There was what Kira hoped was a brief flash of darkness, and her head started ringing as the aircar settled around her. She shook her ahead against a brief spike of dizziness and a warning message popped up in her vision.
Minor concussion detected. Refrain from aggressive motion. Repairs initiated.
A moment later, though, Milani’s voice echoed through the aircar cabin.
“Move!” they bellowed. “Everybody out of the car; we almost certainly have incoming.”
Kira obeyed, despite another warning message flashing across her eyes. An override order to her headware released an emergency stimulant, and she exhaled as her vision and ears settled around her.
She followed the armored mercenaries out of the aircar and looked around to situate herself. The pilot—Juliet Whittaker, her headware absently informed her—had somehow managed to put the aircar down in the only open space in a neighborhood of four-story walk-up apartment buildings.
There were small parks in front of each of the buildings, but the three that Kira could see in the darkening twilight actively had kids and parents in them. The one Whittaker had landed in was currently sealed off by a cordon of yellow light and a sign warning about new grass seeding.
Given the apparent choices, Kira was glad to ruin an apartment building’s carefully managed grounds—and damned impressed with her pilot.
“Milani, what’s our status?” she demanded.
The armored Commander was removing crumpled plating to get at the storage compartment and their “decorative” black box.
“Try to raise Huntress and you’ll see,” they replied. “We’re jammed. Hard. It’s not multiphasics, so I’m guessing short-range…which means they either had a damned good idea where we were going to go down, or they’re in the air and closing on us now.”
Kira was the least armored of the four mercenaries on the ground. Milani, Whittaker and the third trooper—Tsagadai Lovel, her headware reminded her—were all in combat armor.
She was in a more-armored-than-usual shipsuit under her dress uniform pants and jacket. The jacket wasn’t going to make much difference if someone shot her, and she tossed it aside, drawing her blaster from its holster at the small of her back.
“Contact left, high!” Lovel snapped.
A moment later, an armored arm—Kira wasn’t even sure which of her companions it belonged to—grabbed Kira and shoved her behind the crashed aircar as an airvan swept around one of the apartment buildings.
Whoever was flying the van was coming in low and fast, violating at least a dozen traffic regulations—but given that the van’s side door was open and the antigrav vehicle was turning in the air to present three blaster rifles, Kira suspected traffic rules weren’t on anybody’s mind.
Plasma bolts walked across the park they’d crash-landed in as their assailants fired, then Whittaker’s armored form blocked Kira’s vision. The pilot was on one knee, taking careful aim and firing at the airvan as it sliced toward them.
Kira absently noted screaming in the distance, but it wasn’t from any of her people or their attackers. Probably—hopefully—bystanders horrified to see the war come to their very doorsteps.
A nearer scream denoted the success of her own escorts. Kira didn’t pick up the ugly underlying vibration to the sound for long enough that the airvan was almost on the ground before she registered that the antigrav coils had been shot out.
The craft had been low enough and fast enough that it definitely crashed, hammering into a thankfully now-empty street in a spray of debris and destruction.
“One down,” Milani said grimly. “Whittaker, check on Lovel. Admiral…I need you.”
That wasn’t what Kira had expected, and she rose to her feet with a moment’s aid from Whittaker. The pilot had covered her with her own body, but it didn’t look like Whittaker had been hit.
Lovel, on the other hand, was on the ground with multiple blast marks across his armor. Even the heavy power armor Kira’s ground troops wore was only rated to withstand one or two direct hits before the dispersal webs burned out—and he’d taken a lot more than that.
Her headware said he was still alive. Her experience suggested that situation wouldn’t last much longer without medical attention—but Whittaker was already on it as Kira joined Milani at the back of the aircar.
The dragon-armored merc had managed to extract the long black box from the storage compartment, but they weren’t moving right. Kira was used to watching Milani use every bit of speed and grace their power armor gave them, and to see them adjusting carefully was…strange.
“Took a hit to the hip actuators,” they told her grimly. “I’m not hurt, but my entire left leg is frozen in place and parts of the suit network are flash-fried. Nothing’s moving at speed, and I can’t interface with the fucking launcher.”
They managed to get an armored gauntlet into the box and pull away the top of the container. They might not have been able to exert their usual control and grace, but the exoskeletal muscles were clearly active, as the chunk of black-painted metal flew away and dug a dozen centimeters into the dirt.
“We’re still jammed,” Kira noted softly.
“Which means that was just the first strike—and even if they only had one strike team, the team with the laser is still in play. They won’t have stayed with it,” Milani warned. “We still have incoming.”
Kira wasn’t entirely familiar with the weapon in the case except in theory. Short-ranged and slow by space-combat standards, a hyper-velocity missile was a one-shot kill on most vehicles operating in atmosphere.
It consisted of a single overcharged Harrington coil that accelerated from nothing to about four percent of lightspeed in a fraction of a second—and then disintegrated into near-subatomic particles.
Inside the dozen or so kilometers the HVM existed, it was effectively instantaneous. Beyond that… Well, it wasn’t harmless, but it wasn’t the fist of an angry divinity it was inside that.
“Highlighting the shoulder and grips in your headware,” Milani told her. “Goes over your shoulder, interfaces via the same hand-chip that links to your pistol.”
Green highlights appeared on the weapon as Kira’s subordinate spoke, and she followed the instructions, resting the curved and padded stock on her shoulder and sliding her hands in. Most the time, she forgot that she even had a short-range communication chip in her right palm, but it linked into the HVM launcher easily enough.
The weapon quite helpfully painted a three-dimensional red zone on her vision that showed what was going to be obliterated when she pressed the trigger—and calmly advised her that it was locked until her mental release.
“Still no coms,” Milani murmured. “I don’t see anything on sensors, but we’re surrounded by dense-enough structures that they have cover.”
“I’m a decent pistol shot, but this might be beyond me, Milani,” Kira warned.
“Whittaker is keeping Lovel alive, and I can’t move well enough to aim or interface with the launcher,” Milani snapped. “It’s you or it’s nobody.”
They paused, their helmet rotating slightly.
“What’s the chance that Quaker City cops are here already?” they asked.
“Low,” Kira murmured.
“Then the aircraft coming from that direction is the bad guys,” Milani told her, pointing. “And boss?”
“Yes?” Kira asked, leaning into her own enhanced hearing to try to locate the incoming hostiles.
“If you have to miss, don’t hit the buildings. That thing will obliterate a dozen apartments and as many innocents.”
“Thanks.” She’d got that from the red line in her vision. The weapon, at least, seemed to think that everything in that zone was going to cease to exist when she pulled the trigger.
She lifted the launcher slightly, adjusting the course to go past the building she was watching and above the one behind it. Then she released the safety, grimacing as she realized she was now a one-woman weapon of mass destruction.
“Ready,” Milani barked.
“Ready,” she confirmed.
“There!”
It was another unmarked airvan with the side panel open—but this one had a proper assault cannon hanging out the door! There was no cover or armor that would protect Kira’s people from a weapon designed to suppress assaults by entire platoons of power-armored soldiers.
And there was no armor in the world that would allow an airvan to survive the impact of a hyper-velocity missile. There wasn’t even a blip of recoil as Kira pressed the double trigger—but there wasn’t even enough lag for her to think the weapon had failed to fire.
A shock wave rippled out from the space in front of the weapon, a sonic boom unlike anything she’d ever heard in her life, and the red zone the launcher’s software had highlighted turned into a pillar of white fire.
As her implants and nanite systems cleared the afterimage from her sight, Kira looked for any sign of the airvan she’d aimed at.
There was nothing. She’d lined it up perfectly, and nothing in the path of the HVM had survived.
“Clear,” Milani said quietly. “You can put the launcher down, boss. It only has one shot.”
“What happens if they have a third wave?” she asked, lowering the weapon.
“Then it’s a race to see if they can kill us before reinforcements get here,” Milani told her. “And even if Huntress’s people had missed everything up to this moment, I guaran-fucking-tee you my people dropped assault shuttles when they saw an HVM fired!”