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I pick up the bow on the way out. Like it or not, that blasted thing was made by Jack Hargreave and the old fart always had a trick up his sleeve, I'm just too dumb to figure out what it was in this case.

Reports are flooding in now, Psycho's way out of comms range, but there are enough friendlies spread between the two of us for my tactical display to be updated along with his.

This was a hairy landing all around, everyone had to jump off when it was possible to do so, which is never a wise move when it is a smoking mountain of steel falling at terminal velocity you are evacuating, but it certainly is better that sticking around to see all that heat-warped engineering crumble like a ball of paper on impact. Shitty as the situation may have been up there, broken limbs are the worse injury we're having reported, minus those KIAs I mentioned earlier.

My folks, spread across the south and east, are already running recon and setting up FOBs, barely more than trenches and makeshift barricades set up around Oasis and decent-size caves. They don't need orders from me to begin guerilla operations, aren't going to wait on my ass either. You don't get thrown out of the special forces unless you've got a knack for doing things your own way.

The North-Koreans, Chinese and U.S. Marines are all trying to regroup, flocking to Psycho from half a continent, it will take them weeks to get there and do anything useful, but at least they follow the chain of command, right?

But enough bitching about the military, like it or not, these assholes, once they've regrouped and re-armed, are going to be the only thing my assholes can rely on for support.

Except maybe for my quiet travel companions and their hopefully very well armed compatriots. I would talk to them more, but the suit isn't letting me, won't do translations for me any longer on account of my being too… Impulsive, to act as a representative to our coalition. That's what the suit tells me, I wish I could tell it I'm as impulsive as the combat drugs make me, drugs it drips feed into my blood stream.

To kill the boredom, and believe me it's easy to get bored when you're jacked in a quantum computer, I open up a game of Pac Man that lasts exactly five seconds.

My sensors aren't picking anything up at any range. All systems are green, no jamming on screen, no bogies anywhere in the sky. The suit tries to calm me with a dose of endorphin, but I shrug it off and close the game. You can't synthesise instincts, guts are something I no longer have in the physical sense, but possess in scores metaphorically.

Turning to my companions, I force-boot the translation software, kill the suit's heuristics when it protests and finally speak, "Run." I speak, softer than intended, "Run and don't stop running, no matter what."

Vibrations in the gravel at our feet, micro-seismic activity, knocks the suit back on my side. It boosts every senses, fill me with battle stimulants and goes for 25% power to armour mode, for good measure.

Since I've stopped moving, the others do the same despite my words, so I grab them both by the collars of their combat armours and yank them forward, roaring "Run!"

Skeletor's in the sky now, he's under our feet, and sizzling at our sides. Teleportation, a stealth ship or an underground transportation device, or a combination of these, point is, we've got hostiles showing up and they know exactly where we are in a thirty kliks wide bowl of gravel, with zero cover and no backup.

I count twelve Robocops in a perfect tetsuo formation at our back. Five paces, all guns aimed at our backs. A single of these shots can drain my armour, a second can kill me, there's enough here to murder Ol' raider six times in a heartbeat and no cover within reach.

Second comments on what must be the dumbest escape plan in the history of mankind.

Maximum Power.

Cloak Engaged.

Then it keeps quiet as I soar gracelessly through the heat waves, eyes closed so I won't see my firing squad and change my mind. Then, it announces, almost smugly.

Air Stomp.

The N2.1 comes equipped with the latest CryNet CryFibri tm technology, capable of delivering 20J/CM3 of elastic energy… That'll fuck your picnic up.

Dust keeps me from seeing most of the 'bots I knock down, two of them had the misfortune of being between the ground and my fists when I elbow dropped the formation, they are nothing more than goo being sucked up by my suit now.

Upon de-cloaking, I pump some death rays of my own into the first freak to get back on its feet. Doesn't kill him, doesn't even hurt him, but it knocks him back down long enough for me to leap onto his back and tumble him on top of me like a very much unwilling lover. The suit knows better than to liquefy this one. I cloak, power-kick the outraged freak as it soaks up hostile hits that were meant for me, and crawl away, letting the bots to figure it out once the dust settles.

Thirty meters away, my cloak runs dry and I'm ten paces behind the panicked locals, huffing and puffing as much as they do on my tender human legs.

Resilient and determined as they are, the tin men can't run for shit and they seem to suffer from the Stormtrooper syndrome, because there are no whistling shots zipping by our shoulders as we run, nor any green death ray in the corner of my vision. When I turn around, it's to see the eight remaining 'bots just standing there, at arms' length from one another, staring at us as we fuck right off.

Somehow, I get a feeling they don't care that we're getting away. They popped out of nowhere, in the middle of nowhere, directly on our position, so it can't have been just another scouting party, and they certainly aren't afraid of me, so I can only wager they are letting us go because we're good as dead already.

"All units," I call on the radio, "this is your fearless leader, coming to you live from Shit Creek… So, yeah, backup requested on my twenty, over."

Four squads volunteer, but I pick the closest and least numerous one, Yautja 3-6, led by Mako, a green Lieutenant with a degree in engineering from the University of Anchorage, fired from the U.S. Navy after he fucked an Admiral's wife. It's not the fucking that bothered the Navy, it's his smuggling her aboard a U.S. Warship. Mako's twenty-nine.

He heads a Hunter unit, two men team armed and trained to operate in ice spheres with no backup and no intel. ETA is three hours, but my non-existent guts tell me we don't have this long. Logic begs to agree on that. Why would the alien wait three hours before giving us another go?

In the distance, I can still see the Necrons' silhouettes, blurred by heat waves, watching us in complete immobility. "Eyes peeled!" I bark to the others, "Something's stalking us!"

We run some more, but they are getting slower, running out of breath and muscles to tear. I don't leave them time to puke their guts out, to sit or to moan, picking them up and shoving them forward every time they stop, but two hours in, as the suit suggests I acquire at the very least N1 models for the kids, or risk killing the both of them, I decide we're not going to make those next sixty minutes at this rate.

The Necrons can teleport, but they seem to do so only when we are static or moving at a slow pace, the suit calculates a 66% chance that their transport tech has a severe delay and some very crippling drawbacks making every use a carefully planned investment. So long as we keep moving fast, they can't get the drop on us and won't try because they know sooner or later we'll have to stop running.

"Ditch the armours." I order the two half-dying soldiers, who do as they're told without so much as a pause. Plates of titanium-like compound hit the ground in messes of straps and buckles, neither so much as breaks pace, which, at this point, is more of a light jog. I stop for a bit, collect the breast plates and shave the straps off other armour pieces along the way until I've got about two meters of rope from tying them end to end.

Then, I tell the kids to stop. On one end of the rope is the guy's breast plate, on the other is the girl's, the middle is wrapped around my chest and I'm now dragging the armor plates like a pair of retarded sleds. "Sit on these, strap yourselves with the combat webbings and don't let any exposes skin touch the sand, we'll be moving fast, understand?"

The guy cocks an eyebrow, "You want to… Pull us?"

Bitch, I look like a flayed Mike Tyson, why is this a surprise? "Yes, now sit down, we're wasting time here."

He does so, but doubt is plastered on his face.

Maximum Power

Then doubt is replaced with sand as he fails to keep his sled steady for a moment. I give him time to recover and we're off again, the sunset on our right and a gas giant rising on our left, casing an ominous red glow that makes the night side look like a black room from when people still used negatives with their cameras.

"Mako, we're moving south at thirty KPH, suspect enemy pursuit is hot on our heels," I bring up the tactical map, at this rate we'll hit a tropical strip surrounding some inland fresh water sea in half an hour, the Hunters are off in the gas giant's direction, to the southeast, and aren't carrying two exhausted sacks of meat, meaning they can be there in ten minutes, "Set up a welcoming committee for us at the locations I'm sending you now, mark the safe path on my BUD and be ready to lay down some cover."

The capacitors on my suit die and I slow down to a jog, momentum carrying my two potatoes for me until power levels are green again and I can resume moving at speeds usually reserved for Light Assault Vehicles.

By the time I've got the treeline in sight, it's completely bathed in red, as is all of the horizon save for the purple-ish glow receding on my right side. The trees are fucking creepy, they're not being lit up from the top, the gas giant doesn't actually rise far above the horizon, meaning the light it casts light up everything from underneath like a massive discarded flashlight, saturating this place with Infrareds and Ultraviolets that make Nanovision nothing but a glorified HD sonar.

Fighting in there is going to be a nightmare for everyone involved.

Fifty meters away, at the bottom of the final dune that marks the end of the desert and the beginning of this lush tropical strip. "Velros, Kudrensky." I call, slowing down to a jog and eventually a full stop as Mako reports a lone cloaked hostile entering the jungle merely seconds before we came into visual range. The Hostile has so far evaded every tripwire and proximity mine the team's laid down and they've lost visual the moment that gas giant started belching its horror movie lighting, "Get your weapons ready, there's something waiting for us in there."

Velros pulls a sidearm so ridiculously tiny it's almost adorable. She used up the last of her lasgun's power pack to recharge her sidearm instead. Less stopping power, but the packs will last longer.

I hand her the captain's gun and pull that piece of shit bow. Mako's got some thermite warheads for me, he'll drop them on the path, and I can't help but feel like a bow and arrows are better suited for this Hunger Game bullshit that's about to happen.

Kudrensky gives Velros a once over, both of them clad in identical sweat soaked olive tank tops, and he asks "You think we could go for a drink, if we make it out of here?"

She checks the power pack on her gun, slaps it back in and punches the loading handle before answering, "If we survive this and manage not to be executed once we get back, I'll think about it, Corporal."

"Yes, ma'am, thank you ma'am." The kid replies in one cocky breath.

We enter the jungle in silence, keeping to Mako's path, and I can feel my asshole pucker up so tight the suit must think we've hit a black hole. This is going to be one shitty night, the kind of shitty I haven't known since that neo-nazi rave party my brother and I mistook for a peace rally in high school…