The reaction to me opening fire on the group of thugs was immediate; I’d mission killed their leader (or maybe spokesman? Important either way.) with my first shot, while also chucking a grenade right into their midst.

That said, while the reaction was immediate, it also wasn’t very coordinated; I’d successfully achieved a brief moment of shock and awe, as the grenade exploded on the other side of the heavily built food carts we’d ducked behind. Immediately, both Grom and I popped up again, taking in the scene in a few milliseconds as we picked targets.

Of the thirty thugs who’d come after us, five were already down; namely the leader I’d blasted a massive hole in, and the four who were closest to the grenade when it went off. I opened up with my laser and drilled two more while they were still recovering from the blast. Meanwhile Grom made use of his morph’s integrated micro-missiles and fired a salvo that would have taken out the rest, if it weren’t for some of the thugs being really fast on their raster blasters to shoot them down; even still, Grom’s missiles dropped another thug who was unlucky enough to be particularly close.

Still, as we ducked back into cover behind the food cart, we were now in a pretty undesirable position. We were pinned behind cover, and we were outnumbered eleven to one; the instant we poked out of cover we were going to take way more fire than we could realistically dodge. There was only one redeeming feature of this situation, and that’s the fact that our cover had wheels.

As such, I told Grom over encrypted chat “I’ll shove the cart towards our reinforcements, you’re on potshot duty!”

On his part, Grom replied “Head towards the Roger’s Ashes and take a left at the first opportunity, that’s where our biggest group of reinforcements are coming from!” before opening the iris for the laser emitter in one of his tentacles, poking it just above the level of the food cart’s opening. Several cracks of ionized air along with the occasional scream of pain could be heard, even as I leaned hard into the food cart.

With a thought I activated the traction coating on my boots, adhering to the floor with enough force that I could have walked straight up a wall in much heavier gravity than we currently occupied. At the moment, that coating simply meant I could push the food cart with far more force than normal gravitational traction would have allowed.

The cart began to shift almost immediately, my strength easily overwhelming whatever puny motor it had for autonomous movement. Within moments we had gotten up to a speed that could almost be called a decent run, carefully keeping the cart between us and the redhead gang as we headed towards our nearest group of allies.

Then I spotted a major issue, namely more redhead gangsters coming around the corner we wanted to turn at. Grom was still busy suppressing the group pursuing us, meaning that dealing with the flanking group was my problem. In a mere fraction of a second, I drew one of my mag pistols and drew a bead on the first of them to round the corner.

The gun kicked back in my hand, sending a bullet downrange with a distinct supersonic crack; the shot dumped all the remaining energy left in its internal SMES after penetrating the thug I was targeting, thus exploding and splattering everything much above their pelvis across the entrance to the alleyway. Said pair of legs staggered to their feet and started running away as best they were able, but they were very thoroughly mission-killed and no longer a priority.

That snap shot dissuaded the flanking group for just long enough that I could prime a hand grenade in place of my pistol, setting its fuse for exactly the correct time as I tossed it ahead. The grenade exploded a second or so before we rounded the corner, meaning that what thugs remained in the flanking group were still recovering when Grom and I got line of sight, lasers set to raster.

What followed was half a second of hosing down the six remaining thugs in the flanking group with raster blaster fire, the rapidly scanned pulses of light causing massive surface damage to our targets and quickly immobilizing them due to destruction of their musculature, with what remained being still technically alive, but very badly wounded. They probably wouldn’t actually die from it, but they were no longer a significant threat.

Still, now that we were no longer pinned behind a food cart, we started sprinting down the alley we’d turned onto. We didn’t get very far before we encountered a group of fifty armed people heading our way, and I immediately asked “Are you from the Loan Shark?”

The group’s bulky humanoid synthmorph leader replied “Yes we are! We heard you two needed the help, and came right over. What’s the situation?”

“I don’t know how, but I somehow angered a local mob boss and they sent goons after me. If they’re armed and the top of their head is red, shoot on sight.”

The group leader replied “Right.” even as he raised his mag rifle, which kicked three times with the distinctive crack crack crack of supersonic projectiles. I heard the explosions behind us, even as I turned with raster carbine at the ready in linear pulse mode to join the barrage.

After the pursuing group had clearly lost interest in continuing to advance into our withering hail of suppressive fire, the leader of our impromptu platoon thought for a moment, before saying “Alright, advance and flush them out!”

And so we marched back towards that same intersection we’d just turned around. There was a brief debate about how to go around the corner, before we settled on half of our forces jumping out around the corner and immediately opening fire to force our enemies into cover, while the other half would navigate down another nearby alleyway to perform a flanking maneuver.

I was quickly assigned to the group that would be providing suppressive fire, along with Grom. I set my raster carbine to linear pulse, squatted down, and darted out from behind the corner while opening fire. Immediately the remaining twenty-ish thugs that had originally threatened me started running for cover, but as they did so, several of them returned fire in a scattered and disorganized manner.

I saw a brief flash of searingly bright light from one of the laser pistols the thugs were using, there was a short moment of pain, and then I suddenly lost feeling from the neck up as my visual perspective shifted down about ten centimeters or so. My biofeedback confirmed that I was now thinking using my black boxes instead of my primary brain, and that I was seeing using the backup photo-receptors in my skin. For a brief moment I felt inordinately grateful that my dress had a very low neckline.

I ducked behind the fruit cart for a few moments to confirm what I was pretty sure just happened, effortlessly waving my hand through the space my head normally occupied. Lowering my hand a bit, I soon encountered a ragged slightly squishy stump with a hard nub where my spine terminated. There were a few rivulets of blood, but the emergency valves in my circulatory system had done their job and stopped me from losing more than a few cosmetic spatters.

Now that I knew I was just headless instead of something more serious, I immediately got back into the fight. I had to take a bit more risk to see where I was shooting now due to needing to expose my upper torso, but we were putting enough suppressive fire downrange to keep the rest of the redheaded thugs firmly pinned behind their cover.

This carried on for about a minute, then laser and mag gun fire erupted from an alley to the thug’s side, quickly downing the remaining red-headed thugs. I commented using my integrated radio “OK, let’s see if any of them have an intact black box to interrogate.” as I stood up to my full (somewhat reduced) height and started walking towards the downed thugs, feeling the airflow across my neck stump as I did so.

We quickly fell upon the mission-killed gangsters, and with a bit of knife work we quickly extracted several black box implants in pristine condition. Zhao, our current cyberwar specialist quickly hacked the black boxes and extracted their memory data, before immediately informing us “There are three thousand more members of this gang closing on our location. I recommend making a fighting retreat to the spaceport.”

I’d already lost my head over this whole mess, so I was perfectly willing to just get out of here. On the other hand, I felt like I needed to ask “Aren’t there millions more members of our crew around? Can’t we just call for more reinforcements?”

There was general agreement, and a series of rendezvous points were set up along our route to the spaceport; we’d be collecting reinforcements as we went. We hit the first and second rendezvous points without being intercepted by any significant forces, but that luck didn’t hold.

By now our group of ostensible pirates had ballooned in size to a few hundred, and we were passing under one of the pod cableways when suddenly several of pods had their doors kicked open and thugs aboard opened fire with crew-served particle beams in raster mode. I mercifully didn’t get hit again, and with the amount of return fire we sent downrange the heavy weapons were only firing for a couple seconds before they were silenced.

Still, in that time we’d taken upwards of 30% casualties in degrees ranging from completely fried to simply immobilized, and our previous leader fell under “completely fried”. So I stepped up and called over my internal radio “Everyone down with intact black boxes, highlight yourself! Everyone else, take a couple black boxes from each of our downed allies then slag the rest of their morph. We can’t carry this many wounded the hard way, so we’ve got to do it the easy way!”

Recovering the black boxes from our downed comrades took only a few seconds, our knives getting slicked with blood in the process. The subsequent destruction of their previous bodies on the other hand took slightly longer; it paid to be thorough with this sort of thing. Still, in less than a minute we were ready to move again, reaching our third rendezvous point and swelling our ranks to a full battalion.

That’s when the trouble started. I didn’t actually have any hearing organs at the moment and I really wasn’t used to that fact. That’s the only reason I didn’t notice the large group of thugs approaching from our left flank while everyone else was busy pumping weapons fire into a bunch of Crimsons – our nickname for the red-headed gang – that had gotten directly in front of us.

Ironically, my head having been shot off earlier is all that saved me from dying right then and there, as the heavy mag rifle bullet went whistling right through the volume where my cranium normally was. The shock wave from the explosion it produced on impact with the wall to my right was strong enough to let me know that if it had hit, I would have definitely been a problem for the janitors.

Still, we managed to divert enough firepower to force the flanking group back into their alleyways, greatly reducing the damage they could do. I and a bunch of other crewmates took the opportunity to prime grenades, quickly pulverizing everyone in the flanking group with a storm of explosive ordnance. That done, we recovered the black boxes from our latest batch of casualties and continued on our march towards the spaceport.

That said, we were definitely having problems with all these ambushes, so it was decided to send scouting elements ahead via the pod network in order to spot and deal with them before they could cause any more problems. Admittedly using public transport was a bit of a risk, but for a small group it was probably worth it. I’d stepped out of leadership after my short-lived assuming of command, meaning that I got assigned to be part of one of these scouting parties.

As such, I’d been sent ahead using the cable pod system; there had been some discussion of whether our entire contingent should go via pod, but that was shot down pretty quickly. Anyway, since I’d be separated from the main group and my black boxes wouldn’t be easily recoverable, I had the one implanted in my left arm extracted and stored away for safekeeping. I still had nine more of the implanted computers I was using as backup brains, so I could spare one for an offsite backup.

And so, Grom and I climbed into a pod and started on our way ahead of our main group. I couldn’t help but poke and prod at my neck stump while waiting; this was my first time being headless, and it really wasn’t anywhere near as bad as I thought it would be. Admittedly learning this in the middle of combat wasn’t exactly the greatest, but I’d have to try it again sometime when the stakes were lower.

Perhaps seeing my interest in the sudden alteration to my morph, Grom commented “If you’re thinking of giving your next morph a detachable head, that is perfectly fine.”

I thought about the idea for a few moments, before deciding that it was worth a try. As such, I replied “You know what? Let’s actually do that. Adding it to my record that I want to give my next morph a detachable head.”

Then the pod doors opened at our stop, and it was back to the mission in full. We’d decided on the way over that we would be searching for ambushers from the rooftops, and that of course meant climbing over. Fortunately, both of us had gecko pads that made climbing sheer vertical surfaces fairly straightforward, me on my boots, and Grom on his tentacles; the low gravity of Tide made the climb even easier.

Once we were in our elevated position, the process of hunting for ambushers was much, much easier. We quickly fell into a routine of sweeping the rooftops for threats, checking the alleys below for same, and then jumping to the next building to repeat the process.

It actually took a few minutes of this for us to find the first ambush point, a group of about twenty Crimsons setting up a heavy weapons nest in an alleyway. We quickly swept the area for more just so we wouldn’t get blown away by any friends of theirs, and quickly found three other such deployment points.

Quickly, we hatched a plan. I would drop one of my grenades on the nest directly below us, then Grom and I would use the three lasers we had between us to simultaneously destroy the tripod-mounted heavy weapons that the Crimsons had set up on the other rooftops. If we hit the power boxes for those beam guns, the resulting explosions would be sufficient to paste the groups around them and negate much chance of retaliation.

And so we did just that; I primed a grenade with the exact time it would take to fall from our rooftop onto the weapons nest below, and as soon as it dropped Grom and I got into position and took aim at the power cells for the Crimsons’ heavy weapons. We didn’t even wait for the sound of the explosion; as soon as the timer expired we shot simultaneously; I drilled one boxlike energy cell with my raster carbine, while Grom got two with his tentacle-mounted lasers.

The resulting explosions were felt more than heard, especially in my case since I didn’t have any ears at the moment. They were definitely seen however, putting serious craters in the roofs of the buildings they’d been on top of and blasting the ambushers to paste, though notably not breaking through all the way to the inside of the building. Apparently the locals built to last.

Either way, I quickly sent an encrypted message back to the main group saying “Found an ambush group along our route with four heavy weapons nests. Threat eliminated with no losses.”

In response, I heard back “Understood. Please continue on scouting duty. We’ll meet up with you at the next rendezvous point.” along with a data packet detailing the route they were planning on taking. They’d burned a one-time pad code for that too, so I knew it was secure.

Well, that was clear enough. Without further delay, Grom and I went about looking for more ambushes. Only a minute or two into this, it was pretty clear that the Crimsons knew what we were doing, as Grom and I needed to start counter-sniping gang members before they could nail us with laser or mag gun fire. While we were pretty good at this and took out the first few would-be snipers without incident, neither Grom nor I wanted to risk this for any longer than actually necessary. I’d already lost one head tonight, and that was plenty.

So, we dropped down from the rooftops and started traveling through the alleyways, looking for any further groups of Crimsons who might want to cause trouble for our allies in the main group. In a strange twist of fate, we didn’t encounter any more alley-bound ambush groups all the way to the rendezvous point.

For a moment we got our hopes up that this was due to the Crimsons having given up, but that hope was quickly dashed when we got close to the rendezvous site, and saw a heavily entrenched group of Crimsons exchanging fire with a similarly entrenched bunch of our crewmates.

Quickly Grom and I considered what to do with that, and we determined that our best course of action would be to try and flank around behind the Crimsons before they realized we were here and open fire on their relatively vulnerable behind.

And so we set about sneaking through the alleys, only to suddenly come face to neck stump with a group of a few Crimsons who apparently had the same basic idea we did of flanking around behind the impromptu trench lines. Fortunately I was able to react ever so slightly faster with my raster blaster, frying the oncoming group and disabling their weapons before they could do the same to me.

Still, the noise from that definitely blew my cover, and that meant Grom and I needed to relocate. We did so by climbing straight up the walls of the alleyway like we’d done previously, but we didn’t go all the way up; ascending to roof level would just expose us to the snipers again. No, instead we walked sideways along the walls using our gecko pads, exploiting the low gravity to jump between buildings with ease, and firing down at any Crimson flanking groups we found en route.

We actually had to deal with quite a lot of those flanking groups; it was very obvious that the Crimsons had a rough idea where we were and were trying to flush us out. Still, they didn’t succeed before we managed to get into position to pump some ordnance into their formation. Oh they knew we were coming; they just couldn’t actually do much about it since our allies were still pinning them behind cover.

So we opened up with our lasers, wreaking complete and utter havoc on the entrenched Crimsons, driving them out of cover and into the withering hail of lasers and mag gun shots our allies were putting out. The power cell in my raster carbine actually finally depleted after a few seconds of continuous fire, and I quickly shoved it in one of my pockets even while I drew a fresh one and slammed it into the socket on my beautiful weapon.

Still, by the time I’d finished reloading my laser the mopping up was nearly done. I came out of the alleyway and noted “This is the rendezvous point where we’re supposed to meet up with the main group, but they don’t seem to have arrived yet. Guessing you’re the planned reinforcements?”

The leader of the reinforcements noted “No shit. The main group is still about a minute out. Thanks for the save, though.” even as her pink hair seemed to blow in a nonexistent wind, revealing the tips of her pointed ears.

I would have nodded but I didn’t have a head right now, so I replied “Fair enough. Guess we’ll be popping open some black boxes for intelligence while we wait.”

That didn’t reveal too much we didn’t know already. The Crimsons were thoroughly out in force trying to match our escalation and they had a home field advantage. On the other hand we-as-agents had access to some slightly more optimized processing hardware allowing for reaction times ever-so-slightly closer to the limits imposed by physics, which is one of the major reasons we’d been so effective at getting the first shot off in tight situations where it really mattered.

Still when the main contingent of our force arrived, it was clear that they’d been having a rough time of things. I could count at least twenty more new members of the headless club, and more were missing limbs, had craters blasted open in their torsos, or were similarly heavily injured while still capable of fighting. There was a brief mutual acknowledgment of the situation, a few more scouting groups were sent ahead after each dropping off a black box just in case, and then it was back to the grim march towards the spaceport.

Less than a minute into the march, we were jumped by another bunch of heavy weapons teams that had apparently been missed by the scouting elements. I immediately opened up on one of the tripod-mounted weapons and managed to destroy it, but then my luck ran out as particle beam pulses ripped through my pelvis and right shoulder, reducing me to a one-armed mutilated torso.

I managed to send a few more laser shots downrange one-handed, but it was very clear that I was no longer combat effective. As soon as the current burst of fighting died down, I called over my internal radio “I’m done. Yank my black boxes, fry my morph, and get me out of here.”

I was vaguely aware of Grom coming over and replying “Understood, Ress.” before I felt him stabbing through my soft tissues. My biofeedback sent out an alert as each one of my remaining viable black boxes was ripped out of my body, then Grom reached the last one.

Again, there was no feeling of slipping away, nor any recognition of a transition taking place. One moment I was a mangled carcass in a pirate arcology, the next I was lying down in a Mindcast pod, holding my head in my hands.

As the Mindcast pod opened, we quickly spotted our arachnid-shaped handler. Shen noted cheerfully “Welcome back to the land of the living, agents Madeline Zargosty and Maximus Hadrian. All your black boxes were either recovered by allies or destroyed, so there’s no need to worry about a version of you being held captive by pirates. While risky, the gang war you provoked was highly effective as a distraction. As such we have an experience recording of an interrogation from one of our other agents for you to watch, and once you’re done with that, we have another assignment for you two.”

Max almost immediately asked from the back of our mind “So you have a lead on where to look for Bark’s Finest?”

Shen grinned.

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