“WELL THAT’S IT, gentlemen,” Major Brinks said as the connection to the Odyssey blinked off. “We’re on our own from here on out. I hope everyone packed their underwear.”

A few muffled chuckles greeted his words, but for the most part, the men on the link were too busy fighting, running, or hiding to respond.

Brinks checked his HUD before leaping the forty-meter gap to the next building, where he landed with a solid smack, the nano-servos in his armor absorbing and storing the energy as he flexed his legs. The situation wasn’t as bad as all that, actually. For the most part, the drones were being mopped up whenever they stuck their disturbing little mandibles out to be seen.

That was the good news.

The bad news was that fewer and fewer of them were sticking their disturbing little mandibles out to have them shot off. Brinks might have considered that a good sign, that perhaps they were cleaning the last of them out, but judging from the reports he was getting back through the link, it was obvious that the survivors were still numerous. They were just getting smarter.

Nothing worse than an enemy who’s a quick learner, the major grumbled as he stepped over to the edge of the scraper and looked down at the public promenade below.

The whining crack of the bullets was joined by the pure-white contrails as they accelerated across the huge promenade, twisting and turning as they locked in on the heat sources on the other side and adjusted their courses. The firefight raged around him as Sean Bermont held the trigger of his rifle down and poured the last of his magazine into the maelstrom. He kept moving as the now empty magazine hit the ground at his feet. He didn’t flinch, or even notice, except in a visceral way, when a ray of energy blew up a stone column only a few feet away. Bermont slapped the mag into the receiver as he and the others continued to approach through the enemy fire. He lifted the weapon to his shoulder and held the trigger down again.

It wasn’t a firefight as much as a rout when it came to dealing with the drones that came out into the open. The enemy weapons were technically impressive, their whining power enough to actually cause solid stone to explode when the beams intersected it, but the MX-112s were their equal in effectiveness, if not technical prowess, and the battles between the two were short, furious, and final.

The guided ability of the MX-112 gave the humans the advantage, however, since they didn’t have to be perfectly on target with every shot. A near miss without guidance was a bull’s-eye with even the minimal course corrections that each bullet was capable of. If the minimal intelligence of the scramjet-propelled round was capable of seeing the enemy, the enemy was already dead. The problem was when the drones hid within buildings and alcoves and forced the humans to approach too close for the guidance system to be effective.