Rogue, page 20
part #1 of Iron Legion - The Black League Series
I wanted them unable to hit back, not killed.
My knee joints whined as I landed and I took off toward Mac now, covering the ground too fast for him to mount another missile assault.
With Fish out of the picture, it was all about proximity. Mac was built to deal damage long-range and Alice had no precision weaponry left, just flares and missiles, and she couldn’t put one of those on me if I was right next to Mac.
I was on him in seconds.
He lifted his hands, firing the large caliber guns on his wrists, and chased me around, but from his eyes to his hands to the hydraulics of his shoulder servos, compounded by the recoil from each bucking shot, he was too slow to get a good shot off while I was moving like I was.
Darting side to side he had no chance of pinning me down and before he knew what was happening, I was in the air and sailing over his head.
He turned to try and face me as I landed, but I wasn’t there.
With a quick boost from my thrusters, I halted my flight, hung above him, and then dropped onto the wide flat platform of his shoulders, my heel smashing down into the armor around his cam-dome.
Mac twisted and bucked, trying to reach over his head, but the arms were too wide-set on the HAM to get there, the armored epaulets too large to angle around. It was a known design flaw with the HAM, and was part of the reason they were kept back behind the front lines. They were near-useless in close quarters. That probably wasn’t something someone who wasn’t versed in the Mech Corps combat and equipment like I was would know — but I did, and I was exploiting the hell out of it.
Mac bucked and danced — it was all he could do to try and throw me off — but it was no use. The HAM was slow and immobile at the best of times, so it wasn’t much trouble to stay on. In fact, I wasn’t even paying attention to him. I knew Mac and Fish well enough to know their moves. It had been easy. Painfully easy, in fact. And if we ever got out of this, and back on the same side, I promised myself I’d tell him to get some new moves, or it would get him killed.
My focus was on Alice.
She was hanging there in the air, still now, as she racked her brain for any semblance of an idea of what to do.
One of her allies was neutralized by her own hand, the other was near lame and too close to me to hit me with any serious attack. Her one chance at a precision shot had been taken out too — no minigun, no options.
“Come on, come on, come on…” I urged her as Mac’s arms flailed wildly at my flanks. “Do it. Do it.”
She obliged.
I nearly heard her. “Screw it!” she would have yelled, smashing the autopilot button and throwing off her harness, charging for the cockpit door with a look of determination on her face.
The rear door on the Tilt-Wing hummed open and I lifted my knee, letting a smirk play on my lips. I wasn’t enjoying this, but I wasn’t far off. Fighting was in me now, and coming up against these guys was something I’d always wondered about. It was like a twisted fantasy coming true.
A flash of light at the Tilt-Wing’s back-end told me Alice was in her A-Series and blazing into action, the Tilt-Wing now on hover-mode. She was coming for me.
In the same second, my heel smashed down, crushing Mac’s weakened cam-dome straight into his bulbous body, blinding him.
My pistol was out an instant later and four well-placed shots into his shoulders — two on each side — obliterated all the circuitry needed to power the missiles and move his arms.
He wasn’t going anywhere unless it was on foot.
He wouldn’t be a threat any longer.
Now it was just me and Alice, one on one.
I’d come up against her before.
And that time, I’d hesitated.
I’d failed.
But now, the stakes were higher and I was a much better pilot, with far fewer emotions to cloud my focus.
I stepped off Mac coldly and hit the floor, flexing my fingers.
She circled wide and then came in fast.
I raised my pistol.
And fired.
19
In the ten years that had passed since we first tangled, Alice definitely hadn’t let her skills slip.
The first bolt of plasma leaped out of the nose of my pistol and shredded its way toward her, fizzing and spitting as it did.
She rolled smoothly in the air like it was coming at her in slow motion and it zipped under her back, missing completely.
The A-Series was fitted with a host of weaponry, all of which she seemed determined to show me.
The shoulder-mounted minigun was the most potent tool in her arsenal.
It was smaller than the one on the nose of the Tilt-Wing, but that didn’t mean it was any less dangerous.
Despite the caliber being lower, the rate of fire was faster, and that meant getting tagged wasn’t just catching one or two bullets, it was getting torn apart by dozens of them.
I took stock, watched her level, sank into my heels, and then twisted, seeing the barrel spooling up in front of me.
Alice would go for my knees — if she could take out my stance, make me immobile, that would be it. But I knew that, and if she still hadn’t realized it was me, I had that over her.
My heels dug into the floor and I kicked backward, spinning and sliding at the same time.
I made a full three-sixty, making sure I knew where Mac was behind me, and went to a knee, throwing up that armored shin-pad and squeezing off a shot at her flank.
It wasn’t meant to hit, but it was close enough to force her to swing right reflexively and make her barrel come off target before it had time to readjust.
The line of fire whipped sideways, glancing off my shin and carving a line into the ground toward Mac.
Bullets pinged and clanged off his hull, denting the thick plating on his chest.
She eased off the trigger quicker than she could have and zoomed overhead, taking a wide circle around the hangar.
I strafed sideways toward Mac, who’d now fallen perfectly still. He probably had Alice on comms telling him that she was engaging me and to stay put. He didn’t have a chance of doing much else without eyes. Still, I made sure to stay out of arm’s reach, just in case.
I got behind him as Alice made another pass, whipping in quickly.
This time, she didn’t even take a shot.
She soared overhead and went into another lap.
I didn’t really think that I could force her to land, though every lap meant she was eating into her flight reserves. Though they could sustain flight, the A-Series couldn’t remain airborne for more than about ten minutes at full thrust — their limited fuel tanks prevented it. And I didn’t think she’d risk going back to the Tilt-Wing for another cell.
She’d been up for more than two so far, and I knew she wouldn’t come down until she absolutely had to.
With the Federation invading the other hangars and the Ganlon militia falling back, I was going to be cut off if I wasn’t careful. I couldn’t waste time playing the long game. I had to rely on my skills, as well as what I knew of Alice’s. And, if my knee-jerk reaction about them was anything to go by, it was that she was going to be a tough opponent to take down.
All around us, the air grew thin, slipping out through the crack in the doors, an awful sucking noise filling the silence between our engagements.
She came in fast and I moved closer to Mac, forcing her to swing overhead again. I didn’t think she’d try a third time.
But she didn’t need to.
We were toward the back of the hangar, which meant there wasn’t much space for her to make the turn. And she couldn’t do it at full thrust. So she’d have to pull back on the thrusters to bank, and have her back to me for a few seconds.
I pulled my rifle around and leveled it, leading her as she slowed down to make the corner, showing me her flank for a fraction of a second.
My finger bounced on the trigger and I pumped off a half a dozen rounds in a tight wave.
The first sailed wide, the second impacted her shoulder, the third and fourth her back, the fifth her right leg, and the sixth ricocheted off the hangar door and into the ceiling.
Black smoke billowed from her body, and thick yellow flames spat from the injured leg — I must have nicked one of the fuel lines and air was getting sucked through now, causing a dirty reaction in the ignition chamber.
She sagged and then twisted, falling a few meters before she managed to regain herself and pick up more speed, the other jet burning brighter now to compensate. I knew she wouldn’t go down without a fight, but with her thrusters maxed like that she’d burn through her fuel much quicker than normal. That meant she was going to come in hard and fast and try and finish me.
If I was her, I’d be talking to Mac, making contingencies. She wouldn’t risk him breaking from his rig if she had her full capabilities, but she was moving slower now, she was less maneuverable. The A-Series had some surface-to-air missiles, and if she timed and placed them right, she wouldn’t even need to go for me.
If she could get Mac to let off a diversion or pop smoke, he could make a break for it on foot and she could blow his HAM right to hell. The resulting explosion, if I was using it for a shield, would engulf me.
It’s what I’d do.
But I wasn’t about to let that happen.
Whether she was going to try and use Mac against me or not it didn’t matter. I had other plans.
While attacking her would be like trying to bat at a fly, the Tilt-Wing was unguarded and on auto-hover. No doubt Alice was tapped into it and could put it down if need be via remote control, but she didn’t have a hope in hell of maneuvering it from her current position.
“Blue,” I said, calculating how long it would take for her to swing around the hangar. “How many rockets do we have left?”
“There are ten missiles available. Would you like to target the aerial mech on approach?”
“Lock four onto Alice—”
“Who is Alice?”
“The A-Series.”
“Affirmative.”
“And four onto the Tilt-Wing — two on each engine. And let off the first four in succession. I want to keep her busy while we bring the bird down.”
“Targets locked.”
I pulled the trigger and let them all off, circling widely away from Mac before Alice could launch a counter-attack.
She dove and then swept upward over the missiles, fighting her compromised thruster all the while.
Two of the missiles flew by, and she blew the third out of the air with a burst of minigun fire. The fourth was too close to get clear of the blast, and though it detonated, hitting the explosion of the third, the second shockwave rocked her and threw her off course.
She tumbled through the air, trying to regain herself as overhead the other four missiles struck true on the Tilt-Wing and ripped apart its jets.
They erupted in flame and the thing began to twist down out of the air in a flat spin, the engines howling and hissing as they failed to keep it aloft.
As Alice managed to right herself, the ship crashed to the ground and buckled, the wings snapping from the body, the hull crushing itself under its own weight, flattening the bulbous body into a buckled heap of aluminum frames and panels.
Everyone was still, watching it for a second — in shock.
And that’s what I wanted. It was a distraction — an underhanded and expensive one, but a distraction all the same.
By the time Alice registered the flash and dull spit of my plasma cannon, it was too late.
She made a last-ditch effort to swing her foot out of the way, but the bolt struck her in the heel and blew the thruster clean off.
Her other thruster flipped her over the lame leg and Alice tumbled faster than her ship had a moment before.
She fought to stay up, but the directional thrusters weren’t enough to support her weight, and like any good pilot, she cut her losses and dropped to the ground like a stone.
I rushed out into the space between the flaming mess of a ship and the churned bomb-site from their first bombardment, and faced her.
She limped forward, too, locked and loaded, minigun spooling, and took me head-on.
I knew she would.
She was cocky enough to think she could take anyone, and good enough a pilot to kick ninety-ninety percent of pilots up and down that hangar without a second thought.
But I was the one percent and I wasn’t about to take rolled over by her twice.
The last time had been nothing more than a glorified game, but this time the stakes were real — and I wasn’t about to go all-in without an ace in the hole.
We moved forward tentatively, measuring each other before the clash. Alice still had her minigun, and I had my pistol out and raised, each of us trying to anticipate the move of the other.
There was a breath of stillness, and then we both fired, leaping in opposite directions and rolling over our shoulders. If she wasn’t shooting at me I would have laughed at how synchronized it was.
Federation training. Muscle memory.
It was like a rehearsed dance. Anticipate the enemy’s move, and look to counter rather than attacking blindly and letting your guard down.
Her shots sailed wide, cutting a white-hot line into the ground. My single bolt lanced past her and exploded off the far wall.
We were both on our feet in a second, trading bursts of fire.
I let her take aim and lay into me, ducking, throwing up my kinetic shield.
I hadn’t needed it before that, but now, one on one, it would probably be the difference between life and death.
Bullets thundered into it and the surface warbled, absorbing the energy of the shots.
She readjusted and pulled the minigun higher, going for exposed steel. They glanced off my shoulder and shot into the air as I continued to dodge, swinging my pistol low and around the side of the shield.
I aimed fast, going for center mass. A well-placed shot into the gut of an A-Series would sever its central servos and make it collapse on itself. But Alice knew that.
She spun gracefully, like a ballerina, but landed with a clunk, planting her damaged foot awkwardly, letting off another stream of minigun fire that swerved off my shield and into the air as she stumbled.
The shield flickered and stuttered under the onslaught. It was light and great in a pinch, but it wouldn’t put up with this all day.
The eye-tracking in my visor removed the hull-damage warnings with a flick of my pupils and I stepped sideways quickly, twisting my hands straight and letting off a couple of mini-rockets.
Alice redirected the mini-gun to pick them out of the air, catching one halfway between us and the other a few meters short of her.
She jumped back out of the blast zone and let off one of her surface-to-air missiles. It popped off her back and arced forward, slingshotting toward me.
I afforded a quick smile, my pistol already raised, and plugged it before it even got a quarter of the way to me.
It plumed in a ball of orange flame veined with black smoke and before it cleared, I was pumping forward with everything the thrusters had to give.
Before she could react I burst through the blanket of fire and was on her, trading paint in close quarters. My shield was weakened, and that minigun was lethal.
My balled fist shot out and upward, clanging into her hull like a bell-ringer’s mallet.
She jumped back, trying to absorb it, and came over the top with a chop, the sharp hand of the A-Series — flattened to act as a directional rudder during flight — swinging toward my cam-dome.
My left hand was already rising and collided with it over my shoulder.
The impact buckled my forearm armor, but it didn’t matter — it was a small price to pay.
Before she could counter I brought my pistol up across my body and pumped off a round square into her elbow joint.
Sparks leaped into the air and pneumatic hoses whipped like deranged snakes.
I didn’t see her arm hit the floor, but I heard it. I had my back turned, moving away so she didn’t cut me in half with that minigun.
Two more mini-rockets went skyward out of my wrist and I spun on my heel, still close enough for her to think twice about using her own, larger missiles.
I wasn’t trying to hit her anyway — just cause the auto-aim of her mini-gun to switch focus from me.
It swung upward, chasing the rockets, which I’d locked onto a strip-light high above and not on Alice at all.
I leaped upward myself now, a quick kick of the thrusters to get me high enough off the ground to come in at the right angle.
Alice readjusted the mini-gun and turned it on me.
I was tucked into a ball, shin guards covering my vitals, left arm forward to cover the rest, and my right wound up and balled behind me.
The air whistled through my armor as I fell, her bullets singing off the steel of my hull.
But it was no good — they weren’t enough to rip me apart with my armor doing its work — and she wasn’t fast enough to realize that and get out of the way.
I unleashed the strike, whipping my body around on the hip giro with everything the pneumatic cylinders had to give me.
My hand was tightly fisted like a sledgehammer head and flew around, compounded by the speed of my fall and the twist of my torso, and crunched into her hull.
I was aiming for her camera dome — knocking that out was as good as a headshot — but she tried to dodge. She moved maybe only a few centimeters, but my fist glanced off and plunged into the seam between the armor around the dome and the dome itself.
She buckled under the force, going to a knee, her stump of a right arm flailing as she searched for the ground with a hand that wasn’t there.
The mini-gun swung around and I caught it out of the corner of my eye — it was half a meter from my own dome — no more.
My left hand opened, releasing my pistol, and shot up as the barrel started to spin, the first bullets blowing the tops of my fingers clean off before I could get my palm over the nose of the gun and clench down, twisting and crushing in one motion.
