Liberty and Death: Chapter 27
Chapter 27
A ‘chunk!’ next to her announced that Hawk had finished the involved process of reloading Bertha. Cora looked over at her, finding Hawk giving her a broad, excited smile.
“Wanna see the coolest thing my implants can do?” Hawk asked. Cora barely heard it. The slick red blood from her wound had coated her muscles, making them shine in the sun like a grisly kind of bodybuilding oil, and all of her injuries had already closed up, presumably from the help of {Killer} and {Psycho}. She looked like a warrior goddess, in aspect and scale both, and what happened next did basically nothing to change that perception.
“Stay behind me,” Hawk ordered, and at that moment, Cora would have done absolutely anything she said. Hawk slammed her back up against the wall, took a deep, steadying breath, then spun around out of the alley, Bertha roaring even as Hawk brought her barrel to bear.
Obviously, that drew aggro as well as anything ever had, and the street around Hawk erupted in gunfire. It didn’t matter. Hawk’s skin shimmered, like Cora had seen after the first gunfight, and the bullets just sparked off.
On instinct, maybe on training, Cora had followed Hawk out, the woman providing plenty of cover. Cora could damn near hide herself entirely behind one of her legs. She kept in step as Hawk shuffled across the street, hopefully as keenly aware as Cora was that her implants temporary forcefield had a very short duration.
Still, gunfights were decided over the course of seconds, so as they moved, Cora popped out from behind Hawk, snapping a shot into the forehead of a man with Chain-head tattoos no more than 10 feet away. It was easy, since the man was occupied with mag-dumping what was suspiciously close to an Uzi into Hawk’s chest in a devastating display of futility. That peek gave her a freeze frame of the battle, and she spun around, ducking out from Hawk’s other side to place a trio of shots center mass into another Chain-head further out.
Or she would have, if her slide hadn’t looked back after the second shot.
Cora cursed, diving the last few feet into the stairwell Hawk was moving towards, pulling a new mag out before she’d even put her back up against the wall. She ejected her empty, and slapped the new one home as Hawk joined her in the stairwell, letting out a concerning pained grunt.
“You good?” Cora asked, not immediately seeing any wounds on her.
“Fuckin’ peachy,” Hawk growled, voice tight. Cora searched her more closely, following the tattoos of one of her arms down to where her hand pressed hard against her thigh, dark blood seeping between her tanned fingers. Her skin was already beginning to pale.
Oh shit, we gotta finish this.
“Give me Bertha,” Cora commanded, and Hawk was losing strength so quickly that she couldn’t even resist as Cora took her gun. She holstered her own, and as her right palm took Bertha’s grip, her ammo count clicked up from 9 to 48.
How many bullets does this thing hold? Hawk was rainin’ pain during that whole rush!
Cora snapped Bertha’s bipod out, then opened a chat with Iain.
C: Gimme a distraction
Immediately, the sharp crack of Iain’s assault rifle began to come in bursts rather than precise shots, and Cora heard the tinkling rattle of a grenade landing down the street. The ping and spatter of shots around her stairwell ceased, and she swung Bertha up to steady its edge.
People tended to think of guns like Bertha as inaccurate. They were right, if you fired them full auto, or were trying to shoot them standing up without the kind of freakish strength Hawk possessed. But when you had them braced, steadied, and single-fire? They were actually excellent for precision shooting, the pinpoint Cora’s crosshair had tightened into demonstrating that point nicely.
Cora would have sworn there were more enemies further down the street, but as it was, she only counted 3 more men, relatively close, all taking turns returning fire at the cart. Even as she watched, one fell after a booming ‘crack!’ that Cora had identified as Trish’s marksman rife. Cora dropped that pinpoint crosshair onto another man’s head, and turned his mouth into a gory mess, not even watching him die as she swung the weapon to the last man.
The question of what had happened to the rest of the Links was answered as soon as she had her crosshair on the man, when a shadow detached from the wall behind him and jammed a karambit into his throat. Kyra ripped it out, then rode him down as he died, screaming savagely and making an absolute hash of his face.
That scream was the only sound left to fill the street then, once the echoes of gunfire faded away.
Cora dropped back down to Hawk’s side, the woman looking reaaaaal white. Apparently even the major boosts to [Vit] her skills gave her couldn’t offset a leaking artery, though they’d probably slowed it; from what Cora remembered of her studies on combat deaths, a wound like that could kill you in seconds, and Hawk was still very much conscious, gripping her leg with fading strength and cursing softly to herself.
“Iain! Trish!” Cora called, “Either of you know field medicine!?”
Footsteps rushed over, and Trish slid into the stairwell, uncapping a green autoinjector and slamming it into Hawk’s leg just above the wound.
Hawk screamed, the highest sound Cora had ever heard her make, but the seep of blood from her leg stemmed as the wound filled with rushing silver.
“Damn, saw her take that hit and thought she’d be dead before the fight was over,” Trish said, grabbing Hawk’s shoulder and giving it a little shake. Hawk’s slowly refocusing eyes trained on her. “You are one tough bitch, my friend. Combat nanos will have you right as rain in just a sec, I know it burns.”
Hawk nodded, breathing hard, face pale and sweaty, but clearly alive once more.
“Those are amazing!” Cora exclaimed, watching as the silver faded away, leaving slightly lighter, but unmarred flesh where a gaping wound had just been. Trish looked at her like she was an alien.
“Am I crazy?” she asked, looking Cora up and down once more. “Scan showed you having a Nano-stitch implant, right? Why the hell are you impressed by a single use ampoule?”
“Yeah, but how many firefights do you think I’ve been in?” Cora scrambled, summoning a little improvisation. “Never seen one of those in action. She was gonna die.”
“Nah, no way,” Hawk said, already pulling herself to her feet, color almost entirely returned to her face. Now that her blood was back to flowing in its regularly scheduled directions, her boosted [Vit] stat was perking her back up quick. “Juuuuust needed a little sit down, woulda shaken it off. Any shitbirds left for me to shoot? My boost is running out, and another kill wouldn’t hurt.”
Trish looked at her in horror, while Cora just rolled her eyes.
“Whatever you say big girl, why don’t you start grabbing bodies and tossing ‘em in the cart? Anybody left alive, feel free to do what you need to. Not gonna spill any tears over Links, but I also don’t want to do the whole harvesting thing when we're exposed, now that we know they’re targeting us.”
Hawk grinned, gave her a little salute with a hand that was only barely shaking, and ran off to do just that. A quick look reported that Iain was already organizing Dip and Jonesy to do the same.
Tallboy hadn’t made it. His diminutive corpse lay beside the cart, leaking blood out of a hole beneath his left eye.
Yeesh. Probably no amount of nano-bots saving that, Cora thought.
“Sorry about Tallboy,” She said, accepting the hand Trish reached down to help her out of the stairwell.
“Hmm?” Trish asked, looking momentarily confused, peeking back at the corpse then looking back to Cora, a lot more nonchalantly than she’d expected. “Oh, hazards of the job. Not exactly friends with these three, just been on runs with each before that got jumped and they didn’t shoot me in the back or cut and run, which is about as good a reference as a caravan guard can get.”
“Doooo I have to pay his family blood money or anything? How does this work?” Cora said, watching with muted, unsurprised horror as Hawk grabbed Tallboy’s corpse by the neck, tossing him on top of the rest of the bloody pile. One of the corpses reached out, bloody hand pulling Andy’s corpse down to take its place. Tinny, having taken cover among the supplies, hadn’t gotten out of the way in time before Hawk started tossing boys in the wagon.
Again, Trish looked at her like she was insane.
“Honey, the only thing I knew about Tallboy was his name, and that was his real name the same way my real name is Trish. No, merc goes down, the only one that cares is them, and they’re dead.” She shook her head, a bit of awe creeping into her expression. “You’re Linnea Light, right? I mean…. The stories just don’t match up with the reality.”
Cora grinned at her, giving her a movie star smile.
“A girl can’t reinvent herself?” She asked, and Trish laughed.
“Fair enough question to ask the girl going by a fake name,” she said, the look in her eyes not one Cora was really able to read. Sad, maybe, but that wasn’t all. “Anyway, no blood money, nothing like that. When we get to safety, I’ll check his body for a note, see if he had anything on him to indicate a next of kin or something. You could send his thousand ‘trish their way if I find one, but you’d be a rare breed if you did.”
“Thanks, Trish. I get what you’re saying, and I’m becoming accustomed to death real fast, but… He was the first to go down on my side,” Cora said, with a sad smile she wished were sadder. She wasn’t lying. There was a time when Tallboy’s sightless, dead eyes would have haunted her dreams for months. Now? She doubted she’d ever think of him again.