Sunlight Through Concrete Rain - Part 5 (still WIP)

32

“Are we clear on the plan?” Vel asked, sweat dripping off his nose. There hadn’t been much time to put a plan together, but they had one.

“Yup,” Ravi nodded. In her hand was a shotgun loaded with droneshot, her torso covered by an old plate carrier.

“Yeah,” T.H. met Vel’s gaze unflinchingly. From outside, there came a whirring noise, and T.H. turned to Ravi. “You’re up,” he said, and crouched behind a server rack.

“Yup,” she said again. Vel ducked behind a server rack directly opposite the door and levelled his rifle.

Steady your breathing… he said to himself. Nothing new, old boy. Nothing new. T.H.’s cameras had revealed that 4 mercs, one of them modded, and a dozen or so FPVs were heading for his little room. It’s tight, but breathe. Give T time to work his plan. Distract the beast, kill the rest.

There was a blinding explosion as the first FPV crashed into the door to T’s server room, and it flew off its hinges. With a creak and a groan, it landed on a server which began to spark and whir, its lights blinking and dying out. That electronic whirring was soon subsumed by the noise of gunfire.

Heavy shots sounded, four in quick succession, then another four, then six more. The room was lit by small fiery explosions as Ravi’s droneshot brought down all the FPVs. “Reloading!” she yelled, and ducked. From Vel’s hide, he could see her. Their eyes locked, and Vel nodded, mouthing “move!”.

She began to crawl away, backwards as Vel popped up and aimed.

“Fuck they’re all down!” came a voice. It was garbled, as though speaking through a modulator.

“Pile in,” came the order from the beast. “Grenades first. Fucking amateurs.”

On cue, there were the dull thuds of grenades rolling across the floor. T, I hope to fuck you’re right, were Vel’s thoughts before he ducked.

Bang!

Bang!

Bang!

Bang!

They all went off one after the other, and the deafening noises were followed by sound like hammers hitting metal as shrapnel pinged around the room. Vel opened his eyes, and grinned to himself. T’s thick servers had eaten most of the damage.

“Now!” Vel ordered, and he and T both popped up at once. Six quick shots followed, echoing off the dying servers. By the time the last casing had hit the ground, three men were dead – cut down by Vel and T in the doorway before they could move in properly.

“So,” came the low voice from outside. It was the beast. The cameras couldn’t quite get the full picture of the un-man. He was tall, at least seven feet, and each of his limbs was chromium. But, unlike T.H.’s chromium legs, they were much larger than any human limb. “Good job, T. You’ve killed the morons. What are you going to do about me?” the voice was like century old radio static; garbled and broken, but with the bass of a cannon going off.

“I don’t know, man…” T.H. grinned back at Vel. Vel looked behind himself, and saw that Ravi had armed herself with the harpoon gun. She looked back at him with steely eyes.

“One shot,” he mouthed to her. She nodded.

“I’ve got this,” she mouthed back.

“The door’s too small for you, so… maybe you just wanna turn around and leave? After all, Rakshas, where you gonna get your jailbroken software from if you kill me? You can’t keep that chromium running withtout me, man!” T.H. kept Rakshas engaged.

“Ha!” Rakshas guffawed. “For 15 million dollars, I can get off this world!” Immediately, there was a massive thud and the world around Vel shuddered. There was another, and the wall began to crack. Another, and Rakshas’s chromium fist, the size of Vel’s head, broke through. “Enjoy!” the fist unclasped and a massive, heavy sphere clunked onto the ground.

“Crap! I forgot I sold him that,” T.H. exclaimed.

“T, is that what I think it is?” Ravi sighed.

“Yeah just… get down. We have another maybe 5 seconds.”

“T, fuck you,” Vel threw himself onto the ground. A long time ago, in the trenches, under a barrage, he’d prayed. He’d not prayed since, not until that moment. “Ram ram…” he beseeched the old god, and clutched his rifle.

Long ago, he’d seen AT mines at work. From hundreds of meters away, their noise was overwhelming and indescribable. Now, there lay one – modified into a grenade by T.H. himself – just a couple dozen feet away. The TBI alone could kill him.

When it came, it came as a flash of light. Vel heard nothing, for the shockwave blew out his eardrums instantly, but he could feel the force in his body. Had he not ducked behind the server, the shockwave might have ripped him limb from limb.

Tinnitus singing in his ears, he opened his eyes to a cavalcade of dust and rainwater. The mine-grenade had ripped a hole clear through the roof and the dome, and he could see – through breaks in the dust and smoke, through cracks in the concrete canyons beyond the darkness of Old Mumbai – the golden-grey streaks of light on rainclouds.

And he laughed. Maniacally, perhaps. He wouldn’t have known. He could hear nothing but the tinnitus. He’d forgotten that AT mines send their energy upwards, always upwards, never flatly around them. Clearly Rakshas had forgotten this too.

Then, he remembered – Ravi. He scrambled to his knees and turned to look for Ravi behind him. He could not find her. As fear and despair and grief began to cloud his heart, overwhelm his mind, he saw a shadow being cast over him. Ravi was on her feet, harpoon gun shouldered.

She was saying something, but Vel couldn’t hear. She fired, and the harpoon flew straight and true. Vel’s body now acted on its own, as years of training and experience kicked in.

He drew himself back to his crouch, reloaded his rifle and peaked.

Ravi’s harpoon shot had torn straight through Rakshas’s left shoulder and pinned him to the wall. He was screaming, or seemed to be at least, and his right hand was wrapped around the shaft of the harpoon. As he tried to yank it out and free himself, Vel noticed small flashes of light. These, Vel realised, were T firing at the monster of a man, but his microfibre kevlar was absorbing T’s puny rifle rounds.

Vel remembered his job, and began firing. T, in turn, stopped. As Vel’s rounds pinged off Rakshas, he stopped trying to dislodge himself from the wall. Instead, his right hand dropped to a holster on his waist.

From it, he unclasped a pistol the size of Vel’s torso.

“Brilliant,” Vel said to himself under his breath, and ducked as the first shot rang out. There was another shot, and the round embedded itself into the server rack that Vel hid behind. He felt the impact on his back; it was as though he had been punched by a heavyweight straight in the spine. It sent him reeling, each twitch sending spasms of pain up and down his spine.

There was another impact. This time, the massive 20mm round tore the battered server rack in half. Vel was only saved by a miracle, as the round hit the floor and was deflected into the open sky.

In front of him, Ravi was screaming, reaching her hand out, trying to pull him into cover. With his last reserves of energy, he batted her hand away, and yelled “Run!”.

Vel closed his eyes, and hoped for a quick death.

There was another shot, and Vel braced himself.

33

The last shot was followed by a series of rattles, and pops, and more shots. Then, crackles, and sparks. The sound was dulled, like Vel was hearing something going on in a neighbour’s house. The ringing in his ears had died down.

He opened his eyes, and saw that a dull blue glow filled the room. Before he could take anything else in, he felt Ravi’s hot hands on his shoulders, her fingers wrapped around his plate carrier’s shoulder straps.

“I’m okay!” he tried to say, but she was already dragging him further inside. “Seriously!” he winced in pain.

“T’s plan worked, the interruptor fried the fuck’s CNS,” she explained, her voice sounding like it was coming from the other end of a tunnel.

“How’s T?” Vel asked, as Ravi propped him up on a wall.

“Bruised. The blast threw him, but he’s fine.” She stared at Vel with a mix of concern and relief. Then, she grinned. “Like old times, huh?”

Vel laughed, the movement sending a shock down his injured spine. “Except… I was the one pulling you out of the wreck.” Memories flooded him now; of the rescue op he’d led to find the crew of a downed gunship; of finding Ravi half dead in the cockpit.

“Yeah, how the turns have tabled!” She seemed relieved. “Wait here, let me check on T." She scurried off.

“I’m good, man!” T yelled not too long after.

“Good, good. That means I get to kill you, you miserable bastard!” Vel yelled back.

“Fuck man…” he sighed. “They bombed my house!”

34

It was an hour before Vel could move again, and so both T and Ravi just sat with him for a bit. His back was afire with pain, his lungs refused to inflate fully from the shock, and when he breathed out it was as though someone was lighting his insides on fire. It was the most physical misery Vel had been in since the war.

At some point, T disappeared downstairs into the rest of the church, and reappeared with a strip of pills.

“Here,” he pressed them into Vel’s hand. “They’ll speed up your eardrum reconstruction. Should take about an hour instead of a week.”

Vel took the pills. “Listen,” he began, and T clenched his jaw. “I trust you, I think I should start with that. Completely, old friend,” he said as reassuringly as he could manage, and weakly raised a hand to T’s shoulder.

“Yeah,” Ravi spoke up, putting her hand on T’s other shoulder, and grabbing as tight as she could. “I do too. I mean, you’re still acting shady as fuck, but we trust you. We spoke, Vel and I, while you’d gone down to get the pills. And…”

“Just tell us the truth, man, please. We’ve both had enough of this conspiracy bullshit,” Vel interjected.

“Yeah, okay. I mean, it’s not a big deal, really. Not really… when Bento found Rob, or Edward if we’re calling him that, he was actually doing a job…” T began.

“Yeah, we know,” Vel interrupted again. “The Pauthi contract.”

“No, well… kinda. That was just a side-thing he was doing.” Vel’s heart skipped a beat, and Ravi’s grip on T’s shoulder loosened. “He was there for a job we were planning, and the Pauthi gig was just gravy.”

“What were you planning?” Vel asked, as steady as he could manage.

“We wanted to steal RAI. Not RAI itself – the core servers are more protected than nuclear arsenals. But an instance of it, one of the instances that ran cybersec for SG.”

“And?” Ravi this time.

“And we succeeded. My private server? That has RAI running on it. That’s also when Bento found Rob. We figured it was just another one of RAI’s sub-instances until recently. Listen man…” his voice had quickened, his breathing shallower, as though he were panicking. “I’m the reason he’s dead, and I’m so sorry, Vel, I am so sorry.”

Vel was silent for a minute, and then a minute longer. In the depths of that ancient city, there seemed to be no sound for a while – not even the pouring rain broke through to Vel. When next he spoke, he spoke after long consideration. “No, T. Did you lie to us? Did you consort with the enemy and maybe endanger us? Yes. Did you get Bento killed? No. For that, SG and SG alone is responsible.” As he spoke, Ravi took his hand and squeezed tight.

“But we needed to know about RAI, T,” Ravi continued.

“Yes,” T responded immediately. “I know. I fucked it. I’m sorry. But… that instance of RAI has been so helpful. RAI scoured the old internet last night, RAI gave me the source code for so much of SG’s digital infrastructure, it gave me the chinks in SG’s armour… I won’t apologise for using it. I apologise for hiding it.”

“And neither should you,” Vel spoke as loudly as he could, trying to force his lungs to work properly. “But you should have told us.”

“I agree.”

“Alright,” Vel coughed, and pain spasmed down his spine, and his lungs screamed in rebellion. “Fuck me… let’s let the matter drop.”

“I agree,” T sighed with relief.

“Let’s go!” he tried to get up but the pain was too great and, with a huff, he fell down on his ass, which sent even more pain through his entire body.

“Bloody hell,” Ravi muttered. Vel felt a sharp pain in his thigh, as T injected something into it.

“Combat stim,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Won’t fix you up properly, but it should heal the hairline fractures, etc. Another couple hours, and you’ll be almost right as rain.”

“We don’t have a couple hours,” Vel groaned.

“Yes we do,” Ravi pinned him to the ground, forestalling any attempts to rise to his feet.

“I’ll sort food out,” T announced. “Hope ya’ll like expired army MREs!”

Vel laughed.

“Yeah, fuck it,” Ravi smiled.