He was a very fast young man. None of the small, whining Rix projectiles had hit Bassiritz, nor had they, by the celeritous standards of the event, even come close.
His eyesight was awfully good too. Throw a coin ten meters, and Bassiritz could run and catch it--the called side facing up in his small, yellow palm. The rest of humanity drifted through Bassiritz's reality with the tardy grace of glaciers, vast, dignified creatures who evidently knew a lot of things, but whose movements and reactions seemed deliberately, infuriatingly slow. They seemed dazzled by the simplest situations: a glass fell from a table, a groundcar suddenly hurtled toward them, the newssheet was pulled from their hand by a gust of wind--and they flailed like retarded children. Why not just react?
But this Rixwoman. Now she was fast.
Bassiritz had almost killed her a few moments ago. With the servos in his armor set to stealth and his varigun precharged to keep it quiet, he'd crawled into a cunning position behind the Rixwoman, separated from her only by the translucent bricks that formed the sunwall in this part of the garden. The enemy commando was pinned by supporting fire from squadmates Astra and Saman, who were smart enough to let Bassiritz do the killing. Their variguns pummeled the area with fragmentation projectiles, kicking up a maelstrom of flying glass and microbarbed shrapnel and keeping the Rixwoman down, down, down. She knelt and crawled, and her shadow was warped and twisted by the crude, handblown shapes of the brickwork, but from this angle Bassiritz could see to shoot her.
He set his varigun (a difficult weapon that forced Bassiritz to choose how to kill someone) to its most accurate and penetrating ammo-type, a single ballshot of magnetically assisted ferrocarbon. And fired.
That setting was a mistake, however. Just as Bassiritz never understood the relativistic equations that made his parents and sisters grow old so quickly, fading visibly with every visit home, and that had stolen his bride-to-be with their twisting of time, he never could remember that some varigun missiles were slower than sound. Bassiritz couldn't understand how sound could have a speed, like his squadmates claimed even seeing did.
But the crack of his weapon reached the Rixwoman before the killing sphere of ferrocarbon, and with Bassiritz-like speed she ducked. The ball-shot shattered three layers of ornamental pleasure-garden wall, but missed its target.
And now the Rixwoman knew where Bassiritz was! The swarm of seeking bullets proved that, though she herself had disappeared. All manner of shit was about to come his way. Fast shit, maybe faster than Bassiritz.
Bassiritz decided to swallow his pride and call on help from the ship above.
With his right hand he pulled a black disk from his shoulder holster. Yanking a red plastic tab from the top, Bassiritz waited for the few seconds it took the disk to confirm that it had, in fact, awoken. That red light meant that there was a man in it now--a wee man who you couldn't see. Bassiritz stood and took the stance of one skipping a flat stone across water, and hurled the disk down the long hallway. It glanced once against the marble floor, making the sharp sound of a hammer on stone, then lofted up like a leaf caught by a sudden wind...
PILOT
...Master Pilot Jocim Marx assumed control of the Y-1 general tactical floater as easily as slipping on an undershirt. Whatever grunt had thrown the floater had imparted a good, steady spin, and the small craft's fan drive accelerated without turbulence.
Marx looked out across the terrain materializing in synesthesia, adjusting to the much larger scale of the floater (almost a hundred times the size of an Intelligencer) and the new perspective. He preferred flying these fast small craft with an inverted viewpoint, in which the floor of the palace was a ceiling over his head, the legs of humans hanging from it like giant stalactites.
The enemy target was a sharp-eared Rix commando, so the floater was seeing with only passive sensors and its highest frequency echolocation. The view was blurry, but the long, featureless hallways offered few obstacles.
The master pilot took his craft "up" to just a few centimeters from the floor, brought it to a halt behind the cover of an ornamental column. According to battle data compiled by the Lynx insertion AI, the nearest Rix commando was roughly twenty meters ahead. A hail of audio came from the canopy's speakers: blaster fire. The Rix was on the move, closing on the marine who had tossed the floater.
She had the marine's position, was moving in for the kill.
Firefight debris began to fill the air. The brittle glass and stone of the palace demanded the crudest sort of tactics: bludgeon your enemies with firepower, raining projectiles on them to cover any advance. Rix blasters were particularly well suited for this. It was not the best environment for floaters. Marx took his craft farther away from the marine, escaping the maelstrom of flying glass and dust, circling around to take a position behind the advancing Rix. At least in this cacophony, the commando wouldn't hear the soft whine of the floater's fan. Marx brought his active sensors on line and decided to go in close.
There were several ways to kill with a floater. Paint the target with a laser, and have a marine launch a cigarette-sized guided missile. Or deploy the floater's skirt of poison spurs and ram the enemy. Or simply spot for the marine from some safe vantage, whispering in the soldier's ear.
But Marx heard his marine's ragged breathing, a panicked sound as the man ran from his pursuer, and realized there wasn't time for any but the direct approach.
He brought the floater up to ramming speed.
Sweeping around a corner, Marx's craft emerged from the palace into a dense sculpture garden, the way blocked by the splayed shapes of birds in flight, windblown reeds, and flowering trees, all rendered in wire-thin metal. Marx found himself within a few meters of the Rix, the purr of her servomuscles just audible through the din of blaster fire. But she was moving through the sculptures at inhuman Rix speed, dodging and rolling among the razor-sharp sculptures. It was possible she had detected his floater; she had moved into very inhospitable terrain for Marx. If the floater collided with one of these sculptures, its fan drive would be knocked out of alignment--the craft instantly useless. With the lightspeed delay of remote control, this garden was a nightmare to fly through.
Or for the true master pilot, a challenge, Marx thought with a smile.
He closed in, prepping the poison spurs of the ram skirt with a harsh vocal command.
PRIVATE
Bassiritz was bleeding.
The Rixwoman had hounded him into the corner of two long hallways, bounded by supporting walls--one of the few hypercarbon structures in the palace. His varigun couldn't blast through them. Bassiritz was trapped here, exposed and wounded. The Rixwoman's incessant fire had brought down a hail of fragments on him, a stone-hard rain. One random sliver had cut through a thin joint in his armor, tearing into his leg just behind the knee-plate.