Ep. 1 - Think Tank - (Closed)

[Deleted]

Where: Unknown
When: Set one hour after "Online, Off the Grid"
Who: Fairwinds, Silas, MECH

---

Somewhere, another monitor sprang to life.

It glowed in the blue-lit laboratory, a narrow chamber surrounded by towering racks of computer servers and their monitors. Lights blinked on and off in the gloom while white-coated technicians moved like ghosts through the equipment, masked and silent. Only the dry tap of laptop keys and the soft whine of the air conditioning could be heard.

In the lab's observation room the glowing monitor split into four camera views. Two were black. One was snowed in static.

The last view was live. CAM 4 it was labelled.

This is what it showed:

----

The camera focused, blurrily, on the centrepiece of the laboratory: a massive steel apparatus, like an iron lung, aligned horizontally on a steel berth. Four glass panels studded the top of the tube like skylights, arranged in a row. Wires draped from it, snaking across the floor. The technicians stepped carefully over the tangled cables as they paced back and forth across the lab.

"Camera 4, check. Camera 4 is live."

The camera swung jerkily. Its unseen operator was nervous. The scene in its viewfinder shifted back and forth, before its operator walked towards the apparatus. It peered down through one of the glass panels, trying to focus upon the immobile creature plugged inside.

The camera operator cleared his throat.

"This is Day Two, Data Collection and Processing tests," he said. "Subject DC 3, Test: Neural and Brain Core. Key is, uh, A-T-dash-P-O-S, Lab D-4. Head Technician is Y. DeWitt. MECH, Ruby Hills. Test, test. Sound check is good."

The camera panned around the darkened lab. It passed over the servers, the bundled spaghetti of wiring that flowed from them, over the steel computer racks and glowing terminals. It focused briefly on the men in white lab coats before settling upon a security guard in black body armour who stood at the only door, his face hidden behind a gas mask and a rifle hefted to his chest. The guard motioned impatiently at the camera before its view hastily swivelled back to the apparatus in the middle of the room. It zoomed in on another panel of glass, and the blurry shape within it.

"Stand by," said a voice over the intercom. "All lab personnel, lock down your stations. All unauthorized terminals shut down now. Subject is going live in forty seconds. Stand by."

In forty seconds, this is what the subject saw:

----

Slowly, Fairwinds' optical sensors would come online.

She was alive, intact, sealed inside an insulated steel tube. It was a narrow apparatus - claustrophobically so, too narrow for her to stretch her wings. Blue light shone down through four glass panels in the top of the thing, chilly and pale. Little could be seen through the thick glass. A dark shape loomed over one of them: a figure, masked, pointing a hand-held camera down at her.

It was cold inside the tube. A bitter frost seemed to hang in the sterile air. She would discover that she was completely immobilized - it felt as if her motor and electrical systems had all been shut down by a foreign computer system, protected behind a battery of firewalls, rendering her unable to move. A self-diagnostic would reveal that her comm system was also offline, and that a steady data feed was flowing from her neural net, through an accessed port in her back. Cables, plugged into her, threading out of the tube.

Her audio sensors worked fine, however. Through a small speaker embedded at the far end of the tube she would hear tinny voices echoing, garbled and indistinct.

" - bring her online! This is not what I instructed!"

" - adequate protection. The technicians know how - "

" - at risk! If she should - "

" - no longer your concern - "

One of the voices was harsh, alarmed. Almost familiar. The other spoke in cool tones. There was nothing familiar about it.

[Deleted]

It was cold. She couldn't move. Her comm.s were down. Something was tickle-itching at the back of her mind. Her last clear memory was far from pleasant. There were foreign data streams buffeting about in her processor.

And she couldn't speak.

Well. This pretty much sucks on every level of suckiness on the road to crapsville.

Her wings didn't touch the sides, but her proximity sensors were buzzing from the confined space. She'd been immobile in here for a while, it felt, and the chill was no doubt being artificially maintained to keep her uncomfortable and sluggish. Only real extremes of temperature would cause her serious problems - this seemed a psychological tactic, and it was as quietly bothersome as the tiny narrow tube she'd been stuffed in.

Gunna kill whoever did this.

Fairwinds lay covered in cables in the tube and fixed a mental glower on the blurry shape through the only window she could see.

Yeah, you, glitchscrap. Gunna skin you when I get out of here, and tie your entrails 'round a Maypole. Then set it on fire.

Whoever it was didn't seem to be affected by her mental threats, though Fairwinds felt fractionally better for the imagery. Refocusing on her situation, she set about throwing some aggressive data packets at the firewall shutting down her motor systems, whilst tracking down that data feed to see where it went.

If she couldn't break or shout out, she was going to light up their screens.

[Deleted]

The blurry figure with the handheld camera actually stepped back, as if it could sense the unspoken threats she had directed at it. It hesitated and lowered the camera briefly, then looked up from her.

Meanwhile, even as her data packets lay siege to the firewall that protected the code that had stripped away her motor functions, the rest of her consciousness would be able to flit back along the lines that connected her to the alien presence that had imprisoned her. The first thing she would be aware of was that the network it commanded was crude, but brutally effective in its simplicity. Though primitive, the network was thorough - she would encounter nothing but dead ends in her effort to reach a mainframe. Every feed ended in a firewall, in layers of encryption, tangled briers of alien gibberish. The humans had been meticulous in isolating her from their systems.

What they lacked in sophistication, they made up for in military-grade diligence, it seemed. And it would appear as if they knew just how big a threat she posed.

However, Fairwinds was not out of luck entirely.

One line did not end in a digital barricade. Unlike the others it did not seem dedicated to prying data from what regions of her brain core it could burrow into and access. Rather, it was a simple one-way connection, a monitoring feed that she would be able to trace back to a single laptop within the laboratory. There was barely anything installed in the machine - it had been stripped down to a few sparse programs, most of which were tracking basic bits of information like the internal operating temperature of her brain core. Nothing that would grant the machine greater access to the other networks operating within the lab. It operated alone.

But as bare as it was, one program had not been stripped from it, a humble application that might be of interest to her:

A notepad.

She could even open it, and bring up the cursor if she so pleased.

[Deleted]

And she very much did, please, because there was apparently nothing more frustrating to Fairwinds than having her brain plugged into organic' tech and being so mired in the mess of it as to not be able to bust out of it.

This was not a discovery she had ever been inclined to make, and it wasn't going down well now. Having somewhere to vent helped marginally.

Imagining peeling the cameraman nice and slow, like getting that sexy plastic off a new screen, also soothed the simmering rage a little.

Fairwinds opened the primitive little notepad, tweaked the cursor around a little, set it to 'Word Wrap', and then stopped. There were so many angles to play this from, and she couldn't decide which would be most advantageous to her.

She could play the 'Tiny Sparkling Whah' angle, going for emotional uppercut and guilty roundhouse. That would depend on them recognising her as sentient, feeling and adorable. Reviewing what they already knew of MECH, this was improbable.

There was always 'My Master is Lord Megatron and He Will End You Like a Pudding Cup in a Black Hole', which worked three out of five times (disbelief and proximity were the potential catches) but depended on MECH being both aware of the Decepticon Commander's might, and incorrectly believing that Megatron would come crashing in looking for her. A last resort.

'You Have No Idea Who You're Messing With, Bud' would work if she wasn't so thoroughly physically incapacitated. Threats over Notepad about how stupendously awesomely dangerous she was were a tough sell, at best.

Which left playing for time whilst she tried to get her motor controls back. She could do that, Fairwinds decided, wriggling the cursor with purpose now. Taking up time by talking and being obnoxious enough to get a rise, but not so much that she was cut off, was well within her skill set.

THIS TUBE IS A LITTLE BIT OVERKILL, MECH. I'M NOT RADIOACTIVE OR PRONE TO EXPLODING UNDER PRESSURE! PROMISE! ALSO, THE WIRES AND CABLES ARE PRIMITIVE EVEN FOR YOU. YOU NEVER HEARD OF WIFI? I SUPPOSE IT LOOKS LIKE I HAVE DREDS, WHICH IS PRETTY NEAT - I FEEL LIKE I LOOK LIKE I HAVE DREDS CUZ, Y'KNOW, I CAN'T TAKE A LOOKSEE, YOU UTTER CADS, YOU. SERIOUSLY THOUGH, YOU GUYS SUCK.

When she got through these firewalls, she was totally going to pre-opening-credits MewTwo all over this joint.

[Deleted]

It didn't take long for her message to be noticed.

At first, there was a startled exclamation. The tube was too well-sealed for distinct words to make it through. All she would hear was a muffled cry as a passing technician spotted the open notepad application and the words typed on the screen.

Things got a bit livelier after that.

The lab erupted into motion as techs walked back and forth to take a look at the laptop. Fairwinds would be able to see white-clad figures hurrying past her tube, slightly blurred by the glass. There was more shouting. Voices rang over an unseen intercom. The arguing voices cut off, as if in surprise.

The cameraman hovered over her, his lens directed at her back. Even he seemed excited now.

Eventually, the commotion calmed down a little. Through one of the panes of glass a huddle of technicians was visible. They were gathered around a taller man dressed in dark combat fatigues. His back was to the tube, and before long he walked off with the techs. Fairwinds was not given a glimpse of his face before he vanished from sight.

Silence. Then:

Words, scrolling quickly as they were typed.

HELLO, FAIRWINDS. GOOD TO SEE YOU FOUND THIS COMPUTER. I'M SURPRISED TO DISCOVER THAT YOU'RE BACK ONLINE. OUR ORIGINAL PREDICTIONS SUGGESTED YOU WOULD NOT MANAGE IT FOR ANOTHER FORTY-FIVE MINUTES, ROUGHLY SPEAKING. REGARDLESS - HOW ARE YOU FEELING?

[Deleted]

Fairwinds mentally squinted at the use of her name in that returning message. It wasn't as if her designation was embossed on her undercarriage, and her diagnostics had been altered to give a serial number instead of a name.

The most obvious place they could have gleaned that information was from Roulette, though she doubted MECH could effectively interrogate the sharp-shooter. Though she'd only spent a limited time with the femme, Fairwinds had gleaned enough through records and the Nemesis grapevine to know that Roulette was tough as treds, loyal to the cause, and smart on her own. She could have been hacked, which Fairwinds wouldn't have thought likely if she weren't currently immobilised by interfering software.

Roulette could be being held in this same facility, being studied just like she was. Roulette could also, in all likelihood, be being dismembered right now. Fairwinds found the latter to be the more effective motivator, and snarled into the firewalls. If she could short something, even in her own processor, it could break her own of the mire.

The tallest-leader figure seemed to be interested in communicating with her, which would give her the time she needed to work a way out. Hopefully they were one of those arrogant villain types, and she'd get a data-rich monologue to take away.

FANTASTIC. JUST LIKE BEING AT HOME. THOUGH I DO MISS RECHARGING PLUGGED INTO THE MOTHER-MAINFRAME.

Immediately, the last line of text was deleted, though it had appeared just long enough to be read.

AND HOW'RE YOU? TIRED? HOT? COLD? DEHYDRATED? MEDICATING A CARDIOVASCULAR CONDITION? YOU MEATSACKS ARE SO DELICATE. JUST BREAK AND EXPLODE FROM THE SMALLEST TRAUMA. IS THAT WHY I'M IN HERE? YOU AFRAID I'LL PECK YOU?

[Deleted]

Her response elicited a buzz from the gathered lab technicians. The glass muffled their voices, though the inflection of the drone was clear enough. Through it she would be able to see a few more men in white coats walking over to the laptop.

The cameraman remained where he was however, his handheld pointed at her.

There was a pause as the voices spoke between themselves before quieting.

The cursor moved.

ACTUALLY, YOUR CURRENT RESIDENCE IS WHAT WE SHALL REFER TO AS AN ISOLATION UNIT, it said. NOT ONLY DOES IT PROVIDE THE NECESSARY DRIVES AND CONNECTION POINTS TO WIRE AND ISOLATE POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS HARDWARE, IT IS ALSO CAPABLE OF WITHSTANDING THE EXPLOSIVE FORCE OF MOST IEDS. IN YOUR CASE IT HAS BEEN MODIFIED TO ASSIST IN THE CONTAINMENT OF SMALLER FOREIGN AUTOMATONS AS WELL. I'LL SPARE YOU THE DETAILS.

The masked cameraman gave her a silent thumbs up.

Meanwhile, the firewalls held under Fairwinds' assault. Not only did they politely acknowledge her as an external user, but openly recognised her as a known foreign system and redirected her back into another network of stripped out lab computers currently running a simple program dedicated to recalculating the difference between local standard time and Daylight Savings time. It would, at least, tell her that wherever she was being held was within the Pacific time zone. Hm.

The cursor was moving again.

IF I MAY, A QUESTION, it said. WHEN YOUR DISAPPEARANCE HAS BEEN NOTED, APPROXIMATELY HOW QUICKLY WOULD YOU ANTICIPATE A RESPONSE TO ARRIVE? EVEN IF ROULETTE IS WRITTEN OFF AS BREAKDOWN WAS, I ASSUME THE LOSS OF A DATA-SPECIALIST SUCH AS YOURSELF CANNOT BE IGNORED AS EASILY.

[Deleted]

'Containment' probably translated to 'lots and lots of weaponry is pointed at you'. Fairwinds... figured she was just fine being spared the details. It would probably depress her, at this point. If she could regain any motor function, however...

These firewalls were really starting to get bothersome, now. For such a low-tech species, they certainly knew how to use their shitty tech in effective ways. It wasn't sophisticated or particularly clever, but it was well layered and obnoxiously persistent.

Abandoning time-telling for a moment, Fairwinds returned to the Notepad.

YOU REALLY DON'T GET HOW THIS WORKS.

I'M NOT IMPORTANT. I'M NOT BAIT. I'M NOT A BARGAINING CHIP. I'M A DECEPTICON. I'M EXPENDABLE IN THE SERVICE OF THE CAUSE. WE ALL ARE. THAT TACTIC WILL WORK WITH THE AUTOBOTS, BUT NOT WITH US.

BUT THEN YOU'RE NOT TARGETING THEM, ARE YOU.

These guys were damaging her calm, now. She sorely wished that Notepad could convey scoffing.

(*?-?)

That'll work.

THIS PLANET IS SO FUCKED IF OUR COMMANDER DECIDES THAT YOU'RE MORE THAN JUST AN IRRITATION. WE USE NUCLEAR MATERIAL TO FLAVOR DRINKS, YO.

(?_?)

[Deleted]

AH YES, EXPENDABLE, said the cursor. OF COURSE. IMPLYING THAT THEY WILL MAKE NO ATTEMPT TO RETRIEVE YOU. THE SAME WAY THAT BREAKDOWN WAS CONSIDERED EXPENDABLE, I PRESUME. EXCEPT YOUR FELLOW DECEPTICONS SENT A SMALL TEAM IN TO RETRIEVE HIM. LED, OF COURSE, BY NONE OTHER THAN STARSCREAM. SO I THINK I WILL SIT BACK AND OBSERVE WHAT EFFORTS GET EXPENDED IN THE INTEREST OF RESCUING YOU AND YOUR COLLEAGUE ROULETTE. I'M SURE IT WILL BE A VERY APPLAUDABLE SHOW.

Before Fairwinds gave up in the face of the persistent firewalls, she might notice something... odd. According to the network the computers were reporting that the time was at least an hour slower than the time her own internal chronometer was giving her.

Her watch was running fast, perhaps?

The cursor moved again.

I SHOULD SHOULD MENTION WE DON'T CONSIDER YOU AS EITHER BAIT OR A BARGAINING CHIP. YOU ARE A CONVENIENCE FOR OUR TECH DEPARTMENTS, A WAY TO SPARE THEM PERHAPS THREE TO FIVE YEARS OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT. CONSIDER YOURSELF OUR GUEST. OR, IF YOU DON'T APPRECIATE A SHOW OF FAUX AFFABILITY, YOU MAY CONSIDER YOURSELF AN INTERESTING PIECE OF HARDWARE WE INTEND TO STUDY AND DISAS-AS-SEMBLE. THAT'S ALL.

The little notepad program faltered, flickering against her neural net. The low drone of voices outside her tank took on a staticky note before clearing.

The cursor moved on. This fellow was oddly chatty.

OH, ONE MORE MISCONCEPTION I SHOULD CLEAR UP. WE AREN'T TARGETING YOUR ARMY SPECIFICALLY. YOUR DECEPTICONS HAVE MERELY WALKED IN FRONT OF OUR GUNS MORE OFTEN THAN THE AUTOBOTS HAVE. I FRANKLY COULD CARE LESS WHICH OF YOU ENDS UP IN MY COMPANY, NO MORE THAN I CARE IF I PURCHASE A CARTIER OR A PIAGET FOR MY NEXT WATCH. I'LL TAKE WHAT FUNCTIONS WELL AND IS AVAILABLE TO ME AT THE TIME. AND IT MAY INTEREST YOU TO KNOW THAT THIS TIME AN AUTOBOT MADE ITSELF AVAILABLE TO ME AS WELL. WE WERE UNABLE TO OBTAIN HIS NAME, UNFORTUNATELY. PERHAPS YOU KNOW HIM - A WHITE JET, F-35 I BELIEVE, WITH RED MARKINGS.

[Deleted]

<I>Air Raid.</I>

The one ever so slight silver lining in being completely immobilised was that she couldn't betray so much as an autonomic reaction. Fairwinds continued to lie still in the tank, wondering at the flickering glitches; how they hsd gotten their information on Starscream; and how super unfair it was that after weeks of lurking around Haven once she'd heard of the Aerialbot's presence on Earth, that <I>this</I> was the closest she'd gotten to seeing him.

She shouldn't care about Air Raid being in MECH's clutches (unconscious, injured, alone...), or even about Roulette right now. It was, she decided, her sole priority to bust out - taking as much of their intel as possible. Roulette was a tough femme. Air Raid had a high chance of being rescued for being an Autobot, who in turn had connections with the human military. They'd be fine.

And she had enough on her chips not being turned into schematics for the next generation iPhone or toaster.

The repeated words and flickering window were promising. Human technology was occassionally sophisticated/effective in its application, but fundamentally weak in materials. If she could break enough to free at least one of her systems from their snares...

The cassette began a game to see how many times shr could ask the computer the time per second.

SO YOU'RE BASICALLY A CHOP SHOP? LIKE YOU'RE THE FIRST GUYS TO ADVANCE THEMSELVES BY HACKING UP OTHERS. I HOPE THIS BASE IS BURIED IN THE DEEPEST, DARKEST HOLE ON THE PLANET, BECAUSE YOU'VE STRUCK ON THE ONE THING THAT COULD SUSPEND OUR INTERGALACTIC WAR FOR THE TEN HOURS IT'D TAKE FORBUS ALL TO WIPE YOU OUT AND WASH OUR HANDS. YOU'RE NAIVE IF YOU THINK YOU CAN STAY UNDER THE RADAR LONG ENOUGH TO EXTRAPOLATE ANY MEANINGFUL DEFENSE.

[Deleted]

The computer kept up with her rapid queries; each time she interrogated it it returned the time to her, broken down into fractions of seconds. It showed no signs of strain against her persistence. But still it remained oddly out of synch with her own chronometer, running at least an hour slower than her own time. Closer to an hour and forty-four minutes slower, actually.

The cursor paused. Then, it ticked onwards.

I ANTICIPATE WE SHALL ENCOUNTER DECEPTICON AGGRESSION SOON ENOUGH, it typed. I'M LOOKING FORWARD TO IT. IT WILL BE A GOOD TEST FOR OUR STANDARD OPERATING RESPONSE PROCEDURES, I EXPECT. AND THAT IN TURN BRINGS MENTION OF ONE OF OUR GREATEST ADVANTAGES HERE, ON OUR OWN PLANET - CAN TRAVEL ANYWHERE WITH IMPUNITY, QUICKLY AND SILENTLY, BENEATH NOTICE. CAN YOUR KIND HONESTLY CLAIM LIKEWISE?

The cursor paused again. It blinked in place, black against the stark white screen.

Behind her, the man in the dark combat fatigues turned from the laptop and the huddle of technicians gathered around it and looked back in her direction. The light fogging of the glass obscured his features; all that could be made out was his height and pale close-cut hair. The masked cameraman continued to circle, still filming.

Another glitchy burst of static. Then:

THERE IS ONE OTHER ADVANTAGE THAT WE POSSESS THAT YOU MAY YET BE UNAWARE OF. WOULD YOU CARE TO KNOW MORE?

[Deleted]

In any kind of technology, a glitch was a glitch. Unintended. Uncontrolled. A weak spot.

Fairwinds poured as much processing power as she could muster into the single, narrow connection she had with the MECH computer. Perhaps pointing out that it was running slow would piss it off...

Notepad popped up a new message - intact. The letters didn't appear individually. Something to press on. Fairwinds mentally rolled her optics (she'd gotten that jfc gesture down perfect, now - lots of practicing in shiny surfaces) at the content. Doubtless the egotistical meatsack was smirking away, feeling all high and mighty whilst it shed dead epithelial cells and squelched full of all manner of organic disgustingness just waiting to be excreted.

YOU HAVE SOMEONE ON THE INSIDE?

It was a fair assumption to make - Fowler's organisation could realistically be involved. MECH could be a Black Ops dagger in a more innocuous sheath of peace, co-operation and mutual understanding between their two races. Or the Autobots, anyway.

[Deleted]

Fairwinds would be able to feel her neural connection arrow into the band between herself and the MECH system. It bored through, and somewhere at the other end of the invisible link the internal temperature of a drive rose forty degrees in response...

The static intensified.

A GO-OOD-OD GUESS scrolled the cursor, the letters sharp and livid against the white screen. IT MA-KS -E --NDER JUS- -OW CONR- --UR LE--DER ---- OVER HIS -WN --RO--S

White noise would burst across her neural net. The world outside her vanished, taking with it the darkened labs and the cycloptic camera lens, and the faceless masks of the technicians watching her.

What happened next was jumbled, confusing.

Voices. Garbled, indistinct. Shouting. She would be able to make out some of the words, through the static.

"- heating!" one man was shouting. "It's not meant to operate above - "

" - lost the connection, check the - "

"- external battery just restarted!"

There was a rumbling too, the low roar of a powerful diesel engine in full drive. Beneath her something heavy was jolting, riding out the bumps of a rough and unmaintained road. She was in a dark place, but thin gaps of light pieced the rugged khaki canvas roof overhead where it did not quite snap flush against its rugged metal frame. The vehicle swayed, its big axles creaking and growling.

In an instant, the computer lab was gone. In its place was the dark and thundering rear bed of a military logistical transport truck, dirty and reeking of diesel fumes. Four heavily armoured soldiers surrounded her, their rifles aimed at her. Nearby a stunned looking tech in a simple black bulletproof vest sat on the side bench and stared at her, a simple laptop connected to a port in her neck resting on his knees,. She was strapped belly-down to the floor of the truck by cables that snapped onto iron rings, four to each side of her.

"Shit," said one of the soldiers. His voice was muffled by his helmet and mask. "I think your time-lapsed simulation just got fucked, Simmons."

[Deleted]

Fairwinds pushed through the disorientation with a hiss, straining as she reconnected her mind with the reality of her body and the environment she was in.

The humans surrounding her looked dressed to take on a bomb, and they looked more than a little alarmed that she was back out of the Matrix.

Good.

Her comm.s and laser had been physically compromised -by a hacksaw, from the feel of it- but everything else was in perfect working order. Fairwinds took in her surroundings and the paltry cables holding her down with rapid, independent swivels of her optics. Then both fixed forward on the seriously underdressed man ahead of her.

She smiled nastily. Her glossa slid out one side of her mouth, split into multiple needle-tipped cables as it dragged across her beak, and then reformed on the other side.

"Yeah, Simmons. Think you just got fucked."

Then she lurched forward, twisting her sinewy body like a corkscrew to simultaneously slide out of the cables and pull their mountings up out of the floor. She was getting that laptop, preferably with a good portion of Simmons' charred flesh attached to it, but the four bozos stationed around her were a legitimate threat.

Wings free and thrusters warming, Fairwinds launched herself up onto the collar padding of the closest soldier. She filled the view through his mask with her body, then fired her left thruster to spin him into the line of fire of his friends.

[Deleted]

As it turned out the four soldiers weren't just wearing body armour - from head to toe they were clad in bulky black EOD suits. Bomb suits, layers of strain-rate sensitive synthetics reinforced with hardened composites lying over polyurethane and a soft, flexible fabrics. Hard-armour plates shielded the front, while the head and throat was protected by a heavy strike-face helmet and reinforced neck collar. Even the boots and gloves came flame-resistant with reflective hard-armour plates. Evidently MECH expected Fairwinds to retaliate in an explosive fashion if she were to awaken.

In the cramped quarters of the transport truck, the suits were cumbersome but effective.

Fairwinds' target took the full brunt of her attack. With the cassette in his face he staggered and spun around, smashing heavily into the soldier next to him. The soldier's rifle discharged with a noisy clatter that spat bullets into the floor. Most punctured cleanly through, but several rounds caught inside the undercarriage of the truck and ricocheted, whining furiously off an axle. The technician yelped and cowered, covering his ears.

Her target was yelling, his voice muffled by his helmet. But it seemed that each soldier was wired with headsets, because one of the other men immediately lifted his tactical shotgun and fired directly at Fairwind's back, evidently trusting in the suit to protect his comrade if he missed.