TIME: DAY 2 OF EXILE, 16:30 HOURS.
LOCATION: SECTOR 8 - THE ASH-FALL BRIDGE.
STATUS: COUNTER-ATTACK.
The silence on the Ash-Fall Bridge was heavier than the smog.
A minute ago, the air was vibrating with the terrifying, rhythmic thud of the Blackwatch 'Thumper' mechs and the electronic screech of the Mobile Command Center's jamming field. Now, the only sound was the wind howling through the suspension cables and the distant, dying crackle of the downed bomber outside the Scrapyard walls.
Leo (Tank) stood out in the open, the heavy machine gun pressed tightly to his shoulder, his finger hovering over the trigger. His massive chest heaved with adrenaline and pain. He stared at the three twelve-foot-tall war machines.
They were statues. Their hydraulic limbs were locked mid-stride. Their rotary cannons pointed uselessly at the concrete. The glowing red optical sensors that served as their eyes were completely dead, replaced by the dull, flat black of powered-down glass.
Behind the mechs, the six matte-black 'Rhino' Armored Personnel Carriers had rolled to a halt, their engines sputtering and dying as the localized network failure triggered their internal safety shutoffs. In the center, the massive Mobile Command Center sat dark and silent, its parabolic dishes drooping toward the deck.
"Is it a trick?" a scavenger whispered from behind the ruined transit bus. He clutched a sharpened piece of rebar, his hands shaking violently. "Are they waiting for us to step out?"
"It's no trick," Torque rasped. The cyborg gang leader stepped out from behind a concrete pylon, his organic eye wide with disbelief. He tapped the radio clipped to his chest. A burst of static crackled, followed by the chatter of the Ironhead lookouts on the perimeter wall.
"Comms are back up," Torque announced, his synthesized voice echoing across the bridge. "The jamming field is dead. The Admin's network is down."
Leo lowered his weapon slightly, a savage, disbelieving grin spreading across his grime-streaked face.
"Ren did it," Leo rumbled. "He actually broke their brains."
Torque didn't celebrate. He racked the slide of his combat shotgun with a loud, aggressive clack. His metallic jaw clenched, grinding the gears.
"They came to burn my yard," Torque snarled, pointing his hydraulic claw at the dead column of armor. "They came to incinerate my people. Don't just stand there! Tear them apart!"
The Ironheads didn't need to be told twice. A roar of pure, feral vengeance erupted from the hundreds of laborers and gangers manning the barricade. They surged forward like a tidal wave of rust and rage, swarming over the barricade and sprinting down the bridge toward the immobilized Blackwatch forces.
The elite Blackwatch soldiers were trapped inside metal coffins.
Without the Aegis network to authenticate their biometric signatures, the electronic locks on the Rhino APCs had defaulted to their failsafe mode: sealed shut.
Ironheads swarmed the vehicles, beating against the reinforced sloped armor with pipe wrenches, sledgehammers, and crowbars. Sparks flew as they tried to find purchase on the smooth, matte-black plating.
Torque stomped up to the lead APC. He carried a heavy industrial plasma torch scavenged from the smelting pits. He ignited it, the blue-white flame hissing viciously in the damp air.
"Burn them out!" Torque commanded, stepping toward the rear doors of the troop transport. "Cook them in the can!"
"No!"
Leo's voice was a thunderclap. The giant man strode forward, grabbing Torque's cybernetic shoulder with his good hand and hauling him back from the APC.
Torque spun around, raising the plasma torch, his eye flashing with rage. "Back off, Tank! These are Ministry executioners! If the roles were reversed, they'd be sweeping our ashes into the river right now!"
"We aren't them," Leo growled, standing his ground, towering over the cyborg. "If we burn men alive while they're trapped in a box, we're no better than the Admin. We take their gear. We take their intel. But we don't slaughter helpless prisoners."
Torque sneered, the speaker in his throat buzzing with static. "This is the Rust Belt, big guy. We don't have prisons. We don't have food to feed hostages. Dead men don't come back for revenge."
"I said, no," Leo repeated. The absolute certainty in his voice made the surrounding Ironheads hesitate, lowering their sledgehammers. Leo stepped up to the rear doors of the APC.
He didn't use a torch. He looked at the heavy, manual emergency-release wheel recessed into the center of the armored doors. He shoved his heavy machine gun onto his back by its sling.
Leo gripped the wheel with his right hand. He placed his injured, freshly stitched left hand over it for leverage, ignoring the searing, blinding pain that shot up his forearm. He planted his heavy boots against the bumper of the APC.
He roared, a primal sound of exertion, and pulled.
The metal groaned. The locking mechanism, designed to be operated by a hydraulic winch from the outside, fought against him. The veins in Leo's neck bulged like thick cables. His bandages soaked through with fresh, bright red blood.
With a deafening CRACK, the locking pins sheared.
Leo spun the wheel and ripped the heavy armored doors open.
Inside the APC, twelve elite Blackwatch soldiers sat in the dark. They were fully geared in sleek, urban-combat ballistic armor, their faces hidden behind respirators and red-lensed tactical goggles. They held advanced kinetic assault rifles.
But they were terrified.
For the first time in their careers, they had no HUD, no targeting telemetry, no commanding officer barking orders in their earpieces, and no drone support. They were blind and cut off.
Leo stood in the doorway, bleeding, massive, and silhouetted against the smoggy sky. He looked like a demon of the Undercity.
"Drop the rifles," Leo commanded, his voice rumbling through the cramped metal interior. "Drop the armor. Step out. Or I let the guy with the blowtorch have his turn."
For a long, agonizing second, the Blackwatch squad leader hesitated, his finger tight on the trigger of his rifle. He looked at the giant blocking the exit, and then at the hundreds of screaming, armed Ironheads surrounding the vehicle.
The squad leader slowly lowered his weapon, dropping it onto the steel floor plating.
The rest of the squad followed suit.
"Strip them!" Torque barked, waving his men forward. "Take everything! The guns, the armor, the med-kits! Leave them in their undershirts and kick them back across the bridge!"
The looting began. It was efficient and ruthless. The Ironheads stripped the elite soldiers of millions of credits worth of military hardware in minutes. They repeated the process for the other five APCs.
Leo watched them go, his chest heaving, his hand throbbing in agony. He looked at the massive, silent Mobile Command Center sitting in the middle of the bridge.
We won, Leo thought, the realization hitting him like a physical blow. We actually beat the Ministry.
TIME: 16:35 HOURS.
LOCATION: THE VAULT (SCRAPYARD BASE).
STATUS: MEDICAL EMERGENCY.
In the subterranean bunker beneath the Scrapyard, victory looked a lot like death.
"Hold him down! He's seizing!"
Kara (Jinx) screamed, diving across the concrete floor to grab Ren's thrashing legs.
Ren was convulsing violently in the padded chair. The heavy, modified welding-mask VR rig had been torn off his head, but the damage was already done. The unbuffered neural feedback from destroying a Level 50 Boss in the raw code had sent a massive, unregulated electrical surge directly through his nervous system.
His eyes were rolled back in his head, showing only the whites. Bright red arterial blood was pouring from his nose and ears, staining the collar of his jacket and the front of his shirt. His jaw was locked tight, grinding his teeth together so hard Kara could hear the enamel cracking.
"Ren! Ren, stay with me!" Maya sobbed, kneeling beside him, using her entire body weight to pin his shoulders to the chair. Her hands were covered in his blood. "Kara, do something! His heart is beating too fast!"
"I can't!" Kara panicked, her hands shaking as she tried to read the erratic, spiking lines on her makeshift medical monitor. "The Hardline dumped too much raw data into his visual cortex! It's basically a localized grand mal seizure! If I hit him with a sedative now, his heart might just stop entirely!"
"Then what do we do?!" Maya cried, tears cutting tracks through the soot on her face.
"We wait!" Kara yelled, tears welling in her own eyes. "We have to let his brain process the backlog of phantom pain! Just keep him from biting his tongue!"
For two agonizing minutes, the bunker was filled only with the sound of Ren's violent thrashing and Maya's desperate, pleading whispers. Arthur, awake on his cot, watched with wide, horrified eyes, too weak to move and help.
Slowly, the convulsions began to subside.
The violent jerking turned into severe tremors. Ren's locked jaw finally relaxed with a gasp. His chest heaved as his lungs greedily pulled in the damp, subterranean air. His eyes rolled forward, the pupils blown wide and unresponsive to the harsh fluorescent light above him.
"Ren?" Maya whispered, gently wiping the blood from his face with a clean rag. "Can you hear me?"
Ren blinked slowly. He looked at the concrete ceiling. He looked at Maya's tear-stained face. He looked at Kara, who was slumped against the console, sobbing in relief.
"Did... did the bridge hold?" Ren rasped. His voice sounded like it was filled with broken glass. Every muscle in his body felt like it had been beaten with a sledgehammer. The migraine behind his eyes was a blinding, living entity of pain.
"Torque just radioed down," Kara choked out, wiping her eyes behind her cracked glasses. "The Blackwatch column powered down. Leo forced them to surrender. They're stripping the armor and the mechs right now."
Ren let his head fall back against the chair, a long, shuddering sigh escaping his lips. "Good. The Ghost Army held the aggro."
"You almost died, Ren," Maya said, her voice shaking with a mixture of profound relief and fierce anger. She grabbed his face in both her hands, forcing him to look at her. "You promised me you wouldn't die. You promised me you'd see this baby."
"I'm still here," Ren whispered, reaching up with a trembling hand to touch her cheek. "I'm not logging out yet."
He sat up. The movement made the room spin violently, and he retched dryly over the side of the chair.
"Whoa, hey, stay down!" Kara ordered, stepping forward. "Your nervous system is fried, Ren. You need sleep. You need hydration. You need to not move for at least twenty-four hours."
"No," Ren said, gripping the armrests of the chair and forcing himself to his feet. His legs wobbled like jelly, but he locked his knees, refusing to fall. "Arc 3 is over. The survival phase is done."
He wiped the blood from his chin and looked at Kara with intense, burning eyes.
"The Admin just handed us a Mobile Command Center on a silver platter," Ren said, his tactical mind completely overriding his physical trauma. "When the Ministry realizes their jamming field failed and their column was captured, they won't send ground troops. They'll send orbital strikes. We have less than an hour before they purge this entire grid square."
Ren staggered toward the heavy blast doors of the Vault.
"Where are you going?!" Maya demanded, moving to stop him.
"To the bridge," Ren said, leaning heavily against the cold steel of the door. "The loot hasn't been secured. Jinx, grab your laptop. We have a physical server to hack."
TIME: 17:00 HOURS.
LOCATION: THE ASH-FALL BRIDGE.
STATUS: THE LOOTING.
The walk from the underground Vault to the Ash-Fall Bridge took everything Ren had. He leaned heavily on Leo, who had rushed back to the Scrapyard to escort him. The giant Tank wrapped his massive, uninjured right arm around Ren's waist, practically carrying the sniper through the cheering crowds of Ironhead laborers.
They looked at Ren differently now.
He wasn't just another rat from the Sump. He was the man who had brought down the sky and frozen the unkillable mechs. He was Wraith.
When they reached the bridge, Ren was stunned by the sheer volume of military hardware scattered across the asphalt.
Dozens of elite Blackwatch soldiers were jogging back across the bridge toward Sector 7 in nothing but their black thermal undershirts and boots, their heads hung in humiliation.
Behind them, the Ironheads were piling up a mountain of high-end gear. Sleek, composite-weave ballistic vests, tactical helmets with integrated night-vision optics, and crates of kinetic armor-piercing ammunition.
Torque was standing on the hood of a Rhino APC, inspecting a captured assault rifle with glee.
"Wraith!" Torque shouted, jumping down and walking over. The cyborg looked at Ren's pale, bloodstained face and frowned. "You look like you went ten rounds with a smelting furnace, strategist."
"I'm fine," Ren lied, leaning against the cold, sloped armor of the nearest disabled mech. He looked at the massive, eight-wheeled dreadnought sitting in the center of the bridge. "Is the Command Center secure?"
"Doors are locked tight," Torque grunted. "My boys tried torches, thermite, and C4. The armor on that thing is three feet of depleted uranium weave. We can't crack it."
"You don't need explosives to open a door," Ren said, turning his head slightly. "Jinx."
Kara stepped out from behind Leo. She carried her battered laptop and a coil of heavy data cables. She walked up to the side of the massive Mobile Command Center. She didn't look at the heavy blast doors. She looked at the external maintenance panel near the rear wheel well.
She popped the panel open with a screwdriver, exposing a cluster of diagnostic ports. She plugged a cable from her laptop directly into the military-grade hardware.
"They isolated their local network to prevent wireless hacking," Kara muttered to herself, her fingers flying across her keyboard. "But physical access is physical access. If I inject a corrupted handshake protocol through the diagnostic port, I can trick the hydraulic relays into thinking the vehicle is submerged, triggering the emergency evacuation protocol."
Ten seconds passed.
With a heavy, pneumatic hiss, the massive rear ramp of the Command Center slowly lowered, hitting the asphalt with a heavy thud.
Torque stared at the open ramp, then looked at Kara. "Remind me never to let you near my personal safe, girl."
"I'll keep that in mind," Kara smirked, adjusting her glasses.
Ren detached himself from the mech and walked slowly up the ramp, followed closely by Leo and Kara. Torque and his enforcers crowded in behind them.
The interior of the Mobile Command Center was a hacker's paradise. The walls were lined with advanced server racks, cryptographic processors, and holographic tactical tables. The screens were currently dark, locked down by the network failure.
"Jinx," Ren ordered, pointing to the primary server bank at the front of the cabin. "Download everything. I want their encrypted comms frequencies. I want their patrol routes. I want the blueprints for the Apex Spire. If it's on their hard drives, I want it."
"I'm on it," Kara said, already plugging her laptop into the main terminal.
Ren turned to the rear of the cabin, where a series of heavy, locked weapon lockers lined the wall.
"Leo," Ren nodded toward the lockers. "Pop them."
Leo stepped up, grabbed the heavy steel handles, and simply ripped the doors off their hinges with a screech of tearing metal.
Inside sat the specialized, high-tier gear reserved for Blackwatch officers.
Ren reached in and pulled out a long, heavy case. He flipped the latches and opened it.
Inside, resting on custom-cut foam, was an M-99 "Archangel" Kinetic Sniper Rifle. It was a masterpiece of lethal engineering. It featured an integrated smart-scope, a carbon-fiber chassis, and a specialized barrel designed to fire hypersonic, armor-piercing sabots.
Ren lifted the weapon. It was perfectly balanced. It was vastly superior to the rusted iron pipe he had carried through the Sump, and lightyears ahead of the heavy, inaccurate rifle Rook had given him.
He slung it over his shoulder, the familiar, comforting weight settling against his back. He felt like a piece of his soul had been returned to him.
Leo reached into the locker and pulled out a massive, reinforced chest piece. It was "Juggernaut" class heavy assault armor, designed for point-blank breaching operations. It was the only piece of armor large enough to fit his immense frame. He strapped it on over his dirty tank top. He looked like an indestructible wall of black steel.
"The survival phase is over," Ren said, his voice cold and hard, echoing in the metal cabin.
He turned to face Torque.
"Listen to me carefully, Torque," Ren said, stepping up to the cyborg gang leader. "The Admin is going to realize that this column is lost in a matter of minutes. When they do, they will authorize an orbital strike to wipe Sector 8 off the map, just to erase their failure."
Torque's metal jaw clenched. "Then we have to evacuate the Scrapyard. We have to run to the deep tunnels."
"No," Ren said. He pulled a heavy, encrypted radio off the console of the Command Center and tossed it to Torque. "We don't run. We use their own toys against them."
Ren pointed to the servers Kara was hacking.
"The Admin thinks this Command Center is offline because of a localized glitch," Ren explained. "Jinx is currently splicing our Hardline directly into their military communication frequency. We are going to broadcast a signal using their own encrypted authentication keys."
"What signal?" Torque asked, confused.
Ren's eyes narrowed into dangerous slits.
"We are going to tell the Apex Spire that Sector 8 has been fully neutralized. We are going to broadcast a 'Mission Accomplished' code, signed by the commander of this very column."
Torque's organic eye widened. "You're going to forge a victory report? If they buy it, they'll call off the airstrike. They'll think the Scrapyard is a graveyard."
"They'll think we're dead," Ren confirmed. "And dead men don't build armies."
Ren turned back to look out the open ramp of the Command Center, staring out over the hundreds of cheering, armed Ironheads and the captured mountain of military hardware. He saw a rusted, oppressed underclass that had just been handed the weapons of their oppressors.
"Sector 8 doesn't belong to the Ministry anymore," Ren whispered, sliding a full magazine into his new sniper rifle with a satisfying click.
"Welcome to the Resistance."