Gunship Read Free Page B

blasters. I checked every one, and they’re all dead. We’re going to have to go old school on this mission.”
    Reilly cursed. This was bad news. If they had the misfortune to come up against any advanced machines during the mission, they’d lack the ability phase shift their fire. This meant the machines would be able to adapt their shields and defenses to the team’s weapons after only a few shots. Then their weapons would be useless. She held the mic for a moment and glanced down the corridor to see Chang briefly flit across the hall. The uneasy feeling came back, but she stubbornly shook it off.
    “Ty, grab a backup weapon and some grenades, then get Maude ready.”
    She clicked off as Ty’s “Roger that” faded away and grabbed her gear. Duv gave her a surly wave and turned back to his work while Skeeter disappeared under part of the raised flooring, hauling a bunch of wires along with him. She walked down the hall and then jogged the stairs from the catwalk down to the floor where Ty waited with the Tactical Off-Road Retrieval Rover, or TORR, its motor grumbling loudly in the mostly empty bay. Chang had dubbed the four-person, heavily armed, high-speed tactical vehicle “Maude,” although no one really knew why. The name had stuck. Maude had saved their asses on more than a few occasions, and the vehicle was almost like family now.
    Reilly nodded to Ty as he climbed up to man the rear turret gun. She turned the vehicle tightly and headed down the ramp into the dusty canyon. The unexpected restraint field, the damages to the ship and the weapons—it was enough to set them all on edge.
    Reilly watched their surroundings for any sign of danger while the vehicle holo-display projected the fastest route to the compound. The lack of activity only made her more wary. One thing was certain, when things went wrong early on a mission, they tended to keep going wrong until they ended with unusually bad results. The sensor suite on the vehicle was going haywire, creating a field of static and causing random energy spikes on the system. The TORR grumbled to a halt as Reilly pulled up to the edge of an open field area.
    “I’m getting some strange readings. It could be from that restraint field, but everything is too jacked up to tell for certain. Let’s leave Maude here. We can take the handheld and check it out on foot first.”
    She turned the TORR off and Ty jumped down from the turret, landing next to her, as she began to wade out into the field of tall grass. Her handheld was picking up an electrical emission that was different from the natural noise of the moon. Patiently, she watched as the device scrolled through threat profiles for restraint fields and security systems, attempting to match the signal to a known entity. She continued to walk forward, her rifle slung, while Ty cautiously took in the landscape around them. Halfway across the field, she paused. The signal was stronger here. Ty took a knee next to her, his height just enough for him to peer above the top of the grass around them. Reilly looked up, scanning out across the ocean of vegetation, looking for signs of trouble. She stood stock still as the device gave a quick beep, affirming the identity of the signal. The grass continued to ebb and flow in waves around her, waist high, like a sea of gold in the afternoon sunlight.
    There. As the wind blew, there was just the slightest deviation along the right edge of the field. The pattern sought to mimic the wind, but the movements were too precise and stood out to her trained eye. She flipped open the screen in her left hand again, queued up the pattern analysis program, and smiled grimly as it confirmed what she already knew. Ty still crouched, head and gun low, unmoving.
    The machines had already targeted them, so silence and stealth no longer mattered. “Three on the way, heading in from two o’clock, all class threes, and if there’s more I can’t see them through this damn interference.”