The bunker was quiet. Proxy sat against the left wall of the rear room with the network active in his perception, the scan looping through the ridge on repeat.

A ventilation shaft he had mapped during the earlier hours remained in his awareness as a route, an old exhaust conduit from the nuclear contingency design, exiting through the ridge face roughly twenty meters southeast. He had it under options he would rather not use, which was probably what made it an option.

As expected, the broadcast had come through the hardwired speakers every four hours. One more elimination had been confirmed, and their location was given the same.

After that, the bunker had gone back to its sealed quiet, and Proxy had gone back to the scan, and Nyx had eaten her ration block and watched him work with the patient, contained energy she had when she was waiting for something to do, or waiting for something to happen.

The scan returned something that was not empty ridge.

Two signatures, moving with discipline. One was dense and powered, with a servo-assist draw running at the steady consumption of armor that expected to be hit.

The other was the tight active pulse of a smart-link in standby, weapon hot, cycling for a trigger command that had not yet arrived.

"Two coming up the ridge," he said. "One in powered armor. One with an active weapon relay."

Nyx was on her feet before he finished the second sentence.

She moved to the position she had taken during preparation, the corridor in her sightline and the cache cradle at her back, and she raised Clippy with readiness.

Clippy projected a small hologram. It was a classic paperclip figure, round-eyed and attentive, appearing in a pale blue speech bubble near the handgun with the timing of something that had been waiting for its cue.

Threat signatures confirmed! Two approaching hostiles. You’re doing great. I’ll keep an eye on things from here!

"Thank you," Nyx said.

You’re very welcome.

The hologram gave a small encouraging nod and remained present.

Proxy returned his attention to the lock.

The electromechanical mechanism was on his node. The problem was that their guests ignored it and opted to physically force the entrance apart.

He could feel the stress through the node, the metal shifting by degrees under repeated pressure.

The mechanism failed. The door came open. They entered with professional patience.

A man that looked like a gang leader came first.

The armor he wore was corporate-grade plate over a substantial frame, with the right shoulder section broader than any natural shoulder, the chest and torso coverage complete except at the collar and wrists.

The knee servos were audible through the concrete, a low cycling hum with each step.

He moved down the corridor with confidence that the armor gave him.

The logic was crude, but crude logic is still logic when it is wrapped in armor.

A trooper came a step behind and to the right, using the gang leader’s bulk as partial cover for his own approach.

The smart-link from his weapon was active. Proxy could feel its pulse through the network, the relay feeding targeting data from the gun into the trooper’s nervous system in real time.

In this corridor, with that gun, the barrel filled the corridor’s width at his waist height.

Every meter they advanced was a meter of kill zone.

Proxy watched their positions through the bunker network and let them advance.

He waited until both signatures were fully inside the section of corridor where the copper conduit line ran, and then he fired the emergency cell through it.

The discharge had no interest in being precise.

Everything the bunker’s residual power had stored went through the old copper line in a single uncontrolled pulse, and the corridor received it everywhere at once. An unexpected burst into an explosion.

For the gang leader, the armor did what it had been made to do, the wave spread across the plate and was absorbed, or at least partially dissipated.

The right shoulder section cracked along its primary seal.

The left knee servo collapsed mid-cycle and dropped him to that knee, the leg unable to support the armor’s own weight without assistance.

The exposed skin at his collar and wrists, where the plate could not reach, took the remainder in full, and he struggled to cry out in pain.

He went to both knees.

He did not go farther.

The trooper behind him had no armor.

The reflected wave came back off the corridor walls and took him off his feet in one undignified motion.

He hit the right wall and then the floor in that sequence, and the smart-link went dark as his nervous system reset under the concussive impact.

He still had the machine gun.

It was still in his hands.

He was not moving, which was important enough.

Incredible!

Clippy announced, the hologram bouncing with evident enthusiasm.

That was a really effective area denial technique! I’ve logged it for future reference!

Proxy had no time to answer.

The gang leader was rising.

The armor had absorbed enough to let the man inside it stand back up.

He came up with one arm compromised, the cracked shoulder section grinding against the plate below it as the joint refused full range of motion.

The knee servo clicking on every step with the arrhythmic tick of something managing rather than functioning.

He still had explosives on his belt, on the good-arm side. He had protected them from the explosion.

He looked at the corridor entrance and at what was standing in it with a furious expression.

Nyx stood in the corridor entrance with amber at the edges of her eyes and Clippy raised.

She fired into the gap at his collar.

He turned to bring the armor’s intact left side toward her, and the round that had been aimed at his throat hit plating instead and went wide into the concrete.

He moved toward her, using the mass of the armor as the primary weapon now, the distance between them closing with slowly.

She adjusted and fired again.

He got his good arm around the corridor wall bracket and shoved his entire armored mass into the motion, driving his shoulder toward the rear room doorframe where she was standing.

The collision was not elegant for either of them.

She hit the doorframe with her right side, and the bruised ribs that had been managing received the full impact of corporate plate moving at speed and flickered in pain.

She did not make a sound.

Meanwhile the trooper had gotten himself to his knees and then to his feet, and the smart-link was cycling back to active.

The relay came up and Proxy was already inside it, waiting at the output layer to fabricated depth coordinates, phantom targets assembled from corrupted data, distance measurements that refused to become reality.

The smart-link dutifully fed this information into the trooper’s targeting instinct and the trooper pulled the trigger and the burst went into the concrete ceiling above the rear room door, approximately half a meter above where Proxy was standing.

The sound inside the bunker concrete was significant.

Dust came down.

That was not where he was standing.

It was close enough to count as an error, which is to say, close enough to hurt, just not the right person.

Clippy projected the hologram, which appeared briefly near Proxy’s eye level, looked at the ceiling where the rounds had gone, and said.

Navigating a dynamic threat environment! This is very exciting! Would you like target priority recommendations?

"I’m managing," Proxy said.

The gang leader had an explosive in his hand.

This changed the situation for everyone at once.

A grenade in the rear room was not a problem the bunker to solve, it was a problem the bunker created.

Nyx had seen it at the same moment.

She moved toward him rather than away. At close range, with her inside his arc, throwing it became a bilateral problem instead of a unilateral one.

She went inside the good arm’s reach and the fight became close and grinding and brutal.

At this distance the plate was between them, and the arm he got across her to keep her at a range where throwing the grenade still made sense.

The trooper had dropped the smart-link, switched to manual, which was pure trained instinct without the neural relay’s help.

A burst swept the corridor floor at knee height and went into the concrete and did not find anything.

Proxy reached through the armor’s servo network.

Military-grade armor had servo-assist through a power management system networked for status monitoring, which was a design choice that made maintenance easier and gave him an target.

He could not shut the armor down, because the systems were sealed from external command.

What he could do was introduce inconsistency into the timing, small corruptions to the sync signal that made the left arm’s servo answer a fraction late and the knee servo hesitate on load transfer.

For someone who had been relying on that augmentation as a natural extension of their body for years, the delay did not arrive at a convenient moment.

Nyx found it.