On the High Frontier

1. A Simple In-and-Out (part 3/3)

The suit protects Kimiko from injury as she hits the wall. She struggles to her feet, half crouching, facing the wall. Her shoulders shake slightly as though she is having trouble breathing. If he thinks she's in trouble then this new guard may get careless. It's their turn. Meanwhile she finds what she was looking for on the local scape. As her attacker comes up behind her, presumably to gloat, she sets off a fire suppression system just behind him. He turns slightly and as the gun wavers she moves fast, hitting him on the solar plexus with the flat of her hand. The augmented strike both winds him and propels him backwards. The gun fires, but she has moved past the muzzle, so the shot misses her and hits her previous attacker, again. It is just not his day.

Sliding past the downed guard as he struggles for breath, she grabs the edge of hatch and drops into the lock. As she does a bullet pings off the floor where she had been announcing the arrival of the other guards. She hits the large red emergency seal button inside the void lock and the hatch slams shut with a reverberating clang. That will give her a short time but she needs a more permanent solution.

She brings up the full scaping UI, but the local extent had turned extremely nasty. Damn, there's at least one active scapecaptain here, and weather everywhere. All the main transfer nodes are covered by HAIL and all the infrastructure control interfaces are decorated with RAIN to prevent unauthorised commands. Her tag cloaking is holding for now or the roaming ICE meshes would be bringing the whole thing down on her. Vandalism it is then. Using the suit's enhanced strength she rips open the access panel next to the hatch mechanism and smashes the control board. No one is going to cycle that in a hurry.

She looks round to assess her situation. No lockers in here and she has lost the breath mask. The lock has filled with breathable air, but no prolonged space walk. "James, I'm going to need extraction as I don't think they'll let me just stroll off here. Do you think Fee will be willing to come and help?"

"No Sayoko, but I'm sure you can persuade me." Just hearing her voice and somehow Kimiko feels safer. "James gave me a heads-up."

"Fee, I hope we didn't wake you." James gives an audible harrumph.

"Let's just say I was already out. Though why you would want to be in this particular neck of the void is a mystery to me."

"It has such a distinctive atmosphere, and the locals are always so excited to see visitors."

"About that. I'm reading hard targeting emissions all over the zone. Even my pod with the reflectors squelched has some return. I'm not going to be able to get close enough without some kind of diversion or cover."

"Their external security is hot and I'm fighting all kinds of weather just to pull up the nav maps and stats. There are active scapecaptains on-line and they are not happy. I can't even get close to the weapons interfaces."

"Then you're not doing right. Scaping that is easy. But proper engineering, now that is the trick." She hates when he does that, someday she was going to make him eat that glib little doggerel.

A slight hissing-rumble noise starts coming from the jammed hatch behind her. "Great, now they seem to have found cutting torches, any help would be greatly appreciated."

In an ideal world she would get the guns to shoot each other. But they aren't on the module's main scape extent, and any attempt to move off will be immediately flagged and shut down by the access intrusion lockouts. Given time she can probably subvert one of the intrusion countermeasure engine meshes or clone their identify friend-or-foe protocol, but time is something she does not have in abundance. They know where she is, and they really seem to want to get her. She needs to get out before they can get suits outside of the lock. She suspects they want battle carapaces out there, and it's taking time to find them.