Stormblood, стр. 31
Nominally, the Warren was sealed off, but you’d always find skinnies holing up in hideaways called ratnests. I could hear them twitching under rags. Scampering in the dark, their rattling coughs echoing through the tenement halls and dilapidated warehouses like gunshots. Thousands of people, hiding away and left to rot in this miserable place.
Grim waited on the other end of the commslink, sitting in his technest for backup and auxiliary support. He’d already combed the Warren for any surveillance tech that might track Artyom’s movements. He’d turned up empty, but remained on watch as a contingency. If my brother was under scrutiny, I’d stand down. I didn’t want Artyom to be at risk just because I was tailing him.
I’d set myself up in the shelled remains of some kind of office building. A bank, maybe. I peered through a grime-smeared window into the heart of the Warren’s spider-webbing of blackened streets. The Hippo was stored for collection mere metres away. I flicked on my HUD’s spectral and thermal amplifiers and the world flickered into an overlay of cool colours and sound. My readouts scrolling with stats. Assuming our alien drug dealer hadn’t been lying through his teeth, Artyom would be along soon, and it’d be impossible to miss him.
I squatted on a mouldy old couch, rolling my shardpistol in my hands. Shardpistols fire crystals that punch into human skin. The more lethal versions detonate on impact, burying toxic-coated shards into the target’s body. Both are illegal, of course, the latter more so. I’d asked Grim to get one for me and, never one to let the tedious complications of legality bother him, he’d passed me one fresh out of its foam casing in less than two hours. I wore it like a knuckle duster, and when I flicked a button the weapon coalesced into my hand like millions of shiny insects scrambling over each other. Standard carbon-black stock. Long, thin barrel. Red holographic sights. No ammo. Like all ranged weapons, shardpistols autoprinted projectiles, something that had given us a monstrous advantage over Harvest. It varied on the calibre and weapon, but you could generally fire over two-hundred rounds before inserting a cartridge of quickmatter – the baseline material all printers used.
I flicked the shardpistol on and off, on and off, on and off. A habit I’d had ever since I was issued one, a year into enlisted duty. I’d still struggled to wear my bulky armour in the higher gravity. My fireteam had been deployed to a small city on the broken outskirts of a wasteland, rescuing stranded civilians and securing outposts abandoned by Harvest. We knew something was wrong the moment we entered the city outskirts, unease rippling from man to man. ‘Weapons up, eyes open,’ Alcatraz had said while following Ratchet, our quick-footed scout. Cable and Myra had my flank as we moved through abandoned concourses and desolate streets. There was a rank, sour stink in the air as we followed the shattered storefronts. Splatters and smears of dark blood congealed across the pavements. It was the silence that got to me. Like the quiet after an avalanche: total, complete, utter silence.
Didn’t take us long to discover everyone in the town was dead. Men, women, children, the elderly, everyone. Gunned down, dragged from their homes and into a flaming pyre in the middle of the town square. Dirt had been kicked up in a likely struggle, showing that not everyone had been dead when the burning started. On the edge of the pyre was a small, withered husk that could only be a child, the outstretched, skeletal hand of a parent reaching out one last time. The smell of burnt meat was still in the air.
I gagged, hoping to be sick, but the stormtech stuffed the sensation back down my body, keeping me alert to danger. I stood there, guts roiling and acid tearing up my stomach and chest.
‘No,’ Cable groaned beside me, his voice choking up, his heavy assault autocannon sagging in the dirt. He was always hit hardest by the horrors we encountered. ‘No, no, no.’
Myra, our sniper, was always more callous. ‘Stop it,’ she hissed. ‘We don’t have time for—’
‘They were just children!’ Cable all but roared. ‘They were just children.’
I put a hand on his shoulder, feeling the tremble in his bones through the armour. I wasn’t sure if the stormtech or paralysis was stopping my legs from buckling. Even Ratchet was just standing there, frozen at the sight. And that’s when Alcatraz pinged us on the commslink.
The Berserk killsquad of Harvesters who’d carved up the town had set up a temporary camp in the remains of the bombed-out schoolyard. Chatting, sitting around and eating from nutrition packets. Swinging from a tree next to them by a length of rope were two teenagers, riddled with bullet-holes. They’d been using them for target practice.
Any other type of soldier in the SSC would be trained for this. To follow protocol and procedure, neutralise the enemy and bring them in for questioning.
But stormtech was designed to react to our emotions. Harvest had reduced cities to rubble, shot down evac ships, set forests on fire, trained their soldiers to hunt Reapers like animals across the planet. Now we’d walked through a civilians’ pyre, the stormtech swiftly converting our grief and horror into blinding fury.
We all moved as one.
Alcatraz blasted the squad leader in the back of the skull with his shardpistol. Cable grabbed a man, dragging him across the ground and smashing his head against a