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Chapter 22

Olliver lowered his massive, invisible armored shoulder and plowed straight through his second building in less than ten minutes, grinning with angry satisfaction as he took out his frustration on the crumbling, groaning structure. His brute-force attack punched straight through the rusted-out tin and steel rear wall of what was once a clothing store by the rotting mannequins, and he now looked back and forth on the street his unit commander had directed him to find.

Sure enough, a gaudy, rotting, rust-covered heap of a building still bore a legible sign, 'Irish King Carl Burgers', that made Olly curl a lip in disgust, back in his real body. The startled-looking paratroopers about to enter it looked back in his direction, boggled by the sudden explosive entry of an invisible machine, likely able only to see its momentarily-shimmering outline.

They hadn't been informed that adaptive-camouflaged bleeding edge mechs were going to be deployed against them. The flankers had been dropped here, Olliver presumed, to flank the attacking resistance fighters, or perhaps even to infiltrate their underground tunnel base in the absence of a large number of fighters.

He couldn't risk them calling in their sighting. Both of Black Jack's arms came up, as his jolting push through the building broke into a ground-devouring charge, throwing stealth to the wind as his side-mounted wrist guns belched out death and destruction.

From his right arm, the heavy autocannon roared, vomiting flame and laser-cut chunks of iron-infused polycarbon, sliced from the solid-state block of ammunition buried deep in the mech's chest. Three of the twelve paratroopers were hit in the first second, bodies smashed to smoking pulp and ground to hamburger across the buildings and asphalt.

From his left arm, six 40mm grenades were sent corkscrewing at hypersonic velocities, exploding in the enemy's midst in a rain of carnage and terror, ripping furs apart and blasting their limbs in all directions as the terrible god of slaughter stormed into their ranks.

Screaming, trying to fall back from the semi-visible horror unleashed on them, the special operators managed to raise rifles and open fire, wildly pelting the charging demon-machine with badly-aimed and ineffective fire. Olliver grabbed one in his mech's left hand, then swung his arm back and pitched the hapless creature forward, metal muscles accelerating him to lethal speeds for both him and the two he smashed into, crushing bone and splattering flesh.

A sensation of pressure on his left calf had Olliver looking down, as his Walker accelerated handily to 45 kph. Someone had managed to scratch his arm with a grenade, likely launched from a rail-mounted firing system. He whirled around, sliding like a skier on the crumbling asphalt like black snow, and in less than a second surveyed the annihilation he'd wreaked on his foes.

Of the twelve paratroopers that had been alive, orderly, professional and infiltrating enemy positions just ten seconds ago, three were rendered to gobbets of flesh by his autocannon, three lying in a broken, limb-mingled heap from his close-combat attacks, and five were little more than grease stains and smoking boots thanks to the 40mm fully-automatic grenade launcher mounted in Black Jack's left wrist.

One fur, a male tiger with tall round ears, shaking with terror and paralyzed by the sudden demise of his fellows, stood right in the middle of the street, hot piss staining the trousers of his BDU's, smoke still spilling from the underslung grenade launcher on his MK-45 assault rifle. A lethal solid-state ammunition using rifle, the matte black weapon's sinister profile seemed such a pathetic thing, the tiniest cock at a porn stars' cock comparison tournament.

Nonetheless, Olliver had to salute the poor fur's ability to fire accurately, even once, against such a vastly superior foe. He cancelled the Walker's adaptive camouflage, fading his silver-black Black Jack into view. The Whip raised his right arm, open-pawed in a knight's salute, showing the Jack of Spades emblem embossed and painted onto its palm.

It was the only salute he could allow. Though his enemy had managed to valiantly stand his ground, and even now managed to raise his rifle in a final show of defiance, Olliver couldn't let him live. He had no way to carry a prisoner, and this enemy had seen too much. No matter how much he respected this foe's will to fight, the male had to die.

He made it quick, smearing the tiger across the street with a blast from his wrist-mounted grenade launcher. Then he made for the burger shop, tearing the front façade right off the building even as his camouflage re-activated, blending him into the crumbling brick, mortar, and steel.

Sure enough, he found the lift, a simple slat of diamond-patterned steel with a rusting set of side railings, and an old-fashioned lever activated lift system. With far more delicacy than such a massive god of war ought to have, Olliver lowered his arm, gently grasped the lever, and maneuvered it into the 'down' position. Beneath his feet, the steel machine groaned under his weight, barely able to support the many-ton creature on top of it, and began to descend into the underground.

Solomon Sign and Void Shadow waited, silent and patient, camouflaged and stealthy hunters of the starry void, as Solo ran multiple low-intensity scans hoping to get more information on the coming fight without alerting their pray. Like a tiger hiding in tall grass, he moved slowly, checking one target over thoroughly before moving to the next, never pressing too far with his equipment.

"Void, looks to me like the strategic cruisers south of the equator are out of ammunition and calling for resupply. I doubt they'll get it anytime soon, so they aren't a problem. The cruiser hanging over magnetic north has at least one bad point defense computer, I'm seeing jerky motion-detection error movements. It's seeing ships where there's just space dust. The fourth strategic is our target. It's moving towards Irontown, fully loaded with orbital-to-surface weaponry."

Void smirked in the dark, pulse pounding in that pleasant way it did just at the beginning of a good session of weight-lifting or right after excellent sex.

"Okay, Solo. Keep an ear to the one over mag North. I'll drop stealth when we're close to pull its fighters off. Then you get up close and drop your torps right up its ass."

"You sure you can outrun their fighter screen? That's going to be at least two dozen fighters on you."

"Heh. Randy? When have I ever let you down?"

The lizard gave his view screen a bland, sardonic look. Though Void Shadow couldn't see it, he knew exactly what face his lover was making.

"Oh c'mon! That's totally unfair! It was just a simulation! We were barely cadets!"

Randy grinned, scaled lips pulling back in a smile that would have frightened his new team-mates, who had never seen the toothy lizard express in such a way before.

"You made it up to me later, as I recall, Void."

Void snickered into the headset, as both pilots began accelerating, the roiling green-grey toxic planet below them rolling by at increasing speed as they moved toward their target.

"Heh, hardly. You were the bottom."

"It wasn't about whose penis went into whom, Bill. You did what I asked you to do, so you therefore paid me back."

"You and your logic."

"Okay, here we go, going quiet."

Ahead of them, as the planet's horizon began to glow with the coming dawn-line, a silvery and pregnant-looking shape was becoming quickly more visible. With its attitude thrusters and main drives active, the strategic cruiser clung carefully to its high orbit, close enough to the planet that complex gravitational forces wouldn't ruin its shots by bouncing them off the upper atmosphere.

The downside to that closeness, however, was its reduced maneuverability due to planetary gravity and the risk of losing its orbit and falling into re-entry. Strategic cruisers were mostly built not to land on planets. Such a re-entry would be fatal, and was exactly Randy Kerrick's plan.

Surrounding the strategic cruiser, two full companies of fighters swarmed along, shoaling around the great bulbous whale like minnows, forced to continually move to maintain their altitude or risk falling to re-entry themselves. Void moved, an invisible shape outlined in green on Solo's view screen, climbing high up into the ever-black and star-scudded sky above them before boosting smoothly toward their quarry. He would stay in stealth, quiet and moving at less than half his speed, until the moment before he engaged.

Randy mirrored his move in parallel, taking the more dangerous but less-watched underside. Down here, even just a few kilometers distant from his void-flying wingman, Randy was more affected by planetary gravity and atmosphere, and had to carefully manage the turbulent shaking of his ship to avoid space sonar picking him up by harmonic vibration.

He just hoped they were transfixed, as he was tempted to be, by the flashing distant silence that indicated a massive space battle that loomed overhead. Like a million stars blazing brilliantly to life and instantly dying out to nothing, the light show would be nerve-wracking to the cruiser's crew. If their side lost, their ship was as good as dead - their ship neither fast enough to evade light pursuit ships nor strong enough to stand toe to toe with the big ships of the line, the strategic cruiser would be forced to surrender or die.

The pair didn't intend to leave them waiting that long.

Without so much as calling his intended attack to his partner, for fear of the signal being noticed, Void Shadow activated his afterburners, spilling solid oxygen fuel into the plume of his fusion drive. It created a ball of expanding plasma behind him, hurling the powerful fighter forward far faster than its normal drives could, tripling his speed in an instant and sending off an energy spike only the most idiotic of brand-new sensors' mates could miss.

Solo watched, flexing his damp-palmed hands nervously as his beloved friend swooped in, straight past the cruiser's startled fighter screen as his adaptive camouflage dropped, and released a pair of flame-tailed rockets at nearly point-blank range. Both hit, dead center of the bulbous cruiser's dorsal side, impacting almost dead center with two spherical bursts of released energy and flying debris, quickly parted and turned into a wake by Void's high-speed death-defying flight path.

Instantly, both fighter wings scrambled like startled bees, confused and disrupted by the sudden surprise attack, and began pouring fire into space in the attempt to hunt down their target. The lizard smirked. They must not have even realized their enemy started the fight cloaked. In the vast black of space, it wasn't uncommon to miss the signal of a single fighter that was moving slowly, and not at all uncommon to visually fail to notice such a small object in the enormous nothing.

Better, both wings followed, leaving just two fighters behind to defend their precious mother ship.

Rookies. They left rookie pilots to defend ships they didn't think would be involved in the fighting. Perfect!

He drifted, like so much debris, until he was less than a kilometer from the cruiser's big, fat bottom. Built for stability and to carry massive downward-facing armaments, the strategic cruiser's underside looked like some sort of massive inverted pincushion. Barrels for rail guns protruded, currently capped to prevent space trash from drifting into their breaches. Torpedo tubes, magnetically shielded against such debris, remained open, an ambitious captain wanting to get the bombardment started the second they were in range.

Randy slipped his transport's crosshairs over the largest tube, leaving his targeting computer shut down to avoid an energy spike alerting the enemy to his presence. This close, even their minimal defenses might well swat him down. All they would have to do to get him for sure would be firing off the big guns. All of them at once would be enough to vaporize his vessel, even if they didn't hit him. The sheer shockwave would bash him to bits.

Synchronizing himself with the enemy cruiser's movements, Solomon Sign drifted for a few seconds, just letting himself breath and cool his nerves to utter calmness while Void Shadow led the enemy fighter screen on a merry and ultimately futile chase. They couldn't match his speed or ability to vanish from short-range radio sensors. The only time Void had been at real risk had been in the first few seconds, when a lucky pot-shot could have ended his flight.

Solomon Sign sucked in a breath, held it, then released it. At the same time, his thumb clicked the red stud that sat side-saddle on his control stick. His ship jerked gently, as a pair of miniature torpedoes were ejected from their pods under his fuselage. Then he tapped the button again, releasing two more as the first fish drifted, driveless, towards the enemy's defenseless underside.

Then Solomon Sign jerked his stick to the side and slammed the throttle forward, simultaneously striking a button that remotely signaled his four torpedoes to activate and fly to the designated target.

As he rocketed away, towards the rapidly-approaching planet, both remaining enemy fighters saw the torpedoes. There wasn't enough time to do anything about them.

In his rear-view scope, Solo watched as four fast flashes erupted beneath the strategic cruiser. For a moment, he worried that the armor had been too strong, or that he'd missed the torpedo tube entirely.

Then, less than a second after he passed minimum safe distance, the cruiser detonated from its middle like a burrito wrapped around an exploding stick of dynamite.

The lizard grinned, and had to stop himself from yelling a jubilant 'splash one!' into the comms.

The Fist of the Nascent Dawn lowered its nose slightly, then exploded a plume of light from its aft thrusters that seemed to those nearby as if it were brighter than the nearby star. In a jolt of sheer power, its drive core flew from 10% to more energy output than its designers had believed possible. With Chief Karnen's expert tinkering, she was pushing the needles past 100%, full thrust hurling her forward so suddenly that her own fighter escort could barely keep up.

Point defenses firing at full tilt to keep the debris of smashed friendly and enemy ships away, she hurtled toward the growing gap in the enemy's lines, dead-set on engaging the diamond of heavy cruisers that sat behind the enemy, waiting to be used as a trap. Her fighters pushed forward, hard, keeping pace but only barely.

Captain Leith had to resist the urge to burst out laughing at the sudden rush of speed. With the ship's internal gravity turned off, she could feel the almost divine power of her vessel thrumming through the decks, making the whole great vessel hum like a struck bell. It was in these moments that she felt most truly alive; every bit of bureaucratic nonsense, every choice made in the times between these moments, were just preparation for the hectic insanity of such dramatic moves.

For long seconds, the bridge was silent, every officer in poised but sweating anticipation, waiting for the moment they were spotted or got close enough to engage.

At the two minute mark, they reached the enemy's line, or where the line had been before Rear Admiral Vernier's gambit had begun. Adriana had just begun to blow out a breath, as they passed that invisible line, when Lt. Adeling, the iguana in charge of the Fist's impressive sensor suites, barked out a warning.

"We've been spotted! Four cruisers and six frigates are diverting to engage!"

"Will we be in range of the target before they reach us?"

"At this speed, the front two frigates will have thirty seconds to hit us before we reach them. Wait one..."

Captain Leith raised a brow and looked his way, as the screens all around them began lighting up with variations of red dots, showing which ships were actively moving their direction versus those that were merely enemies engaged in other fights.

Lt. Adeling's iguana crest shot up, as he stiffened and shouted.

"The enemy flagship, Star of Aden, is making an about face to engage!"

The thrill up Adriana's spine started at her toes, went straight through her crotch, and to the top of her head. It would have been terror in most officers. The Star of Aden was an Apocalypse-class battleship, second largest and most deadly vessel type acknowledged by the USF Navy.

Adriana was thrilled, though, not afraid. She grinned, a frightening feral rictus, and dug her fingertips into the command seat's arm cushions.

"Keep us on course, helm. Mr. Torvals, open fire the second we're in range. We'll get one, maybe two barrages before defenders engage us. I don't intend to be caught in the middle!"

"Aye, Captain!" both throats voiced, hard, intent on their given actions.

Commander Forza keyed the line to Sati Anwar.

"Ms. Anwar, all gravitic shield controls are now in your very capable paws."

The otter's voice came through, finally filled with energy again.

"Understood, Commander. I won't let you down."

"Major Thaurun," Captain Leith called out, fingers out and tapping over multiple data screens now, "I want your fighters to avoid those frigates. Mr. Torvals...Make them sorry they tangled with us. Aim for their engines."

"Aye!"

Two minutes passed, as Rear Admiral Vernier's grand flotilla pounded away and was pounded back, trading as good as they got. The ships that had broken away to intercept the Fist had done so as a gamble; the gamble being they could stop the Fist of the Nascent Dawn before their own absence from the battle line rendered Vernier significant advantage.

Vernier had anticipated their movement, though, and when it came far larger and more impressive than he thought, the admiral missed not a moment in ordering his forces forward. Lurching from their traditional long-range stand-off positions, the entire fleet accelerated nearly as one, dumping torpedoes in savage swarms for two more salvos before they crashed into close-range weapons distances, where his ships now held the advantage in sheer firepower.

Lt. Adeling shouted out again.

"Frigates are in range, I say agai-"

"I noticed, Lieutenant," Dane Torvals drawled out. The big hound was a perfect gunner, calm and cool, not liable to get excited and start jittering. He plotted the firing solutions seamlessly, even as the lighter, faster frigates started pumping out long-range light rail gun rounds.

In response, well before the rail gun rounds could hit, Torvals dispatched six torpedoes and ten ship-rending heavy turret blasts. Then, all he could do was wait, thirty seconds of knuckle-cracking silence as turrets fired on now-automated trajectories and solutions.

The first wave of light rail gun blasts flew wide from both ships' barrages, dodged by the nimble frigates and deflected by the pocket battleship's artificial gravitic shield. A second wave was better-clustered, and Captain Leith watched with surprise as the damage control monitors showed nothing bursting into flame or armor plates damaged. Anwar's command of the gravitic shield was excellent, shifting the field in nuanced, intuition-guided ways that guided the rail cannon rounds off her sides like water from a duck, rather than trying to brute-force them away like the computers were programmed to do.

"Damn, Mr. Forza. You had a fine idea with that young woman."

The big wolf just grinned and shrugged lightly.

"I'm a lousy disciplinarian, but people tell me I'm a great judge of character."

"Hah. I thought you got your position by smiling prettily? Make sure to get computer logs of how she's doing this, I want algorithms built for when the rest of the fleet starts using these shields."

The wolf just laughed for a moment, typing away at his console, before Lt. Adeling reported again.

"Multiple hits on enemy frigates...They're backing off!"

To their port side and above, one of the retreating frigates was struck by three torpedoes in rapid succession, and disintegrated in a dozen flashes of sub-explosions, scattering its innards across the growing clouds of debris fields.

"Frigate destroyed! We're in range of the cruisers!"

Adeling yelled out again, urgency tingeing his voice.

"Pursuing enemy cruisers in range in...Forty seconds!"

The diamond formation hadn't scattered. Those cruisers were smart, Adriana noted, as the Fist's fighters catapulted themselves forward. At a tapped-out signal, the engine room cut power to 40%, and the Fist slowed to stay outside of the estimated maximum blast radius of the cruisers' rigged drive core bombs.

Fighters could survive such a massive shockwave if their pilots were skilled, by being maneuvered to ride it like a surfer on an ocean wave. Bigger ships, even nimble ones like the Fist, would be torn to bits as the shockwave destabilized their internal pressure and squashed them like tin cans.

Now was the moment of decision, and Captain Leith knew it. She sat forward in the chair, heart thundering and body flush with the thrill of battle as the calculations flew through her mind. To ensure victory, she would need to engage those rigged-up cruisers, pump every shot she could into them hoping to blow their trap before it could be sprung. To do so would leave her virtually undefended against the pursuing cruisers, who could very well tear the Fist to pieces if her main objective wasn't accomplished in the next few moments.

Lt. Cmdr. Torvals already had his orders. All she would have to do, to virtually guarantee her ship's survival at the potential cost of their mission would be to snap out the order to engage the pursuit ships. Instead, she blew out a breath and sat back, as the big hound finished his calculations and opened fire.

To the fore and ten degrees down, she watched as Major Thaurun's fighter wings shoaled over the defensive screen protecting her targets, braving the teeth of the diamond of cruisers' savage point defense guns. A dance of death, explosion and calamity, swarmed the area with sudden spectrum changes in color outlines. Where living friendlies and enemies had been moments ago, tiny outlines flashed and shifted, showing fighters destroyed, showing hits on enemy capital ships. Then, suddenly, Torvals' guns opened up.

First, the rail guns fired. The magnetic accelerators inside the heavy guns allowed for the greatest precision of all the Fist's weapons, plotting courses that would fly straight through zones the swirling dogfight melee failed to occupy. Then, a second later, the white-hot streaks of particle acceleration cannons filled those spots, using the targeting information from those rail guns as tracers. Half a second after that, the torpedoes, all twenty tubes' worth, bellowed from the Fist's underside.

Major Thaurun's fighter wings knew exactly what to do, why they had actually been pitched face-first into the hell of defensive fighters and point defense screens. Using the rail gun's silver streaks as signals, they swarmed over the zones immediately around where Torvals was funneling his shits, slaughtering the fighters in those areas and occupying the point defense guns with too many targets for computerized defensive fire to handle.

If those four ships hadn't been traps, those guns would have been manned, not automated. Suicide ships were rarely fully staffed, or so Captain Leith had gambled, in case detonation had to occur before crew could be evacuated.

The rail guns hit, hard, massive iron cylinders shattering armor like glass as they raged into the enemy at velocities that would have set the air on fire in atmosphere. All four cruisers suddenly listed, belching gas and hydraulic fluid into space. Then the particle accelerator cannons hit, slagging armor and setting atmosphere inside the four ships aflame, forcing the automatic closing of fire-fighting bulkheads and activation of damage control systems.

Neither of those could have been intercepted. Rail cannon rounds were too fast to be stopped by fighters or point defenses, and particle accelerator rounds had been known to go straight through intercepting flak, just adding the molten balls of metal to their mass. The torpedoes, though, were true ship killers. Torpedoes were slow, large, and showed up even to automated targeting systems as easily-targeted radar blips. Even a light hit could damage the sensitive internal machinery, and stop a torpedo in a dozen different ways.

In this case, there were no defenses left. Their defensive screen was dispersed or destroyed, unable to respond even when they could see where the torpedoes were going. Point defense guns, normally able to stop such a fusillade with ease given their intelligent diamond formation, had too many targets and were unable to focus on the most deadly ones.

Even the heavy armor of such potent cruisers had been holed, focused fire from the Fist's expert gunnery commander and his well-trained and battle-hardened operation teams having slagged it straight through.

Five torpedoes hit each of the four heavy cruisers hard, spearing into their insides before detonating outward in a holocaust of ship-busting ordnance. In instants, all four ships had gone from pristine examples of their type to brilliant balls of chaotic light, armor plates flying off in warped and melted shapes, bulkheads and internal structures hurled out into the void like guts from an eviscerated warrior. One detonated, the trapped drive core going off from impact alone, rendering the vessel into a cloud of violently-expelled atoms that hurtled in all directions at near the speed of light, colored every brilliant hue of the spectrum. The other three were crushed, dashed, shattered, exploding into debris fields, crews slain and ship systems rendered to slag.

Adeling was withholding ecstatic cries of victory, Adriana knew. She, herself, was flush with the taste of victory, sitting back in the chair with a breathless sense of relief. Her quick mind, though, wouldn't let her forget the coming threat.

"Helm, give us all speed straight forward through that debris field and towards the planet. Force their ships to slow for maneuvering. Mr. Torvals, I want you to turn our guns on the pursuing cruisers. Keep them off of us. Do whatever you have to, torpedo control is yours. Adeling, I want you scanning those hulks, make sure we don't run right into an exploding drive core."

"Aye, Captain!"

Adeling yelled again, voice pitched and cadenced as he'd been trained in OCS, to make certain everyone heard.

"Star of Aden is showing strange power spikes, Captain! She's also accelerating to an intercept course!"

Leith twisted her neck, straining against the restraints that kept her in her seat despite zero gravity. Back behind them and above, the massive Apocalypse-class battleship was outlined in brilliant orange, denoting its status as an enemy vessel outside of range.

"Any idea what she's doing, Lieutenant?"

"It...Looks like she's giving her RT-Drive 50% energy?"

Prickles of worry shot up her spine. RT Drives functioned via complex scientific processes that required exactly a certain amount of energy to generate the singularity that made faster than light travel effectively possible. 100% power was the only setting the drives had, as it was the critical amount needed to cause an event horizon without immediately initiating its collapse and detonation.

Her brows furrowed up. A large battleship like the Star of Aden could, in fact, outpace most smaller ships. Simply put, in space, objects with large mass could move just as fast as objects with small mass, on account of a lack of drag and gravity to slow them down. It was entirely possible that the Star of Aden could intercept her current course, though at the cost of abandoning her battle line.

Ms. Anwar's voice yelped through the speaker in Leith's chair.

"Half the energy in an RT Drive goes to containment! She's going to fire a quantum torpedo at us!"

"What?" Adriana's brain screeched to a halt for a moment. Surely that wasn't possible, she thought. The containment field also served to direct the torpedo's direction of 'fall'. Without that 50%, the torpedo should, theoretically, go in whatever direction had the largest and most proximal mass. Which would, in this case, either be the system's star or the Star of Aden herself.

Nevermind the fact that the singularity needed to go through the full jump before it discharged, even if the jump were a short-range hop. A short range hop that was not at all worth the potential risks, for a ship of that value.

"Call it a hunch, Captain, but we have to move!"

"Engine room, all forward!"

The first thing he felt was a strange wrenching sensation, like the lurch of his gut in a falling roller-coaster. Only it was coming from his whole body, a squirming-intense feel of discomfort so powerful he hoped to black out again just to get away from it. Then, in a moment, it was gone. All he could see were strange lines of green text, running through his right eye, full of words he didn't understand.

Then pain, bad pain, though not so bad he couldn't push through it. He grunted, and felt air push through his throat, up his nostrils, felt someone holding his tail to one side as the robotic thing tried to wriggle and thrash. His ears were working, too, he noted, though stuck stationary and forward despite his best efforts to move them back, as he heard Nivea Gordon curse and grunt in exertion.

"Jesus, nobody told me they added muscle to the thing!"

"There's no muscle in it, just nano-constrictors."

"What? Seriously? They put mech muscles in his tail? What's that gonna do to his spine?"

"Break his tailbone, if he lashes it too hard. Just from a quick glance at it, I'd say they're using him as a test subject for something that's supposed to be fitted to a small Walker. For balance and stuff. This has the joints to be prehensile. Hold on, found the bullet."

"Good, you're enjoying looking at his ass way too much."

There was a snort, of shared if stressed amusement. Derry wondered just how conscious he really was. The pain seemed vague now, like a nagging itch, though he knew rationally that if Corpsman Derkin was digging around in his ass with those big medical tweezer things, he should be screaming and thrashing in mind-squashing agony right now.

Luckily, Derkin seemed to know what to say to keep him from freaking out.

"Derry, if you're conscious right now, try to keep calm. The more torqued up you get, the more you bleed. I've dosed you with a pain killer at minimum dose like you asked. You're probably paralyzed right now, but it'll pass in a while. If you're not conscious, uh...Go on doing what you're doing?"

Down in the stagnant underground, there was no wind, no motion but what living creatures made, or the slowly decaying landscape created while shifting. For long minutes, there were no sounds to orient on but a disquieting squishing noise, the soft clinking of metal implements, the sound of zippers being undone, and the breathing of his compatriots.

Every so often, he was treated to the sound of Lt. Waters leaving the chamber to scout, only to return with the same report each time.

"No contacts nearby. How much longer?"

"Until I'm done. Cool your jets."

Finally, he heard a clink of metal on less-dense metal, and a breath of relief he recognized as being from Niece. A tentative-feeling paw touched his bare left glute, brushing over the soft fur there, her dull canid claws scritching at him.

"Almost done, boss-man. Bullet's out now. The armor must've slowed it a hell of a lot."

Derkin commented, too, though his voice sounded vaguely distant, his concentration now on getting Derry cleaned out and stitched up.

"It missed all the bones and arteries. You'll be limping and have an awesome scar later, but you'll heal."

"Yeah," Niece interjected, and Derry could mentally see the grin, "besides, chicks dig dudes with scars. So it's been a good day all around!"

He managed just the slightest weary snort at her sense of humor. At least she hadn't been affected by all this, he figured. Nivea Gordon didn't change her mind for anything, unless the facts were irrefutable. It gave him hope that he hadn't blown the mission entirely.

A slightly painful tugging sensation started on his rear, and he heard another grunt from Nivea as the tail tried to move again. Then realized, to his embarrassment, that he was naked from the waist down, legs spread to give Derkin the best angles, his upper body bent over onto a table he remembered repairing for Mr. Tenh once upon a time. He would have blushed scarlet, but the drugs were helping to keep him chilled out, even though his block and tackle were on display for all to see.

"Okay, you're responding fine to the nano-surgeons. You'll be hungry as hell in an hour or so, but at least you're somewhere close to normal blood supply. I'm going to give this ten more minutes to get less sensitive, then I'm going to give you the counter-agent for the anesthesia."

"Then we're going to find your sister and mentor. And if you start lagging, Derry, I'm going to kick your ass."

He gave another snort, though this one slightly stronger. Still well less than they expected from a conscious fur. Or perhaps he was only snorting in his own imagination, he thought, wondering just how much of this was dream and how much reality.

Hopefully more dream than nightmare. Every second they stayed here, tending his wounded self, Mr. Tenh and Trisha could be under the gun. The wolf restrained the urge to fight his anesthesia. He could wait just a few more minutes.

In the meantime, he could wonder where Corporal Kerr had gone off to.

The darkness outside Black Jack's armored frame was so absolute that even the mech's night vision was worthless. Computer-generated imagery, based on a sound-bounce system, rendered the four walls of the elevator in a ghostly pale blue, as the otter found himself actually tapping the nimble Walker's foot in annoyance. The elevator was too damn slow by half.

Then the elevator began to groan, and Olliver felt a sudden jolt of acid terror, that the aging and clearly un-maintained piece of machinery was about to simply collapse, dumping him and the walker down that dark shaft into a black, crushed oblivion. It was hardly any relief when it simply ground to a halt, with a screaming sound of metal on metal that gave him images of his desiccated body being found, centuries later, in an elevator jammed shut halfway down an endless shaft.

He waited long minutes, in heart-thundering silence, knowing that any movement of his multi-ton Walker could destabilize the elevator. Then, eventually, he frowned at himself, coming to the conclusion that there was nobody coming to rescue him, and that inaction was as bad as disaster. He reached an invisible hand towards the door, and was about to begin opening it when voices echoed from the other side, distant and tinny with echo.

"Listening devices say this elevator moved. What d'you wanna bet it's just another of these busty lower-city hunks of shit falling apart on its own?"

"You know the drill, private. Boss says we have to check them anyway."

Olliver frowned slightly. The speakers were military, clearly, but on whose side? So far as he knew, the local forces were indigenous irregulars, hardly known for addressing one another by rank. Given mission intelligence, they were most likely enemy troops, since he was still only shallowly into the underground.

He snorted slightly to himself, and left the adaptive camouflage turned on. If they were enemies, they were going to have a nasty surprise.