Kat didn’t wait for the door to fully open, instead firing four flechette rounds at the metal in rapid succession. The first two warped and dented the doors, warping them to the point that they scraped to a halt as the elevator’s motors tried to pull them open.

The second two shots slipped through the narrow gap between the ruined doors, spraying the inside of the elevator with hypersonic metal. A scream of pain confirmed that at least one target was hit, but Kat wasn’t going to rely on only sound cues.

A capacitor warning flashed red on the back of her carbine, and Kat let it drop in its sling. For all of its versatility and stopping power, the new technology simply couldn’t replicate the rate of fire of a modern machine gun.

“Chiffon!” She shouted into her mic, directing a Water Jet at the elevator to soak everything on the inside. “We have company coming down the elevators. Please tell me that you have control of the system by now. If you don’t, things are about to get very exciting very quickly.”

A twist of her mana activated Scald, and this time the screams were much louder as her magic flash cooked everything inside the elevator.

“Not quite Erinyes.” Whip’s voice was garbled and strained. “I have control of the day to day systems, but the part of the network devoted to its combat systems is extra hardened.”

To Kat’s side, machinery hummed into motion as the other elevator began to descend. Ideas flitted through her mind at a record pace before Kat settled on the simplest option available to her. She reached into her dwindling mana reserves and began casting Gravity Spike.

“Get ready to slam on the safety brakes on the elevator!” Kat shouted back, focusing her spell into the shaft above her. It was hard to aim without being able to see exactly where the car was, but the red number above the door dropping from two to one seemed to indicate that the Phantom’s backup was imminent.

“What do you-” Whippoorwill began, cutting herself off when Gravity Spike caught the lower end of the elevator car, multiplying the weight of its contents exponentially for a fraction of a second.

“Got them,” she continued. “The automatic brakes engaged to stop the cable from breaking, and I’ve managed to make that temporary hold permanent. The elevator is locked down and I’ve flagged both of them as maintenance risks. They should be able to override it given enough time, but at least for right now they won’t be able to use them to get down.”

“Got it,” Kat replied, keeping an eye on the partially wrecked but mostly open elevator. Now that she was nearby, she could see that there were six samurai in partial combat gear on the ground, their exposed faces and hands lobster red from the sudden influx of heat.

“Jasmine,” She continued, addressing the lead geist. “What is the status on Merrimack’s response team? I think we’ve managed to wake up the entire facility, and at this rate it’s only a matter of time before they try to do something crazy like melt a hole through the floor.”

“He says that he’s five minutes from the power plant’s perimeter ma’am,” the mercenary replied crisply. “Also if you could pull back a bit, I’d be grateful. Even if we’ve tagged all of the free roaming guards, the basement is full of sub-rooms and Chiffon doesn’t have control of the security camera network yet. I don’t want to have to explain to Baker that you got shot in the back by some chromed up tweaker after we let our guard down because we thought we had won.”

Kat glanced around herself self consciously before answering.

“Got it. I’ll be coming back down the main hallway. I’d prefer it if no one shot me so make sure everyone knows that now isn’t the time to get trigger happy.”

She jogged back to the group, ignoring the muffled noises from the elevator shaft as she eyed the various bodies for any sign of life. None were moving, and for most the compact railguns developed by her research teams left little doubt as to their survival. Even the samurai that had only been hit by one or two flechettes bore thumb sized entry wounds through their ceramic plated armor. The metal needles didn’t deform or mushroom like a hollow point, meaning their ballistics left something to be desired, but they were moving fast enough to pass clean through metal and shatter bone.

By the time she made it back to Jasmine and Whippoorwill, Hestia had returned with Ander. The geist was leaning against Hestia, a tourniquet around his thigh just above a hole in his armor. Several other spots on his infiltrator suit no longer blurred with active camouflage. Instead, smears of metal creased the armored fabric where they had turned aside low caliber fire or near misses.

Notably absent were both of the Haupt agents. One lay on his back nearby, a pool of blood soaking into the concrete. The other was nowhere to be seen, evidently a casualty of rushing the other team of Silver Phantoms that had trapped the eight of them in a crossfire.

“Prop Ander up against the wall,” she said to Hestia, walking over to the two of them. “He’ll need to have surgery to remove the bullet later, but I can repair enough muscle and bone for him to be able to put some weight on it.”

She nodded, helping the injured operative to the nearest wall where he slid against the concrete with a groan, wounded leg held out straight.

Kat didn’t bother with introductions or explanations, dropping down to one knee next to him and reciting the words to Cure Wounds II. A second later, golden light enveloped her hands and began to soak into the bullet wound.

Her mana dried up quickly, but by pushing through a headache, Kat managed to fix the worst of the damage. There were still tears and minor internal bleeding that would make quick movement painful and slightly dangerous, but Ander was as stable as their team was going to make him short of a visit to a surgeon.

She stood up, squinting her eyes against the sudden shooting pain in her temples. To the side Jasmine and Hestia were whispering something, but Kat didn’t bother to intrude. Instead she walks over to Whippoorwill, planting her back into the wall next to her girlfriend.

“How are things?” She asked quietly, silently willing her mana to recover quicker so her headache would abate.

“Done,” Whippoorwill replied. The basement’s lights clicked, flickering off for a second before whirring back to life. “I have the AI isolated from all systems. It’s still kicking and screaming, but there are enough firewalls between it and anything important to keep it occupied for weeks, even with an analogue processor.”

“I don’t know,” Kat said with a shrug. “Is the AI’s server on site? Can’t we just like, unplug it or something? That seems like it would eliminate any threat fairly thoroughly.”

Whip cocked her head to the side, face impassive through the infiltration suit’s mask. Finally, after a couple seconds of contemplation she just shrugged.

“Yeah, that would work actually. The entire rig is in the room right next to where they have Jasper tied up. It wouldn’t take much to yank the cord or remove its processor.”

“Where is Jasper?” Hestia asked suddenly. “We can run an electromagnet over your new friend once we get him out of whatever box the Phantoms have stuffed him in. I don’t want Merrimack to scream my ear off if he finds out we let the boy linger in a cage a minute longer than we needed to.”

Kat winced.

“Fair point,” she replied. “I doubt Jasper’s in too much danger, but we should get him out first. It might take some prepping to get him ready to travel, and I want him ready to go the instant the response team clears the way.”

“He’s-” Whippoorwill began only to terminate the sentence with a quiet gasp. “Oh God, he’s in the second room on the righthand block but they have him hooked up to something. I’ve released his electronic restraints but-”

Hestia took off at a run, Kat close behind her. The door to the room opened as they approached thanks to Whippoorwill’s aid, and the two of them burst in together.

Jasper was slumped forward on a metal chair, his eyelids flickering slightly as he slurred something incomprehensible. He was still in the same clothing the Phantoms had grabbed him in, except the suit was soaked in sweat and what looked like vomit.

Atop his head sat a helmet made of metal. It was covered in a snarl of wires, all that led back to a pair of quietly glowing, milky white crystals that were implanted in the back of the apparatus.

Hestia took a step toward Jasper, reaching forward to remove the contraption only for Kat to reach out and grasp her by the shoulder. She shook her head quickly at the older samurai while activating her communication channel with Whippoorwill once again. This time, there wasn’t any static, the interference created by the AI gone along with the defensive system itself.

“Chiffon, is it even safe to pull Jasper out of this? I don’t want to accidentally trigger a trap and set a landmine off under his chair.”

“Just a- you’re good,” Whip replied, the glow in the crystal attached to the back of Jasper’s head fading. “Remember to take the scanner off by pushing backward before lifting.”

Jasper shifted slightly, slumping further into his seat. Now that she was closer, Kat could see foam gathering around the corners of the man’s mouth as he quietly blew spit bubbles and mumbled to himself.

“Pushing backward?” Hestia asked unhappily, “scanner? I don’t like the sound of any of this. Do you have any idea what was going on in this facility, Chiffon? Will Merrimack be feeding Jasper with a spoon going forward?”

“Probably not?” Whippoorwill replied tentatively. “It looks like they had him on a pretty impressive cocktail of drugs while they interrogated him and scanned his brain waves. I don’t have specific details on what they put in him or what information they got out of him, but it’s safe to say that nothing that happened in this basement conformed with the Paris Unified Arcologies’ Arbitration Panel on human rights.”

The building shook and the lights flickered. A second later, the sound of a low, rumbling explosion filled the room. Kat looked at Hestia. The older woman’s shoulders were stiff. She opened and closed her hands once before shaking her head sharply.

“Erinyes,” Hestia said softly, “please be ready to catch Jasper if he falls. I’m about to unhook him, and I really don’t like the look of what they’ve been doing to him.”If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

She couldn’t help but agree. Stainless steel counters were covered in electric prods, syringes and unmarked vials of pharmaceuticals. In the corner, almost the size of a trash can, was what looked like a homemade nerve inductor.

Without speaking she moved up next to Jasper, placing her hands on his shoulders while Hestia slipped around back.

Hestia put her hands on either side of the young man’s head, the red fingers of her gloves drawing a sharp contrast against the dark metal of the apparatus. She made eye contact with Kat through their faceless masks and the two of them shared a nod.

With a wet squelch, Hestia pulled the helmet back and lifted it up.

“Oh God.”

Kat wasn’t even aware of the words leaving her mouth as Jasper slumped into her arms. The crystals stuck out a half handspan from the inside of the helmet, their white surface stained a deep crimson.

“They trepanned him,” Hestia said, her voice quavering. “Erinyes, you need to heal him right now, there’s a hole in his-”

The building shook again, dust falling from the panels on the ceiling. The cracks and bangs of high caliber gunfire began to filter down as the power plant’s defenses all opened fire at once.

“I don’t know if I should heal him!” Kat shouted back frantically. “My mana is low enough that I can’t finish the job, and anything physical left in the wound will stay there. I don’t want to cause more problems by healing over a sliver of crystal or something like that.”

Jasper groaned, one hand flopping weakly as he reached toward the back of his head.

“What should we do, Chiffon?” Kat asked, trying to calm herself. “I don’t know if Jasper is safe to move, but we need to move him. At this rate, there’s no guarantee that Merrimack won’t drop the entire building on top of us.”

“There are bandages in the cabinet to your right, no your other right.” Whippoorwill quickly corrected as Kat glanced to the left. “They should be self adhesive. As best I can tell the process was designed to let the Silver Phantoms map every thought, memory and emotion of Jasper’s without harming him, but it isn’t supposed to kill him. I think the plan was to ransom him back to us when the project was over without anyone knowing that they had drained his mind. There’s no question that it’s stallesp tech, a cruder version of what they use to recreate personalities for flash clones.”

“How much did they get out of him?” Kat questioned, rolling Jasper over slightly and motioning for Hestia to grab a bandage. “He looks pretty worse for the wear right now.”

“I don’t know,” Whip replied helplessly. “There are some scraps of the data they recovered kicking around the network, but it looks like they’ve largely been uploading it off site as they received it. The good news is that the process they’re using is crude and they’ve only been able to scan his memories for about three hours a day, but I have no idea what that means in the grand scheme of things.”

The building shook again, all of the lights going out for a second as a series of explosions disrupted the power supply. A second later they popped back on with a hum as the power plant’s generators kicked back into gear.

“Erinyes,” Whippoorwill said, her voice rising. “That hard reset restarted the elevator.”

“Not ideal!” Kat yelled, gently setting Jasper’s head down while she glanced around the room for her railgun. After a second of not finding it she abandoned her search and broke into a sprint.

“See if you can shut down the automated defenses,” she shouted at Whip. “And have Jasmine get in touch with Merrimack. As effective as mortar barrages might be, I don’t think this building was up to code when it was built. Right now it feels about as structurally sound as a gingerbread house in a thunderstorm.”

She rounded the corner to find the first of the Silver Phantoms already stepping into the main intersection of the basement.

Without hesitating, Kat’s hand whipped forward. Her knife hit the seam of the samurai’s armor, easily punching through the thin layer of supple polymer guarding the Phantom’s neck.

Another guard stepped around the corner, shotgun at his shoulder just as Kat finished casting Pseudopod. She juked to the left, head pounding from the returning pain of mana deprivation. The gunman’s eyes widened behind her visor, and their gun began to move toward Kat’s camouflage blurred and rapidly dodging form.

It was like the woman was moving in slow motion despite the visible chrome covering both of her hands. Kat dropped to the ground, unwilling to use the last scraps of her mana on Levitate.

The shotgun roared above her, shattering a chunk of concrete and spraying both of them in dust and tiny flecks of shrapnel, but by that point Kat was too close.

Her Psuedopod snaked out, ripping the knife from her first victim’s throat even as the man finished his collapse to the ground. The water tentacle jerked backward, stabbing the blade into the back of the woman’s knee before yanking itself sideways.

She fell, losing her grip on her shotgun as both of the samurai’s hands grabbed her knee. The blood curdling scream distracted the other three Phantoms that were filing out of the elevator just long enough for Kat to grab her victim’s shotgun and pump one round into the leading soldier.

Unfortunately, even at close range the buckshot didn’t do quite enough to kill the man. Between his ceramic breastplate and the chunks of steel woven under his skin, the attack managed to knock him a step back and punch a thumb-sized hole through the synthetic muscle of his right bicep, but beyond that it only served to scar and discolor his whitish silver armor.

Kat used the moment where the man was off balance to spring back to her feet, darting around the nearby corner so that the Phantoms lost line of sight on her.

At her feet, the samurai she had crippled with the stab to the knee reached down, unsnapping the side of her boot to reveal a pistol. Kat fired a second shot, hitting the woman in her sparsely armored neck and head.

For a second, the basement lapsed into silence as the enemies frantically communicated with each other via their own closed communication stream.

Then, a black and green flashbang grenade skidded along the floor. Kat didn’t bother to react, instead pulling her stolen shotgun tight to her shoulder and letting her Pseudopod to coil tightly, laying in wait like a snake to strike the first person foolish enough to step around the corner.

The grenade exploded in a burst of sound and light, instantly canceled out by Sensory Dampening, as the man she had injured previously jumped into sight, rifle at the ready.

Kat’s Pseudopod burst forward, wrapping itself around his ankle and yanking upward to spin the attacker into an unexpected face first dive into the cement.

A second samurai stepped around the corner even as the Pseudopod darted up the downed man’s leg and drove her knife deep into the intersection of his hamstring and pelvis, severing his femoral artery in a sure, swift stroke.

Her shotgun kicked against her shoulder, and the Phantom’s faceplate exploded, shrapnel from the “bullet proof glass” visor shredding his face a millisecond before the rest of the lead pellets destroyed his visage.

A prickle of fear was the only warning Kat had, but she kicked off of the floor anyway, Shadow Stepping backward even as a burst of flame filled the hallway where she had just been standing.

The third man stalked into view, his left hand burning gently with magic and a quartet of jets sticking out of the cyberware of his arm behind it. In his massive right hand, he held a submachine gun, its angry snub barrel swinging through the air toward Kat.

She fired once, buckshot ricocheting off of the samurai’s shoulder but not doing much more than scraping synthetic skin off of the metal beneath.

He shot back, a whining spray of slugs filling the air as Kat threw herself to the side only to hit one of the corridor’s walls as she ran out of space.

There wasn’t anywhere left for her to run. There wasn’t any cover. There weren’t any tricks left.

A bullet slammed into her right arm. The upgraded infiltration suit absorbed much of the impact, but it wasn’t anything approaching full body armor.

Pain blossomed through Kat’s side as she let the shot spin her.

She dropped to the ground, biting her lip against the pain as she willed her Pseudopod into motion. Two paces from her, Kat’s shotgun clattered to the cement, barely out of reach but worlds away for all the good it would do her in the coming seconds.

The samurai stomped forward, kicking the weapon away from them with his right foot even as he leveled the magically powered flamethrower built into his left arm at Kat’s face.

Her Psuedopod jerked to the side, stabbing into the weak spot in the man’s armor where his left foot met his calf and severing his Achilles’ tendon instantly. The samurai collapsed, unable to support his weight while his right leg was still in the air, and Kat’s Pseudopod pulled her knife out of his foot, slashing through the thin connective armor between his thigh and groin.

Hot arterial blood sprayed out from the wound, and Kat dredged up the last of her mana to cast Overpressure. The Phantom tried to sit up, his submachine gun still in his right hand only for his injury to erupt like a geyser, painting Kat and the entire corridor behind her bright red.

He slumped bonelessly backward, almost immediately losing consciousness as his blood pressure dropped through the floor.

She leaned back against the wall, Pseudopod fading on its own and dropping her knife as her body ran completely out of mana. Kat clamped down on her bicep with her left hand, triggering her suit’s internal tourniquet as she tried to keep her eyes open through the pain from her injury.

“Kat!” Whippoorwill’s voice was distant as her girlfriend forgot about samurai decorum and used her real name. “Oh my God Kat.”

Kat squinted up at Whippoorwill. It was hard to see her through the darkness that was creeping into either sides of her vision.

“I’ll be fine,” she croaked, reaching up with her left arm to pull off her face mask so that she could see Whip better. “It hurts like hell, but the bleeding has stopped.”

Whippoorwill leaned down and slapped her across the face.

It didn’t hurt. Both because the blow wasn’t hard and because Kat could barely feel anything above the throb of her head and the fire in her right arm.

“Don’t you ever do that again Kat,” Whip shouted, towering over her. “There were three geists here that could have helped you in that fight. The four of you could have caught the Phantoms in a crossfire and killed them from relative safety. Instead you ran off without even grabbing your gun to try and be a hero.”

Kat looked up at Whippoorwill, her vision blurring slightly due to the pain.

“But they were scattered all over the facility,” she replied, voice distant. “It would have taken seconds we didn’t have to pull them all together and take the Phantoms down, and they easily could have escaped any cordon we made in that time.”

“Whip,” she continued, pleading with her girlfriend. “You were standing in the hallway unprotected. Hestia was busy with Jasper. I couldn’t let anything happen to you. I was the one close enough to the scene, so I acted.”

“You got yourself shot,” Whip responded. The statement an indictment in and of itself.

“And you didn’t get shot,” Kat said back with a pained smile. “I consider that a fair trade in the grand scheme of things.”

A feminine cough from behind Whippoorwill drew Kat’s bleary gaze. Jasmine was standing a respectful distance back, her railgun cradled at the ready. As soon as she saw Kat’s attention on her, she spoke up.

“I just heard back from Merrimack Erinyes. Chiffon knocking down the automated defenses more or less ended the battle. Some of the Silver Phantoms are fleeing, but they’re being hunted down by drones and gunships right now. There are only a handful left inside the power plant itself. Hover tanks are patrolling the outside and erasing anyone foolish enough to pop into a window while APEX shock troops are making a frontal assault. The fight is more or less over.”

“Thank God,” Kat said in relief, leaning back and closing her eyes. “I need someone to stick me with a needle full of something powerful as soon as possible. Consciousness is a bit of a painful burden at the moment.”