As far as plans went, the first stage of mine was all sorts of simple. We drove to the radio station where Blart’s little mishap had purchased me a new arm and busted our way back into the control station. From there, setting up a simple transmitter with an on/off switch on it was fairly easy. We’d already fabricated all the necessary parts and were ready to go within a minute of getting into the control room.

  After that we set off towards the railgun base. When we got one hundred meters out, I triggered the transmitter, and a blanket of jamming settled over the whole of Hanoi, transmitted from one of the most powerful sources of radio transmissions in the whole city. We crested the hill that shielded us from the base and began with step two of the plan.

  Ultraviolence.

  Quad-barreled rocket launchers were pretty common out in space, from what Captain Cross had told me, and ever since I’d laid eyes on one, I’d wanted to fire it off. Of course I’d incorporated them into the plan. Popping out from the back of the truck, I shouldered the launcher and aimed it at the ten meter tall wall surrounding the installation. Designating four targets for the rockets with my NII, I let a full salvo fly simultaneously. They roared off into the night and crossed the ninety meters between my ride and the wall in a second, and their roar was suddenly replaced with the crash and boom of high explosives. A similar display sprouted from my companion vehicle, and when the smoke and flames cleared, we had ourselves a couple dozen meters of open air to drive over.

  On a high suspension and at speed, our truck slammed into the rubble and debris left over, and it was all I could do to hang on with my enhanced right arm as we bounced insanely over it. Cung didn’t let up though. Allowing the defenders a second to breathe would spell our doom. The mounted guns all over the outside walls weren’t up to the task of shooting down incoming rockets, but they were more than capable of putting holes in us if we gave them the chance.

  As such, Cung and the other driver slalomed wildly around, throwing up dirt in equal measure to the perimeter guns, which were chugging out heavy rounds to chew up the ground along our path. I pulled myself back in and grabbed Steve, putting myself between him and the guns behind us. As I did, a heavy round punched into my shoulder and bounced, doing no damage but hurting pretty damned badly. Next to me, one of Cung’s resistance fighters wasn’t as lucky and got a huge chunk of his shoulder torn off by another wild round. He shouted in agony as blood spurted from the hideous wound.

  Maybe the man could be saved, if we had a corpsman and a place to evac him to, but we had neither and our time was running out. I pushed Steve down with my left hand, grabbed the fighter by his trauma harness with my right, and hefted him out of the open roof of the truck. He shouted in surprise and terror, but it was only briefly audible before we left him behind.

  The mounted guns, seeing an easier target flying on a simple ballistic arc, instantly changed over. His scream was cut short as the stream of heavy rounds and tracers converged on him and chewed him to bloody chunks. Cung shouted something unprintable but kept driving. It was a good decision because the guns wasted no time in turning to follow us, their distraction having barely lasted two full seconds.

  Those seconds proved critical, though, letting him jackknife the truck to a stop in front of the railgun’s control center building. I kicked Steve out first, literally booting him into the dirt, before leaping out myself. The door to the control center was heavily armored, and I snatched a couple of charges from the duffel bag my pet nerd carried, slapping them onto the portal and activating them as soon as they were all there.

  With a roaring explosion, the door crumpled inwards, and I was right on its heels, charging into the base with wild abandon. The place was set up exactly the same as my own railgun emplacement back at home, with a long tunnel heading downwards into the protected command center directly below the railgun itself. Long, loping steps brought me down the ramp until I reached the door at the bottom, and I began setting charges there, too.

  My work done, I stepped back and took cover at the portal’s side, waiting while Cung and his guys stacked up. I caught a glimpse of his face through his faceplate, and he looked furious. It seemed likely that his anger was directed at me, but I was steadily holding out hope that it was righteous fury, directed at our mutual enemies. Once all of his men stacked up, notably two short from when we’d started, I blew the charges with a laser signal.

  Fire poured out from the gap, which told me that the defenders had some wherewithal. Cung and his men returned fire blindly, firing lasers into the control room with abandon, and I ducked through, cutting rightward. A couple of rounds bounced off of my new armor as I rushed the nearest defender and delivered a right hook to his face. The strike I’d meant to simply throw him off so that I could sweep and restrain him instead caved in his whole cheekbone and tossed him contemptuously to the ground.

  Moments later, the fire died down, and I looked around for any living survivors. Lasers, as it turned out, didn’t bore neat little holes in guys. Maybe lower power versions that wouldn’t penetrate real armor might’ve, but the high-powered lasers we’d been given by the spacemen certainly didn’t. They dumped all their energy into their unfortunate victims at once, causing large volumes of water to spontaneously and instantly convert to steam. The rapidly expanding, superheated steam expanded in gory explosions.

  In other words, the lasers Cung’s men used blew melon-sized holes in people. Someone hit by two or three of the shots wasn’t even recognizable as human without finding the head. Somehow I doubted that, even if I were to find one of their heads in the bleeding mess that was left over, it would be helpful. I swore and turned to find Steve, only to find Cung and three of his men pointing their rifles at me, while the other three remaining were covering the door. Another of his men was bleeding out by Cung’s feet, or perhaps he was already dead.

  “Hey!” I said, reproachfully. “We had a deal, friends until this is over!”

  “Friends don’t use one another as bait!”

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  “It was him or us, and he was already wounded. The alternative was for us all, including him, to die. Quit complaining!”

  “Well, we don’t have anyone left alive, so it’s looking like we’re all going to die anyway. I think I’d like to have the satisfaction-”

  “Don’t be so dramatic, I’ve always got a plan B.” If you considered wanton violence a plan, I wasn’t even lying. I crossed over to Steve, who was laying flat on the ground with his hands over his head, and began to fish around in his pack. “We can’t activate the railgun the normal way, but we can brute force it.” Finding what I was looking for, I pulled out a flux charge and handed it to Cung. “If you’re done being a drama queen, go send a guy through that hatch in the ceiling with Steve and get this set up. He knows what to do.” Cung snatched the charge from my hands, giving me a look that should have struck me dead on the spot.

  Ignoring his withering glare, I grabbed Steve by the neck and yanked him to his feet, gesturing for him to get moving. He looked mildly panicked, but seemed to be holding it together well enough. “I’m going to manually aim this thing, you go upstairs and set up the shell. There should be one on the rails right now.”

  “R-right. Right,” he agreed, nodding his head. Cung’s man was already up the ladder and opening the hatch to the loading platform, so Steve hurried to follow them while I moved over to the console.

  As soon as I got to it, I started by trying to simply wake it up by pressing a few keys. It was locked, of course. It must have been more than a minute since anyone had touched it, and the computer had locked down automatically in response. I tried entering my credentials, but of course those had been locked out, and probably wouldn’t have worked on any base other than my own. Though that would make my job harder, it wouldn’t be impossible.

  Most USAS technology had at least one failsafe, and our railgun aiming controls were no exception. As gunfire and shouting erupted at the door, I started to look around for the manual controls. They were somewhere within the console, I was sure, and I began to rip drawers out of their housings, tossing each one out of the way as it proved useless. Finally, I reached one which held a small safe. Hoping that it was what I was looking for, I brought my metal fist down like a club and smashed in its roof to give me a purchase on the door. Wedging a couple of fat metal fingers into the gap, I wrenched it fully open. Lying inside was what I was looking for. Brass-plated, with knobs, dials, and a slider for power, it had everything necessary to manually dial in targeting data.

  “Can you hurry up!?” Cung shouted at me from the door. I glanced back to see that another one of his men had taken a round straight through the throat and grunted at him, doing my best to work faster. There was a safe, slow way to switch from digital to manual controls, the way prescribed by the book, but I was a master of doing things the fast and sloppy way instead.

  Normally, you had to cut power to the console and unscrew all four corners going clockwise, then carefully unplug the whole device. After all that was done, you’d gently pull the control station monitor from its pedestal, protecting all of the plugs, and place it into the same safe that the manual controls rested in. On my own console, I’d replaced the screws with simple plastic ones that I could tear right out of their housings and replace after the drill was over. Similarly, I’d found that the equipment wasn’t nearly so fragile as the brass believed, especially the desk console itself.

  As such, I slammed my metal fist straight through the monitor’s face and heaved. Try though the screws might, my newfound cybernetic might couldn’t be denied, and with a series of metallic pops and pings, all four gave way. I heaved the sparking monitor at the wall and grabbed up the manual controls, setting them into the monitor’s newly vacated slot. The sounds of gunfire mixed with the returning laser fire from Cung and his men was a cacophony behind me as I began to dial in the proper trajectory.

  “We need to get out of here, Melvin!” Cung shouted.

  “Get your guys upstairs, I’m almost done!” I yelled back at him in return. Normally, figuring out how to aim the big gun manually required a set of formula sheets with all sorts of data, and more than a little work on the part of the operator. Regulations demanded a six minute time at most between manual shots for a single operator due to all of this work, but thanks to the computer jammed into my head, I had the gun aimed in less than two. Hopefully I’d even done it right, because there wasn’t going to be a second chance. I drove my fist down through the new control panel and wrecked it, then futzed with the controls. If they wanted to interfere, they’d have to find both the tertiary panel and the slot for it. Without the control board, they’d have to figure out where we’d aimed the big gun by themselves, too. Hopefully by that time I’d be long gone.

  “Come on, Melvin!” Cung shouted from the ladder, and I straightened up from the controls. As I turned around, I watched a grenade bounce into the room. Two sprinting strides took me to it, and I kicked the tiny pineapple back through the gap. There was a shout of terror from the tunnel outside before the grenade went off, after which it transformed into several shrieks of pain. The wounded were already in cover, though, so their compatriots leaned out to deal with the problem. Rounds peppered into my back and shoulder with a sensation like someone was poking me in the shoulder and lower back pretty hard, but none pierced. Paying them no heed, I heaved myself into the chamber above and slammed the hatch closed behind me. Suddenly, everything was relatively quiet.

  “That’s how it’s done!” I whooped, congratulating myself and the men. I turned from the hatch to look at them with a big smile on my face, but none of them looked even remotely happy as they were doing a field dressing on the thigh of another of their guys. Blood was rapidly pooling around his midsection in a way I recognized as distinctly bad. Figuring there would be time to celebrate later, I headed over to where Steve was working on the railgun round. He’d set up the gravplates on either side, and was working to unbolt the base of the huge round to get at its flux charge. “Steve! ETA?”

  “Five minutes! There’s another fifteen bolts to go.” As he said this, he kept ratcheting at the bolt he was working on, twisting away as fast as he could. Occasionally, the ratchet would slip, and he’d curse as he set it back into place. With my good right hand, I reached out and grabbed a hold of one of the bolts, giving it an experimental twist. After a second’s effort, it came loose, to both my and Steve’s surprise. “That’s just unfair,” he grumbled, as I rapidly went about twisting the bolts off with him. We had the plate off in another minute, and Steve hefted the huge flux charge between his hands. He knocked the old one out and slotted our custom one in, then pressed a button on its side, activating the device.

  “That’s it, boys!” I shouted at the team. “Time to go!” The railgun’s shot, when it was on regular garbage duties, was essentially an eight meter tall steel garbage can, half that in diameter. Occasionally someone would throw away something that they didn’t want to, so it had rungs on the side for someone to climb up and hop inside, which was exactly what we did as the booming and banging from the hatch grew louder. “Check your helmet seals!” I told them as we nestled into the waste and detritus inside the can. “Don’t want to-”

  I never finished my sentence, though, as what felt like ten thousand sledgehammers smashed into my brain and I lost consciousness.

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