Coven's Rebellion Chapter 14 (Patreon)

Rosa

We hadn't even made it halfway across the crumbling concrete lot when my robotic combat frame’s onboard threat detection lit up.

Time slowed as both Amelia and I pumped our framerates to maximum. Up on the roof of the warehouse, the barrel of a gun was slowly swinging over to take aim. Oh fuck. What we'd taken for the excess heat haze of an air conditioning unit turned out to be a soldier hiding behind a fuzz field.

With silent intent-to-intent communication, my girlfriend and I planned our next move…

To someone with a default relationship with the flow of time, it looked like we were suddenly and violently thrown sideways, only for us to tuck into matching tumbles. Ame came out of her roll with her huge gun aimed directly at the enemy shooter.

It coughed in the same way that a star might cough and the HVAC unit shattered from the inside out. The UN spec ops trooper had already moved, however, and his return shot struck my girlfriend's combat frame in the chest. There was a loud crack and a sharp whine, but she didn't fall.

“I’m sorry I missed, Sprocket,” Amelia whispered over comms as she tried to track the heat haze that was our opponent. My damn goof of a girlfriend was talking to her gun.

“We don't have time to trade shots,” I said, watching as the enemy soldier ducked behind the cover of another HVAC unit.

“You retreat, I'll cover you,” she said, annihilating the unfortunate rooftop machinery with a high velocity explosive railgun dart.

I took a step to retreat, but I hesitated when something moved out to our right in the lot. Shit. They were in the process of pincering us. The guy on the roof was a distraction, he had to be.

Stepping forward, I unlatched my wrist rope dart and flicked it out. The tip was going exceedingly quick when it struck the blur, and to both I and my target’s surprise, his digital interference field fizzled out with a sparking pop.

“What the fuck?” the man behind the fuzz muttered, barely audible even with my enhanced mechanical senses. He wore matte black armour like nothing I’d ever seen, and the only skin visible was that around his chin and mouth, which was exposed because he’d slid an armoured visor up. Why weren’t his eyes and nose visible, you might ask? His helmet had a secondary visor. I was unsure why, but the fact his headgear contained two different visors was just very strange to me.

To say that I was stunned and baffled by the sudden fall of his digital obfuscation field would be an understatement, but it seemed the feeling was mutual. Between us, humming like a guitar string, was my cable. At my end, it was where it was supposed to be, but on him… the little dart was lodged in some sleek device on his shoulder. The fuzz field generator?

With a shrug that bordered on apologetic, I yanked him towards me like I had a dog on a leash. I was, however, still not accustomed to the level of strength that these artificial bodies possessed, and squeaked in surprise when the man flew through the air towards me with considerable speed.

“Oh, crap!” I blurted, and ducked.

By all the gods, but I was off kilter. Why on Earth did I duck? My girlfriend was behind me!

He collided with her in a tangle of limbs and cuss words, and Sprocket flew from her grasp to clatter across the rough concrete pavement. This was going from bad to— A rifle cracked from above, and the armour on my arm shattered into red-hot chunks of metal— worse. A warning light in my HUD began to blink. The cable mechanism in my arm was damaged and not responding to queries from my onboard control systems.

Amelia, ever competent as she was, had the man off her in short order with a curt shove of a leg. He flew back towards the factory, and she scrambled into a half roll to regain control of her still spinning weapon. Her hand closed around Sprocket with loving care, and she looked up to meet my eye for just the briefest moment.

Then I was plucked from my feet as I followed the United Nations’ newest Special Operations pinball.

I heard the most awful steel-on-steel grinding sound, and my flight was arrested. Amelia had me by the hand. The ball attached to my chain was sitting in his very own man-shaped dent in the wall, and I’d been moments from adding my own impression to the concrete. At least we were safe from the man on the roof… for now.

“Time to go?” she asked with a mirthful little head tilt. “Cut this guy loose and let’s bounce.”

The guy in question was groaning in pain with his hand wrapped around his side. The secondary visor that’d been covering his face was now a wreck that hung awkwardly out of the helmet. His eyes were closed tight with pain, but he forced them open to stare daggers at me anyway.

Another fuzzy blur stepped out around the edge of the building nearby, and I knew that we had little choice. Both of us were damaged now. We needed to leave.

As if to punctuate the point, a chemically powered hyper-velocity stream of bullets tore more of Amelia’s armour away from the vulnerable insides of her robotic body. It was really, really time to go!

My metal legs and their high-performance servos bunched up in readiness, and I nodded to my girlfriend. Together, we flew through the air—the strength of our combat frames lending itself first and foremost to one thing, bursts of extreme speed.

My footsteps were light on the concrete, and this time I flew through the air with purpose. Unfortunately, the new threat and the bark of gunfire zipping past had led me to forget one very important thing in the moment. The other soldier was still very much attached to me. The folks who designed my rope darts were very good at their jobs, and now it was my problem.

The speed I was processing reality lent an almost comical aspect to the situation as I both realised the problem and turned to look back at the soldier. His eyes were widening in alarm. It appeared that we both understood the current issue. Physics, having watched my antics within CORA, had finally found a way to beat some respect back into me.

He collided with me, body to body, with a considerable amount of energy, and we tumbled to the ground in a tangle of limbs, mirroring what’d just happened with Amelia.

“Oh for the love of—” I hissed, and pushed him off me. He fell face up, and I stood over him in a way that was probably very menacing.

“Hold still,” I growled, and placed my tri-toed foot onto his shoulder. He grunted in pain, so I shifted my footing again in a way that would hopefully not cause further trauma to his battered body. My damaged arm twisted the cable around itself, and after glancing down at the man to see him watching with a pained hint of approval in his eyes, I wrenched the dart free from his armour.

A railgun round whipped past me as soon as I was disengaged from the unfortunate soldier at my feet, so I gave him a shrug and bolted away once more, following my girlfriend to the edge of the property. Bullets and railgun darts followed us as we left, but my sensors didn’t detect any pursuit—not that I would be able to detect much. Goddess, but what I’d give to have the option to use the Mk1 Eyeball right now. Simply lifting a visor like they could would’ve given us the ability to see and deal with the spec ops people.

“Nothing behind you both,” Desmonia said quietly. “Amelia, what’s the status of your frame?”

“Armour is busted and I’m down one battery, but I think it’s just disconnected,” she replied, leaping to grab a window sill as we scaled a building.

“Why do you think that?”

Amelia laughed. “Because I’m not on fire.”

Desmonia snorted along with her, but she sounded pensive. It didn’t take her long to let us into her thoughts. “I apologise to both of you. Especially you, Rosa.”

“Uh, why?” I asked, confused.

“Because I made a bad call and put you in danger, along with our mission,” she said quietly.

It was strange to hear Desmonia without the confidence and calm that were arguably her most defining traits.

“I’m fine,” I reassured her. “My nanites are already cannibalising damaged parts of my arm to rebuild their number.”

“That’s reassuring, but…” she trailed off, then made a sound that was the verbal equivalent of a shrug. “I will get better. I will do better.”

“That’s all we can ask for, boss,” Amelia said cheerfully. “Where’s the train situation at?”

“Ah… our ride has been secured and we’re moving the servers now—”