The hallway they had come to lay littered with the metal corpses of deactivated automatons. And they passed them, and entered the Domain.
The Silver Shadow sighted down.
Through the scope, they marked the distance to the ‘corpses’ of deactivated abominations, their idle loll a trap suggested earlier. Of course the Marines would punch through; the automatons were only machines, after all, and no one on this base save Shadow knew the real importance of that fact. So from here, this position on high, they had set up a clear, clean shot – a series of straight lines that would have to be charged down, into the broad two-story control tower that concealed the Shadow.
A clearer shot than anywhere else on the base.
Those corpses were range markers, and they had passed the first of them.
Click, click. The Silver Shadow adjusted the sights.
As the crosshairs drifted, they picked targets. Nepleslian powered machines. “Hostile” Infantry Armorsuit, produced by Nepleslian Arms and Munitions. Most of them, they saw, carried HPAR’s.
The first shot of Deliverance cracked like lightning, and thundered against the helmet of the unfortunate marine, shattering its headlamp in a burst of sparks. Shadow did not pause, but shifted slightly to the left, letting the bipod, padded springsteel stock, and their mechanical shoulder soak the recoil as they chose a second time.
Crack! The sound like lightning, the thunder following.
Another shattered HUD.
Copper tinkled on the sheetmetal flooring. No fatalities. Not yet.
In the concealing darkness, they stayed very still, watching.
"Come on you bastards," the Shadow mouthed, mostly to themselves. "Pause for sniper."
On the ground...
Jamie’s head smarted from the stunning bullet, but he found that despite the prolific dint in the place where his headlamp used to be, along with a ringing in his ears, he was fine. His HUD had cracked a little, but his helmet had protected him from having his brains splattered.
Happy birthday.
He barely had time to recover before out of the corner of his eye he spied the same thing happen to Alec, who had moved forwards a little further into the ruined combat zone. He had the perfect view of her headlamp shattering like the sudden, violent blooming of a glass rose, right after the strange, surreal spark of the high-caliber round piercing her defensive shield with pinpoint precision.
Energy might have dissipated against the superior CBS, but…?
The after-shocks of the high-caliber shots echoed in the metal cavern, bouncing around for a moment, and leaving behind it a high-pitched, utterly uncomfortable silence.
The dark, cratered ruination continued unmolested further than the naked eye could see in the dim lighting, and it faded into darkness further away than their HUD’s lights could immediately reach.
Zooming in, far on the other side, they could see a structure of some sort worked into the wall of the asteroid. Between them, and it, was almost a thousand yards of craters, dead, and deactivated droids. It was a killzone. A sniper’s paradise.
And they had gone far enough into it now that they were big gray targets.