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“We’re worse than blind, space it,” Dick said, turning off the map overlay on his monocular reticule.
“I can handle blind,” Cicada said, firing two more shots down the hallway. They each veered off in a separate direction. Two explosions followed in rapid succession, this time with the sound of armored bodies hitting the floor and a few cries of distress. “Motion detection,” she said. “Just because they weren’t where we thought they were doesn’t mean they weren’t coming.”
“But they’ll be coming from more directions than that, and not all bunched up,” Dick said, and even as he was speaking a pair of guards who’d been missed by one of the blasts came around the corner ahead of them. Cicada positioned herself with her metal half forward and sent a rocket their way. One of them jumped back around the corner. The other was slower, which saved his comrade from being chased by the course-correcting rocket. Three more appeared from the other branch
“Adams, we’re going to need you to provide a revised path,” Dick said. He kicked open a side door.
“To begin with, don’t go that way,” Galatea said in his ear as the door swung in to reveal a supply room. “Also, I’m picking up what I could only describe as ‘chatter’ that is highly suggestive of a detachment approaching you from the rear.”
“Noted,” Dick said. He looked back down the hallway. A sliding door they’d passed through slid up, the edges of armored forms just out of sight around its sides. Dick fired a three needle burst through the door. “Cicada, we need a barrage fore and aft, and then we charge flat out ahead.”
“Barrages get expensive,” Cicada said.
“Noted!” Dick said sharply, letting out another stream of suppressing fire. His needler lacked the oopmh of her rockets, though, and sooner or later someone would brave its line of fire to get off a stunner burst.
“What I’m saying is I’m not packing a hidden rocket factory here,” Cicada said. “Surgical computer-assisted strikes let me take out clusters with a single rocket… without telemetry to target by, I have to use more rockets than there are bodies to get an optimal spread and sooner or later I’m going to run out.”
“Running out of rockets sooner is better than getting overrun now,” Nick Bradley noted, adding his own stream of needles to Dick’s effort at fending off the rear assault.
“We’re wasting ammo debating this,” Dick said. “Do it.”
“Duck,” Cicada said. Her waist pivoted and her cybernetic arm swung around 180 degrees with machine speed and precision. A burst of bullet-sized rockets flew out of it before she swung back around and let out another volley. It took far less time than it takes to tell, though in the time she wasn’t covering the forward group, she took a stunner hit to her organic side. “Grah!” she yelled as the part of her body with normal sensation went numb. Her jaw locked up. “I’m hit,” she said over the communicator.
“Can you move?” Dick asked.
“Yes!”
“Then move… both of you, move, move, move!” Dick yelled.
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