Refraction | Part 1 | Darwin's Steroids
33) Up and Out Cold
I am not under siege for long. Rapidly I go from hiding in my fort, to being pursued through my warren. I shouldn’t have tied the two auto guns together. When the one of them on the surface got wrecked it totally fucked up the one I had set up to spray uninvited guests coming down the ladder. About 15 seconds after it got blown up or whatever the hell happened to it, the one in the shaft started firing at nothing in particular, eventually dumping it’s entire load into the walls of the shaft. Alright, I’ll admit it, being a ass-kicking bad-ass doesn’t necessarily make you into a brilliant fucking tactician. I quit the control room as soon as they breach the entrance and start heading down the tube. I rig the door on my way out, hoping to catch another one of these sonsabitches off guard. I am starting to get a little pissed off about all of this, and do everything I can to stay calm. If I’m gonna survive this fight I’m gonna need to focus my smashing power.
I hook a right and boogie down the hall toward the sleeping quarters. I enter and cross the room, cut through the small gym and into the locker room. The vent is right where the blue prints said it would be. It looks just big enough for me to squeeze into. Luckily a life time of being to big in general for my surroundings has left me with zero claustrophobia. I squirm up into the goddamn vent, and start making my way through the air shafts back toward the control room. I stop and watch the soldiers as they make their way into the tunnel and toward the control room. They leap frog their way down the hall, and take up cover positions on the control room door. I count 9, which leaves three, either guarding the blast entrance door, or the surface. Plus the ninja. Can’t wait for him to fucking show up.
The point soldier slips a pair of goggles over his eyes and scans the entrance to the control room, then turns and whispers something to the man next to him. Not Goggles turns and does some rapid sign language. A third soldier creeps up the line, confers with Goggles, meanwhile Not Goggles does more sign language and the rest of the men began to fall back, well out of range of the meager device I rigged the door with. Third Soldier finishes with Goggles, who joins Not Goggles and the rest of the crew down the hall. Third Soldier pulls a black tube off his rack, flips out its tripod and begins setting it up. It’s a mag ram. These guys thought of everything. Third Soldier does some retrograde maneuvering to rejoin Goggles and Not Goggles and the rest of the gang, then he sets off the rail gun remotely. Its load leaps silently out of its cradle and bangs smack in the middle of the door, blowing it into the room, and setting off my pathetic trap. They bang and clear the control room, then move en masse up the tunnel. I’m fucked if these guys don’t break up into smaller groups. Which they are not doing. Save for the guy they left at the entrance, they are sticking together as a unit. I hem and haw for a second, I really want to finish these guys off. Break the trail, cut their communication, not to mention a little interrogation to shed some light on this bullshit. But I might be out maneuvered on that front. I should have just rigged the place to collapse on itself. Fuck it, let’s go with Plan B. I crawl away up the airshaft toward the silo.
I get to the end of the shaft and peek through the scorched metal of the plates that cover the vent that connects to the bottom of the silo. Two of the three soldiers cover the door, the third is out of sight. Maybe he’s off playing pinochle with the swordsman. Light suddenly spills into the chamber from below me and the triumvirate is complete. He appears to be some sort of communications geek. They must be having a hell of a time keeping in touch with each other down here. Advantage fucking Chuck, dick heads. The communications geek seals the door, crosses and confers with the two soldiers already in the room, then begins to set up a portable dish array in the center of the shaft. Satellite uplink. Which means the site is actively tasked, which means I’m fucked. There is simply no way out of here without being seen. Fuck-ity-fuck, fuck, fuck. I need clouds. Or smoke. Smoke, a whole hell of a lot of smoke. First things first, out of this airshaft, trash the array and these three chumps, then I’ll figure out how to obscure a hundred square kilometers with smoke.
The louvered vent is set about half way between full open and closed. I have to back down the shaft to the first junction to get turned around. I scoot back on my ass to the vent. I scooch up on it and stomp it as hard as I can, which is pretty fucking hard. It pops right out, and get this, clobbers the communications geek. The thing has to weigh 75 kilos and it hits him from behind like, well like a 75 kilogram weight. It smashes him to the ground. That’s nice, because I want to get this done quick with minimal ruckus. I slide my way out of the shaft and drop to the floor of the blast chamber, cut right in a crouching run. Bullets splatter into the concrete around me, and I cut back hard left, leap at the near soldier, who actually drops the muzzle of his weapon. He hesitates, and is lost.
The vent that hit the communications geek was heavy, I am heavier. I bulldoze the guy into the wall, a solid hit. My shoulder drives into his sternum, stresses the costal cartilage well beyond it’s capacity, and with a gruesomely audible series of cracks, his rib cage gives way, crushing and spearing his cardio-pulmonary system. He sucks wind, and crumples as I turn toward his partner. Partner resumes firing at me when he realizes his bullets couldn’t possibly do any more damage to internally-crushed guy, who was now out of the picture. I dive behind the pile of communications geek and vent, but it just ain’t enough to cover my bulk. It feels like someone laid a hot poker down on my left latisimus dorsi and my shirt gets wet. I roll into the pile pushing the vent vertical, scramble to my feet behind it. I’m praying the blast door is muffling the noise. I hoist the plate with my right hand like a shield and use a combo vent plus me technique on the guy. I won’t even go into it. It’s bad for me, a ricochet clips off the number four distal phalange on my right hand, but it’s worse for him. Much worse.
I drop the vent, step back over to communications geek and snap his neck, to be sure. I stomp on his computer, and dish array, to be sure. I stop a moment and listen, take a peek at my poor hand. I am now short one and a third fingers. That’s some fucking bullshit. I tie a piece of shirt around it, and check my left side, the bullet went through and through the muscle, it hurts to lift my left arm but it won’t kill me, at least not right away. I toss the bodies as fast I can, take a gear rack with some grenades, the canteens, a flashlight, and finally a fucking map and compass. I hurry to the ladder and start climbing, my left arm starts complaining one the first rung and is screaming at me by the tenth. Only about a thousand more.
It is long and fucking agonizing. I am still bleeding some, a slow leak. Every time I lift my lefty it sort oozes more out. By the time I reach the surface I have a crimson speed stripe all the way down my left side and I’m feeling a little dizzy. I wait to rest until I’m at the top, that way if Goggles and Not Goggles, and Third Soldier and the rest of the fucking gang finish up down there and start up after me, I can roll some grenades down the hole. I am feeling weak as a newborn baby and can barely lift my left arm when I pull my self up out of the missile silo. I lie there for a minute, staining the dirt red and trying to catch my breath. I sit up, which gives me a big head rush. I set the timers on two of the grenades, one for 15 minutes, the other for half an hour. I arm them and toss them down the hole. I listen for them to hit bottom, plink, plink. I stagger to my feet and turn away from the silo, trying to remember what my plan was, and guess who’s there. He sits in the dust about 5 meters away, he is crossed legged and calm. His sword is across his lap, but it remains in its sheath, which seems wrong to me, but I couldn’t tell you why I feel that way. The Ninja stands, does some blurry things with his hands and the kitana is tied to his back. Travel mode. He bows to me, down slow and low. I kind of bow back but when I lean forward I pitch face first into the fucking ground.
This ain’t gonna be much of a fight.
I don’t hear The Ninja before I feel him, which is creepy, he squirms his hands under me. He lets out a small grunt when he lifts my bulk, and slowly exhales as he carefully rolls me over. He must be one of these look-into-the-eyes-of-my-enemy-as-I-drain-their-life types. I tense myself to grab his throat with the three remaining fingers of my rapidly fucking diminishing right hand, but it telegraphs and he leaps out of range. Then instead of pulling out his washizaki and running it up into my guts, he bows again. He looks like he is sort of shimmering, I can’t quite focus on him and I expect to pass out any second.
“Juggernaut”, says The Ninja, “Do not fear me, with are kith.”
Then the expected happens.
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