“Miss Smith,” Mendel said over an open broadcast channel. “You know, I always liked working with you. Your company is one thing, but I always felt you were one of the most reliable and level headed people to work with. A real professional. You don’t take risks, you know your limitations. You get in and get the job done.”

“I’d thank you for the compliment, but I can already hear the but,” Holly responded, her plane circling the UA-Delphi

“But,” Mendel said, “I find myself wondering why you have not extracted my employee yet.”

“What can I say? The landing zone isn’t safe.”

“Why? Because some poor shmucks are standing around with guns from two centuries ago? That plane of yours has a firing system, doesn’t it? You should be able to put a bullet in each of their brains from a thousand meters overhead.”

“You know how it is, Mendel. There’s protocols. Gotta follow the procedures. Do it by the books. You hired us, yeah, but there are limits to the risks we will take for money. We’re mercenaries, not zealots.”

Mendel screamed, “Iris is going to die at this rate!”

“You sure about that?”

Iris hadn’t gone down. With her reflexes so high gravity looked like it had been forgotten, she couldn’t so much as take her view off Xi’s burning body, off the demonic scowl of anger and frustration. The politician had overclocked his system, was discharging his battery like a firehose of power, but his movements had become predictable. Iris guessed that only some of his musculature could actually take the increased load.

Xi didn’t even use the micro-blade. He had snapped it and tossed it aside. For all the strength at his disposal, he didn’t have footing anymore. Whenever he lunged, half his strength went to crushing the concrete to gravel and mud. Iris only had to dodge the rest, to dance and twist and threaten a counterattack.

Time was on her side. Just like at the start, she had to survive and she would win. Xi didn’t have infinite energy, and no machine could literally be on fire without taking damage somewhere. Even HAB units had design parameters. Something would weaken. Something would break. She just had to survive.

Xi’s fist caught her in the side. Knuckles of jagged armor cut through her combat suit and ripped off her sub-dermal plating. Iris grunted, blinking away the damage alerts as she twisted back. His other fist swung in, crossing over for her face.

She grabbed onto it, kicking her legs up and using his force to whip herself around. Her shin slammed into his broken jaw, cracking it off at the bullet wound before the punch threw her backwards.

“You cockroach,” Xi roared, ripping his jaw off to expose the metal beneath.

Iris rolled through the sand, snuffing out the splattered oil burning on her, and getting some distance before she rose again. “You and me both. Neither of us should be alive right now.”

“Well this is the end for one of us.”

“It ain’t the end for me.” Iris had done more than roll out the fire. She had been knocked to where the broken handle of her micro-blade had been tossed. Xi didn’t even react to it being in her hand, tucked up behind her arm and out of his sight. That was a good thing, it meant his attention was elsewhere; internal. The Gawain had to have done more than immobilize his arm, and the strain of overclocking wasn’t going unnoticed by his system. She smirked. “What good is a trump card if it destroys you in the process?”

“That’s what makes it a trump card.”

“Winning is what would make it a trump card. This is desperation. Let me guess, you poached some off-cast engineers from Daedalus Labs and had them cobble this together for you, didn’t you?”

With only half a face, she couldn’t tell what Xi’s expression was anymore, but his body temperature didn’t lie. He was powering down, the output tapering off. She didn’t know how long they had been fighting. Seconds had become minutes. She wondered whether the viewers were genemodded like Silvy, able to take it in compressed, or if the two of them were little more than mechanical blurs that smashed together and broke apart.

She wasn’t in better shape than him though, not by a long shot. She was dripping oil out of her abdomen, losing pressure on coolant loops. In a sense, worse than bleeding. All she needed was an opportunity. When she tried to imagine how to get some, she could only think of one thing she could do.

When Xi closed the distance again, his good fist darting, his bad arm swinging, she sacrificed her own arm. Like a good, well-trained fighter, Xi’s attention snapped to her arm the moment he got a clean it on it. Her armor cracked. His hand closed around her wrist and elbow an instant later he had it twisted off.

Then she caught the handle of her micro-blade between her teeth. She twisted, rolling through and rending it through the super-heated plates. After opening his chest like a can opener, she dove at him, tackling him to the ground and driving the broken blade through his face. The graphene edge bit in, through the cracked plating, through overheated oil. Once she had it in, it was just a matter of pushing it through, into the casing for his nervous system. That was tougher, but not tough enough. The micro-blade cut into the last organic pieces Xi had left.

Xi jerked, the cut almost too clean to actually kill him. This his struggle became a seizure. She rolled off of him as his HAB unit spasmed, and got to her own feet. Silence held every tongue of the Brothers of Steel. They gaped at her, bits of her combat suit still burning and smoking. There was less and less of her every moment, but she still had the bloody blade between her teeth.

Only then did she realize she had effectively killed everyone on the island. Not by her hand, but in their minds she had doomed them all. The dead man at her feet had been their ticket to salvation through the dark times ahead. Without him, there wasn’t even a point in shooting at her. Spite and vengeance paled in the face of despair.

The Arctic Cutters finally began a descent, spiraling through the air with thrusters down. The plane landed in a plume of sand, and Holly climbed out of the fuselage like it was a cargo copter. Two different defense turrets swung around, pointing their gun barrels at one soldier after the next, singling out anyone who moved towards them. “Iris, you’re taking this exhibitionism thing a bit too far,” Holly said, one hand on her hip, the other holding a micro-blade.

Iris snarled a response back. It was something sharp and witty but gone from her mind the moment she tried to say it. She was too tired to keep it in her conscious thoughts. It didn’t reach Holly either, not through the grip of her broken micro-blade still clenched between her teeth.

Behind her, Roselyn leapt free of the UA-Delphi and landed, Silvy riding atop the RW-33. The big wolf drone climbed into the plane without a word. Holly nodded and walked over to Iris as the strength of will began to fade out of her. Silvy was safe. Silvy was going to leave. Iris had done it.

“I’m real sorry,” Holly said. A second plane came in flying, cruising down through the sky as the first closed up and hit the thrusters. The RW-33 was huge, maybe large enough to fill the whole hold. A second plane made sense for the two of them. “I don’t think anyone is going to deny you’re the best, but even the best get broken down…”

Iris’ shoulders slumped and sagged. That was about all she was capable of anymore. She spat out the weapon so she could talk. “Get me the hell out of here.”

Holly nudged the weapon away with her foot. “I’ll get you out of here,” she said, and looked up at the other plane touching down. It was smaller, a faster model by the looks of it. Sleek and radar absorptive. “I’m sorry. It’s nothing personal. Just business. You know how it is, right?”

“What are you talking about, Holly?”

Then the woman from the Arctic Cutters hacked off Iris’ legs right below her hips. She tumbled to the ground like a felled tree and landed on her back, as helpless as an upturned turtle. “What the fuck?”

Holly clasped her hands together, pleading from behind her sword. “I said sorry, alright? We’ve got bigger customers than Blumhagen, no matter how much Mendel pays us. You know, don’t you? I’m not gunna kill you. I would have cut your head off if I was gunna kill you. I just can’t have you resisting… you in tip top shape, I wouldn’t stand a chance. Gotta level the playing field, play it safe, you know? Iris, you’re coming with us back to HQ. Only Silvy is getting taken to Okinawa, to Blumhagen.”

“You backstabbing bitch.”