FSE

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A ripple passed quickly through the air before it was filled with a cascade of shrapnel. Luke stumbled, hunched over to almost half his height, pushing against the side of the truck. Three heavy rounds of semi-automatic rifle fire hammered into the metallic wall behind him, embedding fist-sized impact marks into the vehicle's surface. Hot sparks danced around the fox's head, and he clasped his hands around his ears in panic.

"Down!" yelled Cybe, forcefully shoving Luke lower down. The wolf's ears were high as he scanned the horizon, trying to draw a bead on the source of the most recent volley.

Luke hit the dirt, coughing a sputtering choke as radioactive dust clouded around his eyes. He winced, tears brimming in his eyes. "Who the hell are they?" he cried out, straining to make his voice heard over the deafening cry of the rifle fire.

Grabbing his companion's shirt by the collar, Cybe pulled him towards the alcove that sat between one of the vehicle's bungalow-sized wheels and the main body of the vehicle. He wheeled around, the pistol that he clasped in his hand searching for a target and, without any luck, blazing a series of rounds of suppressing fire into the air. "Recovery team" he barked. "Keep moving."

The fox scrambled into the darkness. The vehicle's scent of grimy machinery and choking petroleum invaded his nose.

* * *

The day had started peacefully enough. The morning sun had not yet lit the city streets when Luke had left his small apartment. The boy had caught the tram, the automated vehicle rumbling its cramped and bustled passengers along their way towards their respective places of work.

Yet Luke had barely been able to think about what the day's work would bring. Normally, he got through the trip with only a growing agitation at the cramped confines of the carriage. Today, though, rather than finding his thoughts invaded by the sounds that played in thin tinny noises from his neighbour's headset, Luke instead found himself thinking that it had been almost exactly one week since he had met an android called Cybe. The cybernetic being had changed not only the path that Luke's life would take, but his view on who he himself had always been.

He met the wolf in the showers. Waving to the wolf, Luke was relieved as Cybe returned his gesture with a smile.

Finding a space on the changing room bench beside the wolf, Luke begin to pull his shirt up and over his shoulders. "So, uh" he began, "does this change anything? What's happened between us, that is."

The wolf glanced around. Once more, the showers of municipal cleaning was empty but for the two of them, all apart from one other co-worker that Luke recognised as somebody who worked delta shift - and as he was already in the decontamination shower, Cybe lowered his voice to ensure that they could not be heard. "We should be fine" he said.

"What about..." began the fox.

The wolf gave him a warning glance. "We shouldn't discuss that here" he said. "Let's wait until later."

Luke nodded and made his way into the showers. The hot waters certainly helped ease the tension, but even as he dried and dressed in his jumpsuit he still felt a lingering sense of uncertainty.

Together, he and Cybe stepped their way into the warehouse. Roughly the size of an especially large aircraft hangar, the building sheltered six vast trucks. The two passed another member of delta shift, finishing his work late, and although Luke had only seen the man a handful of times before he wasted no time in giving him a friendly wave in greeting. The pair strode towards their designated refuse collection truck; a vast behemoth vehicle which was the size of a city block and dedicated solely to collecting and compacting the charred ruins of the wasteland outside of the borders of Oldtown. Luke climbed a thin metal step-ladder that lead its way up to the vehicle's dark cockpit, quickly followed by Cybe.

The wolf barely spoke as he connected himself into the vehicle's in-built driving system and tracked a route out into the radioactive kibble. The truck gave a resonating rumble as its multiple engines slowly powered up and began to work the behemoth's wheels out into the roadway.

For most of the journey, the pair travelled in a comfortable mutual silence.

"Cybe?" asked Luke eventually.

"Yes?" replied the wolf. "We should be safe to talk here."

Exhaling heavily, the fox wondered where to start. "We stole from CyberaTech" he said, "the company that built you."

"Correct" said the android.

"And they caught us in the act" continued the fox, his words a rush, "and they erased my memory and placed me here?"

Once more, the android nodded. "In order to lure me into making contact with you."

The fox shook his head. "And you did?"

Cybe unfastened the data cable from the back of his neck, sliding it back into the vehicle's computer. "You're extremely important" he said. "To the mission and to the group. And to me."

Luke glanced down, feeling a little guilty. Of course, the wolf cared for him. "Why would CyberaTech plant me here?" he asked, trying to change the subject.

"It's easy to get a job here" he said. "The management don't ask many questions, and there's a very high risk of injury which means that there is a high employee turn-around. I suspect that it was just the easiest place for them to deposit you. My initial investigation indicated that you were paired with somebody who was already a CyberaTech operative."

The fox inhaled, his voice trembling a little. "Dwayne" he said. "My previous partner. Was he...?"

The android paused for a moment. In the quiet, Luke thought that he could sense his companion's hesitation. Perhaps Cybe was simply processing and calculating the likelihood that his answer might cause me further psychological distress, thought the fox. His former co-worker had been kind. Not simply kind, but treated Luke as an individual. Ever since the two had been paired to work together, the fox had looked up to and admired the old canine. Dwayne's jovial good-natured jokes and friendly reassurance of the youngster's naive had been a bright point of the time that he spent at work.

The truck gave a heavy, churning whine as it rumbled on its route.

Luke found himself thinking about the last moment that he had seen Dwayne. The old dog had crumpled to the ground, folding without a sound as a hefty piece of rubble had tumbled down, colliding against the engineer's chest. The blow had forced the air from Dwayne's chest, meaning that he was unable to cry out as the force of the rubble snapped his ribs apart and cracked his spine. It wasn't the workplace injury that had claimed the old dog's life, though - instead, it was the tearing of his pressured anti-radiation jumpsuit.

The last that Luke had seen of his old friend was his twitching body being loaded into the back of an ambulance. The next day, he had received a phone call from his manager.

Cybe said, finally, "I believe so. When he died, I put myself forward, hoping to contact you before CyberaTech were aware that they had temporarily lost contact with their bait."

The fox's head turned down, his gaze falling to the floor of the vehicle. "Are we safe here?" he asked. "Working here, I mean. Now that you're here. Won't they try to..."

"It's possible" replied the wolf, "but unlikely. And if they did, I can protect you."

He looked at the android. Even under the thick confines of his protective radiation suit, which Luke knew that his companion did not even personally require, he could see the strong musculature of the wolf and he had no doubt that he could. "What is your plan?" he asked.

The truck began to rumble, with all of the velocity of an iceberg, to a halt.

The wolf began to fasten on the hood of his suit. "Firstly" he said, "we need to recover as many of your memories as possible - preferably without damaging your current personality in the process."

"How do we do that?" asked Luke, scrambling to his feet. His seatbelt whirled back into its socket with a soft hiss. "I don't even know who I was."

"You were a hacker" said Cybe. "And an excellent one. One of the best that I've ever met. I have never seen anybody navigate dataspace quite like you."

Luke flushed a little. If there was one thing that he didn't feel like, it was a hacker. He had almost no skill with computers - or at least no memory of it, although he was equally aware that those memories had been heavily modified. The thought of traversing the digital pathways of the wired space seemed unusual and alien to him, much less being able to crack his way through the firewalls of corporate servers.

"If it weren't for you" said the wolf, "we couldn't have got the data we needed for the job."

Luke stepped back, sliding his way between the pair's seating. WIth muffled strides he moved over to a tall ladder that lead upwards to the vehicle's upper access port. Pursing his lips, the boy thought. "What did we steal?" he asked as he began to climb, hand over foot, up the tall ladder.

Cybe finished zipping up the hood of his suit, leaving it fully sealed against the outside's radioactive environment. He quickly began to follow the fox, working his way quickly up the ladder. "It was a private job" he explained."Runners are often hired by companies in order to acquire private data for their corporate rivals."

With a sharp moaning whine, Luke pulled on the hatch's access wheel. It slid open with a rusty groan, allowing the tinted sunlight into the cabin. "So you were stealing something for one of CyberaTech's rivals?" he asked as he clambered up.

The android hurried up too, slipping his way through the access port. From atop the vehicle's considerable height, the pair could see a vast horizon spread out around them. The city's heights stood in the distance behind them, sharp and tall, whilst before them the ruins of the wasteland seemed to lay in crumbled and shattered fragments that hugged the ground for as far as the eye could see. "That's what I think" he said. "But, naturally, our contractor demands anonymity, so in truth I have no idea which company has hired us or what their intentions are. We were hired to get ahold of a batch file for one of CyberaTech's proje..."

His words were interrupted as Luke held up a hand. "Look" he said, his voice hushed.

Scanning the distance, the wolf narrowed his eyebrows, filtering his sight between modes of vision. He flickered from one to the next, before eventually zooming in on the location to which Luke was pointing. A skyscraper, broken and grey with age, crumbled against two of its brethren to form a discarded tumble-down domino of collapsed habitation. Around the archways and rent windows, between the cracked masonry that split apart like vast ravines, shadows flitted. Dark forms seemed to crawl.

"Mutants" grumbled the fox. He spoke with a sense of dissatisfaction. The wasteland was all but unoccupied, and certainly uninhabitable to most of the city dwellers due to the considerable radiation. Over the decades, though, the surviving occupants of the ruins had gradually developed a resilience. Luke felt a gnawing sense of sadness at this knowledge. For the mutants of the wasteland, their lives were typically short. Without the necessities of the city, they spent their time as scavengers; or, more rarely, hunters. More than a few had assailed those who were foolish enough to travel through the kibble undefended, stealing their equipment and tools or, at the worst, abducting their victims.

"I'll fire a few warning rounds" said Luke. "That tends to scatter them." He glanced down. Each vehicle was equipped with a few on-board rifles just for such a situation, stashed safely in a locked cabinet at the rear of the cabin. The fox began to make his way towards the hatch, ready to descend.

The wolf reached out and grabbed his friend's shoulder. "Wait" he said, his voice cold. "I don't think those are mutants."

Luke glanced back. Typically, mutants could be readily noticed by their twisted forms; scarred, viscous flesh, mottled hide, exposed weeping sores, and at times even vestigial limbs. Once, Luke had caught sight of one that he swore possessed a secondary, smaller face embedded upon its knotted shoulders - a quick glance, as the creature had hurried its way beneath the rubble once more. He looked back across the horizon, hoping to see any sign as to what Cybe was referring to.

He peered, staring back at the ruins from which he had first saw a flicker of movement. Instead, he saw only a small flare of white. He blinked. A trail of smoke whistled towards them from the glinting light, the flare seeming to grow and swell.

Then, his friend grabbed him by the shoulder. "Get down!" screamed Cybe, shoving Luke down onto the bulk of the vehicle. The trail of white grew closer, the whistling becoming a roar as whatever it brought with it rushed ever closer. Instinctively, Luke hit the truck's metallic surface, scrambling into a huddle. Just as he did, a resounding collision hammered the side of the vehicle.

A deafening explosion rippled through the air, turning the temperature around the pair hot. For a second, all was smoke. Smoke, and screaming.

Then the screaming echo of the explosion died, and Luke could only hear his own ragged breathing. The floor of the truck felt hot against his face, even through the barrier of his suit. He picked his head up, "What was..." he managed to groan.

But Cybe was already beside him, grabbing the fox by the shoulders. He moved quickly, pulling his friend along. The wolf reached up, digging his claws into the neck of his own protective suit and tugging the face mask free with a tearing sound. In that moment, Luke felt an instinctive urge to rush to his companion and stop him, only quickly remembering that the android would suffer no ill effects from the radiation. The wolf dropped the headpiece, before ducking down into a crouch behind the sturdy circular metal hatchway, pulling Luke down with him. "Yasim 4" he replied, tugging sharply at the bindings of his suit.

"What?" sputtered Luke, his mind racing.

"Rocket propelled grenade" explained the wolf, as he pulled the fabric free from his shoulders, "an opening salvo."

Luke stared at him in bewilderment. As the android tugged the clothing free from his torso, he reached down to his then unclad abdomen and slid back a thin compartment which sat flush within the structure of his body. Reaching in, Cybe pulled free a hefty semi-automatic pistol. "Holy crap!" exclaimed Luke as the wolf reached into the cavity to recover a second, reaching his hands up to cover his mouth. "What are you..."

A sharp screeching ringing filled the air. A pounding slammed into the hatch, causing the entire surface to shudder. It was only then, crouching under the cover of the hatch, that he realised that he was in fact being shot at. "And that would be the follow-up" replied Cybe, jamming a clip into his pistol. He held it out to Luke, "take this!"

Clutching the pistol in both hands, Luke was amazed at how heavy it felt. Barely a foot from where he knelt, shots clanged sharply against the vehicle, spinning sharp little notches into the durable steel. Luke yelped, throwing himself against the protection of the hatch. "Shit!" he cried, "what do we do?"

Cybe pressed his side against the hatch, each bullet causing heavy trembles to reverberate through it and against the wolf's shoulder. He leaned around, firing a series of deafening shots around the barrier. "We're trapped here" he said, his voice barely audible under the roaring and tearing of the gunfire. "Get down the ladder."

"This ladder?" yelled Luke, glancing down through the opening into the cabin. That way, he thought, they would both be trapped. He realised that his companion meant the ladder at the side of the vehicle, the one that lead its way down to the corroded soil and broken rocks below. Another round of gunfire tore against the border of the hatch, and several holes cracked into being a few inches from the fox's thigh. "I can't do this!" he barked, "I don't know even know how to shoot this thing!"

"You do!" snapped Cybe, throwing another round of suppressing fire towards their unseen assailants. "We've handled much worse - you did the same thing with me just two weeks ago. Just stay calm and let your muscle memory guide you."

"I don't know how to stay calm when people are shooting at me!" yelled the fox.

As he did, a soft thud echoed from behind him. He glanced over, eyes straining to focus through the grit and the dirt. From around the edge of the vehicle, a sturdy mechanical grapple clanged - a thick cylinder no larger than a small land mine that trailed a sturdy climbing rope behind it. The cylinder, as it landed, adhered magnetically to the vehicle's surface, and the rope tugged twice before tensing. As Luke watched, another two grapples were thrown up over the edge, securing their place on the metal. "Over here!" he yelled.

The figure clambered expertly over the edge of the vehicle, scaling it with practiced efficiency. At first glance, Luke was not sure that what he was looking at was even human - a dark, bulky figure, moving with almost mechanical sharpness, but as his eyes focused on it he realised that it wore a heavy set of military armour. Bulky kevlar covered most of the body of the assailant, while its entire head was encased in a glossy black helmet, all aside from a set of mechanical goggles that covered what little remained. Its sturdy boots clanged as it rushed forward, reaching behind its back to recover what was strapped in place there - a heavy-duty two-handed assault rifle.

Without a second's hesitation, the soldier unfastened the weapon from where it hung holstered over his shoulder, and moved its barrel down to point directly at Luke.

Luke scrambled to get out of the figure's way, barely able to think, moving purely on instincts. He threw himself against the surface of the vehicle, his gun tumbling free from his panicked grip. It clattered down onto the roof beside him as the fox tried to hurry back.

A sharp series of cracks filled the air as gunfire whistled. Luke clasped his palms to his ears, the reverberations heaving through his body. For a moment, all he heard was a scream, before he realised that it was emitting from his own throat.

He glanced up. The soldier before him took another step, this one shaky. The rifle was clasped weakly in the figure's hands. The helmet - what remained of it - was torn apart, shattered fragments cascading through the heat-hazed air.

The fox lowered his hands from where they had been held up around his head. Turned to glance at Cybe, he saw the wolf lowering his gun,, steam twisting in a thick plume from its barrel. He lowered it only a fraction. "Go!" yelled the wolf as two more soldiers clambered their way over the edge of the roof. Several more grapples were hurled up, filling the sky with streams of rope.

For a moment, Luke hesitated. The soldier's body slid to the ground, hitting the vehicle's roof with a resounding thud, but the fox couldn't pull his eyes from the wolf. "You just killed him" he sputtered.

Cybe rushed over, covering the small distance between himself and the fox within a fraction of a second. Grabbing the boy's shoulder, he urged him towards the ladder. Another volley of gunfire tore from the wolf's pistol, the air only a few inches above Luke trembling in the wake of the bullets. "They'll do a lot worse than that to you if they get ahold of you" barked the wolf. "Go! Now!"

A series of returning fire cracked the metal beside Luke. He scrambled on hands and knees, mind racing. The only sound in his air was the cry of ricochets around him. He reached out, moving as fast as he could. His fingers wrapped around the ladder.

Turning, he glanced over his shoulder, just in time to see four soldiers pulling their way up over the edge of the vehicle and clambering onto the cabin's roof. Luke saw Cybe as the wolf moved, hunched low, dodging between one of the armoured figures and another, answering their intrusion with gunfire and death. Then, with the wolf's warnings echoing in his ears, the fox descended the ladder as fast as he could.