Evan Currie - Heirs of Empire

She could feel time slowing down, her perceptions amping up as the thud of her heart roared in her ears. Adrenaline and a host of other wonderful crisis chemicals flooded her brain, but not in the uncontrolled manner that civilians or even knights endured. For her and the rest of the Cadre, everything was about self-control.

She moderated the influx of chemicals, bringing herself to the edge of her abilities without sacrificing the calm steadiness that allowed her to act with firm forethought.

Wings aside, actual flight was out of the question, even with all the miracles built into her armor. The sort of manipulation it would take to make the hardened photon field move to provide lift and propulsion would require computing cycles and power beyond what could be packed into the armor discs.

Gliding, however … that was well within its capabilities.

She dove hard over the train wreck while it was still in motion, angling ahead of the engine and the cars rapidly piling up behind it. The inertics on board would keep her men alive, but they were going to be badly shaken … literally … and would need time to gather themselves.

As she cleared the engine, she saw the bulk of the enemy forces break cover, already running toward the wreck.

Let’s buy some time.

Mira reconfigured her armor midflight, wings snapping back to full extension and flattening out. The wind drag snapped her feet downward, and she started bleeding speed as fast as she could. Preparing for a hard landing, the armor automatically extended from below her and prepared to absorb as much impact as it could.

Mira wasn’t interested in her own safety at the moment, however, and had no intention of softening her landing. She curled her legs up tight, balling up as her wings continued to slow the descent from suicidal to merely insane and nudging her trajectory with minute changes. The Cadre warrior slammed right down in the middle of the lead contingent.

Mira snapped her legs out straight and nearly tore the head from the unfortunate man she struck and then continued on to hit the ground and crumple to one knee as her projected armor did everything it could to both keep her alive and in fighting trim. Pain tore through her frame, but she ignored it. Pain was merely information to her, and right now it didn’t have a priority feed to her brain.

There was a shocked moment while everyone nearby just stared at her, not quite believing what had just happened. Mira took that time to straighten up to her full height and flick her wrist to change her bowed weapon.

The Armati Elan snapped out straight, the bow vanishing in an instant, leaving her with a six-foot staff in hand. She flipped it up, snapping it under the chin of the closest man, sending him tumbling to the ground with a loud crack. The weapon flipped casually over her shoulder, rolling behind her back and up into the crook of her other arm as Mira looked around, her expression hidden by the ethereal helm covering her face.

Her voice, however, was crisp and clear as she spoke. “You’re going to pay for wrecking my train.”

Stephan groaned as he picked himself up off the deck of a train car. He gently shook his head in an attempt to clear it but regretted the action as a spike of pain tore through his skull. He took a couple deep breaths and quickly walked through the centering exercises he’d learned in order to become a knight. The pain faded, not vanishing but becoming less important as he got to his feet and took stock of the situation.

The car he was in was apparently half buried in the desert, clearly on its side, if he were to judge from the sand and dirt that had scoured the armored glass. The men-at-arms were groaning to their feet and he walked among them, pulling them up and getting them clearheaded and ready to move.

“Come on, to your feet, men!” he ordered. “We’ve got enemy forces incoming!”

He grabbed a comm helm from where it had been bounced around the interior of the car and pulled it on roughly, ignoring the pinching pain as it hooked his ear on the way down. The system came online automatically, searching and finding friendly signals from around him, interpreting what it saw.

There wasn’t much to interpret, as the men-at-arms were all inside the cars. Some had systems online but most didn’t, and he paid little attention to the lot of them as a series of harsh red points lit up his display, surrounding the green signal representing Cadre Commander Delsol.

He swore, seeing that she was surrounded, and started to work faster, slapping the men around him on the shoulder as he called them up and got them moving.

“Get your patterns in gear, you sorry lot. We’ve a woman in the heat out there!” he snarled, grabbing a pulse carbine from the rack it was still hanging in.

“Sir,” a man said, “calm down.”

Stephan growled, turning toward the voice. He noted idly that the door to the next car back was open and figures were pulling themselves through.

“She may be Cadre, but she needs backup. Get moving,” he ordered calmly.

A pained voice caught his attention from the open door, and he turned to see an injured figure being helped into the car.

“You don’t need to worry about that, knight,” the man said. “That one is going to get everything that’s coming to her.”

Something in his voice caused Stephan to pause and look closer, his eyes widening as he finally recognized the figure. His carbine was still coming up when the men-at-arms opened fire on him.

Mira ducked, twisting clear of the line of fire as the pulse carbines roared around her.

They were using Imperial technology, restricted weapons, she noted in the back of her mind as she continued to move. Snapping up into a jump that brought her over the closest figure, she hooked the crook of her leg around his neck and twisted hard as she yanked him down. The audible crack was satisfying, but she didn’t have time to pat herself on the back.

The carbines roared loudly. The chemical cartridges in their breach were consumed in a fiery blaze of self-annihilation. Coherent, bomb-pumped gamma bursts emerged, capable of blowing through her hard light armor as if it were nothing but air and faery dust.

Water was one of the few things capable of stopping the bursts, and since she was surrounded by many ambulatory bags of the stuff, she grabbed the nearest attacker and held him as a human shield while his comrades pelted him with enough radiation to kill a man a hundred times over. She wasn’t entirely spared. Gamma particles were extremely high energy and a single human body wasn’t going to entirely stop them, but these were coherent bursts intended for field combat. They were designed to kill one target, not keep on going until they’d irradiated a dozen.

The man’s armor and his body’s water were enough to slow the particles down, break up their coherence, and leave enough energy behind that her own armor could deal with what was left. Still, she needed to keep moving, and as useful as the human shield was, it wasn’t mobile.

Mira planted a foot in the small of his back and kicked off hard, sending the nearly dead man flying into his comrades. Blood was pumping from a dozen festering black boils, his heart still pumping, his brain still registering the horror of the situation, his death completely assured all the same. She didn’t watch him strike; she was already in motion the instant she’d kicked out.

She swept the next closest man with her Armati, the length of the staff taking his ankles out with brutal ease, and then dove aside as another round of fire tore into the sand behind her. She hit the sand in a roll, collapsing her Armati back to two feet in length and shifting her grip as she surged back to her feet.