Pent up smells of mildew and decrepitude hit Kor's nose as they both rushed for the first stretch of stairs, with the soldier taking rear guard.
"You see something, kid, you fucking shout while you're hitting the deck." They passed interior walls tagged all to hell. Spraypaint, embedded net tags, a mobile, benign nanobot colony emitting a phosphorescent glow as it marched the name of a local group in a spiral. None of this shit would exist back home. Mainly because all the kids needed to apply it were already too busy serving.
"You got it, Laren?"
They were midway up the first flight of stairs, and Driver glanced back. "You want me running, or answering stupid fucking questions, yeah?"
"I want you focused on staying alive, kid."
"Think throwing me into traffic was for health and prosperity, uncle?" They were on the second flight now.
"In the long run? Yeah. Don't think you won't be rewarded, kid."
By the next flight of stairs, the flattening, roaring white noise of activated vector thrusters had begun to fill the passage from both above and below. Kor and Driver paused, bent over the railing to look both up and down the hollow column of air, which seemed to stretch either way into infinite nothingness.
Two combat drones, both big enough to be weapon platforms. They appeared to grow larger in size as they approached from opposite directions. The hovering robots were distant, at least twenty floors each way, but they'd be there in seconds -- well before Kor and Qivan could reach the next floor.
The spiraling descent must have induced a sudden wave of vertigo in Driver, because the kid was suddenly peeling up his gas mask, vomiting off into the emptiness as the drones continued to rise and descend at increasing rates.
Kor grabbed the kid's collar, yanked him back from the rail, shoved him up the stairs. "Move, move, move!" The soldier was already dropping his flechette loaded magazine, stuffing it away in favor of EMP. He'd been planning on using them at some later point, definitely not so damn soon.
Driver stumbled forward, yelped as he landed on hands and knees. He scrambled up the stairs on all fours, though, kept moving even as Kor continued to climb.
"Move!"
Kor couldn't believe the Blues were packing this tech. Who were these cultist nuts? Was it just the nature of Varis I, that you needed to be able to defend your property against every possible threat?
The roar of vector engines grew louder, like Kor had somehow been transported to the foot of a gargantuan waterfall. A vastness of sound, like a radio pressed to the ear and tuned to cosmic background radiation having its volume steadily increased, suffused the Menelaun.
He shoved again at Driver, barked for the kid to keep going. At the next landing, he grabbed him by the back of his pants, yanked him to his feet and sent him stumbling as he turned left, brought up the oversized pistol.
The roar intensified. The higher altitude drone hovered down into view. Measuring a meter squared, its weapon mounts were obvious: a rotary gun beneath its snubbed front end, two rocket pods flanking the lethal protrusion.
One more flight of stairs to go. The door they needed was even in view. Kor had to stall. He eyed down the iron sights.
"Cease and desist. Lower your weapon. Remain stationary, or we will be forced-"
The gun barked ineffectually compared to the engines, kicked roughly in his hands. It kicked again a split second later as Kor pulled the trigger once more. Hopefully, they weren't insulated.
Blue arcs, a flash of sparks, heat against Kor's face from the burst of emitted microwave rays. The drone's engines stuttered for a moment, the lights on its hull dimming and going dark as it hung for a second in the air, suspended by residual velocity.
Kor was already moving, pushing Driver ahead. The first drone began to fall, tumble down the shaft like overpriced refuse.
Engines sputtered, fired, sputtered again as metal scraped metal, drone slammed infrastructure, slammed drone.
Driver was up the stairs, was finally taking them two at a time like he'd realized the seriousness of the situation. At the next landing, Kor glanced left as both drones began to simultaneously rise..
The drone on the left repeated the same message as before, and the rocket pods positioned to either side of the rotary cannon opened.
Kor raised his shotgun pistol. It had worked already, hadn't it?
Another roar, this one dwarfing the engines. Flashes of light from the pods, then something slammed into Kor, hurled his right side back into the wall, pinning his weapon out and to the side. Nets, carbon fiber by the texture and feel. Light, but incredibly strong.
Kor tested the cords, grunted, immediately realized he'd never pull his arm free. He looked right, saw Driver's arms and legs pinioned, nailed to the quickcrete wall by the same type of net.
Kor stayed suspended there, thought for a split second about the Nolix rakon, a mammalian creature he'd read about years before. Once one of the most populous creatures on Nolix IV, the nearby sector picked up a fashion trend for its pelt. The rakon was soon hunted to near extinction by Anglish settlers.
Trappers would place shiny objects inside metal traps that were large enough for the rakon's hand to slide into, but too small for it once it had made a fist around the bait. The creature wouldn't ever let go, even under fear of death, and trappers would sweep through each morning to cut the valuable rakon from its inconvenient hand. The pelt would be in tact, but the stumps soon littered the primordial forest floor like memento moris for all the other woodland creatures.
"Cherish life, for tomorrow awaits economies of scale."
Kor never understood the rakon. If it had been a Menelaun, they'd have just chewed off their own arm.
He slid his free hand beneath his coat, found the composite blade he'd bought from Tisbel, skinned it free of its sheath.
Luckily, carbon fiber netting cut more easily than Menelaun sinew and ligaments. Each segment of the straining net audibly popped when Kor's blade sliced through it, and then he was to the door.
"Uncle! Come on! Don't leave me!
Kor's boots skidded. The kid was planted face first against the wall, the nets wrapping him like a gift. He didn't belong with Kor doing this shit. And he still hadn't technically done anything wrong. Laren Qivan could stop, pull back, turn around. Throw himself on the Blues' Mercy.
"Uncle!" There was a longing in his voice, though. Kor had heard the same thing in the voices of so many fresh soldiers. It was Driver's choice to leave or stay, though. Just like it had been those young soldiers' choices. "Don't fuck me over!
Kor flicked the fire selector to auto, spun back to the drones. Trigger down, the pistol was a barely contained, wild animal in Kor's hand as it spat saboted shells. Microwaves burst, electrical panels crackled, radiation flashed.
#
#
Previous entries:
#
Update this week is that you can now find this as a weekly newsletter, available at: https://craiggabrysch.substack.com/
Other than that? Nothing much to speak of. We're rounding the bend and coming closer and closer to the end of chapter three, that much I know for sure. It's still wild to me that Kor hasn't even made it off the block. You see, crafting a book or film or song is one where the input times rarely equal the times enjoyed. It's only when you get into mass distribution that my work begins to equal the aggregate enjoyment. After all, I spend 15-30 minutes per day on this, and it takes you 5-10 minutes to read all seven days worth of work. As the number of readers increases, of course, the net balance begins to tip towards the recreational enjoyment side of things.
And, yes, this is what I stay up thinking about.
