Sword of Minerva (The Guild Wars Book 10) by Mark Wandrey (great books for teens TXT) 📕

decades old by the looks of it, finding what he wanted proved difficult. Rick spent hours overturning crumbling walls and uncovering banks of half-melted mailboxes until they found what the scientist was looking for. Amazingly, it appeared intact.

He used his low-powered lasers to slice the box free and hefted it. It only weighed a dozen kilos at most.

“Well done,” Sato said just as Rick’s threat assessment system lit up. “Let’s get out of here.”

Rick dropped the box and spun, engulfing Sato in his arms. He turned again and bent over. A rain of bullets fell on them from the direction of the street. Most missed, though more than a few ricocheted off his back. The bastards had come in slow and quiet, and he’d been too busy with the scavenger hunt. But now he was pissed.

Regardless of how many attackers there were, they’d eventually have to reload. After the first few shots, Rick was certain they didn’t have anything immediately dangerous to him. He waited for empty magazines so he could afford to stop protecting Sato. The scientist wasn’t bulletproof.

“Who’s shooting at us?” Sato yelled over the cacophony of gunfire.

“Everyone, I think,” Rick replied. A moment later, fire slackened off, but it didn’t stop entirely. Great, that meant the punks had some small amount of fire discipline. He decided it was unlikely there would be a better opportunity. “Stay low,” he said, then as gently as possible, lifted Sato up and moved him to the other side of the boxes he’d just cut apart. These were the extra-strong ones and should provide protection. At least for a short time.

Clear of the need to keep his charge alive, Rick was free to respond. While he was shielding Sato with his armored body, the computers in the armor had been analyzing the attack, using infrared and ultraviolet sensors to spot muzzle flashes as well as the heat from bodies. The counter-battery fire process had identified nine aggressors.

If he had to guess, the two punks he’d run off a couple hours ago had brought their whole gang. Good move, tactically, against anyone except an Æsir.

Rick controlled the armor via a sort of pinplant. Based on the design Sato had ‘dreamed up’ and first used on himself, the scientist called it a Mesh. It provided a direct neurolink to the armor, as well as a dozen other features. More of a wide-spread neural web than a specialized pinplant. Humans with pinplants used them to control starships and CASPers. With the Mesh, Rick didn’t control the armor, he was the armor.

The moment he turned around, the incoming fire faltered dramatically.

“Surprise,” Rick said, though he knew none of the attackers could hear him. Because there were so many targets identified, he let his armor do most of the work. Based on the heat signatures, he could tell two were using larger automatic rifles. They were the primary targets. He triggered both arm lasers to maximum.

A 250-kilowatt laser doesn’t sound like much; most alien laser rifles were nearly a megawatt of energy. Except those weapons operated in limited wavelengths and short pulses. The Æsir could put 500-kilowatts on target for minutes at a time, and with a highly refined beam. Both shots were perfectly on target, drilling a five-millimeter round hole through the heavy gunners’ heads. Seven.

The incoming fire resumed, though not nearly as steadily or as disciplined. Rick kept the arm lasers on full power, firing continuous beams. He got two more, but the others had realized they’d kicked over a KzSha nest and stayed under cover. He located one behind the remnants of a crashed flyer, aimed both arms at it, and fired. The beams burned through the fuselage and into the man within a second. This one had time to scream before he died. Four left.

Okay, time to go hunting. Rick spun up the suit’s flight system just as a garbage truck rumbled around the corner. It had a dozen slots cut in the heavy metal sides and multi-barrel weapons sticking out. “Oh, I hate being right,” he said as the chain guns opened up.

Rick snatched up another wall, not as heavy as the one he’d used to protect Sato. His arms whined with the strain as he lifted the one-ton chunk of metal and concrete, then moved sideways.

Bullets tore into his improvised shield, 20mm and .50 caliber according to the counter-battery fire computer. The wall began coming apart in seconds under the fusillade. The first to penetrate bounced harmlessly off one of his shoulder pauldrons, but another scored right in the center of his chest, staggering him and sending a flurry of warning lights flashing through his Mesh.

 Rick rolled the dice and fired his jumpjets.

They weren’t like the ones built into CASPers; these were more akin to the high-powered micro electric jet turbines used in drones and some flier cars. They had the advantage of being small enough to fit within the Æsir’s remarkably tiny footprint, utilizing the suit’s massive power cells instead of fuel, and having an incredibly fast response to demands. What they didn’t have was the power and speed of jumpjets.

Rick soared into the sky with a scream of the tiny turbines. There were six engines, one on each limb, and two on his back. The noise from the engines was loud outside. It was deafening inside the helmet. Between the screaming of the exhaust and the motors conducting noise through the metal of the suit, it was an assault on his senses. He instantly wished he’d tried it out beforehand.

The gunners didn’t react quickly. No doubt they weren’t expecting his sudden leap to flight. His armor’s computer tracing of threat fire registered the heavy gunners’ direction of fire lagging a full half-second behind him. More than enough, he thought. Their gunfire even managed to miss Sato’s hiding place by a good margin.

After he’d risen a dozen meters,