Exigency: The Old Guard

Wilhelm's every twist and lash and feint has a follow-up. No movement is wasted, no opening is left untested. To their credit the Mercs never showed fear, never fell back... and for their bravery they're obliterated in a storm of slashes and cuts.

The Major brings both blades crashing down towards Serana and, although his frozen face doesn't show it, he's shocked to see her nimbly sidestep away and strike back in the same fluid motion. Pudge's flexibility upgrade lets Serana use the Major's mechanical style against him: he may be fast, but his tactics are unchanging and predictable.

The Arbiters are starting to flag, their attacks becoming more sluggish, struggling to wound when they connect. Two rifle shots sound out. There's a choked cry, and Lyra whirls around to see one of her Arbiters die on his feet, head bowed, held upright by his power armour's servos.

Ignoring the other renegades, Lyra wordlessly hurtles towards the nearest Sharpshooter, piercing her chest and pinning her to the concrete. Lyra rips her glaive free with a vicious twist and turns to the last one, blood dramatically dripping down the handle of her ceremonial weapon.

Lyra's Arbiter struggles to hold his own against two enemies. Their knives are starting to slice into actuators and vital components instead of merely scraping across metal. Every successful hit is another pebble on the mountain of malfunctions that's threatening to incapacitate the Arbiter's power armour in an avalanche of glitches: he's at their mercy.

Serana's uppercut staggers the Major, peeling away a layer of plating from his upper chest and skinning his forehead, taking a slice out of the purple-black subdermal shielding beneath it. No wonder he can barely move his face! The Major raises his arms to strike but Serana hears Pudge's warning and hops backwards...

A lance of blinding white plasma screams down the courtyard. The Major freezes. Then he turns, slowly, back to Serana. There's a glowing hole in the top-right of his head.

The last sharpshooter is so focused on Lyra that he doesn't notice Wilhelm charging in until his legs are swept away. Before his face can connect with the concrete, Lyra's glaive meets it on the upswing. His head goes in one direction and his lower body the other.

Impossibly, the Major still manages to take a swing at Serana. She avoids it effortlessly: the motion is twitchy and exaggeratedly slow. A good chunk of the Major's skull is missing, exposing silvery implants webbed through charred flesh that might have originally been grey matter. The cyborg raises his blades... and falls backwards with an earthshaking crunch, as if his fractured mind has finally registered what happened. The towering Merc lies still.

Behind him, something emerges from the entrance he'd been guarding. A freight tram, squat and rusted but perfectly functional. The Major and his team must have been waiting for its arrival when the Arbiters attacked.

The remaining Mercenaries have had enough. They break, ignoring the Arbiter, fleeing towards the courtyard exit and the relative safety of the coastline beyond the Ivory Cliff perimeter.

Reave has left the APC. She takes aim at one of the retreating Mercs and then thinks better of it, returning her pistol to its holster.

Lyra spins around in surprise. "Reave? What are you doing h—?"

The Enforcer raises a hand to stop her. "Any questions can be saved until we're on that freight tram. I doubt we have long until the cannon is brought online."

Lyra begrudgingly concedes. She orders the last of her Arbiter comrades to stay behind: considering the sad state of his armour, he's only too happy to oblige.

"It's all out war is what it is!" Lyra grimaces. "The communications network came back online and we heard Chief Cáceres' distress call. The embassy sent everyone they could and these traitorous bastards shot down our shuttle... and I hear they killed the Lord Councillor!"

"Armani killed Graves-Burton," Reave says matter-of-factly.

Lyra gasps, looking to Pudge in intense shock. "My god! I can't believe it! How did—?"

Reave snorts. "Oh as if it even matters. Armani, Burton, the Vault— all irrelevant while these sore losers are trying to bombard the city."

Lyra pauses. "The Vault? Was it opened?"

Reave suddenly seems intensely interested in the state of her boots. "Like I said. Let's just... let's just focus on the task at hand."

Serana has placed containers behind the tram's perimeter railings and Pudge has mounted the Hellfire cannon on the small loading arm at its fore. They've effectively turned the innocous flat-bed rail transport into a mobile machine gun nest.

Lyra is quiet. Even Reave seems lost in her thoughts... or perhaps in other people's thoughts.

A press of a button has the tram screaming up a spiral ramp at 80mph. A snail's pace by modern standards but nonetheless a nerve-wracking journey as the rickety old vehicle violently rattles in near-darkness. Even with the noisy engine beneath the party's feet the sounds of distant battle still reach their ears.

And something else. It's crackly and difficult to make out above the orchestra of background noise but a woman's voice is speaking over the announcement system.

"I saw you fight Major Orstein over the cameras. A pity he had to go out that way, but I'm sure you'd argue that you had little choice but to kill him. I didn't exactly see him offer you an alternative."

The tram begins to slow. It has nearly reached the central peak of the Ivory Cliff complex.

"So allow me to offer one: go back the way you came. Walk away from all this. What is it going to take for you to stop?"

As the tram draws to a halt Wilhelm spies a camera overlooking the platform: there are no doubt others dotted around the area, positioned to monitor anyone trying to approach the control hub.

Noticing Wilhelm's discovery, Reave puts a finger to her lips. I'm picking up seven minds, Reave telepathically broadcasts to the party, but that's not accounting for any drones or mechs. We should be careful.

The heart of the Ivory Cliff base is a web of walkways and rooms suspended by cables and held aloft by rusting columns. The tram lines zig-zag beneath everything, serviced by a few freight elevators and primitive robotic loading arms. There are staircases and ladders all over, but they all seem to be in various states of disrepair and none look particularly safe.

Much of the chamber is lost in shadow but the central hub is lit up brightly, a bulbous stalactite of metal connected to both the rafters and the floor by a quartet of massive girders with a flat-bed elevator situated between them. And at the top of it all sits the cannon: a huge piece of artillery built to take down hostile capital ships in past centuries. It's dormant at present, its telescopic barrel collapsed and the roof hatch shut.

Four massive platforms are connected to the hub like the petals of an ugly reinforced-concrete flower. Each is home to a complicated mechanical loader, ready to feed the cannon a constant supply of shells. Very few seem to remain but judging by the symbols on the hoppers...

They're nuclear. The cannon is nuclear. The city wouldn't stand a chance.

The announcement system crackles again, slightly less distorted than the last time. "Perhaps you need to think on it. But I repeat the question: what would it take for you to stop this idiocy? What do you even hope to accomplish?"