The piece of wreckage impacted hard on the armoured body of the thing he was inside. It impacted badly, too. Not a flat side or even an edge hit first but a jagged point. It smacked into his top, off centre so that it half-spun him and sent the piece of wreckage spinning into the shoulder section of his left Main Weapon Pod.
Everything shook. Damage control screen-spreads filled his field of vision. There was a further impact from above. It was relatively slow, implicitly high inertia, crushing.
“Fuck you, motherfucker! Fuck you fuck you fuck you!” (Genius.)
“Sir, ordnance discharged, sir.” (Gulton.)
“Fuck me, I think my anal plug just exited my fucking suit.” (Different voice 2.)
“Oh, that’s spatted. That is one spatted shitfuck of an Armoured Combat Unit.” (Different voice 3.)
“Got to have done it. Got to have fucking done it. Take fucking that, you miserable three-legged space tank motherfucker.” (Genius.)
“Last one in’s an officer. No offence, sir.” (Different voice 2.)
“Steady. Just hold. Those things are tough.”
He was injured. The machine he was in was now sub-optimal. It was called an Armoured Combat Unit.
The protective clamshell had taken a serious kinetic hit and was refusing to open, disabling the upper sensory dome. His left Main Weapon Nacelle had been torn off by the same piece of wreckage. Four Secondary Weapon Pods were non-operational and the upper secondary weapon collar had jammed. Something had damaged his Main Power Distribution Unit, too. He didn’t know how that had happened but it had. Now he couldn’t move his legs properly. Some secondary power left in his Number One leg. That was all. Difficult to estimate how much power or leverage was available.
Some piece of heavy equipment from the ceiling above, the source of the earlier high-inertia impact, appeared to be pinning him to the deck. Additionally, the condensing metals from the plasma event seemed to have spot-welded some parts of himself to some other parts of himself and some parts of himself to the hangar floor.
He rotated another set of disposable sensors into place on the right shoulder. This would be all he had to work with for now.
He would have to stay where he was. He could still turn, though there was a grinding sensation when he did and he could not turn smoothly, which contra-indicated tracking-firing.
He couldn’t see much. The lower sensory dome was obstructed by the squat cage of his immobile legs.
“Okay. Trooper Drueser. You have the honour, I believe.”
“Sir.” (Genius = Drueser.)
The figure came in through the curved entrance, bouncing on all fours and keeping very low to the hangar deck, a medium kinetic rifle tripodded on its back, barrel sweeping back and forth.
Vatueil let it go well past him, almost to the tipped, torn part of the hangar floor, then quietly lobbed a superblack snowflake grenade just behind it. The magnetic launcher produced no exhaust, the superblack coating kept the projectile stealthed and it was too dark for the trooper to have much chance of seeing the round curving towards him through the vacuum.
He launched a second round aimed to fall right on top of the suited figure if it stopped about… Now.
The first grenade hit the deck two metres behind the trooper, then detonated with a flash and a floor-thud. The figure had stopped and spun round. The trooper was caught inside the hail of millimetre- and centimetre-scale fragments.
There was a shriek. (Drueser.)
The back-mounted gun fired twice at where the first grenade had detonated. Then the second grenade landed. It was supposed to fall right on top of the figure but landed half a metre to its left side and half a metre in front it because of his own sensor-compromised aiming and the fact that the trooper had been blown backwards by the fragment shower from the first grenade.
The second grenade had been set to detonate on contact. The detonation caused the figure’s head to kick back. It also tore off and then disintegrated Drueser’s helmet visor, causing an obvious pressure-loss event. The figure collapsed to the floor without further movement or transmitted sound.
“Drueser?”
“Fuck.” (Different voice 2.)
“Drueser?”
“Sir, I think he triggered something. A suckertrap. That thing’s still dead. Must be.” (Different voice 4.)
“Sir? The real bad guys are due to get here awful soon now. We need to be in there even if it’s just to hide.” (Gulton.)
“Aware of that, Gulton. You want to be next?”
“Sir, me and Koviuk thought we might favour the skirmish space below with our twin presences, sir.” (Gulton.)
“BMG, Gulton.” (He didn’t know what BMG meant.)
The two figures dropped through the hole in the ceiling. Their dark suits were made briefly bright by the orange glow still coming from the slagged materials of what had been the hangar ceiling and the floor of the deck above.
Vatueil could have hit both of them but he had heard what they had said and he thought that what it meant was that they thought he was dead. If that was true then it was better to let them think that and to bring them all into the same Immediate Tactical Environment as he was in, the better to attack and destroy them.
Trapeze, came the call. It was not a surprise. Vatueil had been thinking of making it himself.
He left a shell presence of himself in the Primary Strategic Situation Overview Space and navigated to the Trapeze space, scattering pass-codes and decoys like petals.
There were five of them. They sat on what looked like trapezes hanging in utter darkness; the wires vanished upwards into the black and there was no sign or implication of any floor below or wall to any side. It was meant to symbolise the isolation of the secret space or something. He had no idea what they’d have chosen had one of their number had a high-gravity heritage and been congenitally terrified of any drop more than a few millimetres. They’d all taken up different appearances to be here but he knew who the other four were and trusted them completely, just as he hoped they trusted him.
He had shown up as a furred quadruped with big eyes and three powerful fingers at the end of each of his four limbs. They all tended to present as the sort of multi-limbed creature which had evolved in gravity, in trees. He knew how strange this must feel to the two water worlders he knew were present, but it was the sort of thing you got used to in VR. They took on colours to distinguish themselves; he was red, as usual.
He looked round at all of them “We’re losing,” he announced.
“You always say that,” said yellow.
“I didn’t when we weren’t,” he replied. “When I realised we were, I started saying so.”
“Depressing,” yellow said, looking away.
“Losing often is,” green said.
“It is starting to look kind of non-get-out-able,” purple agreed with a sigh. Purple held onto the supporting side-wires and started rocking back and forth, making its trapeze oscillate slowly.
“So, next level?” said green. Their exchanges had become terse over the last few meetings; they’d talked exhaustively about the situation, and the choices it left them with. It was just a question of waiting for the voting balance to change, or for some of their number to become so frustrated with the process and the whole Trapeze set-up, that they formed another even more exclusive sub-committee and took matters into their own hands. They had all pledged not to do this, but you never entirely knew.
They all looked at blue. Blue was the waverer. Blue had been voting No to going to what they usually called “the next level” until now, but had made no secret of being the one of the three nay-sayers who was most likely to change his, her or its mind, as circumstances altered.