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“Badger One, we are coming in hot. You ready?”
Shepard ripped out the last cable from the control governor and then shunted the remaining engine coolant directly into turret’s coolant system. Sealing the gap with her omnitool and giving the whole jury-rigged assembly a good, loving kick, she swung herself back into the turret seat. Grabbing the fire controls, she traversed the main cannon to the break in the arroyo wall while purposefully ignoring the rapidly oxidizing blood spatter on the screen.
“Badger One online, Badger Actual. You set it up, I’ll knock it down.”
“Tallyho!”
Badger Three, Sergeant Talbot’s Mako, bounded through the crumbling gap in the arroyo wall at flank speed. Her ass end fishtailed through the scree before the wheels bit and the Mako raced towards her. Shepard grimaced as Badger Three raced by. Her starboard drive wheel showed serious damage. Carbon and acid scoring pitted her armor plate and far too much smoke billowed out of the after quarter. Still her main gun fired. Slowly now, the compensators obviously overworked. Despite all that, that old bastard Talbot kept her racing and firing.
Setting her up for her shot.
Three seconds later, with an explosion of rock and regolith, the target crashed into view.
Ichor dripped from multiple burn holes in the thresher’s armor plate. Cracks radiated over intact pieces. Despite it all, the bastard charged on, too stupid and angry to catch the goddamn hint that the 331st was too tough to be a meal.
She’d deliver one final reminder.
Snarling, Shepard kicked the left adjustment pedal, lined up the barrel and opened up.
The Mk-22C cannon was designed for a sustained ROF of six rounds/min. Any competent engineer could get it to eight. For one pissed off street rat with a knack for machinery and nothing left to lose, well, she might just be able to pump that bitch to ten. With a howl of rage, Shepard tested just how good she was.
The wreck of Badger One shuddered as she opened up. The hull trembled under her as the weapon spat fire at the fucking thresher that already decimated her unit. The first rounds hit low, striking some of the carapace and sending sparks and chitin flying. It howled and started to reorient itself.
She swung the barrel up and to the left.
Into the maw itself.
Ugly pinkish flesh mushroomed in terrible sprays as hypervelocity rounds tore into the massive thresher. One. Two. Five. Ten. The thing thrashed and shuddered. Bellowed. Yet it kept charging, hundreds of tons of vicious and angry beast.
She kept firing.
It screamed.
She screamed back.
Cruelly savaged electronics joined in.
She didn’t bother to look at the heat indicators. She’d already blown past the critical warnings. Software howled about automatic cutoffs failing. Gibbered about imminent catastrophic failure. She ignored all of it. She knew the capabilities of her Mako. She knew what this shattered old girl could do. And if it couldn’t, if the fucker failed her, well, at least the explosion would be faster than being maw food.
The barrel started to glow. The thresher still kept coming on. Rounds kept tearing into it. One of the blasted jaws flew off. Goo flew everywhere, splashing on the churned up ground.
She kept firing.
The maw reared up.
She yanked the turret up as high as it would go, tracking the thresher’s maw as it reared up for the fatal plunge.
One shot.
Two shots.
Something underneath her crackled. Popped. Fire blew out the shattered starboard side of the Mako. Every indicator light on the cannon died at once.
The thresher loomed over her, jaws leaking fluid.
She yanked her pistol out of the holster and swung it up in a Weaver stance her instructors would have loved and Wolf would have giggled over. She -screamed-.
It howled.
Then with a horrible burst of ichor, it slumped to port, crashing to the surface almost on top of where it had burst through in the first place. It lay there, leaking and gushing fluids.
A second later, Badger One’s tortured, abused power cells exploded.
“Fuck me crosswise…”
With a groan, Shepard pushed herself up out of the regolith dune. She tried to push herself to her hands and knees but her left leg screamed bloody murder and gave out, sending her crashing back to earth. Cursing her weakness, she rolled herself onto her back.
She’d landed halfway up the arroyo wall in a huge drift of regolith. Red and brown dust stained her suit where it wasn’t scorched black. Making a fist, she brought up her omnitool. It flickered fitfully before giving out. Her HUD at least still worked. Her suit was intact. Barely. Pretty much every system had failed and the armor plates were a shattered wreck.
She looked down. Wished she hadn’t.
At least she knew why her left leg didn’t work. Her knee probably wasn’t supposed to turn that way. It was going to hurt like a motherfucker once the shock wore off. With a groan, she slapped open the first aid panel on her breast plate and flipped the suit into caretaker mode. She groaned as needles bit into her neck and pumped her full of the best painkillers the Alliance Navy would spring for.
Immediate concerns taken care of, she checked her surroundings.
The whole canyon smoldered. Smoke billowed from the wreck of Badger One. The poor old girl blew out sideways. Good thing she hated safety harnesses. The maw lay in a leaking, burning, slumping heap crosswise the canyon. Nothing else moved.
“Badger One to Badger Three, come in.”
Silence.
“Badger One to Badger Three, come in please.”
More silence.
“Shepard to Talbot?”
“Talbot, you there?”
“Jackson?”
“Car? Carmichal, you there?”
“Toombs?”
“Shepard to anybody?”
“Anyone on this channel?”
“Anyone?”
Nothing but static roared in her ears.
Shepard lay there, in that dune, staring up at the sky.
It was an ugly sky. Too pale and grey and now streaked with black.
Time passed. She wasn’t sure how much. It didn’t matter. She was alone. Alone in a shattered, smoke filled canyon on this fucking hole. She was going to die here. On some shitty dirtball called Akuze.
Better than in the gutter she nearly died in, right there on 6th Street. That time she had four inches of steel sticking in her belly. That time she managed to get to the church. She managed to hammer on the door. That time Mendoza, that poor, loving fool opened the door and saved her life. Thing was, Mendoza was back on Earth, back in Old DC, saving other street rats. She was here. On a fucking dune on goddamn fucking Akuze.
What a fucking waste.
She could hear Wolf walk over. Crouch down. That low voice as he whispered, “Looks like my little Kitty Kat ain’t so tough at all. Just gonna lie there and die.”
She could feel his sneer. His boot as he thumped her ribs. The pressure as he drove his heel into her belly. Wolf had no use for weaklings. You either got up or you died. That was his law. That was…
He was as dead as the others. All of them.
Just like she would be.
No.
NO.
NO!
She was not going to just lie here and die, like some broken little girl. Fuck no. Not here. Not like this. Badger Three had a comm set. If it was toast, there was the fucking systems comm set back at the colony. Who gave a fuck if it was thirty klicks east. Who gave a fuck if her knee was bent into the wrong kinda L.
If she could walk to the church with a knife in her belly, she could walk now. She could fight. She wasn’t just going to roll over and die like some scared little rat.
With a grunt, she sat up. She looked at her leg. Gritted her teeth. Dragged herself to the nearest rock outcropping. Jammed her foot into it.
Yanked her leg straight.
Ten minutes later, after she regained consciousness, she grabbed her sniper rifle from its backpack mount. Stripped it. Slapped the barrel on one side of her leg. The mount and stock on the outside. Wrapped the whole rig with all the metal tape she had. Squirted the last of the omnigel from her suit to seal it together.
Reached for the rock outcrop. Grabbed it. Pulled herself up onto her feet.
The brace held.
She took a step.
Pain -flared-.
She took another step.
More pain.
Another.
Another.
Another.
Slowly and painfully, she limped down the dune to the maw’s corpse. Actually went so close as to use it for leverage, crawling hand over hand along the rigid spines of its carapace. As sun started to set, she worked her way around the corpse. There she found Badger Three.
What was left of it.
The acid had eaten through the starboard armor and down into the hull. Enough got through to get to the transmission and shear off the drive axle. That’s why the wheel was all the way over there. They were going so fast that once the wheel went, they’d smashed in nose first. Hit those rocks there. Flipped her onto her roof. Then something caught fire. Probably the fuel cells. Blew out quick. Hot. Enough to blow out both hatches and pucker the armor.
She closed her eyes. Grimaced. Nothing would have survived that. Would be burnt to crisps.
She crawled inside. Pushed what had been Talbot over to get at the comm panel. Comm set was deader than the maw, smashed in the crash. She thumped the dead thing and then gently reached down to ease Talbot back into his seat. Didn’t look in his helmet. Didn’t look at any of them. Just pushed them back into their seats. Straightened them.
Exhaustion tugged at her but if she sat down now, she’d never get up. They’d find her here, with them. As much as she longed to be with them, they were the dead. She was the living. Wanted to keep living.
She stumped to the aft end. Rummaged through the wrecked storage containers. Scavenged a medkit, stimpacks and two rifles. She racked the kits into her suit. Slung one rifle. Turned the other into a makeshift crutch. Pumped herself full of stims and painkillers.
Nerves and muscles jangling with stims, she stumped to the broken hatch and turned back for one last look. Closed her eyes. Wished that she knew the right words, the right words for all of her friends. For the closest thing she’d ever had to family. But there was nothing. Nothing. Not even all those high and glorious words Mendoza taught her.
Instead of high and glorious words, she made a promise.
“I’ll make it back. Tell them what happened. Make you proud.”
With a groan, Specialist Katrine Shepard limped off on course 287. Back to the landing site. Back to the only functional comm gear on this fucking shit show of a planet.
She might just have enough stims and water to make it. She owed it to Echo Company of the 331st to try.