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Killer Kittens from Outer Space- Chapter Five
🕑 Added 2024-02-10 05:37:58 +0000 UTCAna (continued)
The first time Ana donned the suit, it had come with a stern warning from the range commander.
“There’s a kill switch built into these prototype units,” she’d explained, looking Ana dead in the eye. “You’re here because you’ve been tested and passed intake, but frankly, you’re human, so that alone doesn’t mean the brass trusts you. If the suit detects an intentional attempt at friendly fire, registers any life form other than yourself attempting to use it, or if you go AWOL, it will lock up and immediately call command to come and pick you up. At that point, you would be faced with a military tribunal. Is that clear?”
It was easy to see why such measures were necessary. Ana had spent time in the suit during training, mostly going over the targeting systems and getting acclimatised to the frankly insane amount of power it provided so that she didn’t accidentally pulverise some poor civilian she was trying to rescue.
In combat, it made her feel like a goddess of war. From above them on the hill, incoming streams of fire came sporadically from the boxy buildings— mostly junky FN FAL and AK-47-type small arms that were popular with the cartels. The 7.62mm rounds weren’t all that threatening by themselves, but being hit by a large number could overwhelm the shields, so while Ana’s team had the technological upper hand, the cartels were still apparently holding onto some hope of repelling them.
That hope was poorly founded. The suit’s targeting systems tracked the rifle barrels that protruded from the sides of the colourful, blocky structures. Those systems provided real-time threat assessment and communicated with the rest of her fire team’s suits so that if one of them had eyes on a target, they all did. The duradians advanced up the hill methodically, using their active camouflage to approach and flush out small pockets of fighters into the open, where they could be quickly dispatched with short bursts of highly accurate fire.
The suit did almost all the work, a heads-up display in the helmet indicating when and where to advance, painting targets in red (apparently a universal bad-guy colour) and providing a targeting lock, the suit adjusting her aim each time it detected a clean shot. It was also comfortable, with air-conditioning built into the helmet, and light, primarily because the bulk of its protection was provided by the force shield projector in the small of her back, which saved weighing it down with bulletproof plating.
It did everything except pull the trigger. That Ana had to do herself, sending a burst of white-hot plasma rounds streaking up the hill to tear straight through the torso of a bare-armed female fighter who’d turned to run while firing blindly over her shoulder.
Ana’s stomach churned as the team continued to advance, ducking under hails of bullets as they did so. She was halfway up the hill when the first accurate round connected with the side of her stomach, thudding against her field projector like a blow from a hammer and spinning off through the air to drop to the ground a few metres away. Her suit’s targeting system adjusted, and a strangled gasp sounded out, amplified by her directional audio, which isolated its location in the dark recess of a nearby alleyway.
Ana turned, her gun came up, and then she froze as the petrified face of a child no more than fourteen or fifteen years of age filled her targeting screen with red.
The girl was shaking, a comically oversized rifle clutched in quivering hands, and as she stared down the barrel of Ana’s far more advanced rifle, a dark patch of wet fabric bloomed in her trousers. She closed her eyes, and her gun lowered slightly as she flinched away.
Ana had barely a second to register the scene before another rifle barrel sprang up beside her, a duradian seemingly appearing out of thin air as she bore down on the teenager, a fraction of a second from firing.
It wasn’t even a decision. Ana’s hand moved almost of its own accord, knocking aside the gleaming black rifle just as the girl dropped her weapon and the targeting system cycled from red to yellow. Bullets still flying around them, Ana dragged the duradian behind cover into the same alleyway, weapon still trained on the teen as she did. The girl was still frozen to the spot, her rifle lying on the concrete beside her. Her mouth moved, but nothing came out. The suit did the work of lip reading for her. ‘Diabo, o diabo’. Devil.
She needed to move. Active hostile or not, there were always soldiers who were more trigger-happy than most. Without time to consider whether it was a good idea, Ana’s hand came up to press a button on the side of her visor, and the opaque screen changed to a clear, glasslike panel, revealing her face.
“Menina!” she screamed at the girl through the suit’s built-in speakers, and the teen’s eyes opened, staring widely back at Ana in disbelief. “Vai já! Corre como o diabo te carrega!”
The girl didn’t need any more urging. Like a deer finding its feet in the headlights, she sprinted away, arms flailing, almost falling over as she hurtled down the narrow alley and around a corner.
Ana breathed out a sigh of relief. The duradian was watching her steadily, but she didn’t say anything, her rifle tucked up against her shoulder as they waited for the flow of bullets along the main street to stop.
“Just a kid.” It felt like she had to say it, and she looked the lizard in the eye. “She was just a scared kid.”
The duradian stared back at Ana for a few seconds, then nodded and moved away, pulling a small object from a bandolier on her chest. She hefted it over to the end of the alleyway toward the teen’s escape route, and it collided with the far wall, thudding to the ground. Ana gasped, waiting for an explosion.
It didn’t come. Instead, her HUD lit up, projecting the walls behind the corner in a fine mesh overlay. When the scan registered no new targets, the duradian returned her attention to the street.
Fighting their way up through the favela was a slow grind, but it was far from the impossible task it would have been as a policewoman in pre-invasion Brazil, and their progress was consistent as they battled their way up the hill. After a while, the gangs realised that small-arms fire wasn't cutting it, and they pulled their troops back uphill to regroup.
The first grenades came all at once. Ana had just begun moving up on new cover when her suit registered the dark blobs flying towards her, and a pair of meaty paws grabbed her from behind, pulling her back and down behind a rectangular shield that Bruiser laid horizontally on the ground. There was a loud thud from the shield as one of the explosives bounced off and skittered across the ground, and a cold splinter of fear gripped Ana as it rolled down the hill, passing the shield wall to rest just beside them.
“FUCK!” Ana screamed, reaching, but Singer was already there.
“MINE!” the avian called, her wings unfurling and propelling her forward with a sharp snapping sound out of her cover to land beside Ana, her beak slapping the grenade back out in front of the shield and up the hill. She pulled her body and head in behind Bruiser just as the explosions went off.
The percussive blast rolled over the trio, and Ana’s bones rattled in her body. The shield took the brunt, and Bruiser growled as she braced against it, then toggled a switch on the backside of the dark metal plate to cast a display across its face that provided vision from in front.
Poking her rifle out over the top of the shield, Ana’s targeting system painted three (thankfully adult) targets red, and with a trio of short bursts of her rifle, they dropped, her suit tightening around her wrist to direct her aim between shots. From their eight o’clock, Raker’s marksman rifle barked four times in sharp retort, and two more cartel members slumped from their vantage points in the dark windows of a rusty red-coloured house further up the hill.
When no more heads popped up, the duradians took the opportunity to move to the next row of narrow streets, firing as they went.
More sporadic gunshots and the occasional grenade came their way, but it was clear that this was cover for a retreat and not a final stand as the number of cartel members standing in their path diminished significantly. After another minute, the street was quiet, save for the low moans of wounded humans and distant shouts from citizens taking shelter in their homes.
Bruiser straightened up and moved to the side of the street, wedging her shield against a wall and looking back to check on the rest of the squad as they regrouped behind her.
Raker took a knee behind the bulky ursinian and raised her hand to her communicator. “Hostiles are falling back,” she reported. “Fire team three has sustained zero casualties and is ready to move up; how copy?”
“Solid copy,” a translated voice replied in an almost instant response despite coming all the way from low orbit. “Fire teams one and two have reported successful advancements. You are to regroup with them at the top of the hill and prepare for further orders, over.”
“Copy that,” Raker acknowledged, then turned to the rest of the team. “You heard the woman! Eyes on swivels, we are not welcome here!”
The cartel’s hit-and-run tactics kept up as Ana’s team pressed on. After climbing what felt like the hundredth set of stairs, they rounded a corner into a stone courtyard, around the edges of which thirty or so additional Imperial troops were waiting on standby.
“Friendlies approaching from the East!” one called out, and Bruiser immediately strode into the courtyard to clasp burly paws with another ursinian who she seemed to recognise. Raker made her way over to talk to the other NCOs in charge, which left Ana standing next to Singer, awkwardly fielding the attention of the courtyard as the murmuring started.
Shit, my visor’s still up. Ana cringed away from the stares. Guess the cat’s out of the bag now.
