Deadly
Game
Chapter
Eight
By
Fade
Eagle Eye quietly worked his way to the top of the building. The call for this work had come in just last night. Normally the slender elf didn’t take jobs that were so obviously rushed, but Harry, his fixer, had assured him it was on the level. Most runners quickly learned that you couldn’t trust anything coming out of a Johnson’s mouth, and only half of what came out of your fixer’s mouth, but this was far from a typical run. The Johnson had been an up and coming fixer named Peter. From all indications Peter played things as straight as Harry always did. Harry had told Eagle Eye that Peter would pay five grand for twenty-four hours, and that the work would involve a special kind of bonus that the elf would greatly enjoy.
Checking the roof for observers, the elf covered himself with a ruthenium blanket, which quickly assumed the colors and texture of the surrounding roof. Fairly certain that he was safe from all but the most determined search, the sniper started assembling the custom built sniper rifle that would help him earn his pay for the night. Eagle Eye felt a certain grim satisfaction wash over him at the thought of killing the racists below. Nothing could bring back the friends Eagle Eye had lost during the night of rage, but eliminating the kind of people that had fueled the hate might help stop those kinds of things from happening again.
Loading ten heavy-caliber rounds into the weapon’s magazine, the sniper contacted Command One. “Eye One ready, identifying targets.”
“Copy One,” came the reply from Command. “An additional exit from the base has been identified, anyone coming out of the alley next to the functioning light is suspect.”
____
Whizer checked the input from his scouting drone. The target was an abandoned industrial complex. The wall was obviously old, but still in good repair, while the buildings inside seemed to have been torn down, and rebuilt fairly recently.
The area between the buildings and the walls was well patrolled, at once a curse and a blessing. Whizer downloaded a birds-eye picture of the compound from his drone and began marking it with the patrol paths.
After several hours the rigger had determined probable areas of mines, and other static defenses, as well as determining the schedule of patrols, and several possible methods of entry. After double checking the accuracy of his information, Whizer sent it all to Command Three, and began checking the status of his six combat drones-the way things were looking, the night should be a target rich environment. The only thing Whizer needed to worry about now was keeping his drones from being shot down by the opposition.
____
Ritchie had spent the last seven hours astrally scouting the area surrounding the base. The mage was powerful, but he had no illusions about what would happen if he tried to breach the wards surrounding the buildings.
Luckily, stirring up the hornet’s nest wasn’t required today. Instead, as the mundane assets spotted probable locations for hidden exits, the mage would locate the exact entrances to the network of underground tunnels that the racists used to help minimize the traffic coming and going from the much more obvious gates aboveground.
An owl shaman named Hunts in Silence had established that the watchers providing magical surveillance for the tunnels were only checked on once a day. With the help of his favorite air elemental, Ritchie had been destroying all the watchers, and then signaling for Peter’s non-magical assets to move in and scout the exits for mundane alarms.
As the
last watcher fell, Ritchie smiled. Aside
from the chance to help dispense some payback, the best part of this job was
that since the mage was operating in astral space, he didn’t even have to soil
any of his clothes,
____
Iron Fang was very bored. Nevertheless, the wolf shaman was a true professional who realized that he was playing a key role in the preparation for the night’s assault. The electronics specialists examining the alarms needed fairly early warning to avoid any enemy operatives who might decide to use whichever exit they happened to examining.
After the fifth false alarm from his fairly stupid watchers, the shaman began to wish that he could trade places with Ritchie-at least that snob of a mage gets to hunt something, even if it is only watcher spirits.
_____
Hammer and Shiver were currently serving as advisors to Flash, who was designated as Command Two. The white hair and wrinkly skin did little to divert attention from the old mercenary’s bright eyes. One of the few normal females to reach squad command in the British Special Forces, Flash seemed to know everything there was to know about infiltration, assaults, and conflict in general.
Hammer was very grateful to be in the room while the assault plan was fleshed out. Although the troll and his student hadn’t been able to contribute much to the discussion between Flash and her two subordinates, Hammer had learned a couple of new things about how to crack especially tough eggs. Although to be frank these guys are a far step removed from a truly world class security setup. Having to keep such a low profile has forced them to compromise in several security areas.
Torch and Alfred, designated Command One and Command Three respectively, had quite agreed with Hammer’s assessment of the situation, and quickly set up their sniper and rigger assets to take advantage of the weaknesses Flash was identifying.
____
Ox and Vixen had drawn a fairly difficult assignment. Apparently we impressed Peter with our ability not to get killed while playing with Hammer and the rest of the big boys, thought Vixen as she crept up on another squatter.
Command Two had decided that the friendly operatives needed to start from locations fairly close to the enemy base. Unfortunately, even though there had been a rash of disappearances lately, the whole area was still full of squatters. One squatter who got indignant about the fact that an assault team was setting up near him would be all it would take to tip the bad guys to their plans.
Consequently, several groups had been tasked with insuring that wouldn’t happen. Vixen spotted the next squatter that magical recon had found. The samurai quietly brought her narcojet pistol up, and shot the squatter twice in the back, sending him into a deep sleep. Sighing in relief, Vixen motioned Ox forward to retrieve the comatose old man. While her partner lifted the squatter, Vixen called in to Hammer, temporarily designated Command Four, to inform him that the area had been cleared and that it was ok to start moving the first team in.
____
Shrapnel hummed quietly while he set up a battery of light mortars. Safely surrounded by a perimeter of Peter’s willing, but less experienced operatives, the stocky dwarf adjusted the elevation of the mortars so their shells would impact in the section of the compound where the main team would be making its assault. A slight adjustment to the individual barrels set the battery to launch its shells so they landed in a slightly greater dispersal pattern.
Loading each tube with a clip of mortar rounds, the dwarf set the entire battery to fire from remote control, and then began the process again on another battery.
____
At 12:40 A.M., Five teams disarmed the alarms on the various hidden exits, and entered the warren of underground tunnels. Hammer led his team through the route that had been judged most likely to contain heavy resistance.
Back in Central Command, Flash and her assistants watched as the red dots representing the tunnel teams moved closer to the base. Whispered reports and the soft hiss of silenced rounds taking down threats let Command Two know that her people were encountering scattered resistance. Looking over to One and Three, Flash made sure that they were ready to send in the troops if the teams inside somehow tipped their hand to the opposition.
_____
Shadow heard two voices moving down the tunnel in the team’s direction. Falling back to the rest of the team, the shape shifter saw that Hammer had also hear the approaching operatives. Motioning for stillness, the troll waited until the two samurai came around the corner, and then dropped the man on the right with a silenced shot, while Shiver dropped the female on the left.
“Rock One, Command Two here. It looks like the tunnels meet, you’ll be running into Rock Four within the next hundred feet.”
Acknowledging the information, the troll got the team moving again to try and make up some of the time they had lost. Rounding a corner, Hammer nodded to Team Four, all of who were clad in the same black sneak suits that team one had been given for the operation. Checking his chronometer, Hammer realized that the team would have to hurry to reach the first building before the assault was scheduled to start. It would put a serious crimp in our plans if the assault starts, and they lock everything down before we can get there, thought the big troll.
At exactly 1 A.M. the guards between the walls and the buildings were caught completely unprepared for the chaos that ensued as mortar rounds began dropping all over the place. While the antipersonnel rounds were making short work of the inner patrols, Eagle Eye and the other five snipers started dropping the plain-clothes targets that they had picked out hours ago. A swarm of ten flying drones, and ten tracked drones quickly appeared on the scene, providing suppressive fire, and helping to eliminate the enemy operatives that had made it to some form of cover.
By the time the last sniper round had reached its target, the mostly-metahuman hit teams had sprung into action, blowing both gates with quickly-placed plastic explosives. Flash had decided that the indirect route through the minefield, which the riggers had mapped out, would simply take too much time. Consequently the old soldier had tasked one of the mortar batteries with marching its fire from the gates all the way to the house. The high explosive loads that the rounds carried, had chewed up the landscape quite badly, making it slightly harder to run across the ground. None of the teams minded though because the rounds had fulfilled their primary objective. All the mines, and other fixed defenses blocking the use of a direct path to the buildings had been destroyed.
____
Rodger had never really expected to make it anywhere in the world. Starting life out as a skinny street urchin tended to open your eyes to the fact that most people die in about the same circumstance as they start out.
When the opportunity arose to start making deliveries for some of the fixers in the plex, the young man had jumped at the possibility. One thing had lead to another, and the young man had found himself making some runs against a variety of very minor targets.
Joining up with the organization had seemed to be the next big break-the organization had paid to have him equipped with some top of the line muscle replacements--making Rodger much more dangerous than he had been before. Unfortunately, there had been a problem arranging a time to install the wired reflexes that would have helped round out the package. Consequently, Rodger found himself always stuck guarding the basement entrances to the tunnels. I guess they figure that it is the one place where I’m not too much of a liability, thought the aspiring samurai.
As fate would have it, Rodger’s superiors proved to be very much mistaken. When the compound came under attack, the sam found himself pacing back and forth wishing he could abandon his post to go get a piece of the action, oblivious to the fact that the action was about to come to him.
Rodger never even
heard Shadow and Shiver ghost into the room.
By the time the young gillette realized that he wasn’t alone anymore,
Shadow had hit him twice with cavity strikes rendering him immobile. Shiver looked at Rodger for a moment, and
then raised his pistol and shot the young man with a narcojet dart.
Quite possibly better than he deserves considering who he works for, reflected Silk as she followed Hammer into the room. Looking into the astral the mage confirmed that the party had moved inside the final set of wards. Leaning against Hammer for a moment, Silk left her body to begin scouting the building. Looking back to make sure that Hammer was being properly careful with the part of her left on the physical plane, Silk started sticking her head through the doors and walls of the room in an effort to decide the best route to some kind of command room.
By the time Silk return to her body, the other teams had finished filing into the room, and Hammer was starting to look somewhat impatient. As soon as the mage had made her report, Hammer started dispatching teams. Vixen, Ox and the others from team five were tasked with holding the tunnel exit. Two and three were tasked with reaching the southern stairwell, and then working their way up to the top floor.
Looking over to Latino, who was leading Four, Hammer finished his instructions. “Our teams will take the closer stairwell, you’ll work your way up, while we will try to get far enough down to disrupt whatever the op forces try to set up once they realize that we have made it inside the complex.”
Nodding, Latino and the other team leaders got their people moving.
____
Flash was worried. Although the above surface teams had initially done well against the opposition, the amount of resistance they were running into was increasing at too high a rate. Half of the drones had been destroyed by the flood of enemy machines that had come rolling out of the buildings. Careful use of indirect fire from the mortars had helped to knock out the Dobermans and Steel Lynx drones, but the enemy had shifted over from the relatively immobile ground based drones to a variety of flying drones, which mounted surprisingly heavy armaments.
Command One and Three looked up from their displays, and Flash gave the only reasonable set of commands she could. “Tell the above ground teams to pull back. Use the remaining drones to cover the retreat, have the snipers switch over to the armor piercing rounds they were issued, and see if they can help thin those fraggers out a little. Try to get some mages up on buildings, where they have a clear shot at those drones, but aren’t likely to take enemy fire in return. If our people can make it back to some buildings they should be ok. Don’t let the enemy loose contact with out people though; we don’t want them to pull back any assets until after Hammer’s people have started raising drek inside the building. That big guy doesn’t need any more resistance than he is likely to already face.”
____
Eagle Eye had been enjoying himself immensely. Things had been in the slot and rolling--right up until the buildings had started spewing forth drones. Suddenly the sniper felt way too close to the action. Being close enough that you can’t miss doesn’t help very much if you’ve got enemy assets right on top of you. All of a sudden Flash’s rep is starting to look like so much hot air.
Feeding APDS rounds into his rifle’s magazine, the sniper reminded himself that the odds of anyone spotting him under his ruthenium covering were incredibly slim. The elf took a couple of calming breaths as he looked through his thermal scope at some kind of vectored thrust drone. The drone was one of a pair that had a team of the good guys pinned down in a crater.
Lesson one, you don’t have to kill it, you only have to take it out of the fight. The words of his first partner echoed through his mind as the elf took a third deep breath and then exhaled halfway. Predicting the drone’s course, Eagle Eye aimed at the closest thrust vectoring port and squeezed the trigger.
A depleted uranium round exploded out of the sniper rifle and streaked towards the drone, covering the half mile in a matter of microseconds. Upon impacting on the drone’s armor, the bullet’s unique characteristics came into play. Normal bullets carry an impressive amount of kinetic energy prior to impact, but the hardened steel of the armor was sufficient to stop them because the flattened out on impact. The super-dense core of the uranium round carried several times the kinetic energy of a lead round. The superior punch of the APDS rounds would have still been for naught, wasting itself as the uranium flattened on the armor, save for fact that it didn't flatten out. Instead the unique characteristics of uranium allowed the outer layers of the projectile to peel back, essentially creating a self-sharpening round. In this instance, the round punched completely through the drone, tearing a hole through the exhaust vent before exiting the far side with a slight tumble.
The destruction of the exhaust vent wouldn’t have normally been enough to bring one of the drones down, but the bullet also punctured the machine’s pressure chamber. Unable to create the thrust needed to keep itself aloft, the drone rapidly spiraled into the ground.
With a slight smile, Eagle Eye sighted in the next target.
_____
Grease Spot was mad. The greasy ex-humanis man had just lost a pair of drones to a sniper. Judging from the swearing going on around him, a number of the other riggers were having similar problems.
You may be a nova-hot sniper, but you’re still just a sniper. I only have to hit you once, now that I know you are out there, it is only a matter of time until I find you mother fragger. Estimating a rough bearing from the two previous shots, Grease Spot lofted a pair of observation drones high enough to get a decent view of the area.
Another shot, and another maimed drone later, Grease Spot still hadn’t found the sniper that was causing him so much problem. The drones aren’t seeing any muzzle flash, so lets try some other tricks. Pulling up a picture of the area, which his drones had taken the week prior, the rigger tasked the vehicle’s dog brains with comparing the old file against what they were seeing now.
Loading a new set of evasive programs into his combat drones, Grease Spot managed to avoid loosing another drone in the thirty seconds it took to find the first discrepancy between the two images. You son of a slitch, thought the rigger when the first hit proved to be no more than a congregation of pigeons who were to stupid to flee the scene of a battle.
Twenty seconds and four more false alarms later, the rigger struck pay dirt. Frosty, a ruthenium blanket to match the color and texture of the roof, with a thermal lining to create a perfectly even heat signature. Unfortunately the spot you chose usually has a slight heat spike right where you are laying.
Eagle Eye
knew he had to be pushing his luck. They
are going to find me before too much longer, even if they are totally
incompetent. Quickly disassembling
his rifle into something slightly more portable, the sniper was ready to bug
out when he heard the hiss of approaching drones.
They wouldn’t be all the way over here unless they had found me. Abandoning his position, the sniper sprinted a broken course to the stairwell as three drones opened fire with machine guns. Eagle Eye was fast, as a sniper he had decided that speed augmentations would be of more value than big muscles, so all his cyberware was geared towards making him faster, or a better shot. Unfortunately, the scientists still hadn’t invented anything to make an elf run faster than a bullet. Two steps from the open door, one of the drones finally managed to hit the elf with a sustained burst, and Eagle Eye tumbled through the door and down the top flight of stairs, just managing to avoid breaking his neck.
Triggering his Doc Wagon bracelet, the sniper hoped that the enemy didn’t have any operatives in the building, as blackness closed in around him.
_____
Inside the building, the alarms had taken on a new tone, but still didn’t seem to be the kind of frantic noise that Silk would have associated with the realization that hostile forces had penetrated the complex. Hammer seemed to agree because he had instructed Shadow, who was running point for both teams, to move as quickly as possible.
The shape shifter was proving once again the value of his combat sense. Moving at what translated as a flat out run for Silk, the phys ad had already reached the stairs, savagely cutting down two enemy samurai who had turned corners only to find themselves confronted with Shadow’s deadly, fast strikes.
This place is nothing short of huge, thought the mage as the two groups split, and Shadow started leading the way down the stairs. The lack of carpeting in the stairwell required that the team slow down considerably to avoid making too much noise, Shadow was still incredibly quiet, as was Shiver, but Silk hadn’t had much practice moving silently, and Hammer was so big that he tended to make noise even when trying not to.
As Command Two relayed situation updates to Hammer, Silk saw the troll look more and more concerned. “Things aren’t going well at all up top,” relayed the big razor. “Our forces are trying to pull back, but hostile drones are appearing faster than our guys can kill them. The snipers were helping to equalize things, but they’ve all been forced to pull back, or been taken out of action. Right now our people are pinned down in a number of buildings. Troops are now pouring out of the complex, and they appear to be ready to go from room to room in those buildings to clear our people out.”
____
Command had decided to send the two reserve teams into the building through the underground tunnels. One of the teams had taken over guard duty for Ox’s people, and the big human was now leading both his and one of the reserve teams, to the southern stairwell where they would descend and try to hit the command center from the direction Hammer’s people wouldn’t be using.
About the time the two teams reached the stairwell, Command Two came back on the tactile network. “Ox, the team we left back at the tunnel entrance has a mage who has been scouting since you headed out. It looks like she has found some kind of control room full of riggers. I’ve notified Hammer that your teams will split off to neutralize those riggers before they shred our forces any worse.”
Ox listened to Two explain how to get to the room, and then acknowledged the command and signaled his teams to continue on.
____
Teams Two and Three were having a hard time. The initial resistance had been very slight, but thirty seconds ago someone had dodged a shoot and slapped a wall alarm before being sent to whatever after life he believed in.
Colt was absolutely amazed by the number of people that the complex seemed to contain. I’ve joked about the whole city being racist, thought the ork as he ejected an empty clip and slid a fresh one into his assault rifle. I never really believed that there were more than a handful of people who hated metas so much that they would kill them.
Mercury, a beautiful elf who had suffered all kinds of abuses as a child growing up in L.A., wasn’t quite so nonchalant about the number of operatives the two teams were running into. I wish they were all here. We need to gather all these pigs into one place so I can kill them all, thought the slender mage.
Silk had been briefly introduced to Mercury before the op started, and had been at a loss for why everyone was so deferential to the other mage. If Silk could have seen the other elf now, all questions as to why the mage was so well respected would have been answered. Most mages chose to play things fairly cautiously. Taking a street samurai on head to head was considered bad form, as the muscle was fast enough that the mage generally died. Far from a typical mage however, Mercury had always thought her colleagues to be ridiculously timid.
The abuse the elf had suffered at the hands of racists just like these had left her fairly anti social, and very possessive of her time alone, time which the mage dedicated to honing her art so that she would never be helpless again.
Secure in the knowledge that her spell lock maintained bullet barriers would withstand the punishment the meat in front of her was dishing out, Mercury stepped up beside her team leader and reached through her power focus to summon the mana.
Most mages knew that you had to pick different spells for different situations, but it was more of an intellectual knowledge. For Mercury, who was even more obsessive than most mages, picking the right spell for the right job was something approaching pure religion.
In this instance, the mage knew that the halls provided limited room for people to dodge, and that the principle would probably prefer that collateral damage be held to a minimum, so she chose to use her ram spell. The same powerful spell that had crushed a City Master a week earlier, now tore through the hall, throwing samurai into the far wall.
Most of the enemy operatives who had been spared by the ram spell figured that another spell of that magnitude wasn’t likely to be thrown again immediately after the first, and therefore popped out of their doorways to take shots at the elf who had just killed so many of their friends.
Unfortunately, the universe didn’t seem to be rolling in favor of the racists at that moment because Mercury unleashed another ram which caught several more of the figures raining lead on her. The mage swayed a little and stepped back into the cover of a doorway while the other members of the team picked off the rest of the immediate opposition. Looks like you boys messed with the wrong metas, thought Colt with satisfaction as he took down the last swastika-covered goon.
____
Ox and his team rounded the corner only to find a couple of humans standing guard at the door they were trying to get to. Ox was pretty fast, but the humans were in a state of high alert due to the alarms which had been going off for the last ten minutes.
Before the gillette could get his weapon around, both the guards had opened fire, hitting him with a pair of full-auto bursts. Ox’s armor actually stopped about half of the rounds, and he was saved from taking a round to the head by the helmet Vixen had insisted he wear, but he still felt pain blossom all over his body as a significant number of rounds entered his flesh.
As Ox started falling to the floor, Vixen and Bang Bang came around the corner and dropped the guards with their own sound-suppressed full-auto bursts. I really need a pain editor and some kind of dermal weave-the combination seems to work well for Hammer, thought Ox as he drifted into unconsciousness.
Slapping a med kit onto her partner, Vixen swore, “Frag it, it just hasn’t been our week big guy.” Motioning to the door, the pretty samurai signaled Bang Bang to open it.
“Locked,” reported the other with a smile as he pulled out a small block of C-4. Vixen nodded permission for Bang Bang to plant the explosives as she and Spike pulled Ox away from the door. I always have to wonder when I work with Bang Bang, if anything is really locked, or if he just wants to ‘play‘.
Thirty seconds later the block went off, blowing the door into the room, and just about deafening Vixen. The three remaining members of the team threw concussion grenades into the room, as confused riggers tried to bring up holdout weapons, and disconnect from the input coming from their drones.
Ducking back around the door as the timers on the grenades wound down, Vixen saw Bang Bang smile knowingly at her as he tapped another block of C4 and made motions like he was turning a key. I hate that, thought Vixen. He is always acting like he knows exactly what is going through my head. Someone needs to take him down a notch or two.
Looking at all the unconscious riggers, Vixen changed to the command frequency and reported. “Ten riggers down, as is Ox. We’ve got to pull back to get him healed.”
____
With the enemy riggers out of commission, Whizzer and his fellows all bent their attention to breaking into the relays that the other riggers had been using to control the swarm of aerial drones. It took a couple of minutes, but the wait was worth it, as the four riggers broke the encryption and took control of the enemy drones. The battle started shifting as the riggers replaced the drones that they had lost up to that point in the firefight.
As the enemy operatives started taking fire from the very equipment that had been protecting them moments before, they started panicking. The emergence of Peter’s aboveground teams combined with renewed fire from the snipers on rooftops, quickly had the enemy forces retreating back to their complex.
If we can bottle them into their complex without killing the teams in there, we can take these guys, thought Flash.
__________
Special thanks to Rat, and Dan for letting me use their character Harry. I’ve enjoyed getting to know Shapcano’s and Rat’s characters so much that I hope to be able to have them pass through my stories from time to time
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