Unwise Decisions

Maria

The faint tremor of rock beneath her was Del's only warning. That, and the shrill alarm in her suit that lasted for less than tenth of a second before the shot struck.

She screamed, silently. The EMP burst from the Seeker coming over the ridge struck her suit full-on, blasting the electronics clean. Fire traced over her suit as secondary explosions took the oxygen recycler and lit up the fluid conduits.

The man she had been tending groaned as a small fraction of the EMP's power surged through his body. He jolted awake just as Del collapsed on top of him, knocking what little wind he had left out of him.

"Must get up," he muttered, the blinding sunlight blasting through his helmet and adding to his already substantial headache. The bleeding had stopped, but the pain hadn't. He pressed the suit's chest plate to reactivate the automed, but it had been fried by the burst.

Faint white steam came from a crack in Del's suit helmet, the pressure dropping, slowly, slowly.

He shoved her off himself and looked up at the Seeker bearing down on him. He didn't even have anything to throw at the vehicle much less any way to fight it...

Or did he?

He staggered to his feet, dragging Del behind him, thankful for the low gravity. The Seeker peeked its head over another short ridge just as he reached the opposite side of the Basilisk. It fired again, autocannon shots tearing into the Basilisk's already-damaged cockpit area. He climbed up, feeling a muscle in his chest tear under the strain, and slammed his fist into an access panel in the back of the vehicle. He typed in a control sequence on the subnode located there, and the Basilisk slid sideways, kicking its left leg out.

With a terrible crash, the fifty-ton vehicle struck the rock below and fell apart piece by piece. He only hoped the reactor had not been damaged.

It hadn't.

The vehicle fell on the already-damaged nanite cannon on its side, cracking it and spilling it open. With a sudden explosion, it blasted a cloud of nanites over the stone surface.

Sighting on the nearest target, the microscopic entities grouped together in a radial pattern and chased down the Seeker.

The vehicle tripped over a chunk of its comrade, its legs visibly weakening as nanites crawled up the unshielded base of the foot and into the leg's tube. Seconds later, it pinwheeled, crashing headlong into the toppled Bas, throwing Jehrico several meters to the stone below.

The Seeker's destroyed legs kicked a few more times, then were still. The head rested on the Basilisk's cockpit.

He grabbed Del's candlegun from where it had fallen and started cutting the head apart.

A metal spider a meter long crawled out of the vehicle and was about to scamper away, but Jehrico fired a shot at it and blasted it to pieces. He went to Del and dragged her over to the Cybrid vehicle, placing her inside the cockpit where she would at least be sheltered from the sun.

He glanced around him. Nothing. No movement, only the silence of the Mercurian dusk. The sun was touching the horizon, and the streamers of the corona were pearly white banners waving slowly in the breeze. Stars twinkled among the clouds of the Milky Way, their sparkle matched by the flash of sunlight on rock crystals below. The plains were as gold, reflecting the sun's light like a mirror.

"It isn't such a bad place to die," he thought, and lost consciousness.

-----

Xenogears's Goad sprinted over the plains, outrunning, if barely, the human Minotaur chasing behind her firing a few EMP bursts at her. The shots were not dangerous, unless the enemy got a lucky hit. She forced herself to ignore them, as well as the memory of Altas's last words: "You're as crazy as she is!"

The Minotaur fell back around a small crater that her Goad had leapt over, and she breathed a sigh of relief as the EMP shots stopped for a little while. Her sensors showed Del's suit transponder had gone out, but the other, presumably of the Bas pilot, was still transmitting.

Two kilometers. She turned her gaze to the west, and saw the flash of sunlight over a metal debris field. Seeker remnants, judging by the spread pattern. Two Seekers had been destroyed, one of which was piled up over the destroyed hulk of a Basilisk.

A man was lying beneath the Seeker's head, in the shadow of the Basilisk. This was good: direct sunlight for any prolonged period would deal a human a fatal dose of radiation in ten minutes, what with the current-- untimely-- solar maximum.

Xenogears tried to take her mind off that mystery. One problem at a time.

"Xenogears to pilot," she called into her comm. "Xenogears to Delithita."

No response.

One kilometer. With a burst of speed the Mino cleared the ridge behind her and resumed fire. She gritted her teeth. This would be close, especially if the pilot was unconscious. Indeed, she doubted she would be able to rescue him at all before the Mino caught up to her.

She fired a quick blaster shot at the Basilisk above the man, trying to startle him awake. It didn't work.

The Mino fired again, striking sparks off her aft shields.

-----

"Wake up!" a harsh female voice cried in Jehrico's ear, startling him. He jolted awake, sat up quickly, seeing a Goad skidding to stop only meters from him. He groaned and lay back down. "Get up or you will die," the voice said, insistently. He looked up, and blinked.

He squinted. Nothing was there...

He had seen something. A figure, black clothes lit with a flash of gold on the side facing the sun, a patch of blackness obscuring the stars in the sky. Eyes, kind, concerned, fastened on his--

He shook his head. Tired. He had to sleep.

"Get up," the voice said again, sadly, knowing it was futile. He glanced at the sky again, looked around at the horizon that was shimmering like water through his tearing eyes. He staggered to his feet, feeling arms catch him and guide him along. He limped over to the Goad, collapsed over the blaster on the bottom mount.

-----

Xenogears would have cursed if it would have had any use. It was, of course, an unnecessary act, and she spent her energies pulling Del out of the cockpit of the ruined Seeker. She looked back, checking on the Minotaur--

And gasped, as it exploded into a massive fireball.

She stared at the toppling vehicle with its head blown off, looking around for the shots that had taken it from behind. The glint of sunlight off Cybrid steel would have been apparent quite quickly.

Movement out of the corner of her eye startled her, and she spun. In the distance and rapidly retreating, a flash of white marred the perfectly flat horizon. She squinted, but it had already crossed the horizon.

With quick, leaping movements she went to the Minotaur's destroyed hulk, and examined the exploded hole in its middle.

A fragment of black metal caught her eye and she pulled it out of the stone where it had embedded itself.

She turned it end-over-end, then stuffed it in a pocket and returned to the Goad.

-----

"They'll both be alright," Xenogears informed Icey. "But it will take them both several days to recover. This Jehrico is resourceful: he apparently was able to engage and destroy at least three vehicles in a crippled Bas, and performed several emergency jerry-rigs under difficult conditions. If he wants the job, I would recommend adding him to our ranks."

"Yes," Icey said hurriedly. "The problem is, we have a force coming in. About a dozen of these IB vehicles."

Xenogears mulled that over for a second. "This is bad. Our combat effectiveness is reduced."

"Yeah so what else is new? It's a miracle that all these jerry-rigs of our own ever work. Get ready for battle, we engage in half an hour."

"Understood." The conversation over, Xeno turned away and pulled the chunk of metal from her pocket. She examined it on her way down the corridor, tracing the lines of fine electronics with her fingertips. The residue of hydraulic fluid was a white powder among the heat-distorted metal fibers of the piece.

Several years ago, Maria had investigated the structure of the Shrike missiles and decided they were not suitable for use in a vacuum. With no air to propagate a shockwave, only the radiation damage from the explosion would affect a targeted vehicle.

So she had designed a hydraulic system inside the missile. The kinetic energy of the explosion would be contained within the missile's tube, and ejected in a forward-facing blast out the nose. This allowed penetration of the enemy's hull by the first stage of the rocket. The second stage would then explode and direct its energy into the vehicle's structure directly.

It was a unique system, and Xenogears had never seen any other rocket with a similar system, human or Cybrid.

The last load of hydraulic-modified Shrikes had been mounted on Maria's Apocalypse...

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