit like that while I'm fully primed to die myself, but… goddammit, at least I'll be dying for something! If you stay with me, you're gonna get shot or crushed or blown up, and there'll be no reason for it, 'cause you can make it if you go alone. And Kaie'll make it too, if I can buy her enough time to get stronger. That's why I'm doin' this. I'm only ready to go 'cause it'll actually mean something."
The kitten sat silently, waving its tail in a slow, fanning arc.
Shiden realized that words weren't going to work on this small creature. Arguably, the revelation came a little late, though Shiden tended to punch the people that argued with her. She decided to pick it up again. It purred contentedly in her hands as she carried it to the stairs, where she'd stacked furniture from the bottom step all the way up to the landing, forming a makeshift barricade. She leaned out as far as her arms could reach and dropped the cat gently about four steps down, far enough and with enough obstacles between that it would be easier for it to climb down instead of back up.
The kitten padded unsteadily on the slanting, leaning dresser it had been dropped onto, looking back up at Shiden with its helpless eyes. It meowed forlornly.
"I told you," she said. "You have to go, you have to live."
It meowed again in that pitch of heartbreaking sadness. It pawed at two triple-stacks of dining chairs, leaned by their backs against the dresser, but the kitten was too small to climb over them.
"Get out!" she screamed, angry at it now. "GET THE FUCK OUT!"
Her voice became a roar. The kitten jumped, startled, fur standing in stiff pinions before it turned and bounded agilely down the barricade. Its black fur and white socks stood out against the jumbled furniture for just a few bounding steps, and then it vanished beneath a wiry tangle of Christmas lights and was gone from sight.
And then all too quickly the sound of its tiny footsteps faded away, and Shiden felt horribly alone.
"Good," she told herself in a hollow voice. "Good for him. Or her. Whatever. It means he'll get to live."
She had to remind herself of this a few times, after she caught herself already missing the little thing's presence.
In the far distance of the raining sky, the silver cloud had thickened. It swirled like a vortex of gleaming razors.
The Eintagsfliege moved in two stages. First they rallied at a certain point, pooling their numbers into swarm that thickened by the hour. Once they had gathered enough of them, they swept over the operation zone, blotting out the sky like a mechanical stormcloud. Shiden figured they were just finishing the first stage now. The butterflies would start moving soon, and the combat drones would follow.
Shiden would wait until an easy target presented itself. She would fire from ambush. Hopefully she'd kill one, then hell would follow. Once she got their attention, she would have to duck, dive, and jive long enough to keep their eyes on her, drawing them to her corner of the ruins and away from Kaie's. Five minutes, she decided. If she could survive for five minutes, it would be enough.
Before too long, the already-murky sky darkened further. She looked out the window and saw that the butterflies had covered every last one of the clouds. Moments afterward, she heard the sound.
Legion were eerily quiet for their size. Juggernauts stomped the ground as they walked with great metallic thumps and the crack of asphalt underfoot, betraying their ten-ton size. Shin's Reginleif, which was supposed to be an improvement, was a little quieter, but not by much. But the Legion almost seemed to glide along the ground, and what sound they made was not from their joints or actuators but the terrain itself, shaking at the sheer weight coming down upon it.
The first Ameise scuttled out onto the street from around a bend in the road, a huge body like a sharpened arrowhead, six legs like crystalline blades, two machine-guns at the head. It was followed by three others, and then ten, and then twenty. Soon enough there was a goddamn parade of Legion moving down the street like a column of soldier ants, all steel and order and cold precision.
The Grauwolves came behind. Their bodies were lower, sleeker, curved and elegant. Each bore a turreted six-pod rocket launcher mounted on their backs. Like its scout counterpart, the dragoon moved on six legs, the front two equipped with folding high-frequency blades. The things were massive. She might have stood to a quarter of the legs' height.
Suddenly she felt very deeply stupid for the plan she had come up with. Taking cover in a house? One rocket from one Grauwolf would bring the ceiling down over her head… but the Legion never fired just one. And what would the barricaded stairs do? It might delay the self-propelled mines for a minute or two, but one burst from an Ameise's machineguns would rip through the brownstone's thin walls and turn her into paste.
This was idiotic. What was she doing? Why was she still here?
Because you've got a life to save, idiot, Shiden told herself. She spat irreverently on the floor. Somehow it seemed to help, like she had somehow spat her weakness out with it.
So you better get fucking to it.
Ignoring her heartbeat, which had gone a little bit insane, she went to the window. She grabbed her RPG-7 and the quiver of extra rockets (rocket-propelled grenades, Shana would have corrected her) and slung both over separate shoulders. Aside from the dubious flashlight attachment near the muzzle, there were no attachments on this thing. Definitely no scope or fancy optics; she had only the iron-sights to aim by. But she'd practiced before. She knew she wouldn't miss.
The silver-blue parade had come in full. There had to be a hundred of them outside her window, maybe a hundred feet away, past the overgrown yard and the cracked sidewalk, marching down the two-lane road like they owned it. Rainwater glistened on their hulls. None of them had noticed her yet.
"Alright you metal fucks. Hope you've made your peace with God 'cause-"
"Meow!"
Shiden stopped. With the RPG still settled in the crook of her shoulder, she quirked her head back and saw yellow eyes peering at her from behind the banister of the stairway, through wooden slats like the bars of a jail cell. It was sitting on the slanted dresser where Shiden had first dropped it. It was trapped behind those stacked chairs it was too small to climb over.
"Meow!" said the kitten again.
"You gotta be fucking kidding me," Shiden hissed. "What, once wasn't enough? You want me to yell at you again?"
"Meow."
Shiden glanced back through the window. The parade was still in full bloom. They hadn't seen her yet, but despite their numbers the Legion's movements were still so eerily quiet. A shout would carry a long distance.
"Yeah, okay, maybe that'd be a bad idea. But seriously, you can't-" She cut herself off. She ran mental calculations. "You really aren't gonna leave, are you?"
"Meow!" said the kitten.
"Shit. Fuck. Shit. Shitfuckshitfuckshit-"
The kitten looked at her meaningfully with its wide yellow eyes.
"Alright. Fine. Whatever. Stay right there, okay? I'll grab you." She dropped the RPG on its sling behind her shoulder and went to the stairwell. She leaned down and reached her arms through the banister, grabbing the cat. It meowed contentedly at her touch, nuzzling her palms as she lifted it up.
"Look - I'm not about to go and serve the reaper a two-for-one deal, okay? If you see the chance to run, you take it. Hell, you're probably gonna run as soon as I shoot this thing," she said, tapping the green warhead looming over her shoulder.
The kitten's face was happy and uncomprehending.
"Aaaaaahhh fuck!" Shiden groaned - quietly, of course. "I mean that, okay? I'm on a one-way trip. You're not. You gotta lot of miles left to go on your odometer, so you gotta stay alive to fill 'em, got it?"
"Meow!"
Shiden looked at the thing for a long time. She listened to the low sounds of the Legion's movements, heavy metal legs skittering on earth and asphalt.
"I'm talking to cats, now. Yep. Really have gone crazy."
The kitten squirmed in her grasp. Shiden loosened her grip, and the cat popped out of her hands and walked clumsily atop her outstretched arms, until it had crossed to the plateau of her sizable chest, where it curled into the hollow of her collarbone and nuzzled its small face against her cheek.
"Why do you gotta be so fucking cute, huh? Ugly little shit," she murmured. She turned back to the Legion outside the window. Their numbers had swelled even further. They had formed a river of silver-blue mercury running down the entirety of the street, a fast-flowing, rigid current she had no hope of stopping.
"There's nothing I can do to protect you, buddy. I'm just one little person against a whole buncha huge ass machines," Shiden told the cat. "Well, alright, I guess there ain't much about me that you could call 'little,' but still. I mean it. When it's your time to run, you run, got it?"
The kitten gave a meow that sounded suspiciously like 'no.'
"Stubborn, aren't you? You're starting to remind me of someone, you know that?"
The kitten purred. Shiden laughed.
"Well, alright. But you're gonna need a more secure place to sit than that. We're about to do a whole lot more jumping and diving in about ten seconds."
She considered that for a moment. Then the idea took shape. She unzipped the front of her combat jacket until her cleavage showed - every woman's pocket, because if dresses refused to have them, they would make their own. At least, they would if they were as stacked as she was - and plopped the kitten in between.
"You better not fucking scratch me, okay? Those two bags of fat are just about the only appeal I have as a woman, you know?"
The kitten seemed to nod. Shiden zipped up again until only its head was poking out of her jacket. The little shit seemed to be very comfortable.
Shiden shrugged her RPG off her shoulder and into her hands. She went to the window and took aim. She settled her finger on the trigger-
And gunfire erupted in the distance.
In an instant that river of mercury stopped flowing. Its current shifted from one direction to another as two hundred silver-blue shapes turned on a dime toward that distant sound. They paused just a moment - and then they were no longer a river, but a tidal wave sweeping forward. They barreled through the yards and houses of the opposite street, collapsing one of them right down to its foundation. The gunfire erupted again, and then was followed by a salvo of cannons cracking through the rainy air, echoing like the dull roars of ghosts. The Legion pursued the sound with relentless, mechanical impartiality.
The breath left Shiden's lungs. The tension that had tightened her shoulders dissipated. She felt empty and slow.
There was another Squadron at work somewhere. And nearby, too. That fire couldn't have come from more than a mile or two away. And they were making a hell of a lot more noise than she could have with her one measly rocket launcher. She felt very stupid for not thinking of that first. All that planning, philosophizing, pissing about. All for nothing.
She deflated, stepping away from the window. She leaned against the adjacent wall, then slumped against it, sitting uncomfortably with the rigid shapes of the RPG and the quiver of rockets pressing into her back. The kitten, still nested snugly into her chest, squirmed around until it was looking back at her. It meowed. Shiden stroked its little head with the pad of her finger.
"Yeah, yeah, you were right and I was wrong. Rub it in some more I guess."
The kitten made no response except for a continuous happy purr.
Shiden wondered if what she felt - a vague bitterness almost like disappointment - was appropriate. Shouldn't she be happy? If there was a Squadron out there doing the fighting for her, they would draw the Legion's attention for sure, way better than she alone could ever do. If the drones were too busy with Juggernauts, they'd leave the abandoned buildings alone.
Besides, thinking logically, her plan wouldn't have worked. If the Squadron wasn't here, then the Legion would have killed her all too quickly, and then they'd go back to searching within a minute or two at most. It wouldn't be long at all before they found Kaie.
So why did she feel resentful for the gunfire in the distance? Why did she feel like something had been stolen from her?
Stupid thoughts, she chided. Stupid person, really. There were better things to be thinking about. Like getting back to the other side of town and letting Kaie know everything was all clear. Poor girl had to be bored to tears by now, sitting all alone in that attic, not even strong enough to walk yet. Maybe she should pick up some books or something on the way-
A robotic chittering. The clank of steel claws on hard ground. Both sounds were thoroughly unmistakable.
Shiden's blood ran cold - and simultaneously, something primeval shivered in delight. Resentment melted. Only focus remained. She stood back to her feet and took the RPG-7 in her hands. She leaned inches over, peeking out the window.
There was only one type of Legion that made that much noise when it walked. Ironically, it was also the only type that didn't quake the ground with every footstep.
The self-propelled mine.
From a distance, in the rain, the sky darkened by the Eintagsfliege, they could almost be mistaken for people. They had four limbs, two arms and two legs, a torso and head, forming a distinct, person-shaped silhouette. They could even mimic human voices to a limited extent. This was an intentional. By mimicking the rough shape of a person, the mines could draw human soldiers out of hiding, or catch Processors off guard, goading them into making a mistake.
Get close enough, though - say, about the distance from the second floor of a brownstone house to the yard below - and the disguise stopped holding water. The limbs were black steel, thin and sharp, too-straight and angled to look human. The bodies were oblong and round, bulbous. Their heads were simple steel orbs fixed with a single glaring blue optical sensor, like a huge lidless eye.
'With any amount of scrutiny,' Shana would have said. 'It's very clear to see that they're only machines crudely shaped like people.' To which Shiden would have asked her to stop talking like a fucking professor.
Professor-speak or no, she was right enough. They really didn't look anything like people at a second glance. But the battlefield was chaotic, and a soldier rarely had enough time to look twice. It just took one mistake. One object not seen clearly enough, a bullet not fired when it should have been, or one fired too many, and they could get taken out of the fight forever.
Shiden would not make a mistake. If these things were going to kill her, she was gonna make them work for it.
She scratched the kitten's head, still poking out of her jacket's zipper.
"Last chance to run, buddy. You sure you don't wanna take it?"
The kitten only looked at her with its blameless yellow eyes.
"Heh. Yeah. Didn't think so. But seriously, don't scratch me, okay? At least let me leave a pretty corpse."
Shiden glanced out the window again. There were about a dozen mines on the street, breaking off in ones and twos to sweep out the houses. They carried rifles in their three-clawed hands, steel fingers on the triggers. Self-propelled mines were, obviously, mines. Any single one of those bulbous fat torsos carried enough explosives to disable a Juggernaut. But for headhunting, the Legion gave a certain number of them guns. One bullet per kill was more cost-effective, she supposed.
She swung the RPG back over her shoulder, replacing it with her sidearm, a 9mm semi-automatic pistol. Its double-stacked magazine held a total of 15 rounds plus one in the chamber. She had brought it believing it would be used on herself, not the enemy. So she had no extra mag to reload with, and no armor-piercing rounds either. But that was alright. She glanced again at the drones. One was coming toward the brownstone. She would make do.
Pulling back from the window, she stepped into a closet across from the stairway's landing. She crouched with the door half-open, and waited.
Heavy steel feet slapping across a rain-wet yard, ripping up soil. Shiden tensed on the gun. Her finger, warm and moist with sweat, sat heavy on the trigger.
Wooden floorboards groaning as if in pain. The thudding rattle of cheaply bolted steel with every motion. The low whir of an energy pack, buzzing and whining, growing louder as it approached. Then, crashing wood and shattering objects, furniture being thrown aside. The drone had reached her barricade. It dismantled her two hours of work with way more efficiency than her peace of mind would have liked. It began to climb the steps.
Each wooden plank screamed at the weight that came down upon it.
The kitten whined unhappily, a low, quiet sound, but loud in the confines of the closet. Shiden removed her finger from the trigger just long enough to scratch its head, as much for her own comfort as its.
The drone reached the slanted dresser. She could see the top of its spherical black-steel head. It threw the dresser aside, smashing it through the railing to the ground below, where it shattered with an explosive crumpling sound. The stacked dining chairs that had leaned against it tumbled down the stairs with a tumbling crack!-crack!-crack!, splintering apart by the time they reached the ground floor.
It climbed the next two steps, and Shiden saw its head in full. If it turned, it would see her too.
But it did not turn. It dismantled the final part of the barricade with mechanical determination. It carried on until the path was clear and it stood at the top of the landing with its rifle in steel hands.
Shiden shoots it in the head.
The gun roars with a flash of flame. The kitten screams out a yowl and buries its head in Shiden's jacket, nestling into her chest. She doesn't feel it. She only feels the recoil, only sees the deep dent that punches into the side of the drone's spherical head. Only sees that it does not fall. Shiden shoots it again, but misses, and as it turns to her she runs across the hallway, squeezing the trigger three more times. She misses twice, wings its shoulder on the third shot and the drone twists. It brings up its rifle.
On instinct Shiden drops low beneath a burst of fire. Hot gas and bullets fly past her head. She fires three more times into it chest and the drone stutters back against the wall, and she scrambles to it, arrests the rifle one hand to keep it from pointing at her. She thrusts the gun in her other arm toward its sensor, and the drone brings up its hand in turn to stop her. She struggles against it. It's like trying to wrestle a crane. Its head, inches from her face, turns to regard her, its blue optical sensor like a coldly glaring eye.
The hand and arm she has wrapped around the gun-barrel both burn with exertion. The muzzle turns toward her, first six inches from her stomach, then three, then one.
Until finally she pivots her wrist and frees herself from the drone's grip, slams her gun against its sensor and squeezes the trigger. With a muffled blast and a spray of steel shards, it dies.
She wastes no time. Before the drone's grip has loosened she pries the rifle from its steel hands and runs to the window. She takes aim.
The self-propelled mines are designed to roughly resemble human soldiers, but they act nothing like them. Human soldiers would regard gunfire as a source of danger. They would approach with caution under cover.
In a flash of gun-thunder, the mines perceive prey. They sprint toward the sound.
She picks her targets, starting from the ones closest to the house. One, halfway across the yard, almost leaving her field of view altogether, she kills with one shot through the head. It crumples in a steel heap. She turns and takes down another, and then the return-fire comes and she whips away, bullets shredding the brownstone exterior, blowing holes in the ceiling overhead.
"You okay little guy!?" she screams as she runs into the next bedroom over. If the kitten gives a reply, she doesn't hear it.
From the cover of the bedroom window she kills two more, also on the lawn, one of them nearly to the front door, so close she has to lean out of the window and angle down to squeeze a shot at it. And then they shoot at her again. A bullet explodes the windowsill two inches from her head and peppers her cheek with splinters.
She runs back into the hallway, ducking beneath the window through which a fusillade of fire still pours through. She bursts into the bathroom on the opposite side of the hall. She mantels against the front-facing window. She spins into stance and kills the closest three she sees.
By then, the sound of their movement, that chorus of clawed steel feet on stone and soil, has become deafening. And when she takes the half-moment to look and see beyond the thin radius painted by her gunsights and tunnel vision, she sees that its not ones or twos anymore moving toward her house. It's an entire fucking ocean.
"Alright…" she murmurs in breathless concentration. "Time to do or die, I guess. Or maybe just die."
That makes her laugh. She chuckles as she throws the rifle out the bathroom door into the hallway. Cackles outright as she shrugs the RPG-7 into her hands.
She runs into the hallway as if to chase after her gun, settling the launcher in her arms as she moves, mounting on the window, taking aim. Her eyes align the sights. Bullets spin and crash around her. One gouges the shoulder of her jacket. She can't tell if it's drawn blood. Another ripples past her cheek so close she feels the air being sliced, feels the heat burning off its ballistic path.
Shiden doesn't care. Her heart is pounding but her hands are steady. The drones have covered the yard. Some are probably inside the house already.
She finds she doesn't give a fuck.
She fires.
Pressure bursts over her. Her eardrums thud in their sockets and her sinuses pop open. Her eyeballs are pressed into their sockets like a hand has pushed them. White smoke spews from the launcher's other end. The first breath she breathes tastes like gunpowder.
There's no time to the gauge the explosion or how many it kills. She only sees that it's bright and large, larger than she expected, and it's not one blast but many (Whoomph!-Whoomph!-Woomph!), pressure bursting against the house, rattling the frame, rattling her bones, and that's all she has time for. She swings the launcher over her shoulder and pivots backward.
She is blinded by the blue-white smoke of the RPG's backblast. It floods the hallway, heavy with the stench of acrid gunpowder, and she is coughing, eyes watering, but somehow she finds her rifle on the floor, and more crucially, brings it up just as the first drone tumbles onto the stairs.
She squeezes the trigger and rips three rounds through its rounded gut. It dies, but another follows behind and another after. Within moments there are too many to count clambering up the stairs. She holds down the trigger and doesn't let go. The gun roars like handheld thunder and the drones are cut down, piling into a barricade of corpses-
-until the gun clicks dry.
Shiden curses. She throws it down the stairs and runs to the window, and there sees death in the shape of a hundred other drones. She turns back and sees death in a crude humanoid shape sprinting up the stairs toward her, already halfway.
"FUCK-! THIS-! SHIT-!" she screams, running past the stairs down the hallway to the opposite end where a window promises escape.
A closed window. She didn't even think to leave it open.
She draws her pistol with one hand as she runs, fires and cracks the glass in a spiderweb. She shoots again and the window shatters, and she shoves the gun in its holster and then she's reached it, is diving through. Shards burst in a spray around her. Particles brush past her face, scratching skin.
For a moment she is in the air and weightless. And then she is falling.
The ground is a carpet of rain-slicked grass she has barely enough presence left to register. It accelerates toward her. She crosses her arms over her face and chest by reflex, and then she hits it, and is tumbling painfully across the yard end over end, arms flailing, legs smashing against one another, against the ground. Her lower back strikes a rock and an explosion of sickening red pain lances through her stomach.
But eventually she stops, sprawled on her back, wet long grass brushing against her cheeks, and she is aware of three things:
Her galloping heartbeat, which tells her she is still alive.
The falling rain, which is wonderfully cold against her fever-hot skin.
The rocket launcher pressing uncomfortably against her shoulder blade, which somehow hasn't flown away to God-knows-where during her tumble. It's this third that makes her aware of the fourth:
A churning, teeming, writhing roar. It's the sound of dozens upon dozens of steel-clawed feet swarming through the brownstone. There is a resonant crack as one of them slams against the back door from inside, its face looming over the door-window like a demon's visage, its sensor glowing cold and blue from behind rain-splattered glass. Then there is a hellish chorus of electronic chirps and whirs as all of them, all at once, know where she is.
Shiden sits up - bolts up - and drops the RPG into her hands. She reaches one arm for the quiver on the other shoulder
and comes away empty.
Her vision tightens, blackening at the edges. Her heartbeat accelerates, though it has to be impossible for it to go any faster. She looks up in a daze to see, scattered among the emerald green grass, the darker, duller green of her extra rockets, all fallen from her quiver.
She's going to die. She had thought she already knew that, but she sees now that the thoughts she entertained earlier were nothing compared to this black, iron-bound certainty. She is going to die. Maybe one of them will shoot her. Maybe not - they probably would have done it by now if any of them still had guns. But they haven't, so she's probably destroyed all the rifle-bearing drones by now. It changes nothing.
The self-propelled mines will break through the doors and windows they have piled against, and they will swarm her, and she'll have yet another moment to sit with the knowledge of her own death when they crush her under a mountain of rounded steel bodies, just before they explode, and everything ends.
And she thinks that she's okay with that. That she's done enough.
Maybe, by saving Kaie, she's finally made up for killing Shana. Maybe she'll be forgiven when she goes to the other side. She hopes so. Desperately.
There is a stirring in her chest.
It's a warm, vital motion and it catches her off guard. She puts a hand over her heart and it happens again; a lively, stirring, squirming motion.
Squirming?
Yep. Definitely squirming. And she realizes it's not coming from her chest, exactly. It's actually coming from right between her tits.
It's the fucking cat, still nested in her cleavage.
"Christ, you're still alive in there?" she murmurs wonderingly. Her voice comes out a hoarse croak. It hurts. Her throat feels just about cracked in half. "You sure you even wanna be?"
It might just be her imagination, but she thinks she hears a small meow from inside her jacket.
"Shit. Okay."
Shattering glass like the shot of a cannon. Self-propelled mines begin to tumble clumsily from the windows, sprawling on the grass. The back door creaks and groans, hinges screaming in stressed protest.
"Guess I got no choice, since you're depending on me or whatever."
The first drone gets to its feet.
"We move on three."
It starts to run.
"Three!"
The closest rocket is about fifteen feet away. She reaches it in two seconds. Has it in hand in four. Has dropped it down the muzzle and twisted it once in five-
-and the drone is almost on her.
But she doesn't hesitate. Her mind is blank and her movements are perfect. She transfers the launcher to her left hand in a railman's pass as she drops her right hand to the holster at her hip. She doesn't realize that she never strapped her gun into place before diving out the window, that there was nothing stopping it from tumbling across the yard just like the rockets in her quiver. She doesn't realize that if the gun is not where she needs it to be, she is dead.
And she doesn't have to.
The gun is there. Her right hand finds it. It is perfectly natural in her grip, like it and she were made for each other.
The self-propelled mine is within two yards of her when she brings up the pistol and with one neat shot through the eye, kills it. It hurtles forward on carried momentum and she pivots to let it pass before it tumbles in a pile. There are two others on the first one's heels. She kills them too, and she twists on her heel and there are two more coming from the right.
She kills these too. One shot each, and on the second she feels the difference in recoil from the pistol's slide locking back, signaling empty. She doesn't even look as she throws the gun aside. She takes the RPG-7 in both hands. She twists the rocket once, twice, three more times into the muzzle, and finally it clicks into place, fully primed.
The back door, with a relieved crash of shattering wood, bursts open.
Dozens upon dozens of drones pour out, sprinting like a conga line out of hell.
She doesn't even have to aim.
"Get fucked," Shiden says, and pulls the trigger.
Unleashing hell.
—
It took a solid five minutes before Shiden even understood what happened.
The instant she snapped the trigger, all she saw was light. Piercing white light drowning all. She had to have closed her eyes against it, by reflex if nothing else, but she couldn't even tell. If she did, it didn't help. The light simply burned through her eyelids too.
The one explosion became many.
Whoomph!-Whoomph!-Whoomph!
Blasts of thunder and pressure and heat came in radial waves over her. At some point she fell to the ground but could not know when that was. She just lay there on the grass, curled fetal, her back to the heat and noise, arms over her chest to shield the tiny life hiding there. She screamed until her lungs were empty, and she heard an awful ripping-popping noise in her ears, and thought for sure that they had burst.
She did not know when it ended. At some point the hot waves of pressure like hands passing over ever inch of her body had stopped, but she hadn't opened her eyes. She almost didn't dare to, and the ringing in her ears was relentless, burying even her own thoughts.
It was that stirring in her chest (tits) that made her move.
Shiden opened her eyes, and the sunspot that filled her vision was so huge and black she thought she truly had gone blind. But, no, she wasn't. There were shapes behind that purple-black hole. The outline of her hands, the reaching carpet of rainsoaked grass. And then, with a pop of movement, a tiny, furry head poking out the zipper of her jacket.
When her vision clarified, the sunspot receding after what felt like long minutes, she saw that the kitten's face was soaked in sweat. Which was more than a little gross, because Shiden was pretty sure cats couldn't sweat.
Still laying on her side, not daring to stand up, or look back, or around, like it might shatter this peace somehow, she put a finger on the kitten's wet head and nuzzled it.
"You okay, little guy?" she asked. She realized the ringing had receded slightly, enough for her to hear her own voice. Guess her eardrums didn't burst after all.
The kitten meowed. Shiden wasn't exactly a feline linguist, but she thought the sound of it was a lot more rough and hoarse than normal. She could guess why.
"That was, uh, a lot, wasn't it?"
She was amazed the cat hadn't panicked and started flailing its claws in every direction. She had been half-convinced she'd have to stitch her breasts back together once the fighting was finished. Assuming she survived, anyway. But the little guy was docile the whole time. Probably completely frozen up out of fear if she had to guess. That thought made her feel a little bad for it.
"You're a pretty good fucking cat, you know that?"
The kitten gave her a smug look that suggested it did.
"Do you think we should take a look around to make sure we don't get shot in the back or something?"
The kitten said nothing. Shiden took its silence for a yes.
What she noticed first, when she got to her feet, was that somehow she had fallen behind the corpse of one of the drones she'd shot down. Its steel body had shielded her from the worst of the blast. On the side facing the explosion its bulbous torso was scarred and scorched, peppered with shrapnel, several pieces of which would have been large enough to rip straight through her if the body hadn't stopped them.
It was a miracle in more ways than many.
Even with the defense of the self-propelled mine's sturdy corpse, how had a stray piece of metal not torn her open? How had the pressure alone not killed her or the cat? How the fuck had she even lived long enough to fall behind this thing in the first place?
She stood over the drone's corpse and asked these questions, but got no answer.
A field of scorched black earth lay before her. The ruins of the brownstone loomed like a monolith, but it was destroyed, razed utterly to the ground. Hunks of twisted metal and glowing embers dotted the field. The first stupid thought was one of wonder, asking how one little rocket could have done all that. Then she shook her head. Of course it hadn't been one rocket - it had been one rocket hitting an explosive target, surrounded by other explosive targets. And all the other rockets that had been in her quiver had been scattered among the grass too.
She'd somehow managed to daisy-chain-detonate every single self-propelled mine swarming her. All in one burst. She probably would have grinned and pumped her fists triumphantly if she weren't so fucking bewildered. She looked back at the corpse that had shielded her, and wondered why that one had stayed inert when all the others had exploded.
The kitten, its head still poking out her zipper, squirmed and fidgeted, reaching one paw out of her jacket and onto the plateau of her chest.
"Ah, yeah," Shiden said dazedly. "You probably want outta there now, don't ya?"
She gave it a helping hand, scooping it out by the underarms. She held it in her hands. Its fur was warm and moist with sweat. Which was still very gross.
"Sorry, buddy. Probably could have found you a better place to hide, but, uh, I kinda have a habit of just rolling with the first thought that comes to mind. Looks like you don't mind too much though?"
The kitten meowed happily.
"Huh. You must be a boy cat, I guess. I wonder if this would make Shin jealous…?"
She found her RPG flung several feet back, having rolled all the way to the end of the yard, stopped by a fence that now looked several stages more destroyed than it had before. She picked it up and slung it back over her shoulder. Her sidearm, and any other rockets that might have been in her quiver, were nowhere to be found. She was defenseless if another Legion drone found her, and she was surprised by how much the thought discomforted her, considering she hadn't expected to live this long in the first place.
By then, the ringing had receded entirely. Shiden was struck by the intense quiet of it all. She stopped walking, and when she did, it was like all sound had died in its entirety. The rain, she realized, had stopped. There was no more gunfire in the distance. The wind had died to nothing, and the only sounds she heard were the slow crackles of embers and popping wood, the drip of water off rooftops.
She looked up and saw the Eintagsfliege were retreating. Their silver veil melted away and a crystal blue sky was left behind, bright and gorgeous. Stretching white clouds like grasping fingers slowly pulled eastward, widening the horizon. The light of the revealed sun shone down on sheens of water that shone like diamonds.
"Fuck," Shiden murmured. Her voice was reverent and awestruck. "Fuck, that's pretty."
Lacking any better direction, she moved forward over the scorched earth, pushing past the twisted remains of detonated mines. She skirted around the shattered brownstone on a footpath, returning to the main street.
And there, she was met with the khaki forms of a dozen Juggernauts sweeping the area. One had stopped at the front lawn, where a huge black patch of burnt grass and scattered steel had formed around the impact point of her first rocket. Shiden saw the Juggernaut, and it saw her, and for a long moment neither of them did anything. She only stared, uncomprehending, unthinking, and the Juggernaut seemed to stare back, its optical sensor like a wide red eye.
With a mental self-slap, Shiden shook off her surprise. What the fuck was she doing, going all deer-in-the-headlights? She just killed a hundred goddamn Legion by herself. And you know what? Killing was thirsty work.
"Hey, asshole!" she shouted, waving one arm. "You got any water in there?"
Three seconds of silence. Then with a hiss of compressed air that sounded suspiciously like a labored sigh, the Juggernaut's canopy popped open.
There was an Alba inside.
For a one fleeting, stupid moment, she thought it might have been Shin in his disguise. She was just desperate enough to hope. But it wasn't. The Alba's cheekbones were too high and sharp, and his eyes too narrow, carrying none of Shin's calmness. He unbuckled his crash harness and jumped down upon the scorched earth. He wasn't dressed in the desert camo of a Processor's fatigues, but the crisp Prussian-blue of a Republic uniform.
He brushed shoulder-length silver hair behind his ear before he spoke.
"You speak to Captain Lucius du Frencia, leader of Glaive Squadron, of the military academy of Solis Novem in District 5."
The Alba Captain gave a small, slow smile that probably wasn't meant to be threatening.
"Yes, I have water."
Thanks as always to my beta readers, Sei and Unknownminutes.
They have informed me, using their authority as Havers of Breasts, that hiding small animals in your cleavage while you kick ass and take names isn't stupid. It's badass. I rest my case.
- Verbosity