Not just anyone could pilot a humanoid flying drone like an Archjet. It required visual feeds, radar feeds, and air current pressure feeds from all eight wings, not to mention the internal thermal balancing from the propulsion jets. The only people capable of flying one were the kind of people who could understand a multi-feed.

Silvy, buried deep in the cockpit of the Archjet, snatched Iris out of the air, hitting the jets in reverse as soon as they had a grip on one another. “We got missiles coming, hang on!” she shouted. She banked through a turn over a traffic circle, spraying jamming lasers behind her like contrails. Tracking missiles the size of Iris’ arm zipped through the air behind them, waiting for a straight line lock-on to light their main engines. One by one they blasted, chasing false positives and blowing holes through buildings.

“What are you doing? You’ve gotta shoot them down,” Iris shouted, watching three more of the missiles trail after them, just slightly better at cutting corners. They were catching up.

Silvy reached back with the Archjet’s other arm, hefting a mag-rifle fit for a tank. She cracked off a few rounds, punching them high through the sky and not hitting anything. A few miles away, someone or something would get a surprise, but it had done nothing for the missiles.

“Seriously, Silvy?”

“I… uh… might have failed my marksmanship test.”

Iris swung herself over and ripped the oversized mag-rifle from the Archjet’s hand. “Just go up, will you?” she asked, shouldering it with her free arm. She had to kick her legs up and grab the barrel with her whole body to steady it as Silvy swept up from the city. The instant her vision synchronized with the weapon, Iris locked in on the nearest missile and punched a hole through it. A cloud of shrapnel erupted, stuttering the tracking software on the other two. She blasted off again and again, putting craters into the city streets below.

“We’ve got a laser on us,” Silvy shouted, sending the data feed voer to Iris’ interface. It was coming from the roof of the government building. High powered, but not an energy weapon.

“Silvy, get back down.”

“What? First you want me up now you want me down?”

“Silvy, free fall now.”

The Neo Taipei air defense system had an EFS turret sitting on their roof, like an old lighthouse. As the sun was setting over the Taiwan strait, the turret lit up the sky with fire. Iris shot straight at it as Silvy was still reacting with her merely-human reactions. The mag-rifle round impacted with the stream of lead spewing at them, the bullets ripping apart into shrapnel over the city, but more thousands of bullets kept flying. The instant before they dropped beneath the rooftops, the bullets clipped the wings of the Archjet and shredded the exhaust cones.

“Fuck, what the hell was that?” Silvy asked, fighting the controls and pulling them out of a sudden tailspin. Her jet exhaust burned a line over a row of parked cars, popping tires like grenades before she got back up to speed.

“That’s what’s going to trap us in this city. Shit, we need Mendel. I can’t call him, they’ve got me bugged. Tell him to pop that thing somehow.”

“It’s in your skin.”

“What?”

“The bug, the interference. It’s somewhere in your skin. They must have put something on you when they were replacing your synth skin. You had hours before Xi met with you, didn’t you find it?”

“God damn it, why didn’t you tell me that sooner?”

“Citizens,” Xi Chang’s voice echoed throughout Neo Taipei. Silvy had to throw the brakes and come to a hover as her road ran out. Nothing but ocean laid before then, which may as well have been a shooting gallery for the EFS. Xi’s smirking face replaced every sign and advert in the city, his voice an echoing chorus. “Our city is in a crisis, but we have prepared. A rogue terrorist organization has infiltrated the harbor. At this very moment, our defense forces are in battle with them. To all citizens of Neo Taipei, I ask that you do what you are capable of. The young, the old, take shelter. The strong, I ask you to take up arms. Now is the time to show the spirit of Taiwan.”

Iris gaped at the nearest image of Xi, his image the size of a sports stadium super-broadcast. “He just declared us terrorists. That bastard.”

Silvy picked another road at random and took off. “Iris, he just launched more missiles at us. What exactly are we supposed to do if that gun thing is waiting for us?”

Iris groaned and took aim. The missiles came whipping around the city, but with enough space that she shot them down, one after another. “Just go the other way. Go inland for now. That turret can aim well, but they’re just bullets. They fall. They can’t track us like these missiles can.”

“You mean away from Mendel?”

“Yes!”

Silvy screamed, wailing out into the dusk as she turned away from the harbor, and put her jets to the EFS turret.

Xi’s speech went on regardless. “The attack is ongoing throughout Neo Taipei. Please, I am requesting all Brothers of Steel to rally. Report to your squad leaders. Some of you will be needed for disaster response. There are explosions throughout the city. Save your countrymen. The rest of you, you know what must be done. Put your lives on the line. This is what you’ve been training for. This is the virtue of your existence.” His image was replaced on half of the display screens. Every other screen became a tracking shot of the Archjet, painting a target on them.

“We’ve got problems, lots of them,” Silvy shouted as Iris’ field of view flooded with red warning indicators. Dozens, hundreds of armed soldiers, maybe civilians– she couldn’t tell the difference without uniforms, were flooding into the streets and onto rooftops. They screamed chest thumping war cries. The kind of PR approved, sanitized screams that meant just enough they still worked. “Brothers of Steel!” “My life for all!” “Protect Neo-Pei!”

Their shouts made Iris sick to her stomach, but the real issue was the guns they all had. Few mag-rifles, but enough chemical slug throwers that they could saturate a city street almost as well as the EFS turret. The Archjet wasn’t going fast enough to escape them.

“We need to go faster.”

“I can’t! The efficiency is all fucked, and we’re already running low on fuel. I burned a hell of a lot catching you. If you expect me to get out of the city with this thing in one piece, I can’t just lay it on.”

Iris took down another tracking missile just as the straight-line thruster set off. The explosion bloomed like a rose, sending shrapnel all over one little squadron of defense fighters. “Then we’re going to get shot!”

“This is for dealing with macro-targets! Not infantry,” Silvy screamed back as she banked down another random road, just to put some leaf-covered buildings between them and people who had been given too much time to aim. Dozens of shots cracked off, breaking windows and who-knew-what else.

Iris gritted her teeth, swinging the mag-rifle from one side then the other, looking for the next missile. She crossed the scope over people. Dozens of people who glared back at her with scowls and hatred. Picking them off would have been nothing but a twitch of her finger, a bit of expended energy. It wouldn’t have helped in the slightest.

She wanted to call Mendel, but that would just compromise any attempt of his to help them, if Chang had her communications tapped. She couldn’t think of a good solution. All the cards seemed to be in Xi Chang’s hands.

“My people,” the politician said. He had a smile, his arms spread out like he wanted to hug the entire city. “Please, remember that after this is done, after sacrifices are made, we will come out of it stronger than ever. Like the hammering of wrought steel. This will prepare us for the dark times that are to come.”

“Oh my God, I hate that analogy,” Iris shouted, turning her attention to where she still had a ping on Chang’s position. He was standing on the balcony of the hotel, his back to the government building. It had faded into view on all the screens, looming there. He cared more about a photo-op than his own safety.

So Iris sent forty kilo-joules of Fuck You at him, the first instant she had line of sight.

It hit a panel of polycarbonate, flown in by security drones, but that shielding was only rated for twenty kJ, thirty at the most. Her slug ripped through, leaving a spider web behind, where it didn’t simply vaporize the plastic. Then it hit Xi Chang in the throat. Knocked him right off his feet in the middle of his speech.

Iris threw back her head and laughed. Then she learned why she hadn’t seen more tracker missiles coming after them.

One caught them from a ninety degree angle, cutting them off right at the city limit. Silvy grabbed Iris and rolled, putting the back of the Archjet as the impact before it hit. The shockwave blew out Iris’ ear mics. The pressure put so much shock through her muscle fibers her whole HAB unit had to do a reboot cycle as she and Silvy spun through the air in a smoking wreckage.

Her vision blacked out. When she finished rebooting, she was on the ground, half buried in dirt. Wet. Either mud, or her own synth blood. Her body could move though, even when it meant stripping huge patches of synth skin off. She was beneath the Archjet. The jagged wreck clawed into her like fangs. It hurt. She pushed through.

“Silvy.”

She tore apart the cockpit. The inner pod had cracked, but not broken. The door seal jammed. She screamed, pounding on the glass. Silvy laid inside, breathing but not responding. Only thing she could do was dig her metal fingers into the gap and pry. The panel bent. The security latches creaked. She overloaded them and ripped it off. There was blood in the cockpit, but Silvy had a flightsuit on. It should have been outputting her vitals.

Iris’ communication system still hadn’t booted up. All the datapackets in the world could have been pointed at her, and it would have been meaningless. She was blind to Silvy’s health.

On the other hand, she could hear people shouting. The pounding of boots. The growing rancor and thirst for victory. Chang’s militia was closing in, and she couldn’t understand a word they said. There was too much static from her damaged ears. It couldn’t be translated. Of course they could find them, smoke was pouring out of the Archjet. She didn’t know whether it was scorched oil or decomposing battery guts. Her nose had stopped functioning too.

All she knew was she had to get away, be it from the Archjet wreck exploding, or from a dozen zealots trying to shoot them. She could survive either, but Silvy couldn’t, so she pulled Silvy free of the cockpit and ran into the outskirts of Neo Taipei, to a shantytown where even the weeds tried to choke the life from the desperately poor.