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Hi everyone! Here's the newest chapter of Torpedo Run.

Please leave comments, votes, faves, whatever you feel up to doing :) The more I see of them, the more motivated I am, generally speaking.

Also criticism - If you have some, don't be shy. My work has flaws, I'm sure of it, and I need to know about them.

Thanks, and enjoy!

Chapter 11

The APC was flash-burned into Derry's retinas by a massive explosion as he backed up the stairs, firing over the heads of his Marines as they withdrew into the main facility. Momentarily blinded, he felt the thunderous report as a wave of force that nearly knocked him flat on his ass.

"GO GO GO! GET TO THE SECOND LEVEL, GO!" he roared, the words pushing his withdrawing unit up the escalators and towards Herrin's position on the second floor. Derry just hoped the SSgt was right on both counts.

First, he hoped that the strange hybrid known as Candace could hack through the security computers and get them into the elevator itself. Second, he hoped that the tanks wouldn't risk damaging the facility by firing straight up the ramps at them.

The buzzing zip of furious wasps whipped past his head, and Derry ducked down reflexively as bullets danced across the orbital elevator's lobby, ricochets and shrapnel hurtling about in a deadly dance. He returned fire, praying to the boot gods that he wouldn't trip while trying to walk up a halted escalator backwards under fire from those soldiers brave enough to expose themselves to return fire.

Only when the last of his Marines were halfway up the escalator and the first of them at the top firing over him and downward did he turn and run himself. As he did, clinking bits of metal fell from his armor's trauma plate to the escalator's steps. The wolf didn't let himself stop to think about how many times the armor had just saved his idiotic life. Or how happy he was that most Army soldiers on most worlds were heavily indoctrinated to fire only at their opponents' center of mass.

On his left, a doorway that had blended into the riveted metal slid back into the wall, and security soldiers opened fire right into his Marines' flank. Derry flipped the selector to a stage he hadn't even tried yet, and bellowed out as his finger depressed the trigger.

"FLANKING ACTION, WATCH YOUR THREE AND NINE!"

The AR-225 Pulse Rifle had been called 'nearly recoil-less' during their weapons briefing, but either the dampers had been damaged or someone had failed to test the weapon fully. When he squeezed his trigger, the rifle slammed backwards, belching out a terrible mixture of vomit and zippering noises as Derry was blinded by a terrible explosion of plasma-gold lights from the barrel.

With his shoulder numb from the impact and eyes full of streaking flash-burns, the wolf howled out in a primal battle panic, storming towards the open wall with his rifle spitting gold and death and whining as it began to overheat. Guided only by the blood-red lights that glowed in his artificial eye, Derry drove his overheated rifle's muzzle into a screaming mass of red's center, then rose up and drove a boot into its chest, before spinning and lashing out to slam another in the throat with the weapon's butt.

A third tried to raise his rifle to fire at him point-blank, and the snarling wolf leapt on him, steaming plasma rifle forgotten as he slammed a fist into the reeling fur's solar plexus, doubling him up and wrecking his aim. Then his paws went down, grabbing the creature under the jaw and heaving left to dislocate his vertebrae.

Persistent thumps on his back had him whirling again, and quick as a flash he grabbed the attacker behind his big vulpine ears, slamming his forehead into the other fur's face with a sick crunch of snapping bone.

Then someone was yelling in his ear, and he was running, rifle somehow back in his paw, the red and gold mist of flash-fried retinas fading back into something close to reality.

Nivea had fallen back as commanded, firing over her fellows' heads as they made a phased withdrawal up the escalators first to the security floor, then through the torn-apart security station, through glass doors, and into a second escalator. By then, they could hear SSgt Herrin's Marines tearing into the station security teams, chattering weapons fire and exploding grenades setting up a symphony for the carnage.

Then the wall to her left opened, and she was thrown a half dozen feet by a grenade fired from someone's underslung launcher. Her nano-infused armor prevented it from folding her in half sideways, but she still spat blood as she landed, and fired prone into the incoming green-uniformed security soldiers.

She was sliding backwards, and looked up, to see the strange hybrid Candace had doubled back and was now dragging the gasping, breathless wolf by the handles of her armor. Unable to speak, her chest still feeling like someone had smashed her with a sledge, she asked her question by firing the AR-225 down the escalator and into advancing Atrian troops.

All around, Marines were fighting, withdrawing, fighting more, and from behind as her ears cleared of ringing for a moment, she heard the terrible buzzing of a chain gun, and the staccato crack-crack of multiple grenade detonations.

The vulpine-primate girl yelled.

"They have a walker in there! Who's got explosives?"

Her mind struggled to take the disconnected noises and form them into words. She knew Candace wouldn't yell jibberish at her. Niece squinted, grimaced, and managed to pull herself upright with the other girl's surprisingly strong help.

"Wh...uhh...what?"

"Walker, they have a walker! Bipedal tank! We need explosives!"

Oh fuck, where'd they get one of those?

With her gut roiling in sudden fear for her friends, she pointed to a young rabbit Marine crouched behind a concrete pillar and returning fire while they prepared to withdraw again. Bullets were whizzing past him, spattering off the walls and blowing chunks of grey powder from the undecorated concrete.

Candace kept dragging, pulling the gasping wolf behind another thick grey pillar, then took off with the instant sprint of a trained speed runner before sliding into cover behind the lapine private. A quick exchange of words Nivea couldn't hear over the cacophony of small arms fire resulted in the rabbit handing over his demolition satchel, and the strange girl taking off again, expertly moving from cover to cover apparently un-fazed by the chaos.

With a grimace, Nivea pulled herself upright and fired down the escalator again, blowing the leg off a soldier who hadn't taken proper cover. Finally, her lungs seemed to re-inflate, and she coughed out another command. For some reason the world was still wobbly and whirling, but she fought past it to yell out.

"Fall back! Last phase line, then we get to the elevator!"

With intensifying fire pattering down around her and buzzing wasps stinging at the walls, she turned and limped up the escalator, pushing Marines ahead of her as they came. Then, someone grabbed her, and she was over a shoulder in fireman's carry. Annoyed, she tried to spit out a command to set her down, when she saw that so-familiar metallic tiger tail swishing angrily below her.

With three escalator-devouring strides, Derry had her up to the fourth and final tier, and was setting her down gingerly behind some sort of storefront wall, as the unmistakable sound of a chaingun buzzed ahead of them. Nivea looked around, wondering why Derry was acting so protective all of a sudden, and flushed with relief at seeing so many other Marines and Navy personnel moving through the sea of crowd-breaking barricades, using stores as cover, fighting their way toward a massive glass tube that dominated the central part of the promenade chamber.

His breath smelled bad, like he hadn't brushed his teeth in days. In retrospect, she realized they all probably smelled like that - The resistance outpost hadn't had much water, and certainly none to waste on anything but drinking and cooking. Their kits all had sanitary wipes enough to de-funk themselves a bit, but nothing for brushing that wouldn't require water.

Her mind was wandering, and she realized the reason when Derry smacked her lightly on the cheek.

"Hey, wake up! Stay with me Gordon! Corpsman! Need a Corpsman here"

The wolf looked down. Her armor, Tactical Nano-Fluid Armor, covered her from mid-throat down into her likewise armored boots with layers of bullet and fire-resistant fabric sandwiching millions of tiny pockets filled with nano-machines. Programmed expertly and engineered by the very best, the pockets and layering and nanobots would work together to harden, soften, even convert kinetic energy into harmless heat and light vented out the armor's back, whatever was necessary to turn killing impacts into bruises or even nothing at all. Her suit was expensive enough that not even considering her meager paycheck and the cost of her training, the USF had spent six times as much on her as the average planetary military spent on an individual soldier.

Unfortunately, no armor was fool-proof. Too many impacts on one section of the armor would run the nanobots out of their chemical energy supply before they could synthesize more or rebuild their number, and that could lead to armor failure.

She was bleeding like a sieve from the spot where she'd been struck by that mini-grenade. Whoever had hit her with it must have been fast on the trigger, firing several shots into her at the same time he'd let loose the bomb that hadn't flown far enough to arm itself. Derry's paw was atop her armor, holding the wound shut as best he could, and his fur was matting down quick.

Nivea met his eyes with hers, and grinned weakly, raising a paw to give a thumbs-up that felt far less enthusiastic than she meant it. He looked angry, upset in a way she'd never seen in him before. His dark eyes were full of fury and fear, not the smoldering resentment she'd seen in him so often during their time in boot.

"I'm fine...See? Totally breathing and shit. Just gimme my rifle."

"You're already holding it."

She looked down. Sure enough, gripped in her half-gloved paw, the pulse rifle was there and ready to go. Except she couldn't really feel her paw.

"Goddamnit, Corpsman!"

The big wolf was shoved out of the way, as one of the Corpsmen he hadn't yet met shouldered him aside. He resisted the urge to shove back, so full of adrenaline, fear for Niece, anger at himself for not somehow being there to help her. Then someone grabbed his shoulder, and pulled him around. Derry swung on pure reflex, but hit only air as his fist passed over a ducking head.

Candace didn't miss an instant, flawless dodge followed by a stream of hard words that made Derry forget the urge to strike.

"I need the communication freek for the Ix'kat! I have an idea for delivering the explosives!"

The pilot hadn't enjoyed being deployed at the orbital elevator. So far as he was concerned, the entire place was beneath him, and a waste of his skills and training. He was a special class of elite military called a Whip - short for Walker Pilot - virtually the modern version of an armored knight. To be detached from his military brethren and slapped into a job more suited to civilian security was a slap in the face. To then be further alienated from his brothers in arms by not even being billeted with them outside the elevator itself was just...Horrid.

That first day, the locals had at least impressed him with their efficiency. Local mechanics had the onerous job of lifting and maneuvering his 26-ton Walker, precious not just for its military value and expense but very simply for its rarity. They had done so flawlessly, using a crane system to lift it off a flatbed truck, a hundred feet into the air, and then down through an opened roof panel into the orbital elevator's ground control facility.

On the other hand, why his commanders had decided on needing a 26-ton death dealing titan inside the orbital elevator's control facility was far more of an annoying mystery than even the Army's insistence on placing him in barracks with civilian security staff and not his own battle-hardened team of warriors. He couldn't even open up 20% of throttle inside the building, for fear of slamming through a wall and breaking some precious piece of their space elevator.

He'd been touring the elevator's ground facility again, finally without escort, when an annoying young doe he had met on his first day came charging up as if all the devils of Hell were on her tail. Her face was filled with panic, wide-eyed and muzzle open to gasp.

"We're under attack! Someone just ran over the gate guard w-with a tank!"

Olliver straightened up immediately. Little quibbles about the low-class idiot rent-a-cops he'd been placed with vanished, to be replaced by the analytical mind that had been just one of so many considerations in his testing to qualify as a Whip.

"What sort of tank? Did you see any markings?"

He was already moving, rolling fast down the hallway with the doe jogging to keep up. No security alarms were ringing yet, so he reached up and yanked on one of the hundreds of security panic-boxes around the largely sleeping facility. Its alarm system would go off in the security control room, and make not a peep elsewhere.

"N-no! It was huge! I...L-like a monster!"

Olliver growled in annoyance, and kept moving, whizzing down hallways between the break entertainment area toward the vehicle hangar. When he realized the doe wasn't following, the otter twisted to look back. She was standing, paws together and shaking, arms wrapped aorund herself, in the crux of a four-way tunnel.

"Well come on, goddamnit! If there's a fucking tank outside, we're under attack! Get to the bunker, idiot!"

Her voice was full of tears even more than her eyes, breath hitching as the poor secretary lingered on the verge of total panic. Olliver just stared at her a second longer, then growled and waved harshly for her to join him. All the while, the otter knew he should have just left the fool woman behind - She'd be no use to him in whatever fight was coming.

"Do I have to fucking carry you?"

"H-how could you...Y-you're a..."

His glare cut her stammerings off in a splutter of fear and tears.

"I know I'm a fucking cripple! If they're here for the orbital elevator, they'll go right through the front doors. Which are between us and your bunker. So either follow me, or I'm going to run you over with this wheelchair, pull you into my lap, and take us both to the fucking Walker!"

She ran and cried. At least she didn't just stand there like an idiot.

Thirty seconds later, the otter rolled into his special hangar bay, the doe still on his heels. One of the rushing security teams, sprinting to take up defensive positions and full of fear, had yelled that the bunker was already cut off, that the enemy were already storming the facility and had pinned down the outside barracks.

Which meant all that stood between whoever they were and whatever they wanted to do were a large gaggle of half-trained but well-armed security staff and one otter who couldn't use or even feel his legs.

Fortunately for them, they had Lady Luck on their side.

His hangar was recently converted, by the simple expedient of a twenty foot mesh cage that surrounded what had been a truck lift within the facility's sprawling vehicle bay. The whole place stank of electricity, blow torches, oil and grease, and Olliver couldn't feel more at home. Excepting being inside his Walker.

She squatted low, directly over the heavy truck lift that had been withdrawn into the bay's steel sheet floor. Blocky and humanoid, at her full height she would stand some six meters tall, and with her urban camouflage pattern would have the look of a walking wall of concrete and bone.

Her main armaments weren't usable here, so had been detached - A three meter long silvery shape lay on a rack next to his head as he rolled in, the heavy anti-tank rifle of no use inside a building so filled with critical systems. The shoulder-mounted modular missile systems were right out. Instead he'd simply have to rely on the paired chain guns that attached at her fully-articulate wrists.

Across the multi-ton monster's thorax, small stenciling picked out in red letters the name he'd given her on their first trip out together. 'Lady Luck' had carried him through every engagement, from war games just after his graduation to fighting pirate incursions at the system's outer barren worlds.

She'd saved his life many times, and in more ways than one. The wreck that had ended his aspirations as a galaxy-class track and field athlete had nearly crushed his will to live. Lady Luck had brought the spark back to him.

At a spoken command, the machine recognized his voice and lowered a hatch. He couldn't help the strange mental comparison that she was accepting him back into the womb, the place of greatest safety and comfort in all the world. Only this time he'd have a mostly-unwanted passenger. The floor shook, rattling, as an explosion went off somewhere nearby - With some kind of army tossing frags around like beads at Mardi Gras, he couldn't exactly just tell her to hide in the hangar and hope for the best.

Olliver's powerful arms pushed him up out of the damnable wheelchair and into his pilot's chair as it dropped down from that same crotch-level hatch.

"Get in my lap, it's the only way you'll fit, and I can't just leave you here."

"W-won't that...G-get in the way?"

"No."

With a wince, he settled into the chair. It wasn't that his seat was uncomfortable - Thanks to its nanofluidic filling, it would conform to his body better than the air itself. Instead, he was feeling pain from sitting in the horrible hard-seated wheelchair all day, held upright by a girdle that kept him from slouching forward.

While everyone that worked with him knew that he was paraplegic, they didn't know enough about the spinal damage phenomenon to understand that his gut muscles were paralyzed too. He couldn't feel a thing below his sternum, and was lucky his lungs hadn't been affected by the accident.

None of which would have mattered, if not for a rare allergy that prevented use of medical nano-surgeons. He was one in a billion that couldn't handle being repaired that way. He was a one in a billion athlete with a one in a billion allergy to some obscure protein chain. So he was stuck in a crippled body, peeing into a catheter every few hours, living a life of colostomy bags, upper-body strength training, and virtual reality.

As he settled into the chair and the doe whose name he didn't know into his unfeeling lap, Olliver leaned his head back. Round otter ears pressed into the comfortably warm cushions, and he closed his eyes as the seat raised up into what he thought of as his real body, hissing as it shut and environment-sealed beneath him.

The wire it inserted into ports at the back of his neck was about the closest thing he could get to having sex. As his vision rapidly blacked out, he grinned, a feral toothy smile more suited to a wolf than his own water-borne species. The last sight his eyes saw, in a flickering blink, were the doe's widening, the last sound her whimper of fear.

Then there was an explosion of light and color that obliterated the swirling blackness. All around him, resolved in ten thousand colors only his brain could see, Lady Luck's sensors fed him a wealth of information on their surroundings. From the nano-steel building frame to its similarly reinforced concrete substructures, Olliver briefly caught flashes of densities, predicted explosive patterns, ricochet vectors...

His brain, however, wasn't yet capable of parsing all the information, and within moments the stream of data was calming to a less overwhelming field of vision. Something close to what his eyes would see, albeit with targeting reticles for both of his chain guns.

When he spoke, his real mouth never moved.

"Control, this is Ritual 1-1, what is our situation?"

He could feel the Walker's enormous mechanical muscles moving, as it warmed itself, preparing tightly corded bundles of nano-muscles for battle. The responding voice from Control sounded reedy and scared.

"Marines! We're being stormed by USF Marines! They're in the first two floors! Meiers' team is already wiped out, and they took our flankers!"

Calm down, you idiot. Marines are trained to shock their opponents into flight. Keep your cool and all you'll need to fear is their riflemanship.

The news had been spouting off for days about the unprovoked USF Navy attack on the capital. How, after taking the planetary senate hostage, they had fired off those huge naval weapons and blasted the spaceport to so much ash and broken concrete. The whole thing seemed fairly suspicious - Olliver had been to dozens of galactic athletic events, competing against USF personnel much of the time, and had never known them to be particularly duplicitous or vicious. On top of that, the Senate had traditionally been on the side of galactic cooperation.

Nonetheless, he had a job to do, and orders to protect the orbital elevator. Politics was for politicians.

He jolted his arm left, slamming the steel frame of his impromptu hangar gantry aside with a wrenching groan of fatigued metal. With no time to wait for absent technicians to disconnect him, he reached back and ripped loose the bundled wires and tubes connected to fueling and charging ports along his back, feeling them trail and spark along his hardened skin with a tickling sensation of arcing electricity. With a laugh that echoed in his head, the steel otter strode free of the hangar in two long paces, crouching low to clear the doorway before finally standing straight again.

It felt glorious, to stand on his own two feet again. Though they were metal, and not so nimble as his flesh limbs had once been, they were his, and they moved! No clunky joystick or throttles here, only his brain, sending signals it desperately wanted to know were being received. Just the act of moving was sparkly with pleasure, effervescent to his mind like fine champagne to his palate.

He stood in a hallway, its un-decorated durocrete walls utilitarian and spartan, with only bright red painted arrows to point him down hallways towards the lunch area, or operations, or any of a dozen other unimportant places full of unimportant furs who weren't steel warrior gods.

Olliver twisted nimbly to his left, and took off at a run, as much for the joy of it as the expedience of speed. Through the wires in his spine, the computer fed him fearful and battle-lusty cries, yells of the security troops fighting, even the sounds of tank soldiers doing their job somewhere outside.

"Phase line two is breached! We're overrun! Falling back!"

"Breaching backrdaft two, let's hit their flank in one, two, three, GO GO G...HURK!"

"Cease fire, cease fire! HEAT rounds could destroy the elevator control system! Let the infantry handle this!"

"Tech Services, this is Command, why can't we get a signal out of the compound?!"

"Phase line two is gone, we're at phase line three people, get your asses out here!"

"Sniper, sniper! Colonel Tram is down! Seal up your hatches, shit!"

"They're almost at the elevator! Where are the fucking reinforcements?!"

Lady Luck stormed around a corner, and emerged like an artillery shell from the calm plain halls into a chamber cacophonic with weapon fire and chaos. To his left, beleaguered Security teams were firing wildly, unable to aim and calmly take their shots. To his right, outnumbered maybe two to one, Fleet Marines fired with the furious but calculated ferocity and precision for which they were known and justly feared.

Splatters of light danced off his legs like mosquitoes bouncing off skin as the monstrous Walker whirled. Olliver raised his paws, feeling the comforting weight of his paired chain guns as they began to spin up. His eyes were full of red outlines, enemy troops leaping for cover behind the sort of heavy cement barricades that might actually slow down his rounds. Little diamond shapes were superimposed on them, targeting computer telling him where to aim for maximum effect, though it was hardly needed in this sort of static fight.

He cued up the speakers on Lady Luck's hull, holding fire a moment for the traditional opening words of a Whip.

"Surrender now, and I will spare your lives!"

From amidst the swarm of mixed Marines and Naval crewmen, someone popped up and fired a single shot that arced through the air in a silver flash. With a grunt, Olliver felt the impact as a shot of dull pain across his lower stomach. Whatever that weapon had been, it had just blown off a small chunk of armor, and could thus hurt him.

"I understand. Die with honor!"

With hundreds of small arms rounds flying past from behind, Olliver let out a rolling war yell, and let rip with both chainguns. An avalanche of death and lead blasted forth as flame licked from the paired weapons, blasting and shattering concrete barricades and the outer shell of support pillars as ammunition belched in an apocalyptic stream from his guns.

A Marine panicked and stood up, firing in a blind fury, and was blasted to mist as the chain guns poured high-caliber rounds through him, painting the walls and his comrades with his insides. His right arm, pointing at another angle, kept fire dumping down on the position that light anti-armor weapon had fired from, hoping to keep the fur behind it suppressed.

Meanwhile, he stormed forward, calling out to the Marines and his own allies as he went. His words boomed out over the thunder of his footsteps and the whirling rotor-sounds of his twin chain guns.

"Come on, if you think you're hard enough!"

A gray shape broke from cover not ten feet from where his right arm's chain gun was pinning that anti-tank rifle, and he snarled in annoyance, knowing there was no way for him to bring the left arm gun in line before the fast-moving fur reached the escalator and safety.

"Coward!"

The runner's speed was good, a sudden kick-off and powerful carry through, and Olliver couldn't help a competitive grin that transferred to his living face. If he still had useful legs, he would love to compete against someone like that. A warning blared in his head, pulling him from the meditative thoughts.

Lady Luck's sophisticated sensors had detected an EMP grenade powering up somewhere amidst the barricades being used as cover, and Olliver reacted by bringing his weapons around as he ran in a parallel line to their position, raking fire up the Marines' positions. The paw that came up to fling the blocky weapon caught a high-caliber round and blew off at the wrist, sending the fur owning it sliding from the force of impact.

His clothes were those of a prisoner. A military prisoner, at that, and it was strange enough to make him raise both eyebrows and momentarily pause, though his blistering barrage continued as if of its own accord.

Marines didn't raid planets to rescue prisoners unless those prisoners were P.O.W.'s or civilians being held by terrorists. Even if the USF had decided to supersede its authority and attack Atria, for there to already be prisoners, Atria would have had to strike first. He knew his government well enough to realize there was every chance the 'unprovoked attack' on the spaceport might well have more to it.

Unfortunately for the Marines and their gaggle of prisoners, he was a loyal otter for all his flaws, and wasn't about to abandon his post to ask questions in the midst of a firefight.

"Ritual One-One, this is Command. Our security units are badly depleted, we need to fall back. If you don't come with us, you'll be without infantry escort, over."

Olliver growled and shifted his fire again, as a team of Marines tried to break out of cover, driving them right back into it. If he advanced to flush them, they would dump grenades and maybe even satchel charges on him, which had the chance of ripping him apart like a lobster in a wood chipper. If he withdrew, they would have access to the orbital elevator, and whatever was up top that they were looking for.

"Command, if your teams can't take the heat, they should get out of the kitchen. But if you withdraw them, chances are we'll lose the orbital elevator. I'm not going anywhere. If you want to abandon mission because you're too scared to fight, fine. Ritual One-One out."

In the dreamscape that occupied his reality when jacked in, Olliver spat, which signaled the interface program to cut his communication link. Meanwhile, Marines and prisoners were rearranging, crawling between pieces of cover he couldn't hit them through yet. With enough time, the chain guns would chew through the reinforced durocrete, but it would take too damn long. He had to hope they didn't possess multiple anti-tank weapons. If they did, he was going to have his legs blown out from under him and then be swarmed by Marines with grenades and breaching charges that would go through his armored hatches.

The computer was finally getting back to him with estimated enemy numbers, and the otter swallowed convulsively, though his metal body couldn't respond to the impulse. His interface estimated nearly 300 infantry, two thirds of them armed with state of the art pulse energy weapons - Too light to really damage his Walker, but very much a good explanation for why the security force had been torn apart like so much tissue paper.

What worried him far more was the lack of explosive charges. Either they'd been through hell getting here and used up all of their composite explosives, or some of them had found a way to sneak around. Consulting his knowledge of the facility, he cursed at himself for not asking more questions concerning layout. He hadn't trusted the building staff enough to listen, and now he might have to pay for wanting to see everything first-hand.

Olliver fell back a few paces, and crouched down for stability as he let the smoking chain guns spool down and cool off for a few seconds. The Marines didn't break cover, which meant they were smart or at least commanded by someone smart - He could start the guns up again instantly, but some green or badly-trained troops might take his guns' silence to mean they were out of ammo. A more well-informed leader would know that his ammunition supply was nearly infinite. In place of an obsolete ammo hopper, his munitions came from a solid block of carbide steel contained inside his Walker's rear compartments.

As he fired, the carbide block would be slivered up by internal lasers, and magnetic drive systems would pull the solid pieces into his weapons' chambers. The flame that spat from their apertures when fired wasn't from igniting gunpowder but rather from igniting oxygen in the atmosphere from the sheer velocity and friction of his rounds. The chain guns' rotary chambers were meant to rotate for the purpose of keeping the electromagnets from overheating and losing their polarity.

Which was why EMP grenades were such a problem. His computer systems were so well-shielded that even an atmospheric nuke was unlikely to knock them out. Unfortunately, such an EMP would utterly annihilate his chain guns' ability to continue firing. Carbide steel rounds would build up in the chambers, and eventually destroy the guns' ability to fire completely.

So for now he was left in the position of waiting for the Marines to run out of time. If there were tanks outside, even disabled, there would be mechanized infantry not too far behind. Sooner or later, the Marines would be attacked from the other side by heavy assault troops, and be forced to either Alamo up and die or else charge him and turn the orbital elevator's main lobby into a killing field perfect for the sort of slaughter his guns could provide.

Kilk-ik-Ktch soared above the clouds, warmed by the pleasant rays of a beautiful golden star as she was carried on the back of her faithful drone. His wings stirred her sides pleasantly as they fluttered at a blurring speed, scattering rainbow luminescence only other Ix-kat could truly see.

Let the humans have their ground, she thought, so long as we can keep the stars and sky.

To her left, the other drone buzzed along, content because she was pleased, performing a ponderous barrel roll, its four quad-taloned arms clicking and chittering out a staccato cadence that nearly matched its mandibles. It was asking, in its simplistic way, if it would get to die for her soon.

She could never explain that to the humans. How right and normal that was. It was one of the sticking points between their two species. She could understand how it would be wrong to hold another sentient creature in thrall, for such things had been known to occur in the far ancient history of her people, before they left the Great Hive. However, the drones were very much not sentient - More like biological machines vaguely programmed for survival but truly created to serve.

Nevertheless, she felt a little sad about what was to come. The strange simian-vulpine human had called for her, so it was time to descend into the chaos below. After all, no more mechanical scout drones were anywhere nearby, if her antennae's uncanny vibration-sensing abilities were working as they should.

Such noisy things. That humans called them stealthy was laughable.

Below the three insectoids, the orbital elevator facility sprawled, a strange hive of cubeoid shapes that would always seem odd to her eyes. With a puff of pheromones and a clattering of her jaw, she signaled the drones to dive and they did so without question or hesitation, utterly uncaring about the horde of tanks and soldiers milling about outside the building. With the smog layer between her and them and the rising sun directly behind her, the humans didn't have a sensory chance in hell of spotting the young queen.

In instants, they were landing on the roof of a squat structure around the base of a towering pylon, so huge she thought storms might swirl around it in the right weather. It was like the pin of a gigantic pinwheel, holding the world in place on the fabric of the void.

The structure here was made of thick, nearly impenetrable transparent aluminum. It was designed to give ground crews maximum visibility on the great elevator's exterior, so they could quickly identify structural problems. It was also designed to handle impact from space debris due to any accident at the orbital shipyard at its geosynchronous apex.

Someone, however, had been courteous enough to dig her a hole, which she trotted toward in the same motion of dismounting her drone. The two moved in her wake, guarding her back from no threat she could perceive.

A pair of vulpine ears covered in dust and grease popped up from the hole as she approached, to be followed by a vulpine face and a simian paw. The female was smiling, the grim sort of grin Kilk-ik-Ktch knew meant a combination of grimness and impending revenge. As soon as the human-fur creature was out of the hole, she held up a backpack stuffed full of explosives.

Kilk-ik-Ktch took it, and grinned with her bladed mandible.

"Hello, funny fox-monkey! What's the plan huh?" she chirruped. Human words were difficult for the Ix'kat, requiring fine control over lightning-fast throat muscles to create chittering that would resolve into words. Even being good at it, she knew most humans and human-offshoots had trouble listening for long, due to the battering it gave their fragile ear drums.

This creature, though, showed none of the usual wincing most mammals gave off on first hearing an Ix'kat speak. She just nodded, and pointed towards a bubble-like transparent dome that ringed the orbital elevator's very base.

"That backpack has two satchel charges. We need you to blow a hole in the roof there, then swoop in and try to blow up the Walker down below. You know what a Walker is right?"

Kilk-ik-Ktch tilted her head, one antenna flopping to the side as she continued the unsettling grin.

"Ancient television show! Also big walking tank!"

The vixen-ape blinked at her, then started laughing.

"Okay okay, hehe, you get it then?"

"Yes, it is got! Will it have magical spin-kicks and a big hat?"

"Probably not."

"Aw."

Derry remembered quietly cursing his drill instructor for all the belly-crawl exercises that old rat-bastard had put them through. Now, he was thinking about mailing him a nice letter thanking him for all the hell he put the boots through. The physical conditioning had already saved his life at least a dozen times just in the last few days.

He crawled up past other Marines, and dozens of sailors in orange and red eye-burning prison jumpsuits. Some looked calm and collected, mostly the older, greyer furs who'd likely seen some fighting in their careers. Others looked scared shitless, mostly the young and fresh-faced, and he patted one on the shoulder as he moved past, hoping it would convey some sense of comfort.

The wolf worried about Nivea. Last he'd seen her, she was losing consciousness and he was being pulled away for a talk by Candace. She'd given him a satchel, told him he was the backup plan and how to plant it, then told to get up front and wait.

So instead of worrying himself sick about his best friend, or the cat-girl he'd fooled around with last night that was now curled up behind a concrete wall waiting for the shooting to stop, or about his impending chance of being cut into little pieces by a lethal Walker-class vehicle, he just followed orders and tried to keep everyone else calm.

Ahead of him and past the forest of concrete barricades designed to funnel traffic through security, the Walker belched fire like a wrathful god, stalking back and forth to present its heaviest frontal armor while strafing their position with whip-lashes of rounds clearly meant to keep them suppressed. Derry linked in to his rifle again, shaking off the brief disorientation, and slid his rifle out of cover just after the spray of bullets had left his position and moved to suppress another.

He saw that the security staff were withdrawing, tails between their legs, many dragging or carrying wounded compatriots, moving back towards the heavy bay doors that separated security from what looked to be some sort of lock-down area. The Walker was pulling back, too, though it stopped just in front of the orbital elevator's great steel and glass doors, crouched low with its two chain guns pointed out front. They slowed their spinning tired, then stopped, and he tilted his head before pulling his rifle back down. It was then he saw, amid the grey and white urban camouflage, letters picking out the words 'Lady Luck.'

"Staff Sar'nt?"

"Yeah," came the gruff, hoarse reply from a few barricades off.

Realizing he'd just called out for the comfort of knowing his commander was nearby, Derry came up with a question to ask.

"Why'd it stop firing? Can't be out of ammo."

"It's hoping we'll break cover or sit still long enough for those Army pukes back there to catch us from behind."

"Do we have any AT weapons?"

"Private, we were on a simple honor guard and security detail on what was supposed to be a friendly planet. What little anti-tank ordnance we had was right on top of the main terminal."

"Fuck."

"That about sums up my feelings on it."

"You know the plan?"

"Yeah. You're going to go up there and kill another dragon for us, Blake." The SSgt didn't sound pleased - More resigned and annoyed.

Derry just nodded, sighed, and gave the wintry-faced lion a grin of trepidation-filled bravado.

"Not gonna wish me luck, Staff Sar?"

"Fuck luck. You've got the Corps' training. You don't need luck."

The wolf laughed once, harshly, and shook his head at the realization that SSgt Herrin wanted to carry the bomb. They shared a few things, not least of them the fact they'd rather take risks on themselves than put them on their subordinates. But the burdens of command made that impossible, sometimes.

Derry looked up, then, towards the heavy transparent aluminum plates above. The sun had come up, at some point during the mad rampage of weapons fire and flying death. Atria's smoggy sky had been like a constant pallor since shortly after their mission had begun, and he wondered idly whether the Atrian government had seeded clouds, stimulated rain to give them that first beautiful blue morning.

Then a pair of black shadows zipped past the sun, and he blinked, scrunching his brows, before his eyes went wide and he covered his head with his arms.

"Down!"

An explosion tore the air, deafening him with a buffet of wind and the sound of shrieking metal and cracking glass that melded horribly with the screeching cackle-chitter of enraged Ix'kat drones flying berserk into battle.

Derry grabbed the barricade and hurtled over it, rolling to a stand and running at a diagonal, hoping the two warrior monstrosities could hold the thing still long enough. If they couldn't, he and Clicks were going to die.