The butt of her rifle stoved in the carapace of the last razorworm, and Ash Tairell slumped against the wall behind her, spitting out blood. She looked dispassionately at the remains of the alien monster, segmented like a millipede, but large enough to crush a small car. She shuddered, knowing just how close she’d come to death today. Red lines scored across her stomach, and blood dripped from her right thigh. But the damned thing was dead, and that was all that mattered.
Taking the medkit from her pack, Ash cinched a bandage around her thigh, and rubbed some antiseptic gel against her stomach. The roll wouldn’t have been long enough to go around her that many times anyway, but thankfully the cuts weren’t deep. It was more the fact there were nearly a dozen of them, and they stung like a right bitch under the gel. Looking around it didn’t take her long to establish that she was the last one left, the rest of her unit lying in bloodied heaps or reduced to piles of dismembered limbs. The sounds of battle raged somewhere in the distance, and dust rained from the ceiling as a near miss shook the building. Ash wiped a dirty hand through her tangled hair, then pulled a cigarette from her vest pocket.
She lit up with shaky hands, still coming down from the adrenaline rush of the fight to survive against the Scourge monstrosity in front of her. It didn’t matter if smoking was going to make her sick when she got old—she’d probably never get there anyway. She could only defeat the odds so many times before her number was up. Taking a drag she stood slowly, placing a booted heel against the dead razorworm’s head. There was a satisfying crunch as she put all her weight behind that boot. Definitely dead. She checked the mag in her A-12. Seventeen rounds, and two more mags in reserve. Another eighty rounds. She’d already used her RPG, but there was bound to be at least one left where her squadmates had once been. More mags for the A-12 as well. It was a pity they hadn’t found any warriors—one of them she could have easily overpowered to steal their plasma rifle.
More dust and a chunk of plaster fell from the ceiling. The entire block shook, taking a pounding from Scourge artillery emplaced back in the city. She just couldn’t leave the building yet—they’d almost been on top of their objective when the razorworms had attacked. She found more mags next to Hitchins—his stupid damn boots were unmistakeable. An RPG had been thrown through a desk, launcher and all, but it was still serviceable. She collected another matching warhead for the launcher, a minor miracle given the eclectic gear her unit had to work with. Fully stocked, Ash flicked the butt of her cigarette to the floor and ground it out under her good heel.
She heard a groan as she climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. There couldn’t be any razorworms left—they only traveled in threes, and they’d killed three. It had to be something else. Maybe a survivor, but more likely an aged one, driven mad by over a century of Scourge possession. Bringing the stock of her gun to her shoulder, Ash limped up the final flight of stairs, alert for any movement. Another impact shook the building, and there was a loud groan as one of the main structural members gave way, the entire fourth floor tilting a full five degrees to the right. It was getting too dangerous to stay, and Ash was about to leave when she saw the glint of metal under the flickering light.
Wafer thin, and stamped with alphanumeric codes. Access codes. This was what she’d been sent to find. Ash hurried up the stairs and lifted the card from the floor, stuffing it into a vest pocket. Now all she had to do was get the card to Commander Travis and they would have access to the Lincoln city AEGIS ODL. One of them, anyway. With that active, it might even be possible to cleanse the sector of the Scourge. But first she had to get out alive. A groan came from behind her.
Her rifle butt stopped centimetres from Torres’s face. The other resistance fighter stared at her in shock.
“I thought the worms got everyone.”
“Nearly,” Ash didn’t have time for pleasantries, not with the building coming down around them. “The hell were you doing in that fight?”
“Knocked out when they hit the door, got pinned under it.”
“Up,” Ash yanked Torres to his feet. “We need an exit.”
“Radios are jammed, and the Jellies’ HGT got the bus.”
Ash hurried to the window, trying to make out the distance to the next reasonably stable building. Far too far, especially with Scourge forces still roaming the city. Worse was the fading afternoon sunlight. Soon that would mean the jellies’ sight got better, and the vampires would be falling from their roosts across the city. Ash swore, kicking the window. Glass rained from the already weakened pane. Arc caster fire traced a black scar up the side of the building, artificial lightning ripping out great chunks of stone and hurling them to the ground below. Ash ducked back, swearing again, and headed for the stairs.
“Torres, get your shit together and follow me. This place isn’t gonna last much longer.”
“Basement.”
Ash blinked, not quite believing what she was hearing. The basement would be filled with rubble by the time they got there. Before she could protest Torres elaborated on his plan. Old service tunnels, possibly an underground track from when Lincoln had been a thriving city of the Cradle Worlds. But they had to hurry. Ash fell down the last three stairs into the basement level, slamming hard into the wall. She patted her helmet, dazed. Torres pulled her from the ground, both of them staggering into the side tunnel. The doors hadn’t been sealed, and that put Ash on edge. Her rifle scanned through the darkness, tactical light illuminating very little of the tunnel. It was big enough for a bus to go down it—two abreast, even. Twin rails covered the centre of the tunnel.
“Old monorail, I think,” Torres rapped a knuckle against the waist-high track.
Gun up, covering their advance, Ash didn’t bother with a reply. The tunnel was probably empty—occupation patrols would have seen to that early on—and barely patrolled, especially with the battle raging on the surface now. With the radio jammed they had no idea which way that battle might be swinging, and no wish to use a more powerful broadcast that would pinpoint their position for enemy forces. So under the city they walked—or limped, in Ash’s case—making their way to the next usable underground entrance. A smashed, faded sign on the tunnel wall told them they were in section C-17, and that there used to be a phone a hundred metres down the line.
Three hundred metres down the line, past another clearly ruined phone, was a major platform. Sunlight spilled in from the south, reflecting oddly from broken shards of mirror glass covered in decades of dust. Even from the rails Ash could see the shadow on the staircase, carefully hauling herself up onto the platform with both hands. It was a Scourge Stalker, a tank-hunting walker. It was just standing there, waiting in ambush. Until Ash looked further to the left and saw the black puddle oozing behind it.
Crawling slowly up the stairs, Ash motioned for Torres to stay put while she got a better look at the dead walker. Peeking over the top of the stairs she saw dozens of impacts that riddled the walker’s carapace. Torn and twisted, shredded by a hail of fire. The chainguns on a Hellhog had done their work. A series of heavy clinks sounded, and Ash ducked, peering out the space where the station’s doors had been. A scout walker scuttled up the road, pausing to investigate the dead Stalker. A heavy shell ricocheted from the Prowler’s carapace. It turned and scurried along the road at full speed.
Ash crawled over the top of the stairs, and to the right she saw salvation—a parking garage. There were still plenty of vehicles in the structure, and with a little creative tinkering at least one of them could be made to work. Getting out of the city would be the bigger problem, and avoiding the Scourge’s nighttime patrol. She beckoned for Torres to climb the stairs behind her. There was no way of telling how many Jellies might see them. All that was possible was to make a mad dash for the garage, and hope like hell they could get a car working before anything else got close.
“Torres,” Ash hissed to the other resistance fighter. “Get ready to move.”
Standing at the door, Ash took two deep breaths, Torres beside her. One more breath, and they ran. Pain flared in her thigh with every step, but she couldn’t stop. She stumbled on a crack in the pavement and Torres swung her back to her feet. Torres fell, tripped by an old snare, and Ash felt something in her leg pull and snap as she wrenched him back to his feet. She tasted blood as she bit her lip against the scream in her throat. The garage was only feet away.
Torres turned, shoulder plowing through the remains of the plate glass on the doors. Ash followed him in, boots crunching against shattered glass. The stairs weren’t far. Ash climbed one flight then collapsed on the landing, her right leg on fire. She carefully inspected the damage beneath the bandage. Not good, and it was bleeding heavily. She hadn’t yet started feeling faint, but she knew it wouldn’t be long in coming—that was a lot of blood. With Torres’s help she re-packed the bandage, and limped up to the third floor of the garage.
On the third level they saw few cars, but there was something that might be even more useful. Sport bikes. No weapons, of course—at least, not yet—but bikes would be far better for escaping the city than a car. They might actually have a chance. Ash limped over to the purple one—not her preference, but it was the closest. With the multi-tool from her kit she was able to reset the ignition, and the tank still had some gas in it. She turned the ignition and kicked the starter.
The engine coughed and made an atrocious clunk. Torres coughed in the sudden cloud of smoke. Ash stepped back, watching as the battery case melted in the flames. The bike fell, smothering the fire. An acrid smell filled her nostrils and Ash winced, walking back to try and get some clean air at the side of the building. In the distance she could see Travis’s heavy Alexander tank being scooped by a Lifthawk, its engines screaming in protest at the sudden increase in weight. The flak battery on the Lifthawk boomed out as a Corsair made a run overhead.
Plasma seared through the Lifthawk’s port wing, edges of the hole glowing white hot. A flak round tagged the Corsair, the aircraft beginning a slow tumble as its drives sputtered and died. The battle might still be in the balance, but there was no way to tell through the jamming, and with Travis pulling back it seemed like it had now been decided. Ash turned away, wishing corporal Raleigh’s heavy radio hadn’t been eaten by a razorworm—along with the corporal himself.
A loud rumble echoed through the garage, and Torres rode over on an old cruiser bike, A-12 slung across his back. “There’s another one up on the roof, sports model. Left it idling for you.”
Ash climbed into the saddle with Torres, her rifle unslung and aiming past him as they rode together up the side ramp. The bike idling on the roof was a sleek, modern sports bike. Or at least it had been modern a full hundred-and-sixty years prior. That it still worked was a miracle, but not one she was about to question. It was entirely possible there was a local resistance band that raided the garage for parts. There was still so much they didn’t know about Lincoln City.
Bikes screaming down the ramp, Ash and Torres rode out onto the street. Right in front of a Prowler. The Scourge walker turned at the noise, scuttling across the road with disturbing speed, close to catching them both. Looking back, Ash saw the telltale glow of its plasma hose charging up.
“Torres, break!”
Ash split to the left, riding over the pavement in front of an old mall. Torres went right, down a narrow alley. The Prowler fired, a stream of superheated plasma searing a line of glass down the road and blackening rusted out vehicles in its path. The tail of the stream caught the rear tire of Torres’s bike, and Ash heard a muted scream as her bike plowed into the mall, up an escalator, and onto the mezzanine. The engine died, and the silence that followed was too still.
The battle was over.
So were her chances of seeing Torres again. Slowly, carefully, Ash crept to the edge of the mezzanine railing. She looked over.
Right into the optics of the Prowler that had killed Torres.
Ash fired and ran, not caring if she had struck anything. Heat flared across her back and there was the acrid smell of smouldering hair. She ducked and rolled, batting at the singed ends of her hair as a white hot beam scythed through the floor six feet away. Even at that distance she could feel the raw heat of the plasma. Diving into a storeroom, Ash reloaded her weapon and checked her RPG. She was only going to get one shot—at point blank—if she was going to kill the Prowler. Any further and its countermeasures would destroy the rocket in flight.
Patting down her vest, Ash checked what other resources were at her disposal. Multi-tool, not great. Two mags for her sidearm. One MRE. Credit tokens. Smoke grenades—which were useless against the damn thing’s multispectral optics. She’d packed them more to mark targets for artillery support and airstrikes. Still, they might prove useful. A lance of plasma punched through the floor of the storeroom, eight metres away. She frowned—maybe she had managed to damage the Prowler’s optics.
Limping from the storeroom, Ash shouldered her gun, flipping it to burst fire, and advanced slowly to the mezzanine railing. She was face to face with one of the Prowler’s optics, close enough to see her reflection against the baleful red glow from within. The orb made a satisfying squelching sound as five rounds from her gun tore through it, then five more as she half-sprinted on her injured leg to open the distance between her and the Scourge construct. She’d already let her gun fall on its sling, pulling the pin from one of her smoke grenades, tossing it to cover her retreat. A beam of white-hot plasma scorched through the smoke, the mezzanine floor, and the glass skylight before scything around through three storefronts. Ash dived low, the beam missing her by more than a metre.
But it was still hot enough to set her hair smouldering and make the back of her jacket uncomfortably hot. She rose and fired again, trying to aim for one of the Prowler’s vulnerable leg joints. There was a soft ping, and the hiss of pressure falling off, but it didn’t seem to impede the scout walker at all. Cursing, Ash threw her final smoke grenade at the lower floor, and swung from the mezzanine railing, landing hard in a cloud of smoke. Her right leg gave way, and she felt the blood running down the outside, crying out as pain overcame her being.
She could hear the clicking of the Prowler’s legs against the tiled floor of the mall. Of all the places… Ash had time to think before her training took over. Timing was everything. The Prowler was nearly on top of her, its plasma hose dark. It wanted to finish her off up close. She smiled darkly, fumbling around for her RPG. There was no way for the Prowler to see directly underneath itself—instead, she knew, it would pounce. That was when it would be vulnerable. She saw the Prowler’s body drop slightly, legs shifting apart and seeming to shrink. Ash swept the RPG out from behind her.
The Prowler leapt, plasma hose glowing.
Ash fired.
Plasma seared the side of her leg as the backblast from the RPG deafened her and kicked debris into the side of her head. The RPG slammed into the underside of the scout walker. Ash screamed in pain as her body finally tallied all the damage it had received. The RPG detonated, copper jacket extruded into a plasma jet by the shaped charge in the warhead. Ash could feel herself slipping from consciousness. The plasma jet tore through the carapace of the Prowler, superheated the nutrient fluid inside, and exploded out the walker’s upper carapace, sowing shrapnel in all directions. Darkness filled the mall as the Prowler fell, toppling with a heavy thud, landing just centimetres from Ash’s feet. Ash passed out, spent launcher falling from numb hands.
Silence once more reigned the outskirts of Lincoln City.
Taking the medkit from her pack, Ash cinched a bandage around her thigh, and rubbed some antiseptic gel against her stomach. The roll wouldn’t have been long enough to go around her that many times anyway, but thankfully the cuts weren’t deep. It was more the fact there were nearly a dozen of them, and they stung like a right bitch under the gel. Looking around it didn’t take her long to establish that she was the last one left, the rest of her unit lying in bloodied heaps or reduced to piles of dismembered limbs. The sounds of battle raged somewhere in the distance, and dust rained from the ceiling as a near miss shook the building. Ash wiped a dirty hand through her tangled hair, then pulled a cigarette from her vest pocket.
She lit up with shaky hands, still coming down from the adrenaline rush of the fight to survive against the Scourge monstrosity in front of her. It didn’t matter if smoking was going to make her sick when she got old—she’d probably never get there anyway. She could only defeat the odds so many times before her number was up. Taking a drag she stood slowly, placing a booted heel against the dead razorworm’s head. There was a satisfying crunch as she put all her weight behind that boot. Definitely dead. She checked the mag in her A-12. Seventeen rounds, and two more mags in reserve. Another eighty rounds. She’d already used her RPG, but there was bound to be at least one left where her squadmates had once been. More mags for the A-12 as well. It was a pity they hadn’t found any warriors—one of them she could have easily overpowered to steal their plasma rifle.
More dust and a chunk of plaster fell from the ceiling. The entire block shook, taking a pounding from Scourge artillery emplaced back in the city. She just couldn’t leave the building yet—they’d almost been on top of their objective when the razorworms had attacked. She found more mags next to Hitchins—his stupid damn boots were unmistakeable. An RPG had been thrown through a desk, launcher and all, but it was still serviceable. She collected another matching warhead for the launcher, a minor miracle given the eclectic gear her unit had to work with. Fully stocked, Ash flicked the butt of her cigarette to the floor and ground it out under her good heel.
She heard a groan as she climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. There couldn’t be any razorworms left—they only traveled in threes, and they’d killed three. It had to be something else. Maybe a survivor, but more likely an aged one, driven mad by over a century of Scourge possession. Bringing the stock of her gun to her shoulder, Ash limped up the final flight of stairs, alert for any movement. Another impact shook the building, and there was a loud groan as one of the main structural members gave way, the entire fourth floor tilting a full five degrees to the right. It was getting too dangerous to stay, and Ash was about to leave when she saw the glint of metal under the flickering light.
Wafer thin, and stamped with alphanumeric codes. Access codes. This was what she’d been sent to find. Ash hurried up the stairs and lifted the card from the floor, stuffing it into a vest pocket. Now all she had to do was get the card to Commander Travis and they would have access to the Lincoln city AEGIS ODL. One of them, anyway. With that active, it might even be possible to cleanse the sector of the Scourge. But first she had to get out alive. A groan came from behind her.
Her rifle butt stopped centimetres from Torres’s face. The other resistance fighter stared at her in shock.
“I thought the worms got everyone.”
“Nearly,” Ash didn’t have time for pleasantries, not with the building coming down around them. “The hell were you doing in that fight?”
“Knocked out when they hit the door, got pinned under it.”
“Up,” Ash yanked Torres to his feet. “We need an exit.”
“Radios are jammed, and the Jellies’ HGT got the bus.”
Ash hurried to the window, trying to make out the distance to the next reasonably stable building. Far too far, especially with Scourge forces still roaming the city. Worse was the fading afternoon sunlight. Soon that would mean the jellies’ sight got better, and the vampires would be falling from their roosts across the city. Ash swore, kicking the window. Glass rained from the already weakened pane. Arc caster fire traced a black scar up the side of the building, artificial lightning ripping out great chunks of stone and hurling them to the ground below. Ash ducked back, swearing again, and headed for the stairs.
“Torres, get your shit together and follow me. This place isn’t gonna last much longer.”
“Basement.”
Ash blinked, not quite believing what she was hearing. The basement would be filled with rubble by the time they got there. Before she could protest Torres elaborated on his plan. Old service tunnels, possibly an underground track from when Lincoln had been a thriving city of the Cradle Worlds. But they had to hurry. Ash fell down the last three stairs into the basement level, slamming hard into the wall. She patted her helmet, dazed. Torres pulled her from the ground, both of them staggering into the side tunnel. The doors hadn’t been sealed, and that put Ash on edge. Her rifle scanned through the darkness, tactical light illuminating very little of the tunnel. It was big enough for a bus to go down it—two abreast, even. Twin rails covered the centre of the tunnel.
“Old monorail, I think,” Torres rapped a knuckle against the waist-high track.
Gun up, covering their advance, Ash didn’t bother with a reply. The tunnel was probably empty—occupation patrols would have seen to that early on—and barely patrolled, especially with the battle raging on the surface now. With the radio jammed they had no idea which way that battle might be swinging, and no wish to use a more powerful broadcast that would pinpoint their position for enemy forces. So under the city they walked—or limped, in Ash’s case—making their way to the next usable underground entrance. A smashed, faded sign on the tunnel wall told them they were in section C-17, and that there used to be a phone a hundred metres down the line.
Three hundred metres down the line, past another clearly ruined phone, was a major platform. Sunlight spilled in from the south, reflecting oddly from broken shards of mirror glass covered in decades of dust. Even from the rails Ash could see the shadow on the staircase, carefully hauling herself up onto the platform with both hands. It was a Scourge Stalker, a tank-hunting walker. It was just standing there, waiting in ambush. Until Ash looked further to the left and saw the black puddle oozing behind it.
Crawling slowly up the stairs, Ash motioned for Torres to stay put while she got a better look at the dead walker. Peeking over the top of the stairs she saw dozens of impacts that riddled the walker’s carapace. Torn and twisted, shredded by a hail of fire. The chainguns on a Hellhog had done their work. A series of heavy clinks sounded, and Ash ducked, peering out the space where the station’s doors had been. A scout walker scuttled up the road, pausing to investigate the dead Stalker. A heavy shell ricocheted from the Prowler’s carapace. It turned and scurried along the road at full speed.
Ash crawled over the top of the stairs, and to the right she saw salvation—a parking garage. There were still plenty of vehicles in the structure, and with a little creative tinkering at least one of them could be made to work. Getting out of the city would be the bigger problem, and avoiding the Scourge’s nighttime patrol. She beckoned for Torres to climb the stairs behind her. There was no way of telling how many Jellies might see them. All that was possible was to make a mad dash for the garage, and hope like hell they could get a car working before anything else got close.
“Torres,” Ash hissed to the other resistance fighter. “Get ready to move.”
Standing at the door, Ash took two deep breaths, Torres beside her. One more breath, and they ran. Pain flared in her thigh with every step, but she couldn’t stop. She stumbled on a crack in the pavement and Torres swung her back to her feet. Torres fell, tripped by an old snare, and Ash felt something in her leg pull and snap as she wrenched him back to his feet. She tasted blood as she bit her lip against the scream in her throat. The garage was only feet away.
Torres turned, shoulder plowing through the remains of the plate glass on the doors. Ash followed him in, boots crunching against shattered glass. The stairs weren’t far. Ash climbed one flight then collapsed on the landing, her right leg on fire. She carefully inspected the damage beneath the bandage. Not good, and it was bleeding heavily. She hadn’t yet started feeling faint, but she knew it wouldn’t be long in coming—that was a lot of blood. With Torres’s help she re-packed the bandage, and limped up to the third floor of the garage.
On the third level they saw few cars, but there was something that might be even more useful. Sport bikes. No weapons, of course—at least, not yet—but bikes would be far better for escaping the city than a car. They might actually have a chance. Ash limped over to the purple one—not her preference, but it was the closest. With the multi-tool from her kit she was able to reset the ignition, and the tank still had some gas in it. She turned the ignition and kicked the starter.
The engine coughed and made an atrocious clunk. Torres coughed in the sudden cloud of smoke. Ash stepped back, watching as the battery case melted in the flames. The bike fell, smothering the fire. An acrid smell filled her nostrils and Ash winced, walking back to try and get some clean air at the side of the building. In the distance she could see Travis’s heavy Alexander tank being scooped by a Lifthawk, its engines screaming in protest at the sudden increase in weight. The flak battery on the Lifthawk boomed out as a Corsair made a run overhead.
Plasma seared through the Lifthawk’s port wing, edges of the hole glowing white hot. A flak round tagged the Corsair, the aircraft beginning a slow tumble as its drives sputtered and died. The battle might still be in the balance, but there was no way to tell through the jamming, and with Travis pulling back it seemed like it had now been decided. Ash turned away, wishing corporal Raleigh’s heavy radio hadn’t been eaten by a razorworm—along with the corporal himself.
A loud rumble echoed through the garage, and Torres rode over on an old cruiser bike, A-12 slung across his back. “There’s another one up on the roof, sports model. Left it idling for you.”
Ash climbed into the saddle with Torres, her rifle unslung and aiming past him as they rode together up the side ramp. The bike idling on the roof was a sleek, modern sports bike. Or at least it had been modern a full hundred-and-sixty years prior. That it still worked was a miracle, but not one she was about to question. It was entirely possible there was a local resistance band that raided the garage for parts. There was still so much they didn’t know about Lincoln City.
Bikes screaming down the ramp, Ash and Torres rode out onto the street. Right in front of a Prowler. The Scourge walker turned at the noise, scuttling across the road with disturbing speed, close to catching them both. Looking back, Ash saw the telltale glow of its plasma hose charging up.
“Torres, break!”
Ash split to the left, riding over the pavement in front of an old mall. Torres went right, down a narrow alley. The Prowler fired, a stream of superheated plasma searing a line of glass down the road and blackening rusted out vehicles in its path. The tail of the stream caught the rear tire of Torres’s bike, and Ash heard a muted scream as her bike plowed into the mall, up an escalator, and onto the mezzanine. The engine died, and the silence that followed was too still.
The battle was over.
So were her chances of seeing Torres again. Slowly, carefully, Ash crept to the edge of the mezzanine railing. She looked over.
Right into the optics of the Prowler that had killed Torres.
Ash fired and ran, not caring if she had struck anything. Heat flared across her back and there was the acrid smell of smouldering hair. She ducked and rolled, batting at the singed ends of her hair as a white hot beam scythed through the floor six feet away. Even at that distance she could feel the raw heat of the plasma. Diving into a storeroom, Ash reloaded her weapon and checked her RPG. She was only going to get one shot—at point blank—if she was going to kill the Prowler. Any further and its countermeasures would destroy the rocket in flight.
Patting down her vest, Ash checked what other resources were at her disposal. Multi-tool, not great. Two mags for her sidearm. One MRE. Credit tokens. Smoke grenades—which were useless against the damn thing’s multispectral optics. She’d packed them more to mark targets for artillery support and airstrikes. Still, they might prove useful. A lance of plasma punched through the floor of the storeroom, eight metres away. She frowned—maybe she had managed to damage the Prowler’s optics.
Limping from the storeroom, Ash shouldered her gun, flipping it to burst fire, and advanced slowly to the mezzanine railing. She was face to face with one of the Prowler’s optics, close enough to see her reflection against the baleful red glow from within. The orb made a satisfying squelching sound as five rounds from her gun tore through it, then five more as she half-sprinted on her injured leg to open the distance between her and the Scourge construct. She’d already let her gun fall on its sling, pulling the pin from one of her smoke grenades, tossing it to cover her retreat. A beam of white-hot plasma scorched through the smoke, the mezzanine floor, and the glass skylight before scything around through three storefronts. Ash dived low, the beam missing her by more than a metre.
But it was still hot enough to set her hair smouldering and make the back of her jacket uncomfortably hot. She rose and fired again, trying to aim for one of the Prowler’s vulnerable leg joints. There was a soft ping, and the hiss of pressure falling off, but it didn’t seem to impede the scout walker at all. Cursing, Ash threw her final smoke grenade at the lower floor, and swung from the mezzanine railing, landing hard in a cloud of smoke. Her right leg gave way, and she felt the blood running down the outside, crying out as pain overcame her being.
She could hear the clicking of the Prowler’s legs against the tiled floor of the mall. Of all the places… Ash had time to think before her training took over. Timing was everything. The Prowler was nearly on top of her, its plasma hose dark. It wanted to finish her off up close. She smiled darkly, fumbling around for her RPG. There was no way for the Prowler to see directly underneath itself—instead, she knew, it would pounce. That was when it would be vulnerable. She saw the Prowler’s body drop slightly, legs shifting apart and seeming to shrink. Ash swept the RPG out from behind her.
The Prowler leapt, plasma hose glowing.
Ash fired.
Plasma seared the side of her leg as the backblast from the RPG deafened her and kicked debris into the side of her head. The RPG slammed into the underside of the scout walker. Ash screamed in pain as her body finally tallied all the damage it had received. The RPG detonated, copper jacket extruded into a plasma jet by the shaped charge in the warhead. Ash could feel herself slipping from consciousness. The plasma jet tore through the carapace of the Prowler, superheated the nutrient fluid inside, and exploded out the walker’s upper carapace, sowing shrapnel in all directions. Darkness filled the mall as the Prowler fell, toppling with a heavy thud, landing just centimetres from Ash’s feet. Ash passed out, spent launcher falling from numb hands.
Silence once more reigned the outskirts of Lincoln City.
Last edited by Ravager on Thu Dec 03, 2015 2:42 am, edited 1 time in total.