"You ever killed anyone in person?"

  "Yeah," Mica lied. The last thing she needed was for Fredda to get cold feet right now—metaphorically, of course. Neither of them was glad to be backed up against a rock with the wind against their chests, looking over their shoulders at the clutch of rebel soldiers guarding the base crawler. "Water riots on Sagittarius Planned Colony," Mica added: devil in the details. "I had to sneak out on a tramp freighter when they came after my dad."

  "Sagittarius? You know, that sounds kinda familiar..." Fredda stroked her chin. "What did you say your surname was?"

  "C-Concentrate!" Mica hissed. She really didn't feel like incriminating her parents right now.

  "R... Right!" Fredda nodded, adjusting her glasses. "I'll try to leave a bandpass for the spectrum you guys use for the eyes in the back... do you have any idea what that would be?"

  "The-the-the actual spikes don't escape the b-b-b-body. It's all harmonics." Shufen sat shivering between the two girls with her knees up to her chest. "M-Mica will need the resonance peak at 2.4 GHz." She gulped and sucked her nose. "S... Shit, it's cold... Fredda, I need a tissue..."

  "We'll get you one inside the crawler, bud. What else you need, a cup of coffee?" Fredda grunted dismissively. "Shall we move?"

  Mica nodded, hugging the grenade launcher to her chest as if it were a plush toy. She ran a quick battery check and made mental note of where the magazines were on her vest, as well as what types of rounds she'd thumbed into each. With any luck she wouldn't even have to use them, but it felt like her ancestors were negotiating to get her killed.

  She and Shufen sidled as close as they could to Fredda and watched her count down from 3 on her fingers. On 3, the world around them and all its reds and whites disappeared, replaced by a wall of black.

  Mica couldn't help but think of a three-legged race, except it was six legs and blindfolded, and the punishment was capture and probably death. The plan was to brisk walk backwards with her back to Fredda and Shufen, pinching Fredda's palms to steer her away from the guards, all while only being able to see a few inches ahead. The pavement was flat and quiet under her shoes, but looked like the type to have potholes in it. She tried not to think of what would happen if she tripped in one.

  Suddenly, Fredda stopped. Mica barely avoided bowling her over backwards. She looked down at her feet to find a yellow marshalling line in the circle of pavement carved out of the darkness.

  At this point, she was meant to use dead reckoning to guess if there were Feds inside the cab. If there were, she would pinch Fredda to let her know she was going to fire a frag.

  Mica pressed her temples and stilled her mind. It felt like the Feds were everywhere, ten or twenty trees milling about, radioing their superiors, checking their weapons—everywhere except directly behind her.

  They were clear.

  The three kept moving until the cab's ladder protruded into their bubble. There was a strange game of Twister as the three girls figured out how to climb in such a way that none of them got too far from Fredda, whose forehead was already drenched with concentration. Mica had to tuck her fingers under Fredda's armpit to grasp the ice-cold rungs.

  By the time the cab door was visible, Shufen was shivering badly. The wind this high above the rocks was doing a number on her. Her head tipped back repeatedly as she held back a sneeze. "A... A..."

  Don't you fucking dare. Mica's heart thumped. She glared daggers at the boffin, but that only made things worse. Ancestors, she's going to do it.

  Before she knew it, she'd hooked a knee through one of the rungs to free up her hands, pulled back Shufen's mask and pinched her nose.

  "Hchu," the girl squeaked. "T... Thanks."

  "A...a..."

  Before either of them could react, Fredda inhaled for a second, then belted out the single loudest sneeze Mica had ever heard.

  Instinct took over her body as color returned to the world around her.

  Mica whipped the gun around in one hand and loosed a round at the group closest to the base of the ladder. Three men went from standing to crumpled on the dirt in a flash of smoke. "Fuck, what gives!" she cried when one of the boffins trampled on her head; she didn't know which one, but she hoped they stepped on a drawing pin next.

  "Quick, take my hand!" Fredda hissed.

  Before Mica could even react, both of the girls had already grabbed her further up the arm and raked her over the rough lip of the cab. She wanted to strangle both of them about as much as she wanted to live. As soon as she flopped onto the corrugated deck, Mica craned her neck to see Fredda hunched over the controls, flipping through her keychain for the right fob. "C'mon, c'mon..."

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  "Get down!" Mica shouted, before lunging forward and taking Fredda's feet out from below her. Just as she'd expected, a hail of bullets shattered the windows as they hit the ground.

  "Sh... Shit!" Mica swore. A sharp pain lanced across her face as something clipped the left side of her head—she didn't know if it was debris or a ricochet. Clutching the wound she found her hand covered in a red slick of blood—so much, everywhere. This was real. It wouldn't stop bleeding.

  "Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit." Shufen crawled into a fetal position beneath the dashboard. Her eyes bulged and her cheeks paled at the sight of Mica's bloodied neck. "We're all gonna die."

  "No...!" Grunting through the pain, Mica dragged herself up to the shattered window besides the door, kicked away her magazine and plugged in the yellow one—low velocity, non-line of sight. She aimed it over her shoulder where she saw meridians and winced as it exited the muzzle less than a foot from her head. A group of trees vanished in the thunderclap and the gunfire diminished considerably.

  She turned back to the driver's seat and howled. "Fredda, drive!"

  "I'm trying!" the four-eyed girl whined, her hands a blur on the ignition. A deep, resonant rumble filled the cabin as the base crawler's engine roared to life. Sparks glanced off the windshield; Fredda shrieked before rolling under the dashboard and hitting the throttle with her elbow. Immediately the vehicle lurched forward and a stand of meridians disappeared under the tires, the cabin jostling as the crawler rolled off the pavement.

  As soon as a lull formed in the gunfire, Fredda weaseled out from the footwell and grabbed the wheel. "Here we go!"

  "A... Are you okay?" Shufen held a piece of gauze to Mica's cheek, a deep red spreading through the mesh. There was a nauseous pallor to her, but calmed down once she had a closer look at the wound itself. "It just looks like something took a bite out of your earlobe. But..."

  She glanced over her shoulder at Fredda for a second, before turning back to Mica with her brow creased in sympathy. "The felling of trees can be quite difficult to get used to," she said. "So I've heard, anyway—this is my first time. Let me know if you need any pills, or..."

  "Moumantai ah." Mica brushed her hand away. No problem.

  This was a lie, of course. Pain like a spike cut through her skull, pulsing. Along with their screams, those terminal flashes of crimson burrowed into her mind like nails. It felt like Mica had crossed a line over which she couldn't double back.

  "I... told you I had a plan!" Diane grunted as she banked. Her Gemini traced a particularly wide arc as it turned to face the beam frigate. "You guys nearly got her killed!"

  "You idiot!" Ema's Arrowhead stuck to her tail like it was on rails through the erratic twists and turns. "She's too close, you're going to kill—"

  Perhaps intending to pull a 'cobra', Diane tapped the airbrakes and instead reversed directly into Ema. The two craft clipped each other silently and spun out above the cloud layer. Not to be outdone, Diane managed to claw back just enough control to release the bright yellow missile.

  With what sounded like a whisper, the winged yellow pole glided slowly towards the frigate, as if it were biding its time.

  A pit opened in the bottom of Io's stomach. She pitched down and away from the frigate, putting the lead lining of the Arrowhead's engine between her and whatever was about to happen.

  "Chess, bring down the ramp!" Fredda held the walkie-talkie to her mouth and barked. "This is Fredda—we've got the Epitaph!"

  The engineer on the other end sounded like she'd seen a ghost. "B-Behind you! What the hell am I supposed to do about those things!"

  She was referring, of course, to the pair of half-tracks trailing them just over the dunes, which had been pelting them with bullets for the past few minutes.

  "Adapt and respond!" Fredda's eyes crossed for a second as she remembered something. "In the cupboard, next to the coffee machine!"

  "What..." The engineer trailed off. Office flotsam showered to the floor and something metallic rustled on the other end. "Found it!"

  The Academy's tail drew nearer in the windshield. Sand sloughed off the hull in waves as a tremendous cargo ramp descended, kicking up a wall of dirt the size of a building. Fredda shifted into a lower gear and floored it up the slope like there was no tomorrow. Mica shielded her face as coffee cups and energy drinks tipped back from the dashboard and clamored against the back wall of the cabin.

  As the lights of the loading bay approached, they caught a glimpse of a student in hi-vis crouched next to the door with a rectangular ATGM over her shoulder. The instant they cleared the backblast, she loosed it with a punch of fire, tossed it out the bay and hit the deck. Automatic return fire sang briefly over her head before one of the half-tracks flipped end-over-end, launched upwards by a churning fireball.

  "Shut the door!" Fredda yelled at the engineer.

  "Did you think I wouldn't?!" She charged towards the wall and bashed the close button so hard they could hear it from the cabin.

  A team of medics was waiting for Mica on the floor. One of them threw a blanket around her shoulders, took her blood pressure, took her temperature, shone a flashlight into her eyes. She told them her head hurt. They didn't seem too concerned apart from the one Tian Lung in the group, whose eyes welled up involuntarily.

  Just before the door shrieked totally shut, through the tiny sliver it formed against the doorway—

  —for a few seconds, it was daytime around the mountains.

  The blast-wave jostled Io's now-asymmetrical Arrowhead, although it was nothing she couldn't handle now. She looked back over her shoulder, trying to see if anything had survived the white fireball. Black dust swirled upwards into the vacuum column before tumbling back down in the distinctive shape of a mushroom cloud.

  Somehow, the husk of the beam frigate had survived the liquefaction of its insides, blowing side to side in the turbulent air like a cocoon filled with loose embers. The Gemini responsible climbed away from the fireball with a deep gash in its hull, going in the opposite direction to the Arrowhead that had rammed it, which streaked through the air missing a winglet.

  Her eyes scanned the horizon for the Black Adder. He'd vanished into the fire, nowhere to be seen.

  Io sniffled and sobbed, the tears tickling her chin. All she could do now was turn back. She wished she could linger a little, take it in so that nobody would see her like this, but it dawned on her that she was going to be feeling this way for a while.