Chapter 133: The Operator

The lead bird came in hard over the tower line with its side door open and the gunner already swinging that .50 around on its mount, and I was moving before the barrel finished coming level.

[Fake shield. Fake shield. That thing’ll go through this and me and the floor behind me.]

A few strides took me across the open eighth floor and off the edge of it, out into the cold air with nothing under my boots, and that very next second the bird’s engine note broke.

It happened without a sound anywhere in the sky, no crack, no report, nothing but that steady rotor beat suddenly stumbling into a grinding whine while the whole airframe yawed hard left and started spilling grey smoke out of its mast. The pilot fought it down toward the flat ground by the Ghostbird because there was nowhere else left to put it.

[...That’s my girl.]

I had fired the grapple gun straight up into the floor slab above me while the ground came at my face.

-Chak-! -Krnk-!

The cable snagged and bit before the fall stopped being a fall and turned into a controlled slide, my whole weight hanging off one arm while the System interfacing the gun bled the speed out of my fall floor by floor, the concrete blurring past me in grey bands, and as the second floor came up, I let it go.

The hook came free, the launcher went back into the Inventory, and my hand was already at the small of my back with six meters of empty air still under me.

The bearded axe came out of its loop as I fell.

And I fell straight onto the four men in full kit who were stacked tight at the tower’s entrance with their backs to me, muzzles up, the lead man’s hand already on the frame as he pushed inside to come up the stairs after their sweep team.

They, of course, never looked up.

-CHUNK-!

I landed on the rear man with everything I had and everything the fall had given me, swinging the axe at his right shoulder, and it shredded straight through it and kept going, through the collarbone and the ribs under it and down across the whole width of him, splitting the plate carrier apart at the seam and coming to rest deep in the left side of his waist.

He folded around it and hit the ground under me, the sound he made was not a scream, because a man cannot scream with his chest opened corner to corner.

-Ding!

I didn’t even need to plant my foot onto him for leverage to wrench the axe out; I just yanked it back, and it came free in a wet tearing rush that took a shower of blood and a piece of him with it on its way out.

The other three had turned by then.

Three carbines started coming up in three different directions, and I threw the shield.

-Woosh-!

-Thak-!

It caught the nearest man across the bridge of the nose, mid-turn, bashing his nose into a squelch of bloody mess, and he went down backward with his rifle firing once into the sky on the way, while another ding resounded in my head, but the shield didn’t stop; it bounced off him and rang off the second man’s helmet hard enough to spin him.

-Thak-!

The third one got his muzzle onto me.

I closed the two meters between us before his finger finished traveling and took the barrel aside with my left hand, while I brought the axe up underhand into the soft space beneath his jaw.

-KRUNK-!

The blade went in through his throat and stopped against the inside of his own skull, and I felt every bit of that through the haft.

-Ding!

I kicked him off the axe head, and he came apart from it amid the shower of his blood and brain, and before he could even drop limp, I turned to the last one.

He was still on his feet, the one the shield had spun, blood pouring out from under his helmet and down over his eyes, and he was trying to bring his rifle around with hands that had stopped taking instructions.

He looked at me while he did it.

And he did it anyway.

[Good man!]

I grabbed his rifle and shoved it away from me, bringing the axe down with the other hand through his collarbone, the blade tearing through flesh and bone until it lodged in his ribs.

-Ding!

And at last, the ground was quiet, and there were four bodies around my feet, and my shield was lying face-down in the dirt eight meters away with a Sharpie star pointed at the sky.

Out on one of the flattest stretches on the construction site, the lead bird had come down hard, skids buckling, rotors still turning down through their own noise, and the second one was flaring in beside it because a pilot with a smoking sister ship and no target does not stay in the air alone.

Picking up the shield, I started walking, never once hearing a single shot for the rest of it.

The lead bird’s gunner was still leaning out of the door frame, reaching for his charging handle, and then he simply stopped being a man reaching for anything, and slumped over the mount with a bloody mess for what used to be a head.

Five seconds later the second bird’s gunner went the same way, half out of his door, and the .50 he’d been swinging came to rest pointing at nothing.

[Gunners first... Always the guns first.]

Then the cockpit glass on the lead bird starred, and starred again, five seconds apart, metronome-steady, one shot at a time, while behind me on the eighth floor of a building, a woman lay perfectly still and worked her way through a checklist.

The second cockpit took its turn after that.

And then there was nothing left in that whole construction site making noise except two dying engines winding themselves down and the wind coming through the rebar.

[Fourteen... Five hundred a head... seven thousand credits... Against a hundred and fifty million. That’s basically a rounding error with a body count.]

I went through the helicopter crew first, then the four at the entrance, then the sweep team up on the eighth floor, working each body the same way, plates off, helmet off, rifle and magazines and radio and knife, boots if they looked new, and the whole time the snow kept coming down and dying on all of it.

None of it was for me. My rig was better than anything these men had been issued, my rifle outclassed every carbine on that ground, and the plates in my chest were a full protection class above theirs.

But gear is the only real currency left out here. Credits buy things from a menu only I can see, and the day I need something out of a stranger’s hands, nobody is going to want a number. They’re going to want plates that stop rifle rounds, and a working radio, and boots without holes in them, and by then I’d rather be the man with fourteen sets of everything than the man with nothing but a smile. Besides, that gear was practically free loot now.

So it all went into the Misc. Chest, riding on top of everything I’d stripped off every corpse since the shit-show started. Fourteen sets of plates and helmets, eleven carbines, two shotguns, two DMRs, a pile of loaded magazines, four radios, and not one single item in the pile that I actually needed.

Nia came across the open ground while I was working, the SR-25 across her chest, her own axe on her hip and a crowbar strapped down the side of her pack, Tikki’s ears showing over her jacket zipper.

She stopped beside the entrance, looked at the man I had come down on, at the diagonal that ran through him from shoulder to waist, and then she looked at the axe on the back of my waist still dripping blood.

"Efficient," she said.

"Thanks."

"Wasn’t a compliment, big guy. And your face is still doing the thing... and its getting creepy now."

I laid my palm on the Chinook first, twelve tonnes of tandem-rotor helicopter that had been full of people ten minutes ago, and it went out of the world into the same slot the Ghostbird lives in without so much as a change in the wind. The Caracal followed it a minute later, and then the flat ground had nothing standing on it but my own grey NH90, untouched, thirty-four failed access attempts and all.

"Two birds, fourteen sets of kit, and the Ghostbird back," Nia said. "That’s a good afternoon by any standard you want to use."

"We’re still behind schedule."

"We’re always behind schedule."

I was three steps from the Ghostbird’s door when a radio started talking behind me.

It was lying in the dirt where it probably fell off a dead man’s rig, and the voice coming through it was tired and bored and completely unhurried, a man sitting somewhere warm and comfortable, tens of kilometers away, reading down a checklist of his own.

-Kzzzt-

"Longbow, Command... Say status on the Nine-Zero. Is she flyable?"

A pause, and the hiss of an open channel, and then the part that raised my eyebrows.

"And do you have the operator? Command wants the operator."