Chicago.
Twisted’s radio came to life with a hiss of static.
“Twisted-claw-silent-flight,” it said, “this is Tweetie. Halt your advance immediately, that overhead walkway ahead of you is dripping with sludge. Jenkins is approaching from the south.” The voice paused. “If I don’t make it out, know that you’re a right bastard. Do our race proud.”
“Who the hell was that?” asked Founder. He had to force the words out between desperate gasps for air: the man was carrying a waterlogged Eldest-of-Fields and the heavy interference field generator, and the strain was starting to show.
“My sir,” said Twisted. “We’re turning around. Mottled, can you still keep up?”
The Nedji councilor managed a weak nod. He looked absolutely miserable, drenched with stinging acid rain despite his hood, but he hadn’t voiced a word of complaint since the assault began.
Then there’s me, thought Eldest-of-Fields. Too old and too weak to do anything but cling to my bodyguard like a babe.
“Right then,” said Twisted. “Let’s get moving.”
“What about the tank?” asked Founder, gesturing at the distant mass of armor careening down the road towards them. “There’s a good chance that’ll run us down if we’re not in shelter.”
“Tweetie has something up his sleeve. You’ll see. He plans for everything.”
They jogged south across the street, giving the seething patches of sludge a wide birth. Eldest-of-Fields could have sworn there’d been more replicators a few moments before.
Flaring paused as Jenkin’s radio crackled.
“Twisted-claw-silent-flight,” it began, “this is Tweetie–“
Jenkins cut the transmission off with a savage motion. “Fucking idiot,” he growled. “We could’ve have made it.”
“No, we couldn’t have,” said Cromley. “We can’t even see Twisted’s squad right now.”
“Doesn’t change the fact that Tweetie just broadcast his position to every repl within a half mile.”
The puddles of sludge that peppered the boulevard were slowly forming into their mobile, spider-like forms. Flaring flinched back as a swarm of them skittered past, but they paid him no mind. Aside from sound, their group was on complete emissions silence.
He was really starting to hate the replicators. Their spider form was especially terrifying, lacking either the elegant minimalism of Terran technology or the familiar, designed-by-committee feel of the Compact’s. Whatever had planned the replicator’s hadn’t worked from any biological template Flaring could recognize. The end result was utterly alien.
“Huh,” said Jenkins. “So that’s what they were running from.”
Now that they’d made it to the edge of Twisted’s street, they could finally peer down the corner and figure out what had spooked their friend. It wasn’t pretty. A hulking silhouette loomed out of the rain, swerving wildly as it raced closer. Sludge writhed on its armored surface.
“That’s a tank,” said Flaring.
“No shit,” said Jenkins. “And it’s crawling with replicators. Poor bastards inside are likely already dead.” He set his oversized pulsar cannon down on a relatively dry stretch of road and slid his pack off. “Flaring, help me with the straps.”
“Why do you need to get into your bag?”
“Just shut up and do it.”
The blunt claws that tipped the Nedji’s middle leg-arms had fared much better in the stinging rain than the humans’s sensitive fingers. Flaring had the pack open in no time.
“Thanks,” said Jenkins. He pulled out a short metal tube.
“What the hell are you doing now?”
“What does it look like? I’m putting that beast down before we get trampled.”
Tweetie raced up the side of the skyscraper, his climbing hooks latching onto the glass with satisfying thwops. The little gadgets were really quite something — with them strapped to his six limbs, the slick surface of the tower had more handholds than any Martian cliff. They gave the ascent a rhythm. Plant the hooks. Explode upwards. Unstick, then beat his wings. Plant. Explode. Unstick, then flap. Repeat.
Acid rainwater poured down the side of the tower. It soaked his feathers and burned the flesh underneath. It found its way into his eyes underneath his half-visor. His ears heard nothing but its roar, and his wings were sodden with the damn stuff, but he didn’t care. Tweetie had the beat, and he was lost in it.
Nedji were built to climb. Ten thousands years of evolution coursed through his veins and assured him that, once he found his cliff, he was untouchable. That would normally have been a comfort. Right now, though, it was just annoying. The replicators surging up after him were gaining.
A ball of fire ripped into the concrete a few meters shy of the approaching tank.
“What the fuck was that?” shouted Founder over the wind.
“Mortar, 60mm. Penetrator charge.” answered Twisted. “Jenkins must be trying to take down the tank.”
“In these winds? Is he insane?”
“Probably.”
A sharp, almost metallic explosion cut the air. Eldest-of-Fields ducked his head.
“You missed!” said Flaring.
“Of course I fucking missed,” said Jenkins. His voice was raw from the acid-filled rain. “We’re in the middle of a goddamn typhoon. Now hand me another, I think I’ve got the range.”
The Nedji pulled another one of the antimatter-enriched rounds from Jenkins pack and handed it to the human. Jenkins dropped into his mortar tube with a hoarse whoop.
The replicators chasing up the side of the building Tweetie were maybe twenty meters behind. Or fifteen. He wasn’t sure. He hadn’t checked in a few seconds. He was a little distracted.
Something else was closing in from above. A lot of something. Tweetie hadn’t even considered that there might be replicators breeding at the tops of the towers, but it made perfect sense in hindsight. That’s where most of the anti-air batteries had been.
No use dwelling on that now, though. He spared a quick glance over his shoulder — not down, but backwards. Fifty meters of nothing separated him from the next tower. The neighbouring tower was a short one. Short enough, he’d thought, that he could glide clean over it and bank back into the streets below. But he still hadn’t climbed higher than its roof, and Earth’s gravity wasn’t about to relax and let him fly anytime soon.
Tweetie could hear the faintest edge of the replicator’s tapping as they closed in on him. That was bad. Real bad.
He planted his hooks. He tensed before the lunge. Then he leapt back into empty space.
Another mortar shell exploded against the pavement. A few fragments of asphalt bounced off the pack where Eldest-of-Fields was nestled.
“That one was closer,” said Twisted.
“Closer to us, you mean,” said Founder. “Your buddy’s going to get us killed.”
“Just shut up and keep running.”
“Damnit, Jenkins,” said Flaring. “Aim for the tank, not Twisted.”
“Not my fault that it’s almost on top of them. We got another round?”
“Yes,” said Cromley, “but you’re not firing. Tube. Here. Now.”
Jenkins tossed the tube over to the older man with a grin. “Be warned, it’s a bitch to aim.”
Tweetie was flying again. Well, gliding. He could feel mankind’s homeworld pulling him done, feel her clawing at his waterlogged feathers. The wind buffeted him from side to side. His shoulders shook with the effort of keeping his wings locked out. His skull throbbed with the frantic pounding of his twin hearts.
The acid burns didn’t even register anymore. Tweetie was too tired to care.
It had really been optimistic to expect to glide over the neighboring tower. Hell, Tweetie didn’t even think he could swerve around it right now. He tried to unlock one of his wings and bank, only to plummet a meter and a half before he could relock the joint. Forty meters to the building now. He was closing the gap really quickly.
His grasping-arms closed around the weapon strapped to his tac vest. He closed his outer set of eyes and blocked out the world around him. He was back in training. This was just a flight drill, back in the wind tunnel at Camp Mons.
The rifle’s butt snapped against his chest, just off-center to let his right-middle eye see through the scope. He twisted slightly, ignoring his left wing’s protest as he loosened the joint by a few degrees, and the rifle’s butt rolled into the exact center of his mass. He sighted on a likely pane of glass. Deep breath. Fire on the exhale.
A pulsar dart streaked out and slammed against the side of the tower. Cracks spread out across the polymer. Some part of Tweetie’s mind cursed whatever human designer had built security screens that could survive the apocalypse, but he squashed the thought. No time for that. His left wing complained even more as banked slightly to compensate for a gust of wind.
Twenty meters left. Breathe. Fire. More cracks appeared in the glass. .
Fifteen meters. Breathe. Fire. He saw a few tiny fissures pop into existence.
Ten meters. Breath. Fire. The dart punched clean through the pain, leaving a fist-sized hole.
Five meters. Breath. Fire. Slightly larger hole now, but the glass refused to shatter.
Fuck breathing, thought Tweetie. He flipped the selector to full auto and squeezed the trigger tight.
The mortar struck the tank.
“Bloody fucking hell,” said Founder. “That Jenkins of yours actually hit it!”
It listed to one side, left impellar seared clean off by the strike. Sparks leapt from its armor as it skidded across the pavement. Metal twisted and concrete shattered as the tank struck the side wall of the square.
“I’ll be honest, I’m a little surprised myself,” said Twisted. “Now let’s get behind him before he decides to shoot anything else.”
The glass shattered and Tweetie crashed into the office. The rifle jammed against his chest careened out of his grip. The cord anchoring it to his chest snapped. His right wing slammed into the floor. His helmeted head smashed clean through a cheap wooden desk. His limbs flopped to the ground in a limp tangle.
Tweetie popped his head free from his trapped helmet and scanned the room. A handful of emergency lights bathed it in a halfhearted red glow, illuminating a maze of shitty desks and expensive chairs. And replicator sludge. Lots of replicator sludge.
He dragged himself to his feet and cast around for his rifle. It was decomposing in a puddle of writhing goop a few meters away. Rotten luck, that, but Tweetie consoled himself with the fact that it could have been a lot worse. He pulled out his sidearm and ran for the far wall.
The sludge was starting to coalesce into head-sized spiders again. Tweetie shot the nearest one, scattering it across the floor, but the bits of goop only inched back towards each other and reformed. He’d have given a wing for an IF generator — there weren’t that many replicators in here — but he’d left the bulky generator back on the street with his pack. Without it, he couldn’t even fight his way through to the stairs.
That wasn’t the only way out, though. The far wall was approaching, another massive pane of glass. No window catch visible. Didn’t matter. Tweetie yanked a grenade off his vest, pulled the safety, and lobbed it ahead of him. He was far enough out to avoid the concussion. The window wasn’t. It blew out cleanly.
He rotated his right wing in his socket, noting with worry the way his powerful shoulder muscles twinged. That wasn’t right. Six meters to the newly-exploded exit. He started to slow, then glanced back over his shoulder and sped up. The replicators’ caution hadn’t lasted.
Tweetie reached the edge and leapt.
Flaring picked his way through the street cautiously, careful to avoid any of the shallow pits left by the replicator sludge. He wasn’t entirely certain that the goop hadn’t left something behind when it took off after Tweetie.
Cromley and Jenkins trailed after him, both wearing the biggest shit-eating grins he’d seen in his entire short military career. They’d be talking about that shot for years.
Twisted’s small group was slowly coming into focus. Twisted himself looked sharp, if a little acid-burned. Councilor Mottled’s eyes burned with a determination that wasn’t reflected by his drooping body. And the sole human in their group, bent over under his bulging pack, looked utterly drained. Flaring could just make out the snout of an Askran poking out over the man’s shoulder — Councilor Eldest-of-Fields, probably. He wasn’t surprised that the ancient Askran primarch hadn’t been able to keep up.
“Glad to see that you made it!” shouted Jenkins over the storm. “Was touch-and-go for a bit back there.”
“Still is,” said Twisted. “You guys had better have an evac plan.”
“Walsh’s scouting the route as we speak. Once she’s back, we’ll link up with Tweetie and bug the fuck out.”
“If he’s alive,” muttered Twisted’s human companion. Flaring was surprised to see that the man wore Marshal rank insignia.
“Oh, he’s still kicking,” said Cromley. “Takes a lot more than some nanobots to kill that bastard.”
Tweetie’s right wing gave out with a painful wrench. One second he was gliding, banking downards in a tight spiral. The next he was falling.
Panic shot up the Nedji’s spine. His left wing flailed uselessly through the air and the rain. His right flopped limply. His heart raced unchecked. For a few precious seconds, Tweetie froze.
Then a gust of wind flipped Tweetie around so that he came face to face with the rapidly approaching ground. It broke the terror’s hold on his mind, and something one of his drop instructors had said flashed through his thoughts.
“I don’t care how much faith you put in your wings. When you drop, you pack a chute, and you keep your chute closer than your goddamn rifle. It is a long fucking fall from high orbit.”
Tweetie’s left grasping-arm fumbled at the front of his tac vest, sliding along the edge of the velcro pouch that held his antigrav parachute. One of his claws hooked beneath the lip and tore past the seal. As the road loomed closer it scrabbled against the hard plastic, seeking desperately for the panic button. The claw sunk into the groove.
His stomach twisted as the small inertial damper cut his velocity by a factor of ten. A fraction of a second later, he slammed into the ground.
Tweetie tried to roll over. When that failed, he tried to groan. He contented himself with a tired blink. His vision was blurry, his thoughts slow and thick. Where was he? Why did the damn rain hurt so much.
Movement at the edge of his vision caused him to turn his head. Well, inch his head slightly. He groggily watched a spider-like robot scuttle towards him. The approaching creature felt wrong, out of place, but his scattered thoughts couldn’t quite finger the source of his unease.
Something seized his uninjured shoulder and rolled him over. Tweetie panicked, feebly twitching his left wing in defense, but his strength wasn’t returning quick enough. He squeezed his eyes shut and waited for the end.
“C’mon, sir, don’t give up on me now. Hollow-boned or not, I can’t drag you home and fight our way clear.”
Tweetie’s snapped open. That was Walsh’s voice.
“I thought…” he croaked, “I thought you were… scouting. Scouting the way back.”
“We both knew that was bullshit, sir. It’s a straight compass line to the RV. You just wanted me clear so you could try your heroics in peace.”
“Didn’t…” Tweetie paused to dribble blood out of his beak. He’d bitten deep into his tongue during the fall. “Didn’t work.”
“Well, I’ve been doing this for longer than you. Not easy to fool. Now get up, we have to go.”
Walsh hauled the Nedji to his feet, pressing a sidearm into his functioning hand. Her own left hand clutched his unbroken wing, steadying Tweetie and holding him upright. She cradled a pulse rifle with her right arm.
Their street was slowly filling with replicators, the damned spiders doubtless drawn to the grav ripples of Tweetie’s chute. He shot the closest one, watching with pleased satisfaction as the scattered fragments dissolved. Walsh’s IF generator was working fine.
“I take it that means you’re ready to go, sir?”
He spat more blood by way of answer, then blasted another replicator. Talking seemed like way too much effort. Beside him, Walsh chuckled.
“Let’s get out of here, then.”
TSS Dewdrop. Outskirts of Chicago
“The city’s overrun, John,” said Naomi. “Not one militia stronghold still firing. They’ll start glassing it soon. We have to pull out now.”
“Not yet,” said Calloway.
“What the hell are you waiting for?”
“That,” said Calloway. A grin spread across his face as he stared out through the Dewdrop‘s viewscreen to where a bright green laser flashed from the edge of the city. “Can’t leave without our away team, now, can we?”
Beside him, Rusty’s tail wagged furiously.