Starfall: A LitRPG Adventure (Tower of Somnus Book 3), page 31
“Well, fuck, I was afraid of that,” Baker replied laconically. They took a final puff from their cigarette before blowing out another cloud of smoke and removing it from their mouth. Almost absently, they clicked the back of the white cylinder, and the cherry red ashes on the end went out with a quiet ‘beep.’
Their spare hand went to their mouth. A moment later, Baker let loose a piercing whistle, drawing the attention of the people working on the storage racks. A hatch popped open on the tank, revealing a young woman, dark grease covering her face and auburn hair.
“3445!” Baker shouted. The handful of people that had still been working stopped, instead focusing their attention on the slight person standing next to Kat. “It sounds like the corpos know what we’re up to. Shift your focus to unboxing weaponry that we’ll be able to use in the next five to ten minutes and then get into position behind the turret line.”
“Britt,” they continued, pointing a slim, almost albino, white hand at the woman whose head was sticking out of the tank. “Help the big guy here find one of them APEX suits. We don’t have anyone trained to use heavy armor left, and I’d prefer to not lose people to friendly fire.”
“This is it, ladies, gentlemen, and people of all ages,” Baker finished, clapping their hands together, their cigarette having disappeared into the recesses of their jacket at some indeterminate point in time. “The 3445 gets one last chance today. Either we burn our way out of here and climb out of this deathtrap atop a pile of corpo bodies, or we go out in a blaze of glory. Either way, let’s make it a night worth remembering.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“Come on, big guy,” Britt called out over her shoulder at Davis, “time’s a wasting. Plus, we’re gonna have to uncrate the suit and get it booted up before you can use it. No time for dilly dallying.”
Despite everything, Kat had to struggle to keep a smile from her face. Davis was struggling to keep up with the two of them, his damaged battle suit dripping fluids with every shuffling step.
“I am moving as fast as I can, young lady,” he replied in a clipped voice, bristling at the indignity of the situation. “My armor was designed for survivability, not speed, and that was before an auto cannon trashed the trauma plates and about half of the motors in my left side.”
“If you’re winded, just let me know,” the woman responded, waving a hand dismissively without bothering to look back. “I don’t want your heart to give out because we pushed you too hard or something, gramps.”
“Gramps?” Davis sputtered, her irreverence finally cracking his poker face. “Gramps! I’ll have you know, young lady, that I killed my first corporate executive before you were even born. I did it clean too! They still have his death officially marked down as a drunken fall from his penthouse.”
Kat’s lips moved slightly before she managed to get them back under control. Davis was fuming, but he managed to draw another burst of speed out of his failing suit, unwilling to let the dismissive refugee woman show him up.
“The next right turn will be where the APEX suits are stored,” Britt called out, pointing at the cement floor where large yellow letters spelled out ‘D-2.’ “Once we get one uncrated, we’ll still need to find one of those funky combat rifles for Merrimac. Otherwise he’ll be stuck using that old fashioned—”
Whatever words she was about to say were lost, disappearing with her entire upper torso in a puff of pink mist. Before Kat could skid to a halt, the roar of the shot that had erased Britt shook her body, wind from the passage of the round pulling at the tight fabric of her infiltration suit.
Almost without thinking, Kat cast Levitation and burned stamina, Leaping up into the second story of storage crates. Below her, Davis’s heavy footsteps stopped, but it was too late. An eerie humming noise filled the corridor where the APEX suits were stored. Evidently, the rest of the warehouse wasn’t as empty as previously believed.
“Quit hiding, you assholes,” a woman’s voice crackled from aisle D-3. “You fucking killed Eric and Dominic at the check in station. Now it’s your turn.”
A grayish black humanoid suit of powered armor strode into the open. The robotic frame was twice as tall as Kat and covered in plates of the thick black armor she’d seen on the tank. As soon as the pilot saw Davis’s armor, the strange humming noise increased. It raised a large black rifle in a one handed grip, a number of cables trailing from the back of the weapon to a large blue canister built into the machine’s back.
It fired a fraction of a second behind Davis, and that was all that saved him. The heavy cannon barrel of his weapon spat defiance, half deafening Kat as it launched a saboted armor piercing round into the newcomer’s leg.
The black suit staggered backward, a divot in its leg from Davis’s attack but nothing more. Then it returned fire. Its rifle thrummed, launching a plume of fire as the discharge instantly turned air into plasma. The shot went wide, punching a bowling-ball-sized hole clear through one of the heavy metal crates on a nearby shelf.
“Fuck,” Kat whispered, her eyes growing wide.
The new suit lifted its leg, looking down to inspect the damage. Satisfied, it planted both of its feet, shifting the rifle to a two handed grip and swinging the weapon around toward Davis’s ailing battle armor.
“Just a scratch,” the woman’s voice came from speakers hidden in the darker powered armor. “Quit squirming. If that’s the best you’ve got, it’s not like fighting back can even change the outcome. You’re just wasting my time.”
Kat slid her handgun back into its calf holster. It would be less than useless against that monster. She exhaled, hand slipping into her pack and touching the small box she’d smuggled from Chiwaukee.
Then she was moving, Cat Step speeding her movements as she twisted and vaulted her way through the obstacle course of boxes on the upper level of the storage rack. Just as she was reaching a vantage point where she’d have a proper firing angle on the enemy armor, some sixth sense pulled her up short.
She slammed herself into the back of a box just as a small antipersonnel gun turret on the battle armor’s shoulder swiveled, spraying her cover with bullets. The storage crate behind her rattled and shook as it laid down suppressive fire, pinning Kat.
“What the—” The woman was cut off by another roar of Davis’s heavy cannon.
Kat doubted it was enough to actually stop their opponent, but it managed to silence the secondary turret.
“Motherfucker!” the woman shouted. “I’ll kill you for that!”
The telltale hum of the railgun sent a static thrill through Kat as she finished casting Mirage. There were far too many variables at play. If she guessed any one of them wrong, this fight was about to end very quickly and in a fashion that would generate a whole lot of mess.
She only had one chance at this. Unless the refugees had managed to find some shells for the hover tank’s main cannon, they were sitting ducks. That meant Emma would die. That meant that Whippoorwill—
Her throat worked silently as Kat swallowed, trying to cleanse herself of the distracting thoughts. So what if she only had one chance? She’d just have to get it right the first time.
Kat jumped, a Gravity Plane shimmering through the air just in front of her, angling downward even as the light around her warped, making her body look like it were a handspan or so closer to the ground. She soared through the air, parallel to the ground in an attempt to create the slimmest possible profile for the powered armor’s automatic turret.
Even as she brought the unfamiliar grip of the alien pistol to bear, the NeoSyne guard fired her rifle. Davis’s armor burned with red light. One moment, it was standing in the open, and the next it was a smoking heap, propelled sideways by some Tower-granted skill or perk a fraction of a second before the rail gun went off.
Bullets sailed toward Kat. Most were low, but the handful that were on target slammed into the Gravity Plane, causing the almost invisible angled wall of magic to ripple as they were yanked just enough off course to miss her plummeting body.
Then Kat pulled the trigger. Her entire upper body jerked upward from the recoil, spinning her backward until she hit the very storage apparatus she had launched herself from, the small of her back slamming into the metal edge of a crate.
She bounced back into the corridor, hands clutching the alien pistol as pain blossomed from the blow. A half second later, she landed face first on the concrete floor, the durable material of her infiltration suit saving Kat from any number of scrapes and road rash.
Planting both hands on the cement, Kat pushed herself up, swinging around to point her pistol at the powered armor.
It wasn’t moving. Her pistol had punched a fist sized hole through its torso, leaving a crater in the floor behind the mechanized armor. Partially by educated guess, and partially by luck, Kat had aimed for the center of its upper torso, rupturing the pilot’s cockpit and shredding the NeoSyne guard inside.
The railgun clattered to the ground, the sound echoing in the sudden silence after the brief battle. Then, the entire suit tumbled forward, its form locked in place after the pilot stopped providing input, but ultimately she’d left the robotic suit so off balance that remaining upright was impossible.
Kat stood up, sighing with relief, the stallesp pistol still clutched in her white knuckles. The alien had missed her with it back in Chiwaukee, and she’d known the gun was powerful then, but this was something else. One shot and it had gone through two heavy plates of advanced armor like they were nothing more than wet toilet paper.
“What in the name of Pete was that, Erinyes?” Davis asked as he limped from the wreckage of his own battle armor. “I figured we were done for unless I could get close enough to plant a shaped charge on that beast, but you managed to take her down with one shot.”
He moved stiffly, his slimmer pilot suit matted with grease and sweat from pulling himself from the smoking scrap heap that had represented hundreds of thousands worth of investment on his part. Still, despite his disheveled appearance and the obvious injury to his left leg, Davis managed to make his approach look dignified. It was hard to describe, just an energy about the older man.
“Just a toy I picked up when we recovered the stallesp databank in Chiwaukee,” Kat replied, glancing down at the gun before slipping it back into her hip pack for safe keeping. “Evidently, as futuristic as all of this new NeoSyne hardware is, the moles didn’t trust them with weaponry that would actually let the humans stand up to them. This is only a pistol. Imagine if the aliens bothered to field anti-armor weapons?”
“I’d prefer not to,” Davis remarked with a shake of his head. “I like the safety and security of a personal exo-suit. If the stallesp start fielding weaponry of that power in mass quantities, it looks like the only viable defense will be dodging, something I will have to admit that I’ve gotten much worse at with age.”
“Speaking about that, let’s get you patched up, Merrimac,” she responded, trying to ignore the bruising in her lower back as she walked over to meet the older man. “We don’t have a lot of time. The sooner we can get you healed and into one of those monsters, the better our odds are against whatever the hell NeoSyne manages to throw at us.”
“Very true,” Davis agreed, nodding at Kat as she began mumbling the words to Cure Wounds I. “I am interested in the mobility that the other operator managed to display. She was clearly inexperienced in exosuit usage, but despite that, she was almost as agile as an unarmored samurai.”
“If you managed to find one of those pistols in Chiwaukee,” he continued, stepping back from Kat and testing his weight on his newly healed leg as she switched to her lower back, “there will surely be some here. Unfortunately, unless I wish to share her fate, mobility will be a must in the upcoming battle.”
“Don’t sell the suits short,” Kat grunted back. “I certainly wasn’t expecting an anti-personnel gun turret on that thing’s shoulder. The piece of shit almost turned me into hamburger. Even if there are some stallesp mixed into the NeoSyne forces, it’s not like they’ll be wearing heavy armor. If your automatic defenses tear them apart before they can get a shot off, you should be fine.”
“Now that,” Davis said, a hint of mirth between his normal taciturn tone, “is a weapon design after my own heart.”
The two of them walked around the ruby puddle that had been Britt and entered the corridor where the suits were stored. It was almost like shopping for an action figure at the supermarket. Looming metal crates with a stylized APEX logo spray painted on the side lined the storage area, glass plates in their sides revealing the crouching armored exoskeletons next to the distinctive angular shapes of rail guns.
Halfway down the aisle, one of the crates had been pried open, revealing a webwork of plastic cushioning and cut straps designed to keep the armor safely in place during transportation.
Davis shrugged, remarking wryly, “At least our target is fairly obvious. It’s not much, but we won’t have to open boxes and hope to get lucky.”
Before she could reply, gunfire erupted from the front of the warehouse, followed shortly thereafter by screams. Neither Kat nor Davis spoke. Instead, the two of them sprinted toward the nearby armors.
Davis stopped at the nearest one, inspecting how to operate it, but Kat kept moving, arriving a couple seconds later at the crate that had already been opened. She scooped up the big pry bar from the ground and ran back to her confused companion.
As he stared at a complex release built into the seam of the crate, Kat simply shoved the crowbar into the tiny gap between the front and the side of the crate and pushed. Metal creaked in protest for a second or two before the magnetic locks gave way, popping free with a hiss of released air.
She handed the steel bar back to Davis before grabbing the sides of the cover and sliding it free. Inside, an APEX suit gleamed. The warehouse’s fluorescent lights reflected off of the crouched robotic suit’s grayish black armor. Most importantly, the armored cover for the pilot’s compartment in the chest cavity was slid upward, covering the battle suit’s ‘head’ and providing easy access to the controls inside.
“How’d you know that would work, Erinyes?” Davis asked, jerking his head toward the crowbar in his hands. “Your tampering could have activated some sort of electronic security, locking the entire box down.”
“You haven’t run the streets in a while, have you, Merrimac?” Kat replied with a smile, stepping back and letting the man move past her toward the cockpit. “There’s a joke that every samurai and runner knows. No matter how fancy new technology gets, designers always include a secondary access method, just in case the power goes out. The tertiary access method is just a big stick.”
“Plus.” She shrugged as Davis clambered up into the exosuit, triggering the armored plate to slide down and seal him in. “If I broke it, we have spares. The limiting factor right now is time, not access to equipment.”
The suit whirred to life, fabric straps breaking free as Davis stepped out of the crate, wobbling slightly before catching his balance in the aisle between the storage shelves.
“—very intuitive,” Davis said through his suit mounted speakers. “Sorry, I didn’t realize that the comms are push to talk. The suit is very easy to use. I just try to walk like normal and it moves. The entire system is very intuitive.”
He reached down, picking up the rail gun from its storage cradle in the box, placing the butt of the weapon against his shoulder. Kat frowned, her keen eyes picking up three cables trailing from the back of the weapon.
“Erinyes and Merrimac!” Whip’s voice jolted Kat. There was a bone-jarring rattle of machine gun fire in the background, punctuated by the staccato thump of heavier weapons. “If you could hurry up, it would be appreciated. We’re being hit hard by NeoSyne goons and only half of the 3445 have managed to grab weapons. Two of my turrets are down, and I need someone to buy them more time to arm themselves and get back into the fray.”
“Well, my dear,” Davis remarked, causing the suit to kneel down in front of Kat. “If you wouldn’t mind hooking up my rifle, I’d say it’s about time we went to save your friend.”
Kat activated Levitation, hopping up onto the APEX armor’s back and inspecting the rifle’s connectors.
“Are these… color coded?” Kat asked, frowning slightly at the array of cords and cables.
“Apparently,” he replied. “Yellow is diagnostics and control; you plug that into a processing port. Blue is the power feed that goes in the battery. Black hooks the gun up to the ammunition hopper. Without that, I only have the three shots stored in the rail gun itself.”
Kat worked fast. All of the plugs were clearly marked, designed for easy field stripping and repair. Even without any experience, it didn’t take her much more than thirty seconds to completely hook the rifle up.
As soon as she finished, Davis stood up, shaking her slightly. The rifle began to hum slightly as its capacitors drew energy from the large battery in the center of the suit’s back.
“Hold tight, Erinyes.” Davis’s voice erupted from a speaker next to her head. “I’m still getting the hang of this thing, but I’m pretty sure I can move a lot quicker in short bursts than either of us on foot. After all, if our friends are calling for help, it’s only appropriate that we make a dramatic entrance.”
Before Kat could reply, the armor beneath her shifted upward and thundered into motion.
It was fast, there was no question about that, but the ride was both jarring and disorienting. Davis pushed the APEX suit to its limits, jolting Kat up and down as its powerful mechanical legs pushed off of the concrete floor of the warehouse, leaving a trail of divots in its wake.
Barely fifteen seconds of teeth rattling transit later, Davis shouted, “Now, Erinyes, take to the air.”
She didn’t question him, pushing off of the powered armor’s back and Leaping as high as her Tower-granted strength would take her. For a brief moment, there was a lull in the battle, both sides gaping in awe at the armored suit barreling into the conflict.
