“Come on big guy,” Britt called out over her shoulder at Davis, “time’s a wasting. Plus, we’re gonna have to uncrate the suit and get it booted up before you can use it. No time for dilly dallying.”

Despite everything, Kat had to struggle to keep a smile from her face. Davis was struggling to keep up with the two of them, his damaged battle suit dripping fluids with every shuffling step.

“I am moving as fast as I can young lady,” he replied in a clipped voice, bristling at the indignity of the situation. “My armor was designed for survivability, not speed, and that was before an auto cannon trashed the trauma plates and about half of the motors in my left side.”

“If you’re winded just let me know,” the woman responded, waving a hand dismissively without bothering to look back. “I don’t want your heart to give out because we pushed you too hard or something gramps.”

“Gramps?” Davis sputtered, her irreverence finally cracking his poker face. “Gramps! I’ll have you know young lady that I killed my first corporate executive before you were even born. I did it clean too! They still have his death officially marked down as a drunken fall from his penthouse.”

Kat’s lips moved slightly before she managed to get them back under control. Davis was fuming, but he managed to draw another burst of speed out of his failing suit, unwilling to let the dismissive refugee woman show him up.

“The next right turn will be where the APEX suits are stored,” Britt called out, pointing at the cement floor where large yellow letters spelled out ‘D-2.’ “Once we get one uncrated, we’ll still need to find one fo those funky combat rifles for Merrimac. Otherwise he’ll be stuck using that old fashioned-”

Whatever words she was about to say were lost, disappearing with her entire upper torso in a puff of pink mist. Before Kat could skit a halt, the roar of the shot that had erased Britt shook her body, wind from the passage of the round pulling at the tight fabric of her infiltration suit.

Almost without thinking, Kat cast Levitation and burned stamina, Leaping up into the second story of storage crates. Below her, Davis’ heavy footsteps stopped, but it was too late. An eerie humming noise filled the corridor where the APEX suits were stored. Evidently, the rest of the warehouse wasn’t as empty as previously believed.

“Quit hiding you assholes,” a woman’s voice crackled from aisle D-3. “You fucking killed Eric and Dominic at the check in station. Now it’s your turn.”

A greyish black humanoid suit of powered armor strode into the open. The robotic frame was twice as tall as Kat and covered in plates of the thick black armor she’d seen on the tank. As soon as the pilot saw Davis’ armor, the strange humming noise increased. It raised a large black rifle in a one handed grip, a number of cables trailing from the back of the weapon to a large blue canister built into the machine’s back.

It fired a fraction of a second behind Davis, and that was all that saved him. The heavy cannon barrel of his weapon spat defiance, half deafening Kat as it launched a saboted armor piercing round into the newcomer’s leg.

The black suit staggered backward, a divot in its leg from Davis’ attack but nothing more. Then it returned fire. Its rifle thrummed, launching a plume of fire as the discharge instantly turned air into plasma. The shot went wide, punching a bowling ball sized hole clear through one of the heavy metal crates on a nearby shelf.

“Fuck,” Kat whispered, her eyes growing wide.

The new suit lifted its leg, looking down to inspect the damage. Satisfied it planted both of its feet, shifting the rifle to a two handed grip and swinging the weapon around toward Davis’ ailing battle armor.

“Just a scratch,” the woman’s voice came from speakers hidden in the darker powered armor. “Quit squirming. If that’s the best you’ve got, It’s not like fighting back can even change the outcome. You’re just wasting my time.”

Kat slid her handgun back into its calf holster. It would be less than useless against that monster. She exhaled, hand slipping into her pack and touching the small box she’d smuggled from Chiwaukee.

Then she was moving, Cat Step speeding her movements as she twisted and vaulted her way through the obstacle course of boxes on the upper level of the storage rack. Just as she was reaching a vantage point where she’d have a proper firing angle on the enemy armor, some sixth sense pulled her up short.

She slammed herself into the back of a box just as a small antipersonnel gun turret on the battle armor’s shoulder swiveled, spraying her cover with bullets. The storage crate behind her rattled and shook as it laid down suppressive fire, pinning Kat.

“What the-” the woman was cut off by another roar of Davis’ heavy cannon.

Kat doubted it was enough to actually stop their opponent, but it managed to silence the secondary turret.

“Motherfucker!” The woman shouted. “I’ll kill you for that!”

The telltale hum of the railgun sent a static thrill through Kat as she finished casting Mirage. There were far too many variables at play. If she guessed any one of them wrong, this fight was about to end very quickly and in a fashion that would generate a whole lot of mess.

She only had one chance at this. Unless the refugees had managed to find some shells for the hover tank’s main cannon, they were sitting ducks. That meant Emma would die. That meant that Whippoorwill-

Her throat worked silently as Kat swallowed, trying to cleanse herself of the distracting thoughts. So what if she only had one chance. She’d just have to get it right the first time.

Kat jumped, a Gravity Plane shimmering through the air just in front of her, angling downward even as the light around her warped, making her body look like it were a handspan or so closer to the ground. She soared through the air, parallel to the ground in an attempt to create the slimmest possible profile for the powered armor’s automatic turret.

Even as she brought the unfamiliar grip of the alien pistol to bear, the NeoSyne guard fired her rifle. Davis’ armor burned with red light. One moment it was standing in the open, and the next it was a smoking heap, propelled sideways by some tower granted skill or perk a fraction of a second before the rail gun went off.

Bullets sailed toward Kat. Most were low, but the handful that were on target slammed into the Gravity Plane, causing the almost invisible angled wall of magic to ripple as they were yanked just enough off course to miss her plummeting body.

Then, Kat pulled the trigger. Her entire upper body jerked upward from the recoil, spinning her backwards until she hit the very storage apparatus she had launched herself from, the small of her back slamming into the metal edge of a crate.

She bounced back into the corridor, hands clutching the alien pistol as pain blossomed from the blow. A half second later, she landed face first on the concrete floor, the durable material of her infiltration suit saving Kat from any number of scrapes and road rash.

Planting both hands on the cement, Kat pushed herself up, swinging around to point her pistol at the powered armor.

It wasn’t moving. Her pistol had punched a fist sized hole through its torso, leaving a crater in the floor behind the mechanized armor. Partially by educated guess, and partially by luck Kat had aimed for the center of its upper torso, rupturing the pilot’s cockpit and shredding the NeoSyne guard inside.

The railgun clattered to the ground, the sound echoing in the sudden silence after the brief battle. Then, the entire suit tumbled forward, its form locked in place after the pilot stopped providing input, but ultimately she’d left the robotic suit so off balance that remaining upright was impossible.

Kat stood up, sighing with relief, the stallesp pistol still clutched in her white knuckles. The alien had missed her with it back in Chiwaukee, and she’d known the gun was powerful then, but this was something else. One shot and it had gone through two heavy plates of advanced armor like they were nothing more than wet toilet paper.

“What in the name of Pete was that Erinyes?” Davis asked as he limped from the wreckage of his own battle armor. “I figured we were done for unless I could get close enough to plant a shaped charge on that beast, but you managed to take her down with one shot.”

He moved stiffly, his slimmer pilot suit matted with grease and sweat from pulling himself from the smoking scrap heap that had represented hundreds of thousands worth of investment on his part. Still, despite his disheveled appearance and the obvious injury to his left leg, Davis managed to make his approach look dignified. It was hard to describe, just an energy about the older man.

“Just a toy I picked up when we recovered the stallesp databank in Chiwaukee,” Kat replied, glancing down at the gun before slipping it back into her hip pack for safe keeping. “Evidently, as futuristic as all of this new NeoSyne hardware is, the moles didn’t trust them with weaponry that would actually let the humans stand up to them. This is only a pistol. Imagine if the aliens bothered to field anti-armor weapons?”

“I’d prefer not to,” Davis remarked with a shake of his head. “I like the safety and security of a personal exo-suit. If the stallesp start fielding weaponry of that power in mass quantities, it looks like the only viable defense will be dodging, something I will have to admit that I’ve gotten much worse at with age.”

“Speaking about that, let’s get you patched up Merrimac,” she responded, trying to ignore the bruising in her lower back as she walked over to meet the older man. “We don’t have a lot of time. The sooner we can get you healed and into one of those monsters, the better our odds are against whatever the hell NeoSyne manages to throw at us.”

“Very true,” Davis agreed, nodding at Kat as she began mumbling the words to Cure Wounds I. “I am interested in the mobility that the other operator managed to display. She was clearly inexperienced in exosuit usage, but despite that she was almost as agile as an unarmored samurai.”

“If you managed to find one of those pistols in Chiwaukee,” he continued, stepping back from Kat and testing his weight on his newly healed leg as she switched to her lower back, “there will surely be some here. Unfortunately, unless I wish to share her fate, mobility will be a must in the upcoming battle.”

“Don’t sell the suits short,” Kat grunted back. “I certainly wasn’t expecting an anti-personnel gun turret on that thing’s shoulder. The piece of shit almost turned me into hamburger. Even if there are some stallesp mixed into the NeoSyne forces, it’s not like they’ll be wearing heavy armor. If your automatic defenses tear them apart before they can get a shot off, you should be fine.”

“Now that,” Davis said, a hint of mirth between his normal taciturn tone, “is a weapon design after my own heart.”

The two of them walked around the ruby puddle that had been Britt and entered the corridor where the suits were stored. It was almost like shopping for an action figure at the supermarket. Looming metal crates with a stylized ‘APEX’ logo spray painted on the side lined the storage area, glass plates in their sides revealing the crouching armored exoskeletons next to the distinctive angular shapes of rail guns.

Halfway down the aisle, one of the crates had been pried open revealing a webwork of plastic cushioning and cut straps designed to keep the armor safely in place during transportation.

Davis shrugged, remarking wryly. “At least our target is fairly obvious. It’s not much, but we won’t have to open boxes and hope to get lucky.”

Before she could reply, gunfire erupted from the front of the warehouse followed shortly thereafter by screams. Neither Kat nor Davis spoke. Instead the two of them sprinted toward the nearby armors.

Davis stopped at the nearest one inspecting how to operate it, but Kat kept moving, arriving a couple seconds later at the crate that had already been opened. She scooped up the big pry bar from the ground and ran back to her confused companion.

As he stared at a complex release built into the seam of the crate, Kat simply shoved the crowbar into the tiny gap between the front and the side of the crate and pushed. Metal creaked in protest for a second or two before the magnetic locks gave way, popping free with a hiss of released air.

She handed the steel bar back to Davis before grabbing the sides of the cover and sliding it free. Inside an APEX suit gleamed. The warehouse’s fluorescent lights reflected off of the crouched robotic suit’s greyish black armor. Most importantly, the armored cover for the pilot’s compartment in the chest cavity was slid upward, covering the battle suit’s ‘head’ and providing easy access to the controls inside.

“How’d you know that would work, Erineys?” Davis asked, jerking his head toward the crowbar in his hands. “Your tampering could have activated some sort of electronic security, locking the entire box down.”

“You haven’t run the streets in a while, have you Merrimac?” Kat replied with a smile, stepping back and letting the man move past her toward the cockpit. “There’s a joke that every samurai and runner knows. No matter how fancy new technology gets, designers always include a secondary access method, just in case the power goes out. The tertiary access method is just a big stick.”

“Plus.” She shrugged as Davis clambered up into the exosuit, triggering the armored plate to slide down and seal him in. “If I broke it, we have spares. The limiting factor right now is time, not access to equipment.”

The suit whirred to life, fabric straps breaking free as Davis stepped out of the crate. Wobbling slightly before catching his balance in the aisle between the storage shelves.

“-very intuitive,” Davis said through his suit mounted speakers. “Sorry, I didn’t realize that the comms are push to talk. The suit is very easy to use. I just try to walk like normal and it moves. The entire system is very intuitive.”

He reached down, picking up the rail gun from its storage cradle in the box, placing the butt of the weapon against his shoulder. Kat frowned, her keen eyes picking up three cables trailing from the back of the weapon.

“Erinyes and Merrimac!” Whip’s voice jolted Kat. There was a bone jarring rattle of machine gun fire in the background, punctuated by the staccato thump of heavier weapons. “If you could hurry up, it would be appreciated. We’re being hit hard by NeoSyne goons and only half of the 3445 have managed to grab weapons. Two of my turrets are down and I need someone to buy them more time to arm themselves and get back into the fray.”

“Well my dear,” Davis remarked, causing the suit to kneel down in front of Kat. “If you wouldn’t mind hooking up my rifle, I’d say it's about time we went to save your friend.”

Kat activated Levitation, hopping up onto the APEX armor’s back and inspecting the rifle’s connectors.

“Are these… color coded?” Kat asked, frowning slightly at the array of cords and cables.

“Apparently,” he replied. “Yellow is diagnostics and control, you plug that into a processing port. Blue is the power feed, that goes in the battery. Black hooks the gun up to the ammunition hopper. Without that I only have the three shots stored in the rail gun itself.”

Kat worked fast. All of the plugs were clearly marked, designed for easy field stripping and repair. Even without any experience it didn’t take her much more than thirty seconds to completely hook the rifle up.

As soon as she finished, Davis stood up, shaking her slightly. The rifle began to hum slightly as its capacitors drew energy from the large battery in the center of the suit’s back.

“Hold tight Erinyes.” Davis’ voice erupted from a speaker next to her head. “I’m still getting the hang of this thing, but I’m pretty sure I can move a lot quicker in short bursts than either of us on foot. After all, if our friends are calling for help, it’s only appropriate that we make a dramatic entrance.”

Before Kat could reply, the armor beneath her shifted upward and thundered into motion.

It was fast, there was no question about that, but the ride was both jarring and disorienting. Davis pushed the APEX suit to its limits, jolting Kat up and down as its powerful mechanical legs pushed off of the concrete floor of the warehouse, leaving a trail of divots in its wake.

Barely fifteen seconds of teeth rattling transit later, Davis shouted “Now Erinyes, take to the air.”

She didn’t question him, pushing off of the powered armor’s back and Leaping as high as her tower granted strength would take her. For a brief moment, there was a lull in the battle, both sides gaping in awe at the armored suit barreling into the conflict.

For that fraction of a second, the battlefield spread out before her, a tableau of dead bodies and destruction. About twenty of the refugees, most of them wearing black chest plates that Kat didn’t recognize, clustered around the control bunker, all of them wielding some model of bullpup carbine that she’d never seen before. Four or five bodies lay dead and in the open.

The tank was immobile, smoking from seven or eight familiar fist sized holes that had been bored through its armor by alien pistols. Behind it, another five to ten members of the 3445 took cover.

As for the main floor in front of the elevator, it was a mess. Between the tank’s anti personnel guns and the automated defense turrets, almost a hundred NeoSyne guards lay dead or dying in a twisted mass of armor, limbs, and steadily pooling blood. That said, behind them were another fifty or so more, literally using their fallen companions as cover.

Then Davis broke the silence, firing his stolen railgun downward into the mass of corporate military officers. Rather than one direct bullet, the shot unleashed a cone of destruction, tearing apart the lightly armored NeoSyne officers as well as their grisly fortifications with indiscriminate ease.

All except three. Three well dressed corporate soldiers, none of them wearing the relatively ineffective body armor adorning the rest of their companions, had fields of glowing hexagonal light around them, indicating either technology that shouldn’t be on Earth, or silver tiered abilities from the tower, which also shouldn’t be on Earth.

Kat didn’t hesitate. She unleashed a Gravity Spike in the center of the cluster, staggering the three figures. Unfortunately, the spell wasn’t nearly as effective on individuals with human standard weights, so although it did some damage and disoriented her targets, between the protection provided by their shields and their smaller size, it was far from fatal.

Her pistol, on the other hand, was more than enough. Once again, the weapon’s heavy recoil knocked her off course, but not before it shattered one of the shields, ripping a leg from the individual it had been protecting.

Almost immediately, she dismissed Levitation, casting Gravity’s Grasp on herself to jerk her almost floating body downward as the two surviving officers opened fire. Their shots went wide, blowing sedan sized holes in the ceiling of the warehouse. Almost a dozen, thankfully inactive, canisters of nerve gas dropped toward the floor in a deadly rain of metal and chemicals.

Emboldened, the 3445 refugees popped from cover, spraying the surviving officers with surprisingly accurate gunfire. Their shields held, but whatever trick of physics or magic they used to deflect the kinetic energy of the shots caused them to glow when hit.

Even as the elevator opened with a ding behind them, unleashing another horde of NeoSyne troops, the two upright officers staggered backward, their shields glowing bright white under the unrelenting onslaught.

Davis fired again. This time, switching from a cone of destruction to a single armored penetrator. One second there were two spheres of white light in the midst of the security officers as they sprinted for cover, and then there was one.

His bullet hit like a thunderbolt, detonating one of the shields with enough power to pulp everything in it and kill all of the security guards within a dozen or so steps from the force of the shockwave.

Kat cut Gravity’s Grasp, switching to Levitation to slow her fall to a more manageable rate just as Davis charged into the fray, gun turret on his left shoulder barking death. He switched to a one armed grip on the railgun, holding his left arm high. A metal spearpoint flipped out of it crackling with latent energy before Davis slammed it down into the last remaining forcefield.

It shattered at about the same time Kat belly flopped onto the warehouse floor. For a second, everything went dark. Then she staggered to her feet. The battle seemed far away, like she was watching it through a fog that muted all sound.

Davis stood tall, triangular spearpoint held high once more as lighting coruscated off of a twitching and inhuman body. He lashed out with the suit’s legs, kicking aside NeoSyne soldiers like unwanted toys. The bodies whirred into walls, crunching and falling to the ground as wet, mangled heaps.

The remaining soldiers tried to retreat back toward the elevator, but the refugees were having none of it. After months and months of mistreatment and executions, they weren’t keen on taking prisoners.

Whether a NeoSyne security guard faced what remained of the 3445 or turned to run, their bullets found them just the same. Dozens died in the handful of chaotic seconds following Davis defeating the final stallesp agent, and the remainder didn’t manage to retreat more than twenty steps before they met their fate as well.

Then, there was silence.

Kat took a wobbly step forward, checking her mana reserves. The battle might be over, but they had wounded. Hopefully she had enough.