Eve Berg

Location: Harper’s Junction, Star Kingdom of Windsor

She remembered everything.

The transition seemed different, but she’d only jumped using the technology a few times, so she couldn’t say for sure anything was really wrong. That was one of the big drawbacks of the SRRT training program in her opinion. She knew they were supposed to do dozens of jumps around New Savannah before ever doing one in the field, and especially in enemy territory, but operational needs couldn’t be ignored.

she sighed as she was broken down into her component atoms and shot tens of millions of kilometers through space toward the LZ.

The tingling sensation was something new as her body and armor rematerialized. She closed her eyes to fight off the wave of nausea and fatigue that swept through her, and opened them to see nothing but a brilliant white light. For a second, she wondered if she was dead, but then a high-pitch honk disabused her of that notion.

It didn’t take a genius to know that something was wrong. The LZ she’d studied on the holo-tank showed a mostly wooded area at the foot of a mountain range. At most, she suspected some rebel soldier to be there to escort them to their command and control center. She did not expect to see mountains of metal and glass and the screech of ground-car brakes.

Through her HUD, she saw the driver’s face as a mix of surprise and fear. All she had time to do was brace before the vehicle hit her going about sixty kilometers an hour. She felt the impact in her bones despite the LACS armor. Her shield wasn’t active, so she took the brunt of the impact around her waist. It was good that she got hit around her center of gravity, so more damage wasn’t done. Even so, a few alarms rang out as she was thrown backward from the force of the impact. She rolled with blow and turned the momentum to her advantage. She even ran a diagnostic as she got back to her feet to see no damage to her armor. The car was not so lucky.

It looked like the small vehicle had hit an immovable object. The hood was caved in around the center and smoking while the electric components within snapped and sizzled with small flashes of light. Thankfully, the driver looked to be unharmed. The car had immediately filled with foam to blunt the impact. It had filled the entire car, and after the nanites in the material registered the crash had ended, it sloshed out like water. It was an ingenious protective measure that had saved countless lives since it’s invention, but it was hell on the upholstery.

She could already hear sirens in the distance as she scanned her surroundings. Her IOR linked with the area’s networks and gained master access with her military codes. It was a good sign that the Windsor’s hadn’t gotten too far into changing things on the planet. It was a bad sign that she realized she was over a thousand kilometers from the LZ and in one of the most populated cities on the planet. A city that was under Windsor control.

she prioritized her actions and went to work.

She was on an overpass, so she moved to the edge to see if the coast was clear. The collision had brought traffic patterns to a stop, so emergency personnel could easily make it to the accident scene, so despite there being bumper-to-bumper traffic she was easily able to jump over and drop the ten meters to a street with multiple egress points.

An alert popped onto her HUD as her shoulder-mounted rail gun swiveled and engaged an incoming drone. The schematics matched a known Windsor scout model. she picked up the pace and ran down a side street. She wasn’t halfway down it before a police cruiser, with flashing blue and red lights, pulled into the intersection in front of her.

The two officers piled out of the car and tried to bar her way. Both were armed with handguns and ballistic vests, but they were about as effective as a wet fart against a V4 LACS. They yelled for her to stop, but she simply jumped over them and kept on running. Rounds impacted her shield, but barely registered as hits. She made a hard right and came across a dead end. She reversed direction and had just stepped out into the street when the same cruiser smashed into her. It was going a lot faster than sixty kilometers and hour, so this time her shield did its job. The vehicle flattened against the energy barrier and filled with foam.

“Idiots,” she muttered as she jogged away from the second accident site. “Trying to play hero.” She was still shaking her head when incoming fire rippled across the front of her shield. This time the projectiles registered on her radar as plasma flashed in front of her. She dove into a small alley to avoid the military checkpoint operated by Windsor infantry backed up by a heavy-weapons emplacement.

Her mind whirled through her options, and she settled on going through the wall of several buildings to come at the checkpoint from the flank. Standard infantry didn’t expect a giant armored trooper to suddenly burst through the wall beside them. Their attention was firmly fixed on the mouth of the alley, and they paid for that lapse in judgement with their lives.

It gave her freedom of movement for a few minutes, so she put as much distance between herself and her arrival point as possible. It didn’t do much good. Her railgun constantly chimed in as it engaged surveillance drones hot on her trail, and it didn’t take long for her to realize she was being herded toward the center of the city. When she tried to deviate, she was met with artillery and heavy weapons fire. She was able to weather that kind of assault, but not forever, and her maps told her she’d have to endure kilometers of that before she could even break into anything resembling open space.

She was trapped.

In the moment of realization, she didn’t despair. She didn’t think of her brother, mother, or Coop. She just wanted to hurt the Windsor’s. She wanted to hurt them because she saw them dropping artillery in the middle of the city.

“Let’s show the people of Harper’s Junction just who they signed on with.” As far as last acts went, it would have to do.

She clipped the side of a building going around a corner and stumbled, which ended up saving her life. On either end of the street were hulking mechs, and one was making a swipe directly at her head. Her stumble turned into a slide as she skidded across the street and ruined the asphalt.

She didn’t sit on her ass and wait. She hit the sidewalk on the opposite side and sprang to her feet. Her chest opened and a dozen micro-missiles swarmed out, with half a dozen targeting each of the mechs. The mechs countermeasures reacted instantaneously, but the wave of explosions gave her a chance to pick her target. She picked the closest mech and charged. Her blades came out and she was nearly on top of the mech when the smoke cleared. The mech brought its forearm up to parry and her blade hit the shield with a sizzle of energy.

Then she activated the chainsaw function.

The molecularly-honed blade began to spin and cut into the shield. She hoped the feature would work better in reality than it had in training, but she was shit out of luck. She was still cutting through the shield when heavy rounds started to impact on her shield. The other mech had her in its sights and was hammering her. Its heavy ordinance was doing a number on her battery power, and it dropped precipitously in seconds. She was forced to disengage and dodge a follow-up blow from the still-unharmed mech she’d originally attacked.

She dumped a pair of EW artillery shells out of her armor to give her a moment to breath, but the nearest mech wasn’t giving up the momentum. It charged right through the visual and sensor-scrambling fog to take a close ranged HE shell to the face. The back blast from the explosion, threw both of them off their feet, and the second mech charged in.

Panic began to seep into her mind as she fought off one attacking mech, tried to create some distance to regroup, and then was ambushed by the second one. She knew from the onset she was going to lose. She’d seen an entire battalion with HI support go up against these things and barely scratched their armor, but she hoped their new tech would give her more options. It did, but it just kept her in the fight longer. No matter how hard she hit them, they kept on coming, or they just traded off. Sooner than she would have liked, her shields were almost gone and warnings started blaring as ambient energy or kinetic force started to leak through. She compensated for her shield weakening by dialing up the actuator and tailoring it specifically to the mechs’ attacks.

They were coming at her primarily with fists, blades, and the occasional EM projectile. She knew they weren’t going for the kill, or she’d already be dead, but the thought of being a POW wasn’t very appealing.

Of course, the Windsor mech operators weren’t idiots, and they caught onto her tactics. Half a dozen plasma rounds detonated against her shield. The kinetic rounds were stopped, but the plasma broke through and wreaked havoc. Her armor held, but sensors were scoured away and she lost situational awareness. The next mech combination got some blows through her depleted shield and sent her flying through a nearby building. Warning alarms flashed as something on the right side of her armor stopped working. She tried to pull herself out of the rubble, but lost precious seconds doing it only with her left side while her right side recalibrated. She pushed aside a two-ton piece of masonry in time to see a boot the size of her torso smashing down toward her.

Her shield literally shattered under the force of the blow, and her armor screamed with alerts and warping metal. She squirmed, and tried to dislodge the foot, but it didn’t budge. She brought a blade around to chop at its ankle, but the second mech’s boot crushed her arm.

She felt that, she cried out in pain and…

“That’s enough,” a voice cut through her mind and the fight abruptly ended. A visor was removed from her head and a stark room came into view. All it had was a table, two chairs, and four solid walls. She was sure sensors decorated the ceiling, but she couldn’t see them. “Does that answer your questions?”

Eve looked at the woman sitting across from her and screwed her eyes closed. The VR crash from being abruptly pulled from the situation was fucking with her head, but it was slowly coming back to her. She’d been captured by the Windsor’s several days ago after the fight with the two mechs which had rendered her unconscious. She’d asked the woman when she came in how they’d caught her, and they’d busted out the VR scenario to show Eve her failure in high definition.

“Ok,” Eve spat to her side.

The woman frowned at the action, but Eve didn’t care. She was bigger than her interrogator, but by less than she thought. The woman was over two hundred centimeters, athletically-thin, but very beautiful. She was also dressed in a sharp, smartcloth suit that was probably the height of fashion in the Kingdom. It looked weird to Eve, but to each their own.

“Who are you?” Eve ventured a guess, but not expecting anything.

“I’m the person that is going to get answers from you,” the woman smiled like cat who’d just cornered a mouse.

Eve just smirked back. “Well let’s get on with it then.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” the woman’s smile didn’t falter. “We’ve already begun.”