Sasha

“Sign up to get shot, he said. It’ll be fun, he said,” Sasha muttered as she crouched behind a stack of crates. The goal was not to get her head blown off by the bullets whizzing by. She opened her private comm line. “Moss?”

“Aye?”

“If I kick the bucket because of this,” she peered through the scope of her assault rifle, “I’m devoting my afterlife to reminding you it was all your fault.”

At her pilot’s suggestion, Sasha had signed up as a merc, because she’d got wind that they were hunting “Phantom”, a vigilante gunslinger causing havoc to the smuggling rings based on this forsaken rock. Displeased with the disruption to business, the smugglers had done what smugglers do to pests and put a price on the man’s head. But this particular pest was yet to be captured or killed as, according to reports, he had a very big gun and was very good at using it. 

Sasha had struggled to not laugh when the recruiter had barely taken one look at her and said, “You’re in the wrong place, sweetheart. Strippers report upstairs.”

In true Sasha Barrett fashion, she had pulled out her pistol and pointed it between his eyes. “I know I’ve got a big one. Why don’t you pull yours out and let’s see how you measure up? Honeybunch.”

With a smirk and an ‘Aren’t you cute’, he’d slapped an armband on her and pointed her towards their munitions sergeant. Munitions sergeant Kutzik had been a grumpy old ass in the form of an overgrown bipedal iguana. Cigar butt wedged into the corner of his scaled mouth, Kutzik had glanced at the spray-painted 57 on her armband with his one good eye before telling her he wasn’t wasting good firearms on cannon fodder. This was a strictly BYOG - bring your own gun - shindig.

Sasha had yet to decide whether this whole idea was genius or insane. Looking down the street, the mercs were now calling “the kill pipe”. She was leaning towards utterly insane. But that’s what you get for taking advice from a drunk Scotsman.

The line fizzed with Moss clearing his throat. His voice cracked and jumped up an octave when he finally spoke. “Ye ken, is it a ghost or a poltergeist if it haunts people? Or is there a difference? Oh, wait, maybe a ghost cannae move objects, but a poltergeist can?” 

Sasha’s mouth stretched into a wicked grin. He was just too easy. “Layout?”

“It’s a dead-end street. This ‘Phantom’ guy is holed up in that building at the end, but he’s got the high ground. Clever bastart has turned the entire street intae a killing zone.”

Just ahead of Sasha, yet another merc jerked and went down in a bloody splatter as he tried to run out from behind his shelter.

“Yeah, no shit, Sherlock,” Sasha muttered. 

“I want it to be noted,” Kasia chimed in, “that I still think this is a fucking bad idea.”

Sasha groaned internally.

“This is a suicide mission.”

“Yes. And?”

“Well… it’s a bad idea, is what I’m saying.” 

“So you said.”

When there was nothing but brooding silence from Kasia, Sasha relented. “Look, I’m as ready as anyone to get off this backwater, shit-hole planet, but there’s a guy in that building with the particular combination of skill and moral fluidity that I need.” 

Finding him had been bad enough. Getting a face-to-face with him was a whole other undertaking. Especially on a backwater, shit-hole planet bursting at the seams with smugglers, mercenaries, and anyone looking to get out from under Intergalactic Alliance oversight. As the name suggested, the Intergalactic Alliance was a large body with substantial resources, but even it had limits and preferred to protect worlds that were valuable in terms of resources or military strategy. 

Kasia drew breath as if to speak, but no words came. She huffed. Finally, she said, “I want my objection to be noted in the record.”

“Noted.”

Sasha’s open channel crackled to life. “He’s getting tired,” the merc captain snarled. “He’s making mistakes. He’s been in there for two days. We’ve almost got him! Everyone move in now. Go, go, go! Draw fire so the infiltration unit can get in behind him!”

This “pep-talk” was her cue. The group of mercs she was with prepared to move out, a cascade of safety triggers clicking off. Adrenaline sharpened her senses, narrowed her focus. Her squad sprinted off into the killing zone. Sasha hung back before she made a run for it. Dashing for cover, shot the guy just ahead of her, number 32, and crouched behind the crate in his place. And just in time, too, because a boom from Phantom’s sniper rifle sent yet another soul into the afterlife, shrieking.

Bodies littered the ground from this point up to the building’s entrance. The stench from the rotting corpses in the dusty heat was revolting, and Sasha tried to keep her breathing shallow to not puke. Under that, there was the familiar metallic tang filling Sasha’s nostrils and mingling with the burnt smell of discharging firearms. She navigated the carpet of fallen combatants as she made another dash forward, ducking behind a temporary barricade erected by some of Phantom’s very first victims. She nudged a lifeless head aside with her boot to make space for herself, but instantly regretted it as it rewarded her with a swarm of flies that rose from the corpse.

“This is a fucking suicide mission,” number 86 across from her muttered as he searched the area ahead for more solid cover. He didn’t have time to say anything more before Sasha shot him in the back of the head. 

“Try homicide,” Sasha muttered to the fresh corpse.

“Traitor!” someone shouted, and bullets flew Sasha’s way. “That redhead bitch just shot Lanson! Number 57!”

Sasha ducked, pressing against the barrier, yanked the armband off and waited. At the first hint of a pause in the shooting, she peeked out, but had to yank back with a curse at the flash of a gun. She flinched as projectiles pinged off the barrier, right where her face had been. She sent up a silent thanks for not having a hole, or six, in her head. 

Boom. Grunt.

In the silence that followed, Sasha peeked out again. This time, there were no shots, just a growing pool of blood behind some crates up ahead. Nice shot, Mr Phantom. Or it was, as long as you weren’t aiming for my head instead. When she moved out, crouching low, bullets started flying her way again as the mercs started calling warnings to each other. Pinned by crossfire, she dived behind some large planters on the side of the street. Clearly, friendly fire wasn’t an issue for these mercs. Cannon fodder, as munitions sergeant Kutzik had said.

Running over the treacherous footing of putrefying corpses and leaking bodily fluids was making Sasha’s legs tired. Spotting a small gap between the wall and the back of the planter, she belly-crawled for it. As she hauled herself around a pair of vacant eyes staring up at nothing, holding her breath to pass, she felt a burn scrape down her belly and heard her shirt tear. Shit. She looked back to see a shard of broken glass sticking out from the rubble, her red blood now staining it. Later, she told herself, and crawled on.

Squeezing through the gap, she crossed a good portion of the field unseen. Running out of cover, she crouched and prepared to make a dash for the stairs just inside the main entrance. She laid down a volley of suppressing fire towards the mercs and made a run for it. 

The bratatata of bullets and thwip-thwip-thwip of energy weapon projectiles followed Sasha as she sprinted, clouds of wall plaster exploding all around her. Her energy shield flashed orange a few times, working hard to deflect the shots, but it held. She slid into the relative safety under the stairs, kicking aside the bodies piled in the safe spot. She’d made it to the lobby. The acrid smell of charcoal and sulphur and burning hair hung thicker in here, despite the shattered windows. Outside, she heard the sniper rifle boom again. 

Up ahead, some mercs were crouched behind furniture toppled as shields, shouting at each other to get up and go deal with the nuisance: her. Sasha reached for her grenades, pulling three off her belt. Priming them to the spex unit on her left forearm, she punched the timer for the detonators. Three, she lobbed the grenades across the room. Two, they landed behind the furniture, and one… Dust rained down from the ceiling as she covered her head and dashed out. She didn’t look back and took the stairs two at a time.

Upstairs, Sasha found the infiltration engineer, number 63, hacking the locked door to the sniper’s nest. His back was to her, trusting that his comrades downstairs were protecting him. She was so close to her target that, as she aimed and fired, his shield didn’t stand a chance. It winked out, the lifeless body slumping to the floor with a thud. 

Sasha stepped over the dead man, took his place, her spex holo-screen flickering to life on her arm. She pulled up the building’s internal network. 

“Binny, open this door,” Sasha commanded her ship’s AI, selecting the node on the building’s network that was the lock in front of her.

“Oh, wowee, captain!” Binny responded in a cheery machine generated voice over her private channel. “Access is most definitely unauthorised.” 

“Unlock this door, Binny.”

“Captain, this is an unauthorised action. That means not having official permission or approval. It’s unsanctioned. Prohibited. Dis-al-lowed.”

“Yes, I’m aware. Now open it.”

“This will require breaching the defences of the local network of Planetary Extraction & Refining Resources Inc. and compromising the security protocol on this lock, and may invalidate any warranty they might have. Do you wish me to proceed?”

“Yes. Yes!”

“Even though it’s unauthorised, unwarranted and most definitely illegal?”

“Just do it, for crying out loud, Bins,” Sasha groaned.

“Processing request at once, captain!” 

Sasha crouched by the door, pointing her gun down the hallway, and decided she’d have to take another look at the AI’s heuristics, maybe even a pass at the moral-ethical matrix, to make sure these debates became a thing of the past. 

A beat passed in the stillness. Outside the building she could hear sporadic shouting, but Phantom was doing an excellent job of holding the assailants at bay by the sound if his booming shots, and no one charged up the stairs after Sasha. 

A beep from her spex, and the lock on the door releasing, snapped Sasha’s attention back to her current task. She walked through the door, turning to wait just inside as it slid shut behind her. She allowed a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dim interior. 

“Hello?” she called, but the large room was quiet.

Light filtered through the large windows. She concluded it was some kind of rec-room, currently a mess of tables and sofas. With no sign of Phantom, she led with the business end of her assault rifle. Nearing the windows, she finally saw him crouched by one of the shattered frames, sighting down his long rifle.

“Phantom?” Sasha queried, pointing her gun to the floor.