Stormblood, стр. 143
Done with shafting the nanoguns, Juvens wasted no time targeting the armoured blast doors that I’d tagged in a golden glow, and giving them a hell of a pounding. He poured an endless stream of furious railgun fire, the metal glowing red-hot as Grim snapped the shield-barrier back into place. We collapsed to our knees as a tsunami of sound came crashing back down and the blast doors were smashed inwards, the bulkheads ripped from their hinges with a shuddering explosion.
‘Thanks, Juvens,’ I rasped into the frequency. My throat was raw as sandpaper. Must have been screaming. ‘You saved our skins. That was a hell of a show.’
The gunship hovered above me like an aquatic creature bobbing in an invisible current as Juvens appeared on my HUD. Surrounded by an array of glowing battle readouts, he was fully armoured and equipped with a sleek black-gold helmet that slipped over his horns like they were metallic scythes. The Space Marshall’s smug voice echoed down the commslink. ‘That was nothing,’ he said. ‘Destroying enemy property helps me sleep at night.’ The gunship swerved away, slipping through the shield-barrier. ‘I’m off to reload. I’ll be circling, if you need me again. Don’t destroy all the cultists before I get there.’
Jasken stumbled to his feet. ‘You crazy son of a bitch,’ he panted, slapping my back. ‘That actually worked.’
But Grim was already warning us of incoming hostiles, the IFF tags on our HUDs blinking crimson. We lost a few seconds checking each other’s gear for breaches and damage before jumping through the superheated edges of the bulkhead door, readying our next attack. Burning down the corridor, I couldn’t help but glance at what was happening across Compass. Kirribuli was unadulterated chaos. The once-golden sand was streaked with bloody arcs and littered with dead bodies. Skinnies twitched on the ground or chased after others. A young boy screamed for his mother as he ran from two skinnies who were frothing blue at the mouth. Others were straight-up Bluing Out on the streets. A group of people were perched atop the cruiser-liner I’d seen Samantha Wong’s body in, rifles barking as they targeted skinnies. Folks were boarding themselves up in shops, fighting for space. Something cracked inside me as a skinnie was cut down moments before she got her hands on a crying girl.
Harmony was trying to get a handle on the situation; tranquilising skinnies in the streets and creating quarantine zones. But it was never going to be enough.
Back in the corridor, we hacked and fought for every inch of space. Enemies ambushed us at every turn. We began making snap decisions and executing crazy battlefield manoeuvres that only the stupid or desperate ever used. We lurched around corners into firing squads or kamikaze bombers, going out in a blaze of bloody glory for their beloved aliens. Grim worked furiously from his technest to disable and spring traps. We broke through bulkhead after bulkhead, navigating the labyrinth of dimly lit tunnels. All the while, my body kept tearing me towards the onslaught, eyes darting back and forth as I dissected the battlefield.
A channel from Ark Squad, Fourth Division, broke into our commslink, his callsign lighting up. ‘Saren! This is Ark Leader. We’re pinned down on a bridgeway, taking heavy fire.’ Screams and gunfire echoing violently in the background. ‘Casualties high and about to get a hell of a lot higher.’
‘Hold tight, we’re on our way,’ Saren responded. The callsign corresponded to a waypoint icon, shared with our entire division. Fifty metres ahead, we got to a bridgeway. Below us, Harmony and the Suns fought on similar bridgeways in little worlds of chaos. One was wreathed in smoke, flashes of red and blue as gunfire and grenades were exchanged down the screaming corridor. Another had Ark Squad pinned down by volleys of gunfire. The one below had four Harmony fireteams ravaged and broken. The ones that were still alive were groaning on their backs. The Suns laughed as they moved among the bodies. Taking their time as they jabbed them with slingshivs and electropoles, bullies tormenting a beached turtle. Letting them bleed out slowly before dragging them away.
We swapped for long-range marksman rifles, picking the cultists off level by level. The Suns pinning Ark Squad down whipped around in confusion as a hailstorm of superheated projectiles rained down, cutting them down. ‘We owe you one!’ Ark Leader said, once they’d peeled out of cover. We advanced together, maintaining pace with the other fireteams as we fought across the bridgeways, the battlefield turning vertical as we exchanged gunfire between the floors. Two at the back, two covering the bridgeway below. Our strategy rippled from level to level, creating a chain of fireteams covering each other’s flank. Don’t know how it worked, but it did. It was a team effort. Something the Suns would never have; a concept they couldn’t wrap their minds around. At my side, Katherine focused her fire on a cultist in grey armour, chiselling away at his shielding until she nailed him in the head, flecks of blue spattering our helmets.
Sweat half-blinding me, I stabbed a cultist through the back of his helmet. For Alcatraz. Dropped him, angling my Titan up and slamming two rounds home into a cultist’s chest. For Wong. For all the Reapers that died at the hands of people like these. My body prickled with tension and I spun to see a kamikaze cultist leaping across the scaffolding towards us, heard the whine of the smelter-grenade strapped to his chest. Before I could shoot,