keep them pinned behind cover. Counting my shots as I sidled backward, I knew I’d need to reload soon. Andrea would have to keep up the suppressing fire soon.
“Andrea,” I called out, afraid to take my eye off the corner. “Are you hurt?”
No answer. The silence stretched into seconds and finally, I turned to where I’d seen her last. She was gone.
I didn’t think she’d leave me to handle this on my own, but for her to cloak when I couldn’t was essentially turning me into bait. I pressed against the left wall and reloaded, hoping Andrea had some plan I couldn’t see.
The fire suppression system activated as I racked my weapon. I wasn’t sure what had triggered it. Water poured down from the ceiling, and in that rain I saw a figure. A negative space where the water wasn’t, in the shape of a man. The shape made a quick movement then retreated behind the corner. A white cube shimmered into view and arced through the air. Another grenade, I realized, thrown directly at me.
Maximal Life Affirmation for a situation like that would be to catch it and throw it back. A good idea for most explosives, but not for those white cubes. The white cubes were adhesive grenades, a weapon peculiar to Jovian military. Trying to catch a grenade like that would only result in an explosive bonded to my hand. I couldn’t cover more than fifteen feet in the time it would take for the fuse to burn out, so running wasn’t any better an option. Both fight and flight, in this case, led to the same ends.
My solution was sacrifice. I swatted the grenade with my weapon, and the grenade clung to it as it was designed to do. I cocked back and tossed the rifle as hard as I could down the corridor, then I turned and flattened out on the floor once more. I felt the blast a second later, an instantaneous, all-over pressure like floating a hundred meters below the ocean. Then I felt the heat, searing and angry across my face. I rolled onto my back in the ensuing lull and, in the first moments after, felt a strange calm as the cool water from the fire suppression system rained on me.
I’d been lucky enough to survive twice and knew there would not be a third time. I took a deep breath, rolled over my shoulders onto my feet, and sprinted as fast as my augments could take me to the corner at the end of the hall. If any of the attackers survived the explosion, my only prospect for survival was to overwhelm them before they could recover. I drew my sidearm and thumbed off the safety.
I came around the corner and found two bodies on the floor. Both were torn apart from the waist up, but I could tell they had been very slender and tall people. They were wearing powered exoskeletons but didn’t seem to have any identifying patches or markings on their gray uniforms. The bodies were both so mangled that I didn’t notice at first how odd their positions were. I didn’t consider how strange it was that both were seated, nearly upright, on the floor. I didn’t see, until he was ready to fire, the third figure cloaked on the floor behind the bodies, outlined in falling water.
I dropped immediately, throwing my back flat onto the floor. I heard the unmistakable report of a railgun as rounds streaked over my head. I craned my neck and fired between my knees, grouping my shots as best I could around the blue muzzle arc from the weapon. The shooter flashed into view as two shots struck him in the chest. He was another slim, tall person in gray with an exoskeleton. He seemed hurt but certainly wasn’t dead.
He kicked one of the corpses onto me. A slurry of gore and water sloshed across my face. I pushed the body off of me and saw the man frantically trying to replace the rails on his weapon. That was the trouble with railguns; the power and simplicity comes at a hardware cost. The rails break down structurally from prolonged use and have to be swapped in combat. Not a big deal as part of a unit performing a raid, but a liability when everyone else in your fire team is dead.
I raised my pistol to fire and saw the slide was locked back.
I cursed the situation, myself, and God, and