“We can’t hold the outpost! They’re pushing us back!” Mai looked at the command centre holomap as she watched the enemy forces closing in on their city. Blue markers representing their forces gradually pulled back towards the city, forcing the enemy to fight for every pace.

A readout showed the units they still had as part of their force, the numbers of soldiers and vehicles they had and, much to Mai’s upset, the number of casualties they’d taken.

“Colonel Ayres, how are your people doing?”

“We’re punishing them, our casualties are …” his voice dropped off the communications channel to be replaced by the sound of many weapons firing at once. “ … sweep right! Sorry, I’m back. Enemy urbexers just roped down. Our casualties are light, the militia are losing heavily though.”

Mai looked at the map, seeing where the urbexers had dropped in. Fortunately, it was nowhere near where they had placed the explosives. If the enemy found them, all of their plans would be ruined, and the city would most certainly be lost.

“They’re not attacking to the west. I’m going to move the turrets there towards the centre of the city. Pull your line back one hundred paces, and I’ll move the turrets to your front back with you.”

“Makes sense to shrink the line, how well are the turrets doing?” Ayres was having to shout over the sound of the battle raging around him.

Mai looked at the BASE score. Each kill with a turret was scored differently according to the type of kill. She opened up the score table to double check she had them right.

Infantry – 1 Drones – 1.5 Ground cars – 2 Buggies with weapons – 2.5 Armoured Cars – 3 Armoured Personnel Carriers – 3.5 Tanks – 4 Mecha – 5

No mecha had been recorded as attacking the city just yet, most of the attacks having been probes by infantry supported by light vehicles as the enemy tried to work out the defences’ weak points.

Some of the turrets had already racked up over one hundred kills and her staff were busy using those scores to keep the turrets repaired and replenished. She’d ordered that they weren’t to be upgraded, as she didn’t want to risk creating a gap in the line whilst the upgrade was carried out.

“The Knights report that they’re ready to go, ma’am,” reported a command centre staff member.

“Please inform them, again,” Mai replied through gritted teeth, “that they’ll get their chance to fight when we need them to.” She could understand their eagerness. Listening to the reports of the various units in battle was hard, and she wanted to do nothing more than rush out and join them. But she was getting heartily sick and tired of the repeated messages from the knights.

She tapped a number of blue markers, opening up their comms channels as she did. Tracing lines with her fingers, she marked where she wanted them to pull back. Because different units moved at different speeds, she had to carefully plan when she wanted them to start moving so that they arrived at the same time.

The mental arithmetic was wearing. As were the constant calls for orders.

“You need to delegate,” Dakota stepped up next to her, face covered in soot, as Mai covered her face with her hands. “You can’t do this all by yourself. Use your command staff.”

She’d pitched her voice low so that those nearby couldn’t hear.

“Your job is to oversee. Macro manage, not micro manage. Tell others what you need and have them do the donkey work.”

“I don’t know what I fucking need,” Mai hissed. “I’m a bloody former sewer worker! And before that, a complete bloody slacker!”

“And look where you are now. You command an entire city. You’ve inspired people to do something they never even thought possible. Now you need to let them fight the battle.”

“Fine! Bring the Sector 5 turrets and bunkers back three hundred paces, get them set up before that enemy armoured element gets too close. Use them to cover the infantry and have them move back four hundred paces. Add a line of trenches there, so that the infantry have better cover.”

Dakota patted Mai’s shoulder as she set about pulling their forces further back into the city. Doing so would deny the enemy the chance to destroy any forces in the open, as well as making it more difficult for their armoured forces to fight in the narrow streets. Gradually, as the defences continued to cause enemy casualties and rack up BASE points, she started to pour construction efforts into toughening hab blocks and other buildings, turning them into mini fortresses, and the city into one larger fortress.

“Look, the Ghosts are moving into action!”

Mai looked at where one of her staff was pointing. A unit of urbexers had been unable to withdraw quickly enough and had been engaged by enemy six-wheeler armoured fighting vehicles with infantry support. Pinned down, and at the mercy of the enemy infantry, a unit called Kira’s Kavaliers, the urbexers had sent out a plea for help. And Ayres and his people had responded.

“Biyu, can you get snipers to Sector Three?” Mai commed her intelligence officer who was ensconced in a VR drone couch.

“Already on it boss, three sections moving in. They’ll take some of the pressure off, and hopefully open a corridor up. Or stop the enemy from chasing them that is. I need the marked buildings to be strengthened, and a tunnel to link them and the sewer I’m marking.”

Mai passed those orders onto one of her staffers, grinding her teeth at having to delegate, but recognising there was no way she could fight each engagement individually.

“Ayres, the map is showing that you’ll be there in three minutes, I’ve assigned a squad of droids to help out. Open a corridor and get the urbexers out along the route I’m sending you now.”

She dropped the connection without waiting for Ayres to confirm his orders and instead concentrated on positioning a turret so that it would have a wide field of fire once the building it was behind was removed. Another staffer was tasked with removing that building as soon as the urbexers reached a way marker Mai had set down. With luck the building would be taken down and the turret, on second thoughts, turrets – she added another – would take the enemy by complete surprise.

Another flash message came through, a different sector was being attacked by Mecha. A bitter taste filled her mouth as she thought of how Jock would have led the counter-attack. Instead, she sent a message to Chan tasking a platoon to go and help the gangers and locals who were doing their best to stop the mecha. To help them out, she dropped a couple of bunkers and turrets into a fall-back position, whilst changing the route of one of the sewers so that her people could not only use them to retreat if they needed to, but also to counter-attack by coming up out of them to the enemy’s rear.

“So much for this God-mecha,” Biyu said as she exited her VR coffin. “Do you think they were lying? Spread the rumour so that if any of their people were captured they’d tell us?”

“It’s possible,” Dakota laid a couple of mugs of chai onto the table, pressing a steamed bun into Mai’s hands. “But according to our players, there’s so much chatter about the damned thing it could cause too much of a public backlash if it wasn’t real.”

“Public backlash?” spat Mai. “You mean all those bastards in the so-called real world watching this would get their panties in a twist if some bastard-big, armoured machine didn’t come stomping through our homes?”

“Yes,” Biyu said. “That’s exactly it. We’re entertainment to them, and we’re going to continue to be entertainment.”

“Until they pull the plug,” Dakota said before taking a bite out of her own steamed bun. Mai copied her, pleased to taste sweet pork and bean sprouts. It was one of her favourite snacks and she raised the remainder of the bun in salute.

“I hadn’t even thought they might do such a thing,” Biyu looked like she was chewing on ashes as she considered the idea that whoever ran things in the real-world might literally just turn them off. Wiping them out with the flick of a switch whilst the players went on to play other games.

“Forget it,” Mai ordered firmly. “We’ve got enough on our plate and adding whether we can be wiped out as easily as flicking a light switch isn’t worth it. We have this battle to fight. Once we’ve won it, we’ll have another battle to fight. One battle at a time. Nothing else matters.”

Sudden silence filled the command centre, every comm channel going dead at the same moment. There was a pregnant pause as the staffers looked at their consoles or paused mid-handwave as they used VR to manipulate their allotted station. And then a wave of sound broke over them. Amongst the cacophony, the one word that was clear was God-mecha.