Raiders Read online

  RAIDERS

  STEPHAN MALONE

  Cover Illustration by

  VICTORIA GOODMAN

  COPYRIGHT © 2012-2014 Stephan A. Malone

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review.

  Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  On the cover: Revon, Mirabella, Kama, Aurelia, Julian.

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty One

  Twenty Two

  Twenty Three

  Twenty Four

  One

  “Raiders are advancing, Aurelia. Thirty-two meters. Advise smoke grenade and fallback to rally point one. Time left is zero!”

  “Shut up Victoria, I know.” Aurelia envisioned a brief and perhaps reckless temptation to shut the thing down, this ever-nagging Personal Combat Assistant band presently conformed to her left upper arm. To follow through with such an impulse would remove her only companion and aide for the moment, however. A quick metallic hum punched over her position, a pillowy thwunk followed and then a small tuft of airborne dirt baptised her immediately after. She spit and cursed the mud out of her mouth. The hums and swishes repeated once more as thwunk-thwonk sounds erupted overhead. More dirt flew aloft only this time some fell into her boot tongues and sifted irritatingly down inside them, around her ankles, her heels and without fail, her toes.

  The eery magneto-mechanical hum was created from only one weapon. Aurelia knew it in a breath.

  Shit, they have a Coilgun.

  “Victoria what are the odds of them having forward visual capability? Infrared?” Aurelia slid out the request to her Personal Assistant with a manicked pressure as the words collided themselves one against the other. It was not difficult for Victoria to isolate her owner’s voice amidst the sonic assaults of coil rounds and discordant screams. Whatever noises remained were reduced into a worthless residue, cast away and forgotten, erased.

  Victoria reported her thoughts as best she could, her voice tinned and diminutive against Aurelia's upper arm. “Enemy infrared capability is...Probably zero.. They will be using all of their battery power on the Coilgun. Not enough amperage to power a forward infrared looking device. Seven minus to be of tactical use or else tertiary value I can estimate, no.” Sometimes Victoria’s machine-to-speech interface glitched into a disjointed and sloppy mess when she was taxed.

  “You scanned them for heavies, right?” Aurelia suspected that her body-worn Personal Assistant may not be intelligent enough to search the enemy's remaining battery capacity.

  “Of course. Don’t be silly,” Victoria protested.

  Aurelia blindly chucked out her last smoke grenade toward the blindscrubs. There was no pin to pull for the grenade was smart enough to know what to do on its own. A flash-bang illuminated everything and a decidedly satisfying poof of smoke followed. “There's no time for your humor now. Quick report, I'm falling back.” Aurelia vaulted up and away from the makeshift trench and abandoned the bloodborne bodies, the other five who her former squad mates. One last look back. Beautiful and dead, she thought as she escaped the trench pit.

  Victoria returned. “They have standard lithium laminate cells. Flexible body-worn type, low capacity. Two remaining, one male, one female. Weapons, one Coilgun, range and ammo unknown, the other a carbine assault, seventh generation, make unknown, ammunition almost depleted with about eighteen rounds left.”

  “Thanks Vic,” Aurelia breathed out as she scurried into a low duck-like waddle away from the presently encroaching assailants. She wasn’t worried about the assault rifle too much. As for the Coilgun, well that was a different affair. Her body armor could easily absorb the impact of a bullet but she knew that the Coilrounds were fast, ten times faster than any bullet ever crafted by man. This armor hers, no match for a Coilround. Her shell was as worthless as anything could be against the Coilgun’s deadly ejecta.

  “They’ve stopped,” Victoria said. They're holding position now, back ninety meters.”

  “Recommend?”

  “Go. Keep going. Ninety-six,” Victoria said then paused for a second. “Aurelia, they are moving now. They're matching us!”

  “Right.” Aurelia continued her retreat away from the Raiders and ran fast to the Polar City’s outermost defense zone. “Send an SOS to the Wall Victoria, we’re going to fucking die out here with that Coilgun on our ass!”

  “SOS emergent has been sent already. Responded. I am now tracking Mil-5 and three outbound to respond on crossover.” Victoria was running low on power and could only afford a situational refresh every fifteen seconds. Three troops from the City military approached their position from a distance, heavily armed and ready to engage Aurelia’s pursuers. If Aurelia came within a hundred meters of the City troops head on she would probably live. If she fell short then she would almost certainly fall to the two Raiders in pursuit. Escape or die were the only two destinies for Aurelia and her Assistant.

  Aurelia threw herself into a full-tilt sprint and bolted straight for the City. Victoria continued to paint a digital waypoint onto Aurelia’s-goggles for her to follow and also removed the extraneous statistical junk from Aurelia’s goggles: The Compass, speed indicator, altitude, the auxiliary waypoints. They were all gone, wiped, her vision organically clean excepting for the reticulated waypoint home.

  Aurelia ignored the snap-back assaults of branches that relentlessly caned her, as if she violated some unknown natural law simply by running through the blindscrub bushes. She envisioned herself as a singular blade of stone and steel as she cleaved a path against the harsh and rebel scrub and drew ever closer to the great Polar City. “Vic, how much time...Till cross?” She managed to heave the words from her lungs to the diminutive flexible band around her arm. The pursuers quickly closed the gap between them. Eighty-five now. Eighty-two meters. Eighty.

  Victoria said, “At this pace about five minutes thirty. Tactical options are now hold and cover or continue our fallback.” Her digital voice rang slightly louder from Aurelia's arm.

  “Can they track us or,” Aurelia paused mid-breath, “Or are they guessing where we are headed?” Thwunk. Snap. A Coilgun round reported a half meter from Aurelia’s path as it snapped branches from their mother tree, off and away they spun violently in mid-fall.

  Victoria processed this request for a moment and responded. “Highest probable hypothesis is that they are guessing. They probably have a waypoint that is directing them back to the City and are firing at any sound we make.”

  “So you are guessing that they are guessing,” Aurelia asked.

  “Yes Aurelia,” Victoria said.

  “What makes you,” Aurelia could barely speak three words at a time. “..Think that?”

  “Because if they weren’t guessing, we would have a Coil round somewhere inside us by now.”

  “Good point.” Aurelia bounded herself over a large tree trunk that lay half rotted and covered in moss. Victoria was right, however. Any round shot from a
Coilgun had no observable deviation or drop. To hit a target was as easy as painting it with a laser pointer. A few short seconds of visual lock on Aurelia was all that they would need and it would be all over. But she was not so easily given away in the dense underbrush of the blindscrubs.

  “Know what Vic? I'm tired of running away from these idiots! To hell with it.” Aurelia raised her assault rifle onto the tree’s spongy edge, shrugged off her rucksack and held herself low. She peeked over the edifice of rotted and failed wood.

  “Sights focus-locked. Dialled in. Sweeping now.” Victoria arced a virtual probe out to about 40 meters. “Suggest you switch to aim assist, Aurelia.”

  Aurelia hated to use aim assist. Most soldiers considered the aim assist to be cheating in combat. Still, this was a hell of a crunch she thought, not your typical day and go battle. Two to one was bad enough let alone the threat of a Coilgun.

  She quickly smashed her eyes closed and said, “Fine. Aim assist on. Thanks.” Eyes opened again.

  “Assist active. Setting correction ceiling to plus five on all axes. The rest is up to you, Aurelia.” Victoria shut down her screen. Her available power was getting down to the bone, two hundred milliamp-hours left, barely enough for a final stand. It was definitely not enough energy to remain awake for the trip back to the Polar City, back to home again. She would fight with Aurelia then sleep for a little while.

  “Thanks.” A hollow thwooonka-blump resonated two meters to the left of her head. Another coilround went clean through the tree trunk which was a meter and a half or so in diameter like it wasn’t even there. Like the air.

  “Twenty-seven out Aurelia,” Victoria tactfully whispered. “Can’t lock on to their exact position. Scrub’s too heavy.” Aurelia moved nothing, not a toe, not even her chest expanded as she breathed. She stared down her gun's barrelscope, her right hand steady on. Come on, come on, let me take you two home, she thought.

  Two saplings shuddered within her visual field. Aurelia pressured down the trigger to fire. Victoria responded “Six right! Six right! Six right!” Reflexively Aurelia drew a curtain of fire in a small arc, six meters right-field from the saplings that still waved as if they were animated and alive. The Raiders were separated, the enemy with the Coilgun was on the right, the assault rifle to her left. Coil first, assault second, she thought. “One down!” Victoria said with a pressure. “The other Raider is running right to regrou...”

  Aurelia continued to pump rounds from her assault rifle blindly into the scrubs using the battle proven plug-and-sweep method, three round bursts spread out to where the Raiders lurked. “Vic?” There was no response from her armband. She glanced down at her arm. The Personal Combat Assistant that was Victoria had transformed into a lifeless band of flexible circuitry wrapped round her with a small but cleanly edged hole through it at about a forty degree angle. Blood slowly oozed out of it. Aurelia controlled her rifle with only her right arm as her left hand ragdolled down and away from her forestock and rested lifelessly to her side.

  She felt absolutely nothing at all.

  “Holy Christ!” Aurelia held down the trigger, sweeping in a final razed attempt to reach out and intimately touch the two aberrant Raiders. The trigger guard vibrated slightly, a built-in warning to its wielder. The warning’s unspoken message: Nine rounds remaining. It occurred to her, I can't reload the damn thing with only one arm.

  As her vision tunnelled down the blood eviscerated from her wound. She lost her pose against the tree and shoulder rolled her body right down to the ground. Nine rounds, nine hundred, screw it who cares, I’m dead she thought, juxtaposed into that strange and undefinable emotional zone somewhere between sheer anger and balanced serenity. She stared up at the sky, her rifle quiet now and fallen to her side that was still warm from recent action. The branches and leaves fifty meters above her waved down to her with a friendly phlegmaticity.

  Thwunkk. Thwunkk. Thwoonk. Thwoonk. Thwunkk. A line of Coilrounds spat across her vision and cut a horizontal line about a tenth meter above her, the tree trunk’s punkmoist wood incidental to the bullets’ search for more serious game. How many rounds does that thing have? Aurelia let out a resigned sigh and continued her laconic communion with the branches that waved from above and down to her. To the rear of her position Aurelia thought she had heard the shouts of men just beyond the brush but she couldn’t be sure. Her hearing retreated and shrivelled away as the highs and lows folded into a muddy middle. Aurelia heavily breathed and lay resigned as the subfusc sounds of men and guns pushed ever closer.

  The trees above waved down to her some more. A fan of tracer rounds appeared to splay across the sky above, an illusion borne from her position. Her blood did not stop flowing though. She could feel it as it pooled around her body. Her blood was warm and seeked the earth somehow. And as Aurelia closed her eyes in acquiescence she heard one last thing before she tunneled herself into a numbed, bluefog sleep. It was a man’s voice, only one. She was unsure of its intensity against her sense diminished, but it really didn’t matter anymore. She closed her eyes as the leaves above shushed and swallowed the day almost like a waterfall.

  “Guys, here.”

  Two

  Aurelia tried to open her eyes but she could not. It felt as if something fluffy kept them closed, soft pads perhaps but that was only a guess. She tried to move her left arm. The result was a sound like the motor of a tiny drill as it spun itself up. A resistance prevented any further movement as what sounded like two pieces of dry metal smacked one against the other reported a sudden terminus of motion. As Aurelia squirmed her body around she heard a voice, female. “She’s awake.”

  “Hold still for a second Aurelia.” She sensed a fingertip pushed against her left eyebrowand then on her right. She felt gauze married with tape retreat from her eyes. A woman stood over her. She appeared blurred and heavily back-lit against the room’s brightness. As Aurelia’s eyes adjusted to the light the blurred woman resolved herself froma vague and smudged spirit into a sharp, perklined girl maybe in her mid twenties or so. She wore an all grey uniform, a paper filter face-mask, some kind of a head-net. Aurelia guessed that she perhaps stood about 165 centimeters tall. It's hard to tell how tall someone is when you are lying down, Aurelia rationalized. The girl’s hair was all tied up inside the head-net which obscured its color and shape. “Hi. I’m Kiera. I am your nurse-tech,” she announced with a pleasant overture with singsong overtones laced around the edges. “You are in Medical Zone Five.” She placed her right hand on Aurelia's legs. “Don’t move Aurelia, we have you on the Circulator.” As Kiera explained this Aurelia turned her head to observe a large machine. The device whirled away with pumps and sensors and tubes nested on its face, only a meter from Aurelia’s bed. The machine’s faceplate announced its manufacture, Series Seven, Gambro+Fresenius Internationalwith letters embossed onto a plain business-like face. “You are still on the machine now. We accessed your femoral arteries so if you bend your leg the whole thing goes all wonky. Okay? Do you understand?”

  “Okay.” Aurelia purposely avoided the sight of her left arm. She had already guessed what was there. A bio-prosthetic assist that was nothing like her original arm. “What is this Circulator thing doing to me?” She asked.

  Kiera smiled her face forward, genuine. “Just about everything really.”

  “What do you mean, everything?”

  Kiera said, “The Circulator takes care of everything, all the respiratory functions. It samples all electrolytes continuously and corrects them in your bloodstream. It gives you auto-pressor medications sometimes, if you need it, or dilator medicines or artificial cell packs. Cleans your blood of waste products too but way faster than the old dialysis. Hydrostatically induced high-spin reverse osmosis, that's the technical yip for how it does that.”

  Aurelia crumpled her eyebrows as if Kiera explained the Circulator' purpose in eleventh century Malayalam or Mandarin, neither of which she understood at all. “What the hell does all that mean exactly?”
/>   Kiera raised her palms up in an apologetic gesture. “Oh I’m sorry, really. I’ve been working on you for sixteen hours now. I’m a little wiry.” She chuckled nervously. “Basically the Circulator has been your kidneys, your pancreas, your stomach, liver and lungs for the past thirty-one days. Oh, and we had to use perfusion-assist mode so it was kind of your heart, a heart-helper-outter if you will for awhile there, but that’s off now.” She leaned close to Aurelia’s left ear and whispered. “Our nickname for the Circ is the pump-n-dump. You didn’t hear me say that though.” She scrunched her nose for a second.

  “Thanks. When will I get out of here?”

  “I think you’ll be patched up in about three days, maybe four? We’ll get you off the Circulator machine maybe tonite though, that is if you pass the weaning synthesis trial. You went septic in the middle of all this.” Kiera nervously adjusted her head-net and frowned slightly. “It was touch and go for a week but we pulled you out of it. Even so you're gonna need some work, Aurelia. Rehab that is. Your muscles are thin. We’ll worry about that later though.” She smiled with authentic pretension and then raised her eyebrows a half centimeter. She pointed to Aurelia's left arm. “The prosthetic took to your body great though. It innervated right into your brachial plexus. Textbook grafting. You are lucky because that’s a tough one to replace.” Kiera pointed to Aurelia’s new bio-prosthetic. “For most patients the brachial cutaneous nerve is usually never fixed up quite right.”

  “I heard you say that I’m lucky but everything else you said before and after meant nothing to me. But again, thanks.” Aurelia lowered her head back onto the bed pillow.

  “Okay, just rest up. I will have to do some more things here. Do you want the NoSound Cancellers or no?”

  Aurelia considered it for a moment. “No I’m fine. I’ll just zone out if that’s okay with you.”

  “Are you sure? The Circulator makes a nerve wracking sound when it spins up. Most patients complain about it. It scares some even.”