Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Fourteen: Part Two

 Notes: We're getting out of here! YIPPEE-KI-YAY, MOTHERFUCKER!

Title: Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Fourteen, Part Two

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Chapter Fourteen, Part Two

 

Photo by Valentin Muller

Kieron would never have made it to his destination without two very important discoveries. The first was that apparently, there was no central monitoring AI on the system to tag him for whoever was watching, so instead of having whole teams of mercenaries descending on him, he only had to deal with stragglers in ones and twos.

The second was that Blobby could make himself into grenades.

That was something that Kieron really wished he didn’t have to discover, but when he rounded the corner leading to the door he needed and found an actual group of people on guard outside, he almost took a flechette round to the face before he ducked back out of sight. “Fuck,” he muttered. “We’ve got to get in there, but I’ll get cut down before I can get close enough to fight them.”

A single unit of Blobby’s matrix was pressed into his hand. “Oh honey, I’ve got one already.”

It suddenly beeped and began to glow a menacing red.

“Shit, okay—” Kieron hoped he was interpreting this correctly and tossed it down the hall, almost getting his fingers chewed off by another razor round in the process. Some of the shrapnel cut his hand, but he had bigger things to worry about right now than a blood trail. Those mercs would be on him soon, and—

There was a rather quiet ba-poof from down the hall. Kieron began to turn to see what had happened, but Blobby applied a surprising amount of pressure to the pressure points at the base of his neck just then. Clearly, he was being warned to wait.

Not too long, though. Someone’s going to find us, and we haven’t even gotten to the motor pool yet.

After almost a full minute, Blobby finally relaxed. Kieron rounded the corner and raced toward the door, ready to…well, he wasn’t sure what. Pounce if someone moved? Swallow down his gag reflex if people had been blown to pieces? What he found instead, though, was everyone lying on the ground, alive but nearly motionless, their faces contorted in expressions of disgust. The air still smelled faintly rotten.

“Baby,” Kieron murmured, “what the hell are you made of?” He’d turned his piece into some sort of smoke bomb that had put everyone to sleep…or poisoned them.

He’d figure it out later. Kieron lifted one of the guards’ hands up to the reader beside the door and pressed until it glowed green. Then he ducked, because—

BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM! BLAM! There it was, six shots from the ancient style of handgun that his grandfather had tried to make part of his personal mystique. Kieron knew he would shoot first and ask questions later, so he didn’t give his grandfather the chance to murder him. Once the gun was empty of its old-fashioned bullets, he rose up just enough to see over the desk and shot his stun gun straight into his grandfather’s chest.

The corpulent man convulsed hard enough to drop his gun. Kieron hoped he hadn’t just given the old bastard a heart attack—he needed him to get out of here. He was unconscious, but that would just make this next part easier.

Kieron ran over behind the desk and grabbed the General’s hoverchair, tilted it back so the man stayed put, then wheeled it out into the hall. “Blobby, watch our backs,” he said, then checked his internal map one more time and began the mad dash for the motor pool.

Blobby fired off two more grenades on the way to put people down, but the motor pool was close enough that they made it there in under two minutes. It was grey and raining outside—perfect. Kieron looked around briefly for Carlisle, but saw nothing to indicate anyone was waiting for him. That was fair, it was fine, it was… He honed in on the closest vehicle that looked worth something, a low-lying skimmer that seated four, and ran the General over to it, using his hand to open it up.

“This is what you get for body-coding everything,” he murmured as he settled into the pilot’s seat. It had been a long time since he’d flown a skimmer—not since Trakta, and that had been a very modern one, not this antique that looked like it was old when he was a child. But Kieron knew the General’s standards hadn’t fallen that low—

“Get out of the ship!”

A familiar man stood in front of the skimmer, an enormous old-school launcher on his shoulder. “Turn the engine off and get out of the skip,” Trapper repeated, his voice magnified somehow so that it penetrated the hull. “Leave the General inside. Do that, and I promise to make sure you die easy.”

Was he going to shoot the skimmer down with the General inside? Kieron didn’t think so.

“You’re being targeted by three different snipers,” Trapper went on, and—ah. That was different. Maybe he shouldn’t have chosen a vehicle with a transparent top. “They have orders to fire on my mark. If you’re not out of there in ten seconds, they’ll start shooting off pieces of you.”

Fuck.

“You think we can’t do it? We’re not about to let you take the General from us.” Trapper sounded satisfied, and why not? He was getting just what he wanted. “You have eight seconds. Seven.”

Fuck. Blobby wasn’t big enough to shield against snipers, and Kieron wasn’t sure shots like that wouldn’t destroy the little bot anyway. No.

“Five.”

He would have to surrender.

“Four.”

Maybe he’d be able to—

“Three.”

Maybe he could—

“Two.”

Elanus, I’m sorry. He reached for the com.

“O—”

The darkness suddenly shattered, with what seemed like every light in the motor pool turning on at once, leaving stars in Kieron’s eyes. At the same time he heard an engine roar, and a second later a larger, all-metal gunship lifted off the ground and hovered over his skimmer.

Carlisle stayed! And she was blocking the sniper shots. Now they could—

Trapper shouted something and pointed his launcher up at her ship. Kieron automatically ran through the startup sequence and sent the skimmer lurching forward. He smashed right into Trapper’s chest, knocking the man down and probably breaking half his ribs.

Time to go!

Using the skimmer’s electronic viewer to help navigate now that his night-vision was destroyed, he kicked it into high hear and shot out of the compound as fast as he could, the gunship still hovering above them.

They were out.

Now all they had to do was stay that way.