Subject: “Spectra”
Actual name unknown. Pegasus female. Extraordinary resistance to CADS.
“No you don’t!” Ironwood snapped at her unwanted guest and would-be protector. “You are gonna stay in here while I call Warhorse!”
Spectra’s cyberweapons swiveled noiselessly in their sockets as she turned to face Ironwood again. AR highlights tracking vital zones on her new “target” turned from red to green as her implants took aim. Temple. Trachea. Carotid. Heart. Knee. Of course she would never actually blaze Ironwood, not even with the spitballs she was carrying, but it wouldn’t do to deactivate the combat progs at a time like this.
“Buck that!” Spectra spat back. “This is my mess, and those Warhorse donkeys will just...” she silenced herself, ears perking up at the sound of distant shouting. Ironwood and her unicorn guest couldn’t hear it, but Spectra’s audio monitor picked up every word and transcribed it in an AR window. The news wasn’t good. These punks weren’t going to buck off without doing a proper job of sweeping the building. She was going to need to swoop this storm, by herself, right now. “Listen, you can’t call in corp-sec. They’d clip me just as fast!”
“An’ I’m supposed to think that’s a bad thing?”
“One minute!” Spectra pleaded, turning her back and locking her wings horizontally again. “Sixty seconds flat and I’ll have this whole storm cleared, or my name isn’t Spectra!”
“Too bad that’s not yer name anyway!” Ironwood yelled angrily, as Spectra launched herself airborne and out of sight.
“Um, do you know her?” Daybreak asked, though she had a feeling she knew the answer.
Ironwood just replied with a sullen grunt.
Daybreak bit her lower lip. “... Are you going to call Warhorse?”
Ironwood didn’t speak; she couldn’t over a sudden burst of gunfire from very, very close by. It was followed by a crash, the sound of something very large and heavy falling over. Daybreak saw Ironwood wince. “Better not have been the plumeria,” she grumbled. “No, I’m not gonna call in. C’mon! We gotta get you outta here.”
Even before she opened her mouth, Daybreak knew her next words would sound stupid. Still, she couldn’t help but bring it up: “What about all your plants and equip—”
“Insured!” Ironwood’s expression was, yes, just as incredulous as Daybreak knew she deserved. “Sweet Sisters, are you serious? Move!”
Ironwood took off at a gallop, and Daybreak scrambled to keep up. The path Ironwood led them on skirted the edge of the warehouse and always kept to dense racks of planters. Twice, Daybreak tripped over exposed extension cords laid out across the ground. Each time, Ironwood doubled back for her, dragging her to her hooves by her mane and then taking off again.
Then Ironwood skidded to a halt, and Daybreak bounced clumsily off of her flanks. As she got to her feet, without help this time, she saw why they’d come to such a sudden stop. The loading dock was just ahead, but between them and escape were two unfamiliar faces, both of their eyes concealed by dark AR shades.
One, a lanky zebra, took a three-pointed stance as he extended one front leg and pointed it at Daybreak. The barrel of the gun strapped to his hoof glinted as his aim wavered. “I definitely do want to do this,” he said in a nasal stutter. “Just... just stay with us, loudly.” The zebra’s compatriot, an ebony pegasus with a clashing green and blue mane, said nothing, but took up a similar stance with her own weapon.
Ironwood bared her teeth as she positioned herself between her guest and the invaders in her workplace. “You don’t wanna do this,” she snarled, staring down the guns in her face with a glare that could probably stop a low caliber bullet or three. “We both know it ain’t worth it. Jus’ put ‘em down.”
“You’re right, I do want this, so—”
“Sit down, stripy bitch!” A dark bolt of retribution screamed down from a nearby catwalk, pounding the monochrome thug against the concrete floor before he could even cry out in alarm. Then, just as abruptly, Daybreak and Ironwood’s savior vaulted back towards the ceiling. The neon-maned pegasus who had been threatening Ironwood pivoted and fired, successfully destroying a skylight.
The gunshot sent Daybreak into a cowering stance, but Ironwood took it as an opening. The hapless gangpony spent a few crucial moments trying to follow Spectra’s escape with her aim while Ironwood charged and body-slammed her. The black pegasus didn’t stop tumbling on the ground until she bumped into the far wall.
“Now let’s go!” Ironwood dragged Daybreak out of her defensive curl and towards the door.
Spectra glanced over her shoulder as she rose, hoping to provoke the pegasus door-guard into following her up. What she saw happen instead was just as good. Ironwood could handle herself from here—now it was time to get to the fun part.
Now came the game of seek-and-slag. Spectra's resolve was now tinged with something like excitement. Catwalks offering landing zones while creating a treacherous airspace, concealing walls of planters, confusing acoustics... Before Spectra reached the apex of her jump, she had already marked out a half-dozen heat signatures, mapped the corridors and catwalks on her HUD, and planned her next two leaps.
The first ones to take care of would be the group circling back around to check on the two suckers she’d just dropped. Spectra’s hooves pounded into the thick dust on top of a wall of planters, and she sent herself into a wheeling spiral over another corridor. She sailed as if in zero gravity over the heads of two ponies: some blue on blue derp and a red on black walking target. Neither of them looked up at the cyber-pegasus cartwheeling above their heads. Spectra's spread wings sparkled in the UV lights as they flashed with gunfire.
Not a single round struck the concrete floor beneath her targets. Bright splashes of green appeared on the two thugs' bodies where they were hit, the knockout poison in Spectra's gel rounds spreading and quickly evaporating as it did its insidious work.
Before the two punks even hit the ground, Spectra was on her hooves again on top of a different planter. Her implanted guns clicked rhythmically as their actions automatically flipped open, but Spectra refused to stop moving for the few seconds it would take to chamber another set of spitballs.
She dropped again, aiming for a precise path just inches clear of the top level catwalk. With a loud clang, she struck a railing with her rear hooves as she passed it, sending her shooting like a torpedo between two catwalks on an angled collision course with the ground. A chill of danger tingled across her skin as metal girders whistled dangerously close to her head. She opened her wings an instant before she hit concrete, softening her landing and then propelling herself into another leap.
Tarnished steel blurred past as she rocketed up through a gap in the walkways. Her wings beat once as she neared the top level again, her hooves met metal with another clang, and suddenly she was sailing over a gap again, right on top of two more unsuspecting targets.
They were standing back to back, glancing around in confusion as the sounds of Spectra’s approach echoed chaotically throughout the warehouse. One of them, an earther, spotted Spectra just in time to let out a gasp before taking a dive-kick to the chin.
The other tried to raise a weapon at the cyber-pegasus who had landed in his midst, but only managed to flail as his mane was grabbed and yanked hard to the side. With a gritted-teeth shout, Spectra twisted for leverage and rolled the punk over her own body, slamming him hard onto the concrete floor. The impact knocked the wind out of the ganger’s lungs, so he couldn’t cry out when Spectra added injury to injury by pulling back a forehoof and dealing him a vicious shot to the temple.
When Spectra spread her wings to take off again, they were almost perforated by automatic fire from the corridor behind her. Shit! Shaken by adrenaline, Spectra almost crashed into a top-level planter with her panicked launch. On her way up, she thought she felt the wind from a projectile whistling past her neck.
Her hooves skidded dangerously on the thick dust as she touched down on another planter, but she managed to pivot so as not to turn her back to her enemies. Sure, enough, both of them had followed her into the air. Not two but four saddle-mounted heavy rifles automatically focused their aim on Spectra’s chest. What the hell? The rest of the punks had been making do with scrap-metal hoofguns!
Spectra backpedaled and threw herself backwards off of the wall, wings outstretched. She tried to slow herself in the air, but she knew it wasn't going to be good enough. When she hit the concrete this time, it was all she could do to land on all fours instead of on her side. Her grunt of pain was punctuated by heavy-caliber gunshots. Instead of bullets pockmarking the ground, this time it was bright green “spitballs” exploding around Spectra’s hooves. “No,” Spectra groaned miserably, feeling the sting of capsules breaking against her back. “Jus’ slag me instead...”