"Hold my fire? Are you insane?" Elias barked, his boots sliding through two inches of greasy, industrial sludge as he jammed his back against the slime-slicked concrete of the tunnel wall. A secondary blast of searing white plasma tore across the low-slung ceiling above them, raining down a violent curtain of incandescent slag that hissed viciously as it hit the stagnant green water at their feet. "They are actively dropping artillery-grade thermal charges down the access shafts, Noah! If I stop shooting now, the next thing they drop won't be a drone, it'll be our cremated remains in an ash pan!" "I am not asking you to admire the scenery, Elias, I am telling you that I have hijacked their localized command frequency!" Noah screamed back, his voice cracking from the strain as he violently whipped a trailing mass of black-insulated fiber-optic cables over his shoulder. The small, ruggedized terminal in his hands flickered furiously, washing his pale

 "If you don't run right now, your brains are going to paint this wall!" Elias yelled, shoving Noah violently ahead of him through a narrow service corridor that smelled powerfully of stale grease, burned ozone, and rotting kelp. Noah stumbled forward, his boots skidding across the slick steel grating, but he clutched the battered telemetry deck tighter against his chest. "I'm moving, I'm moving! But don't drop your cover—if they catch us in this straight-away, we're fish in a barrel!" A heavy pulse round slammed into the bulkhead an inch from Elias's ear, sending a blinding shower of sparks and white-hot shrapnel cascading down the back of his tactical vest. He didn't even flinch; he dropped his weight low, pivoted on his heel, and fired two blind, calculated shots back down the corridor. A heavy thud followed by a sharp curse confirmed he’d found a target. "That bought us three seconds," Elias

 "I can't throw punches, Elias, my telemetry deck is hanging on by a single copper thread, and if it shorts out, the entire global frequency sync collapses!" Noah shrieked, his voice cracking with panic as he stumbled over a protruding bolt on the descending service ramp. Elias didn't slow down by a single fraction of a second. He clamped a heavy hand around Noah’s collar, hoisted him upward like an unruly sack of grain, and lunged around the final, blindingly sharp bend of the industrial drainage sluice. "Then pray to whatever god of wire and tin is listening that we hit the bottom before the Coalition catches us, because I am fresh out of ammunition and my patience expired five levels ago!" Elias roared, his boots slamming into the rusted iron grating of the lower platform with enough force to send a shower of orange flakes cascading into the brackish, oil-slicked water below. The air here was thick,

 "That’s a brilliant tactical assessment, Elias, provided you enjoy being buried under eight thousand tons of reinforced concrete and Coalition sonar buoys!" Noah hissed, his fingers flying across the cracked glass display of his handheld terminal as a blinding arc of blue plasma slammed into the concrete bulkhead barely three inches from his left shoulder. Shredded concrete exploded outward in a blinding storm of gray dust and razor-sharp aggregate, stinging their faces and filling the stagnant air with the sharp, acrid stench of vaporized stone. Elias didn’t flinch; he dropped to one knee, the heavy polymer stock of his carbine wedged firmly into his shoulder pocket, and swept the muzzle up toward the web of rusted overhead gantries where the flickering silhouettes of Coalition pursuit drones were beginning to fan out. "They’re not using mortars, Noah, they’re bringing up a heavy thermal sweep," Elias s

 "I'm bypassing their local telemetry nodes right now!" Noah yelled over the deafening mechanical shriek of the dying drone as it careened off the concrete wall and plummeted into the churning green runoff below. "If you'd stop shooting every piece of hardware within a fifty-foot radius, I might actually be able to divert their targeting grid into the main power conduit!" "You have about four seconds before that thermal sweep turns us into charcoal, Noah!" Elias snapped, dropping his empty magazine onto the slick, chemical-stained floor and shoving a fresh one into his carbine with a sharp, metallic click. "I don't care about their targeting grid; I care about not being cooked alive in an iron pipe!" "Well, you're about to get your wish—either we burn or we drown!" Noah retorted, his fingers hammering frantically against the cracked glass of his terminal as a blinding flash of white-hot light illuminated the upper gantry.