‘Since when are you giving…’
‘Just fucking do it, Sudjic!’
But she was already firing, Kjarval too; the three of them were now standing apart by ten metres, directing their suits’ fire towards the enemy. The accelerated antimatter pulses were simulated… of course. If they had been real, there would have been little of the chamber left to stand on.
There was a flash, one so bright that Khouri felt it reach out and push taloned fingers into her eyes. It felt too intense to have been properly simulated… too concussive. The noise of the blast hit with a force that seemed almost gentle by comparison, but the shock was still enough to throw her backwards, keeling into the mottled chamber wall. The bump was like bouncing onto a mattress in an expensive hotel room. For a moment her suit was out cold; even when her eyes began to clear she could see that the readouts had either died or turned to unreadably cryptic mush. They lingered in that state for a few agonising seconds before the suit’s back-up brain staggered on line, reinstating what it could. A simpler — but at least comprehensible — display returned to life, detailing what remained and what had been destroyed. Most of the major weapons were out. Suit autonomy was down by fifty per cent, the persona slipping towards machine autism. There was extensive loss of servo-assistance in three articulation points. Flight capability was impaired, at least until the repair protocols could get to work, and they needed a minimum two hours to finesse a bypass solution.
Oh, and — according to the bio-medical readout — she was now minus one upper limb, from the elbow down.
She struggled to a sitting position and — though every instinct told her to spend the time getting safe and assessing the surroundings — she had to look at the shot-away limb. Her right arm ended just where the med-readout said it would; truncating in a crumpled mass of scorched bone, flesh and intermingled metal. Further up the stump, the gel-air would have shock-congealed to prevent pressure and blood loss, but that was a detail she had to take for granted. There was no pain, of course — another aspect in which the simulation was utterly realistic, since the suit would be telling her pain centre to shut down for the time being.
Assess, assess…
She had lost her orientation completely in the blast. She looked around, but the suit’s head articulation was jammed. There was suddenly an awful lot of smoke out there; hanging in coils in the air venting from the chamber itself. The intermittent illumination provided by the aerial drones was now only a stuttering strobe-effect. There were the wrecks of two suits over there, suffering the kind of comprehensive damage which might indicate that they had been hit by combined ack-am pulses. But the suits were too mangled up for her to tell if they had — or had ever had — occupants. A third suit — less critically damaged, and perhaps only stunned, as her own had been — rested ten or fifteen metres away around the great curve of the chamber’s scarred wall. The wolfhounds were gone, or destroyed; it was impossible to tell which.
‘Sudjic? Kjarval?’
Silence; not even her own voice properly audible, and certainly nothing resembling a reply. Intersuit comms were compromised, she saw now — a detail on the damage readout she had ignored until then. Bad, Khouri. Very bad.
Now she had no idea who the enemy was.
The ruined suit arm was fixing itself by the second, scorched parts sloughing to the ground, while the exterior skin crawled forwards to envelop the stump. It was faintly disgusting to watch, even though Khouri had seen it happen many times before, in other simulation scenarios on the Edge. What was really nauseating was knowing that no such immediate repair was possible for her own wounds; that they would have to wait until she was medevacked out of the zone.
The other suit, the one less damaged, was moving now, raising itself to a standing position, just as she was doing. The other suit had a full complement of limbs, and many of its weapons were still deployed, jutting from various apertures. They were locking onto Khouri, like a dozen vipers poising for the strike.
‘Who’s that?’ she asked, before remembering that the comms were offline, probably for good. Out of the corner of her eye she saw another two suits off to one side, emerging from banners of languid, charcoal-dark smoke. Who were they? Remnants of the original three which had come down with the wolfhounds, or her comrades?
The single suit with the weapons was approaching her, very slowly, as if she were a bomb which might go off at any moment. The suit stopped, motionless. Its skin was trying to mimic the combination of the background colour of the chamber wall and the smoke screens, with only moderate success. Khouri wondered how her own suit was doing. Was her faceplate opaque or transparent? It was impossible to tell from inside, and the minimalist readout told her nothing. If the one with the weapons saw a human face within, would that incite it to kill or hold fire? Khouri had locked her own usable weapons on the figure, but nothing she had seen told her whether she was pointed at the enemy or a mute comrade.
She moved to raise her good arm, to indicate her face, asking the other to make its faceplate transparent.
The other fired.
Khouri was blown back into the wall, an invisible piledriver ramming into her stomach. Her suit started screaming, all manner of gibberish scrolling across her vision. There was a roar of sound before she hit the wall, the compressed burst of a frantic return-fire from her own available weapons.
Fuck, Khouri thought. That actually hurt, at the visceral level which somehow betrayed it as not having been simulated.
She struggled to her feet again, just as another charge from the attacker slammed past and the third caught her on the thigh. She started wheeling back, both arms flailing at the periphery of vision. There was something wrong with her arms; or more accurately, something not wrong where something should have been. They were completely intact; no sign that one of them had just been blasted off.
‘Shit,’ she said. ‘What the fuck is happening?’
The attack was continuing, each blast impacting her and driving her back.
‘This is Volyova,’ said a voice, not in any way calm and detached. ‘Listen to me carefully, all of you! Something’s going wrong with the scenario! I want you all to stop firing—’
Khouri had hit the deck again, this time with enough force that she felt it through the gel-air cushion, like a slap against her spine. Her thigh felt injured, and the suit was doing nothing to ameliorate the discomfort.
It’s gone live, she thought.
The weapons were for real now; or at least those which belonged to the suit attacking her.
‘Kjarval,’ Volyova said. ‘Kjarval! You have to stop firing! You’re killing Khouri!’
But Kjarval — Khouri guessed that she was the attacker — was not listening, or not capable of listening, or, more terrifyingly, not capable of stopping.
‘Kjarval,’ the Triumvir said again, ‘if you don’t stop, I’m going to have to disarm you!’
But Kjarval did not stop. She kept on firing, Khouri feeling each impact like a lash, writhing under the assault, desperate to claw her way through the tortured alloy of the chamber into the sanctuary beyond.
And then Volyova descended from the chamber’s middle, where she had apparently been all along, unseen. As she descended, she opened fire on Kjarval, at first with the lightest weapons she had, but with steadily mounting force. Kjarval countered by directing some portion of her fire upwards, towards the lowering Triumvir. The blasts hit Volyova, gouging black scars into her armour, chipping fragments from the flexible integument, slicing off weapons as her suit tried to extrude and deploy them. But Volyova maintained an edge on the trainee. Kjarval’s suit began to wilt, losing integrity. Its weapons went haywire, missing their targets and then shooting haphazardly around the chamber.