“And we are confident that this action will resolve the
issues with the colony and finally bring freedom to the people of New Lork…”
The corporate lackey droned on at the press conference, but the message was
clear, the war was still on, the fighting would continue. Deliah closed the
small data assistant and leaned back against the ruined car she’d been sitting
behind. She continued with her morning routine: brushed her teeth, rinsed out
the residue with her remaining bit of coffee spitting the mixture on the ground
next to her, rubbed the remaining sleep out of her eyes and made ready for
another round of fighting. Before she checked over her weapons she took out a
busted a little pocket mirror she’d picked up along the way. Her hair was a mess, even cut short it looked
awful. Standing up in the wrong places,
matted in others, that was ignoring the color her natural blonde was so caked
in dust from fighting and general grime of New Lork it looked more like mud
than blonde. Her eyes were blackened with bags, she had been sleeping behind
the car the night before, but it hadn’t been very restful. Her lips were chapped and cracked from the
dryness, even wearing a mask couldn’t keep that from happening, eventually you
had to take it off. Beyond the chapped lips, dirty hair, baggy eyes her lighter
skin was red all over from where the sun got through, even in full armor she
still felt the burns soreness, in a way it almost looked like she was wearing
blush from the way it reddened her cheeks.
Spread around her in the best condition she could make them
was her weaponry: a longshot sniper
rifle, a pair of rapid fire submachine guns, and her old beaten up Hanlon
pistol. The Hanlon was the oldest firing weapon she still used (she kept a
combat knife from the old days at the small of her back, but rarely ever used
it anymore, better to shoot and scoot than get up close and personal), she
dropped the magazine out and pulled the slide back to eject the last cartridge
in the chamber. The dust had been hell
on most of her gear necessitating more maintenance and proper checks. The inside of the pistol looked fine to her;
a quick look down the barrel didn’t see too much dust within. She replaced the cartridge in the magazine
and loaded it back into the bottom of the pistol, a quick knock back of the
slide returned the weapon to ready status. She holstered the pistol on her
right hip, and checked over the other three weapons. The sniper was the least used, it had been
all inner city urban fighting so far and not a lot of opportunity for opening
up from a distance, the submachine guns were getting worn down, even with the
cleaning without replacement parts they’d become too dangerous to fire soon,
she made note to acquire a new weapon today if possible. Her armor looked no
better, the padding was chaffing, the plating guarding her chest and vital
regions were pock marked with hits from small arms, and the joints in the arms
squeaked originally there was some urban camouflage sprayed on it, but that was
gone too, now it was just a brown color like everything else. She picked up her
armor mask and had to smile for a moment, she’d taken the time to paint on some
exaggerated fangs and a message prior to this conflict (the message simply
“Fuck off”) and now both were barely visible, the fangs were an outline, and
the message read “off” the fuck having long worn away.
Deliah stood up and put on her mask, she slung the sniper
rifle over her back and adjusted the shoulder straps on the submachine guns to
make sure they were still at hand level, with those secure she scanned the area
one final time before moving out. There
still wasn’t any recent activity; she could hear gun fire far off, but that was
constant in this section of New Lork.
The policing action she was originally apart of was supposed to last a
week, then that week stretched into a month, and now that month had grown to be
almost a year.
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