Spinward Fringe Broadcast 7: Framework (69 page)

“Listen, I don’t know if you’re the real
Alice, or what’s going on, but I want to have the chance to find
out in person. You don’t have to impress anyone, you don’t have to
prove anything, I’m sure we can figure it all out if you just come
in. We’ll try to make a gap so you can get through the shield
without exposing the settlement,” Ayan replied.

Firefights dotted Alice’s near vicinity and
beyond as ship crews fought frameworks for control of their landing
sites and others simply tried to get from one place to another. The
skies were eerily still; most of the ships that could leave did so
in the minutes that followed the appearance of the Skyguard Navnet.
Most of the ships still on the ground were empty, disabled, or
defending something important. Port Rush was a ghost town, for the
most part.

In the distance she could see the tracers
from the Triton Compound, firing at drop pods as they fell. A blur
above their relatively small patch of the shanty port told her that
their energy shield was still up. Other ships used their shields
for defence and fired at incoming pods as well, but no one else was
as prepared or well armed as the former Triton crew. “Trust me,
getting behind a big shield and wagging my jaw at someone until
they believe I’m who I am sounds better than picking a fight with
an army of regenerating thugs, but someone’s got to put a crimp in
their plans. Actually, I kinda like the idea of a fight. Talk is
getting boring.”

“Just hold on, we’ll figure something out,”
Ayan said. “Maybe we can take care of that from here, a quick
fighter strike.”

“Nope, they’ve got turrets in range, no need
to risk a pilot and a ship,” Alice said.

Alice settled into her perch so she could
get a better look at the crater and the large drop pod in the
centre. “My tactical counter marks twenty soldiers and one
commander. I see a mount for the top of that drop pod and it looks
tall enough so it can reach above the nearest ship,” she said over
her comm. “And I see acceleration rails.”

Alice turned and looked for three soldiers
she’d seen earlier and spotted them carrying heavy chunks of metal.
Other frameworks guarded their passage, forming a safe path to a
refuse lot a hundred metres away.

Her attention was drawn back to the landing
pod, where four more frameworks emerged from cases, put on a
lightly armoured uniform, took a rifle from the rack, and marched
outward to stop at the edge of the crater. They were perimeter
guards, and the longer she waited, the more there would be.
“They’re setting up a junk gun,” Alice said.

“What?” Ayan replied. “Don’t do anything,
we’ll think it through here. We just got specifications for
framework killer rounds, we’ll be able to fight them soon.”

“Yeah, the anti-bot rounds work just fine,
already tried a few shots. That’s why I’m cloaked. I put a few of
those things down and they all seemed to notice.”

“I saw that, and it’s going to happen again
if you-“

“Sorry, they’ll be able to break your shield
down if they finish this gun,” Alice replied, “can’t let that
happen.” She blocked Ayan on Crewcast, so anyone but her could
communicate with her.

She rolled back and let herself drop behind
a broken hatch for cover. After a quick look around, she de-cloaked
and detached her pack. After a moment of digging, she found a
fist-sized demolition charge and several clips of anti-bot rounds
designed to kill Eden Fleet machines. She loaded the charge into
her rifle and changed the clips in her weapons.

An alarm sounded in her helmet as her HUD
brought up a navigational alert window that highlighted a Carthan
ship descending on a course leading to a location within ten
kilometres of her location. Alice reactivated her cloaking systems,
slung her rifle and jumped down off the side of the ship. She
landed running. “Unblock user – Ayan Rice the Second,” she told her
communications device. “Hi, you see the trouble I do?”

“Yes, can you find cover?” Ayan asked.

Alice glanced at the falling mass of mangled
metal in the sky then back to her surroundings. The barriers
dividing the landing slips from each other and the roads between
were flimsy at best, made from found materials. All the ships
nearby were sealed. “There’s nothing,” she said, more panic in her
tone than she expected to hear. Alice looked to the crater
surrounding the drop pod as she ran around the corner. There was a
road going right past it, a tall barrier to her left and nothing
close enough ahead or behind that could offer cover. “What’s on the
other side of this barrier?”

“An empty slip,” Ayan said. “Just find
anything bigger than yourself and try to get under it. If you can
find a dip, or a culvert to jump into, that would be best.”

“I see a dip,” she said, unslinging her
rifle as she redirected her run towards the drop pod crater.

“That’s not an option!” Ayan said.

“Tell my dad I love him,” Alice said, “and
that kicking ass runs in the family.” She pulled three slim
grenades from her pocket and switched her armour’s field generators
from stealth to shield mode. Framework soldiers who were hurriedly
working at securing their small crater base spotted her
immediately, and she leapt high from the edge of the crater,
launching herself forward and well over their heads.

Alice armed the first grenade and tossed it
towards the sentry guards. Her HUD targeting assistant found her
rifle’s first victim and she opened fire, hitting with one shot out
of the burst. The round exploded inside the framework soldier,
rending him through the middle.

The other grenades were tossed at the drop
pod and fell into the equipment rack. Her suit sent a signal to
them and they exploded, damaging the equipment materializer and
sending broken hardware across the crater. She rolled onto her feet
firing the particle acceleration pulse portion of her rifle at a
group of four frameworks, disabling them as the high energy bursts
ripped through their necks and chests.

With a thought her armour knew to send a
signal to her rifle to switch back to anti-Eden bot rounds, and she
sent bursts into every framework she could see. A grasping arm
slipped across her energy shields and she turned to fire several
bursts into the recycler system, reducing it to shreds of scrap
metal.

Rounds caught her from the right and left.
Her shields read twelve percent, and she rolled to her left, taking
shelter behind the drop pod. Alice came up on her feet and blasted
a crowd of frameworks within two metres of her, hoping that the
Eden-bot buster rounds would do the trick. They would be disabled,
thanks to the grievous wounds she was inflicting, but not for more
than a few minutes at best.

Alice returned fire at several frameworks
that shot at her from the edge of the crater and caught sight of
the Carthan carrier as it disappeared over the lip of the crater.
She fired a pair of grenades from her rifle at the three frameworks
she could see and ducked down into the fetal position. “This is
gonna hurt,” she said as her armour reported her shields were down
to three percent.

The ground quaked violently, battering her
armour. She could hear the world around her breaking.

The bridge of the Triton had been evacuated
under protest from the crew. The main security doors behind Alice
filled the large hatch and sealed. Someone had to remain at the
main controls, and Jake had left her in charge. Alice knew she was
going to die, but it was only so her crew could win the day for
once.

The crew of the Triton had been beaten in so many
different ways, individually and together. Refugees, survivors, but
never the victors. Someone had to show them how to win, and she
would, even if it cost her her life.

Alice awoke sputtering and gasping, aware
that she was just recalling her sacrifice aboard the Triton.
“Dying’s got to be the worst,” she said, her voice sounding
strange, higher. She was buried past her waist in rough dirt and
debris. “Oh, God, this sucks.” The sound of something scrabbling in
the gravel silenced her. Nothing was coming up on her HUD, so she
removed her helmet in time to see a framework bending down only a
couple of metres away to pick up his rifle.

She squirmed to get out of the hole, pumping
her legs in the loose gravel and pushing as hard as she could with
her hands. The armoured vacsuit she wore under the armour was still
operational, and she couldn’t have been more thankful for that as
the framework fired a burst at her, hitting her in the chest twice.
The vacsuit held up, but it wouldn’t repel him forever.

She picked up her helmet, which had a gaping
hole in one side, and tossed it at the soldier right before he
opened fire again. Her legs came free, and she fell backwards,
drawing her sidearm and firing white hot micro-blades into him from
his neck to his forehead.

His head was ruined from within as the
little electrified projectiles popped behind his face and inside
his neck. He fell limp.

“So much for my spiffy armour,” she said.
The new HUD in her secondary armoured vacsuit calibrated and she
looked at all the red marks around her on the tactical map. Alice
pulled the last of the ruined armour plates off and looked around.
Her pack peeked out from the loose dirt beside a star cruiser
resting on its side. She rushed to it and pulled it free. There was
one Freeground D9 rifle still attached and to her relief it checked
out fine.

Her tactical monitor warned her of three
frameworks regenerating behind her, and she whirled to face the
nearest. It stood on new legs, its left arm still regenerating from
a stump near the shoulder. “Surrender, you will be treated fairly,”
it said.

“Funny, I didn’t think you guys were big on
talk,” she said, taking aim at its head. “How’s this for an
answer?” she fired and missed as it dropped to the ground and
rolled.

“You little,” she said as she opened up with
the rifle and caught the regenerating arm first, followed by its
chest then the side of its head. The electromagnetically enhanced
rounds burned for a second before bursting, only a little more
dramatically than her sidearm’s ammunition did. He fought to get
away from her with his working arm; his legs weren’t moving. The
arm that was regenerating stopped. “EMP rounds, huh?” she said.
“That’s what makes you guys twitch and die?” She drilled a short
burst into his head and smiled. “Easy enough.”

The framework’s regeneration began again, so
slow she almost couldn’t make it out through the blood pumping from
the stump. Another framework stirred in the dirt, buried up to its
chest, laying on its face. She stepped over to it with her rifle
raised. “Please, mercy,” it begged. “The Order will remember.”

Alice stopped and regarded the soldier as he
turned his head awkwardly to look up at her. She looked into its
blue eyes and saw a man, someone she would think was simply human
if she ran into him on a busy street. “Please,” he repeated.

“You don’t move,” she said. “You just stay
there and be quiet.”

He shifted in the dirt and her tactical
system highlighted an intact rifle under his right armpit. It was
hiding its weapon from her. “Mistake,” she said, raising her weapon
and firing into the side of his head.

With a steady gait, Alice walked around the
corner where two unarmed frameworks were getting on their feet. The
first lunged at her. She dodged aside and shot him in the back of
the head. The second ran for cover but she caught him in the leg
before he made it. She turned the rifle’s field generator up and
watched as the next electromagnetically charged rounds she fired
tore his head off.

Her tactical display showed that she’d
cleared the immediate perimeter, so she took the time to retrieve
her pack and affix it to her back. The muscle enhancement in her
vacsuit adjusted, and she hopped up onto the hull of the nearest
starship and ran up the side, staying low.

The shockwave had changed the landscape
entirely. The forest in the distance, past the Port Rush shanty
port opposite the city proper, was flattened. The kilometre wide
junk fire she’d seen before was out. The Port Rush shanty port
itself was a jumble of smaller ships that had been tossed away from
the epicentre, larger ships that had taken extreme damage, and
leaning or collapsed landing platforms. She was almost afraid to
see what happened to the Triton settlement, which was between her
and Port Rush City, but checked anyway.

Her tactical system didn’t read any trace of
a shield, but their tiny rectangle in relation to the rest of the
sprawling port was an oasis, showing some of the only clear ground
for kilometres. The quiet was disturbed as an energy round sparked
on the hull near her. Her tactical system showed her the origin
point. She didn’t bother firing back, but slid down the side of the
overturned hull instead, settling in under cover.

“Search: XO-99,” she said to her command and
control unit. Her eyes focused on the tactical read of the area
around her. There were thermal readings that pointed to thousands
of trapped non-combatants who were hiding in their ships. The drop
pods had stopped, but readings told her there were hundreds of
frameworks in her area. Most of them were still recovering, but
they had survived the event just like she did, only she regenerated
faster. “I think I’m shorter,” she said as she moved behind cover.
“Yup, shorter, more compact. I wonder why? Maybe I lost something?
Wait, no, my mass is almost the same.”

Her tactical computer highlighted the
location of her XO-99 rifle and she smiled. It wasn’t too far away,
less than a hundred metres. “You’re probably all broken up, but I
bet if I get you home someone can help me rebuild you.”

Alice checked her ammunition; the D9 rifle
was loaded with explosive pellets that could hold a charge, and had
nine hundred thirty rounds left. She checked the bag hurriedly and
found three more clips. “Now this is a party.” Realizing that she
stood out like a sore thumb, she activated the colour matcher in
her vacsuit and touched a rusty patch of dirt. Her armour changed
colour to match. “Yup, I’m definitely shorter. My run speed is
gonna drop.”