A few meters away, Corporal Russell knelt on the roof of the apparent access building. “No problem. We’ve got three of the bastards jogging over here right now.”

“Great,” Bermont muttered, yanking one of the guy wires from the chute and pulling one of the locals to his feet. “This isn’t going to tickle.”

While the man looked at him oddly, Bermont looped the wire under his arms and around his torso. He clipped it to a loop built in for just that purpose. Bermont then grabbed the second man and repeated the process.

“Two to evac,” he signaled, then turned to see the next chute swoop in.

The two men looked confused and scared out of their minds as the line was suddenly drawn taught and they were pulled off their feet while the wire loop bit into their chests and underarms. They yelped in pain, but the remote-controlled chute didn’t really care one way or another. It hung low, then dropped over the edge of the skyscraper, using the immense building itself as cover as Savoy guided the two to safer ground.

“Wait here,” Bermont told the third, the woman who had appeared to be in charge. “I’ll be right back.”

Then he reached up and grabbed a handgrip on the bottom of the chute and kicked off the ground, skimming the rooftop over to where Curtis was still unconscious.

“Beautiful,” Savoy whispered as the suit’s tactical network grabbed the information from over a kilometer away. He tossed the numbers over to a module he had developed for on-the-fly programming.

From there, it was just an electronic hop, skip, and jump to recoding the computer buried deep in the carbon-fiber chassis of his rifle.

The MX-112 assault weapons system was a throwback to an earlier time. In a lot of ways, it was a twentieth century rifle masquerading in twenty-second century clothes. When the rest of the militarized world was moving to lighter, higher-velocity rounds, the USMC adopted the exact opposite stance.

The MX-112 was big, nasty, and it put equally big and nasty holes into whatever it was fired at. It didn’t jam. It fired underwater if someone was stupid enough to try it, and if the barrel was clogged with sand, the first bullet simply cleared it and greased the way for the rest.

Put simply, the marines of the day were in love, from grunts to officers and beyond.

Despite this, however, the design mostly languished in obscurity until the outbreak of the war, since SWAT and anti-terrorist units had no use for a weapon that was going to perforate the target and then go on to do the same to any five others hiding behind it. When the Chinese attacked Japan at the start of the Block War, however, the Block soldiers were understandably perturbed to find that their opponents on the beaches carried rifles that were able to perforate light-to medium-armored vehicles and still retain enough energy to kill the soldiers inside.

The fires of the war burned away a lot of lesser weapons, but the MX-112 emerged with a legendary reputation. A legend that had continued to grow over the decades as the rifle underwent revisions and evolutionary changes, until the latest product found its way into the hands of one Lieutenant Savoy, NACS Odyssey, on an alien world over a hundred light-years from where the rifle was born.