“Grenades!”

  It was all I could get out as I saw eight balls of death sailing through the air.

  The Kittens reacted instantaneously. Fire shifted focus. I felt explosions rattle through me as they managed to detonate some of the grenades in midair. Three of the clusters were shot down before they could reach us.

  Two grenades sailed through one of our windows.

  Before I could even feel terror, Mela tackled me to the ground. My skull bounced painfully against the floor, but that was the least of my worries as explosions shook the building.

  My visions went absolutely insane as the flash of heat and force rolled over us. I was surrounded by grinning monsters and dying Kittens. Horror flooded my system until I couldn’t feel the floor I was lying on. I couldn’t move. I’m pretty sure I had a seizure or two.

  “… fuck, kid, speak to me!” Mela’s voice slowly broke through my daze. Once my eyesight cleared, I saw her worried face leaning over me.

  I blinked up at her. “Wuh?”

  “Thank fuck. On your feet. Now. Now!” she screamed, pulling me up and pressing me against the wall.

  I finally got to look around and take in the devastation the grenades had wrought. Honestly? It wasn’t that bad.

  Well, ignoring the blood and viscera scattered all over the place.

  “Uric, Tip, and Bethany jumped on them. Fuck. They jumped on them,” one of the Kittens, the medic, ranted in Mela’s direction.

  Mela herself seemed stuck between rage and resignation, but it didn’t take her long to choose ‘pissed.’

  “Back to your posts! Back to your posts now! Punish those fuckers!”

  That finally reminded me to check the camera feeds properly again. For a second, I just stared in surprise. I saw only two borgs struggling to cover the remaining distance between them and the HQ. The other two were gone, and there were two suspiciously fresh craters on the street below, still smoking.

  Just about every Kitten’s gun was focused on the two borgs, who were struggling to continue their advance. Their metallic bodies strained against a literal hail of bullets. The riot shields, no matter how good, were starting to chip and crack.

  Then one of the brutes threw caution to the wind with a scream.

  He dropped the shield, covered his head with his harms, and broke into a dead run. His feet left actual indents in the ground as he covered the last few meters. Just as I thought he might actually manage to burst through the front doors of the HQ, a high caliber bullet caught him in the knee.

  It must have hit something incredibly vital, because the metal limb exploded. Still, the brute had enough momentum to throw himself forward. While the camera angle was awkward for me, I guessed he planted his face on the building’s wall about a meter away from the doors.

  The angle was awkward for our shooters, too. They couldn’t take him out. Terror started to rise in my chest. I was convinced the borg would live until he managed to find his way inside somehow.

  I was wrong.

  I sucked in a sharp breath when a Zerx bullet caught the back of the man’s skull, obliterating his head. My shock then quickly turned to horror when the borg’s body detonated with enough power to shake the building’s foundations.

  Smoke and dust billowed up into the air, blocking the camera. When they cleared a few seconds later, I could make out the edges of a massive hole in our HQ.

  The Zerx had an opening, now. A very real, very visible opening.

  I was already screaming a warning when more vehicles emerged from behind the Zerx. Just two, this time, careening directly for the opening the borg had made in our wall. The second borg was still out there as well, though he had crouched down when his buddy exploded. He cowered desperately, trying to present as small a target as possible for all the people shooting at him.

  Someone in the building must have had enough of the worsening situation. Grenades began to sail out of the HQ at both the approaching vans and the borg.

  The second borg didn’t fare any better than the first. The explosion of his death was only matched by the detonation of his own body in response. Another grenade rolled directly under one of the armored vans and blew up the entire front half. What was left of the vehicle swerved to the side and tipped over, spilling out blood, body pieces, and a remarkable number of living Zerx who’d apparently been packed into the back like sardines.

  The other vehicle was more successful.

  It got through the kill zone, then vanished from my view when it tore through the opening the borg had made in the wall.

  “Fuck. Fuck!” Mela screamed, frustration rolling off her visibly.

  When she opened fire again, she did so wildly and with no regard for aim. Funnily enough, she still managed to be just as deadly. Her shots clipped one of the Zerx when he peeked a bit too far over his barricade. The man toppled over into the street, where he was promptly finished off.

  Mela yelled at the top of her lungs as she continued venting her emotions in bullet-form. “Keep at them! Kill all the fucks!”

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  I hesitated for just a second, but my curiosity refused to be held back for long. I kept three of my six viewpoints trained on the outside, prioritizing the cameras which were focused on the thickest clumps of Zerx fighters.

  The other three, however, I quickly scrolled through until I found the cameras on the inside of the ground floor.

  The place was a mess. Plaster, blood, and bodies littered the floor. The van had driven straight across the room and into a wall. It had caught at least two Kittens between those points, if the blood trails and corpses were anything to judge by.

  The Zerx had already started spilling out of the vehicle, shooting all around them blindly. They weren’t being very effective, and the defenders were using their superior positioning to gun them down fast, but I still saw several Kittens falling.

  “They’re in, but they’re not doing great. Our guys are moving through them,” I narrated quickly, only half-aware I was even doing it. The news did the trick, through. Most of the Kittens relaxed noticeably, and both their rate of fire and their accuracy went up.

  There was no one keeping an eye on scrolls at that point. The overwatch had been delegated to me some time ago when my effectiveness was proven. That meant I was the only one who got to see two more borgs emerging from the van inside of our HQ.

  Somehow, I felt disinclined to share that little tidbit. No sense in triggering a panic.

  Before my own panic could properly set in, actual turrets descended from the ceiling of the room. Four of them, one for each corner, with double barrels thicker than my wrist. They opened fire, and… well, the borgs didn’t last very long at all.

  I felt my lips curl into a vindictive smile as I watched the turrets light up the van, absolutely obliterating another regular Zerx that tried to slip out. The man’s sacrifice did let them drag one of the double doors shut, though, and soon another brave sacrifice managed to close the van, which was standing up to the turret fire frustratingly well.

  That didn’t stop me from trying to bolster our morale.

  “Turrets have them boxed in! Most of them are dead already, but the leftovers are trying to hide in the van. I don’t think they’re very happy they made it inside!”

  Cheers and bloodthirsty hollers answered my claim. For just a few moments, it truly felt like we were close to wrapping things up.

  The Zerx on the outside were dwindling. A ton of their people had gotten pinned down by defenders, thanks to all the height and positioning advantages. Their borgs seemed to be down, even if they had left a hole in our wall and repainted the bottom floor. The van was managed.

  Then I felt the oddest shiver crawl down my spine.

  It felt like I’d just dipped my toes into ice cold water, or like that one time I’d spotted a guy stalking me when I was ten. It was pure dread brought on by deep primal instinct, the kind of feeling that just couldn’t be captured in words. I’d never been able to describe it.

  I could definitely describe what happened next, though.

  A line of crackling electricity zapped up to one of the cameras I was using and booted me out of it. And I wasn’t just mentally aware of it, either. That electricity was a physical experience. I felt it stab through my eye as it severed my connection to the camera.

  I doubled over with a groan, clutching at my left eye, but the feeling didn’t abate. It stretched out. This time, it claimed two cameras at once, for double the agony.

  Then I felt it race deeper into the building and up its sides, gaining in speed and power. I desperately tried to pull away, but the thing was spreading too fast. The discombobulating sensation it left in its wake prevented me from doing anything other than slumping to my knees.

  Helpless, I experienced each new link in the growing net of wrongness. I felt it spread through our cameras and infect the turrets. Then, languidly, like it was relishing the moment, the infection reached out to people. I felt it claim every cybernetic on the lower floors. I felt eyes going blind. I felt hands and legs seizing up, going into convulsions, or even threatening to strangle their owners.

  Higher and higher up the building it went, sweeping through and into the netrunner’s suite above us, as well as into me.

  I was only vaguely aware of Mela screaming my name, barely even felt her hands close around my shoulders. My mind was entirely consumed by the glitching kaleidoscope of my vision as it fractured into something foreign and entirely inhuman.

  The cybernetic organs were rapidly heating up, and as they did, the chaos in my visions grew and expanded. I saw spots of black so deep and alien, they could never belong within our reality. Colors the likes of which I’d never seen, spilling over and into each other. Creatures, wrong and inhuman and with grins too large and too pointy, grins which opened into devouring holes of infinity speckled with far too many eyes.

  My brain hurt. My mind hurt, threatening to fracture into a billion little pieces as that feeling of creeping electricity struggled against the safeguards that must have been placed on my eyes.

  The electricity won. My eyes fizzled one final time, and shut off.

  Then, just as the infection rose up to swallow me completely, I felt the crackling line of electricity go taut… and then it snapped.

  One second I was spasming out on the floor, utterly blind. The next, I blinked — and looked up into the worried eyes of Mela, whose hands were gently cradling my cheeks.

  “Don’t fucking die on me, kid. Not again. Please not again.”

  She brushed her fingers under my eyes with a gentleness I had trouble associating with the woman. When she lifted them away, I realized they were stained red.

  Blood. My blood.

  “Is it me or did I just get hit by a lightning strike?” I tried to say, but all that came out was a garbled moan.

  Still, that was enough to make Mela’s face light up. “Fuck, kid, ya freaked me out. Up with ya, but gently! Gently!” she hissed when I tried to sit up too fast. “Let’s get ya propped up against the wall, and Ravs will see ya in a second. Don’t try to do anything, ’kay?”

  I couldn’t have tried shit even if I wanted to. I just collapsed against the wall, letting my head thunk against it. The bit of pain from that failed to register compared to the mother of all headaches currently raging inside my skull.

  My eyes, too, felt oddly… tender? That wasn’t really the word for it, but they were strained. The way my failing set had felt whenever I forced them to stare at a screen for hours on end.

  A tiny bit of panic shot through me. Still, all I had to do was open my eyes and sweep them over the room to reassure myself that my vision was as unnaturally keen as it had been since I’d made the switch. I could only hope that whatever had just happened hadn’t damaged anything permanently.

  That thought prompted me to try and connect to the cameras again. The effort hurt, at first. It felt like I was poking at an open wound, and the connection was slow to establish itself.

  It did work, however, and I was treated to the sight of waning chaos. The turrets must have turned against their owners. More than a few Kittens were laid out in pieces.

  In spite of that, the van was finally cracked open. I got to see a few Kittens emerge from it with satisfied looks on their faces, so I could only assume all the attackers were well and truly dead. On the inside of our HQ, at least.

  The attackers on the outside were still there, but they looked hesitant and confused. Some had stepped freely out from their cover and advanced a fair bit before getting gunned down for their trouble by the Kittens recovering from the chaos. Those who hadn’t rushed in weren’t pleased at all.

  Whatever had happened, I could only assume it was some kind of plan on their part. A netrunner of their own, perhaps? Those were rare in the slums, but… well, the Kittens had one.

  The Zerx had attacked with confidence. They were expecting to win. Assuming not all of their leaders were idiots, it made sense that they had something to rely on, some card up their sleeves meant to ensure their victory. Of course, that left me with a burning question.

  Why did the attack stop?