By: Chris Edwards

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Read Part 3 here!

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We jogged over to the large, blocky building at the side of the rails. Cheaply constructed from slabs of bonded regolith, it was festooned with random pipes and antennae.

Sutler fiddled with her gauntlet, trying to hack the door, then shook her head. “System’s too simple. The E/M disruption from the rail gun means they’ve gone old-school on internal security.”

Without asking, Will simply blasted a hole in the nearest wall, allowing air to whoosh out. Immediately, bright green emergency repair foam started to expand and plug the gap. Not the kind of stuff you’d want to get stuck on you mid-mission, for sure.

Sutler sighed. “Ver, just open the bloody doors, please.”

I squared up to the entrance—large enough for the Ravelin. I considered a shoulder-charge, but my carapace was riddled with dents and I didn’t want to make them worse. Sliding the mono-crystal combat blades out of their housing on my forearms, I sliced a rough triangle shape into the door material and then booted it hard enough to send the displaced chunk smashing inwards. Air gusted out weakly; obviously, life support was giving up on pressurising the area. I stepped aside, Sutler snapped off a burst of grenades from her Baby Boomer pistol, and then the boys hurled themselves inside. There was a burst of gunfire, and then a flat “Room clear” from Ben.

Inside was a loading bay with a heavy cargo lift and access to the central launch rail. Tiers of powerful electromagnets were wrapped in patchwork scaffolding and access gantries. As per usual for Pact, the whole thing looked like it was held together with baling wire and spit.

“Ben, lift-shaft. Rest of us, gantry.” No hesitation in Sutler’s voice. Ben duly slid off and began cutting a hole in the floor of the cargo lift, while the rest of us trooped down the shoddy gantry. The magnetic coils were playing merry hob with our sensors but weren't strong enough to disrupt circuitry. Still, it was a nerve-wracking descent, guns pointing everywhere. I was expecting that bloody sicario to take a shot the whole way.

We’d made it about halfway down when Sutler began cursing. “Ben’s in trouble, looks like he suddenly dropped to the bottom of the shaft. No response on comms, but I’m still getting some vitals from his transponder.”

Turning on the wall to the shaft, I quickly hewed out a smaller block of stonework, shearing off clumps of the sticky green foam as William leapt through to assist his brother. Once that was done, Sutler and I began to double-time down the ramp. 

We hit the bottom level in time to see a figure dressed in mismatched mining gear slipping away over a huge stack of tarp-covered pallets. At the elevator entrance, a giant metallic cockroach was busily worrying Ben’s shoulder with bloody jaws.

Instinct kicked in; I stormed towards the chelae pod, even as Sutler was shouting, “Trap!” in my comms. I grabbed the bastard thing and tore it in two just as the explosion went off behind me. I’ve been blown up a lot, and I have to say this was both the least deadly and the most disturbing. There must have been hundreds of canisters of sealant goo in the pile the riyad had rigged, because I was instantly engulfed in a tide of cloying green foam.

Desperately, I began strimming it away with my blades, but it was designed to expand and solidify in a vacuum, and we’d been kind enough to remove the atmosphere. 

I could hear Sutler cursing a blue streak, even as my sensors became clogged and my joints began to grind. “Burn it off! Use your thrusters.”

Quickly, I ramped up my reactor to max and began expelling pinpoint plasma jets which burned the gunk to a nasty crust. Naturally, that was the point the bloody Sicario sent a lance strike right to my armor’s head. Half-blinded, I z-calculated where the shot had come from, sprayed, and prayed. I got lucky with a smart round, tagging one of his legs, sending him looping through the air. At about this point William burst up out of the foam and hit him almost point-blank with his launcher. Both of them flew apart, smashing into opposite walls and lying still.

“Pack of bloody idiots! We can scrape those two up on the way out. Ver, you and I are going to go deal with the nano-breeder.” Sutler jogged off into the facility, and I limped after her, every movement making a grinding screech.

When we found her, the little Riyad had hardwired herself into the nano-breeder. The damn thing was the size of an apartment building, with organic-looking feed lines trailing away into the moon rock where it got raw materials. 

She waggled a finger and broadcasted over open comms, “Uh-uh, no closer or I take us all out.”

“How about we just let you walk away?” Sutler could be convincing when she wanted to, but I could tell she was up to something.

“The foam was a nice touch,” I added, playing along for time.

“You renta-goons never learn, do you? You can’t stop people who want to be free!”

Oh boy, a true-believer. Yeah, everyone wants to be free—free of taxes, free of responsibility, free of consequences.

“BACK, NOW.” The command flashed in front of my eyes and I lumbered away as best I could. Behind the little riyad, the casing of the nano-breeder began to break down in a boiling silver welter, which then sprayed out over her like a fire hose. Her open comms still carried her screams as the nano-bots stripped her down for material.

“Called ‘gray goo,’ that. Nasty little backdoor nano hack. Might be a Protocol violation, but it’ll remove all the evidence…”

The entire machine began to liquify, a wave of silvery doom spreading out, dissolving everything it touched.

“Holy…you’re terrifying, Sutler. You know that?”

“Thanks, I’ll add that to my dating profile. I’m sure it’ll help.”

We raced back to the edge of the lift and began frantically digging out the twins. 

“Can we make the rockets?”

“The rockets are scrap.”

“Then how the hell are we getting out of here!”

“Extraction plan 78c. You should know, you came up with it.”

“No! Sutler, no. That’s…it’s insane!”

“It wasn’t up for debate. Pick them up and let’s get going.”

I grabbed one body under each arm, both still showing faint vitals, and stumbled my way to the launch cage at the base of the rail gun. Rumbles from below indicated the entire structure was collapsing.

I wedged into the launch cage, my systems glitching as the E/M spiked. 

“I’m going to shut down or I’ll lose containment.”

“Understood, I’ve hacked the controls. Still enough power to activate. No idea where we’ll end up, but that’s Balkis’s problem.”

It didn’t take full power to reach escape velocity, but I still saw black spots as the acceleration squeezed the blood from my brain. No power, and only emergency systems to keep me alive as we hurtled away into interplanetary space.

This would count as dying stupid.

I slow-counted to two hundred and then toggled the emergency restart. After a few harrowing seconds, the reactors flickered to life.

The pickup, the chase by gunboats, that stuff’s all in Li-Xuan’s report, which I assume will be “burn after reading” anyway. Suffice to say, we escaped and lived to fight another day. The Saltshaker shakes no more, and the Pact pulled out of Jinda. Of course, the day after we slipped, the Astrapelago crisis became a whole thing, and I never did get those two weeks…