Even as Junebug swung her rifle onto the new threat she saw dozen more armed thugs swarming into the small plaza. It was an incredibly rapid response, one that Andor’s Armored would have struggled to have mounted. She fired the plasma bolt was aimed at center of mass but the alien’s shooting posture meant that the bolt struck the thing above its elbow. The plasma liberated its energy with a cyan thump and the alien staggered away burning as though doused in hydrocarbon. A detached part of Sayeeda’s mind theorized that the odd reaction might be because the alien’s blood was flamable.

Gunfire rippled out in almost random arcs. Even so there were over two score of shooters in the plaza now and probability meant that someone was bound to get lucky eventually. Junebug ducked back as rounds of a half dozen different varieties tore into the cement ledge that protected her. She crawled on her belly to a new position. With a sick feeling she realised what had happened. Every minor ganger had wanted to look like he had been ready for what had happened earlier at the club and moved his people into position so that they could tell Gnorlac that it hadn’t been them who had failed. Then, all unexpected, the target had reappeared ready for the taking.  Oddly it didn’t make her feel any better that the enemy had caught them flat footed because they had been so incompetent it worked in their favor. 

“Junebug, Lonny say we have multiple ships on an intercept course, what should I do?!” Taya’s voice was tight and terrified even over the comms. Sayeeda pushed herself to one knee, snapped off two shots and ducked before the return fire swept her position. Gnorlac had obviously put out the word that if the Highlander couldn’t be taken, it was to be destroyed. Dogfighting in a vertical city while trying to perform an evac would have been a strain for Neil and was no bussiness for a girl with a handful of hours of training.

“Bug out Taya, get to orbit and make a holding jump, Lonny can tell you how,” she said. A grenade sailed over the railing twenty feet from her and went off with a harmless crump. Making a holding jump required a precise insetion into the RIP with just enough way on to hold stationary against the prevailing currents. Once you were there you could stay in the RIP so long as your fuel held out without moving more than a few fractions of a light second, safe from attack. It was the sort of thing pirates did routinely, dropping in and out of normal space to scout for prey.

“What about you?” Taya asked, her concern for her captain not quite outweighing the relief at not being asked to attempt a suicidally dangerous maneuver.

“Drop out of jump every hour or so, we will let you know once we figure it out,” Junebug replied, cutting the call with a neural impulse. Taya would want more information, but there was a limit to how much her mind could process at one time and she needed to be in the firefight now that the ship was taken care off. There was a rumble of engines barely audible over the rapid fire of dozens of weapons.

“We have vehicles closing,” Junebug announed popping her head up to survey the scene. The gunmen were focusing their fire on the alley mouth where the mech had finished clearing the rubble. Across the plaza she saw three ugly looking monstrosities sorting into the chaos. One of the things might have been an old Dart T combat car but it was so heavily modified it was hard to tell. It bore a large old fashioned fusion cannon. The other two were clearly converted bulldozers, with extra blades welded on to act as side and top armor.  One of the rusted clunkers bore a heavy duty assault cannon on a pintle mount. The kind of ten barreled weapon that might be used for air defense in a second rate mercenary company. The other bore a cylindrical ring of hypersonic rockets. What the gangsters had originally built the vehicle for she couldn’t guess, but any one of the tree was more than capable of shredding Neil’s ‘I cant believe its not a mech’ into so much tin shavings. 

Without pausing to thinks she aime her rifle at the base of the rocket dozer’s pintle mount and fired a half dozen rounds. Steel sublimed in bright red flashes as the plasma gouged holes in the side of the armor. One of the rounds flew high and struck one of the rockets in its housing. With a roar so loud that it knocked half the gunmen down and engaged Sayeeda’s helmets audio dampers the thing vanished in a flash of white fire. Rockets whistled out of the inferno like fireworks blasting nearby buildings to flaming rubble. With horror Junebug watched a burning warhead hurtle towards her. It hit the floor below crashing through the concrete wall without detonating. Junebug jumped to her feet and started to run for the next roof, when a round smashed into her chest armor and sent her spinning to the floor gasping for breath. A moment later there was a tremendous explosion as the warhead below her went off, hurling her, and  a giant section of the roof, skyward in a low tumble.