Karma Has No Currency

The railgun rifle hung across his chest like a dead limb. Five kilograms of composite housing wrapped around magnetic accelerator coils that could punch a tungsten slug through reinforced hull plating at a decent distance. No flash. No bang. Just physics doing what physics does when you strip away all the ceremony. Ragnar ducked under a sagging clothesline strung between corrugated shelters, his boots finding the dry patches between puddles of something he chose not to identify. The favela stacked itself in layers around him—shanties built on shanties, rust on rust, life clinging to life.

At least powder had manners. You pulled the trigger, the cartridge cracked open the air, and even the dead man heard it. A fraction of a second, sure. But there was an announcement. A declaration. Here I am. This is happening. The railgun made no such courtesy. One moment a wall existed. Then it didn’t. A body stood upright. Then it was geometry—angles, scatter patterns and wet silence. Garfield, his ship’s AI, had a theory about that. Called it “the human obsession with elegant murder.” Said any rational system would standardize one efficient killing method and stop iterating. Instead, humanity kept reinventing the same basic function—stopping a heart—with increasingly complicated engineering that often performed worse than the previous version.

“You people could have stopped at rocks,” he had said once.

Ragnar moved at a controlled jog, rifle up, eyes cutting between rooftops and shadow pockets. Behind him, small boots slapped wet concrete in uneven rhythm.

“Left fork, fourteen meters.” Garfield’s voice came flat through his earpiece. “Collapse choke point ahead, route compromised. Hard right after the water tank.”

He took it without breaking stride. The girl kept up. He’d checked on her twice and stopped checking. She ran with her jaw set and her eyes fixed on his back, the armored vest hanging off her narrow shoulders nearly to her knees, his spare boots flopping around her calves. One of the buckles had torn loose somewhere two blocks back. She hadn’t said a word about it.

“Four tangos converging on the gated junction, bearing two-seven-zero. Gate is sheet metal over a hollow frame. Rated for nothing.” came through comms.

Ragnar didn’t slow. He angled left toward the gate, a corrugated panel bolted between two crumbling walls, surface blistered with rust patches and old paint. He raised the rifle. Four controlled taps. The metal punched inward in a ragged line, each hole throwing a brief spark. He heard two drops on the other side, immediate and heavy. A third went down a beat later. The fourth made it through the gate. Ragnar put him down before the man finished raising his weapon.

“Three confirmed, one hostile still mobile, retreating.” A pause. “Correcting. Non-mobile.”

He stepped over a section of gate that had buckled outward and kept moving. The girl cleared it in two steps, clearing it like she’d been jumping debris her whole life.

“Garfield, how far to the extraction corridor?”

“Two-ninety meters northeast. You have a seventy-second window before the southern pursuit element closes the gap. I would suggest pace increase.”

“Working on it.”

He glanced back once. The girl met his eyes, bruise dark along her cheekbone, a cut above her brow still wet. She said something in her language. Sharp, clipped syllables he recognized as functional rather than frightened. Garfield translated a half-second later.

“She says you’re slow.”

Ragnar turned back to the alley and ran. He hugged the building line, cutting through a covered walkway that bled into a loading dock, never letting more than two meters of open sky sit above him. Garfield had marked three drones on his visor overlay, small patrol units fanning a search grid two blocks wide.

“Drone, eleven o’clock high, gap between the awnings.”

Ragnar stepped into the gap, fired twice, and stepped back under cover before the thing finished its tumble. Thirty meters on, a second one drifted across a courtyard entrance. He shot it through a drainage arch without breaking stride, the wreckage sparking off a parked cargo loader.

“Two drone kills. Remaining unit has pulled back. They are compensating with eyes on the street. Four tangoes moving parallel on the avenue to your east, another group pushing hard from the south. Both on light vehicles.”

He took a corner hard, pressing his shoulder into crumbling masonry, and put two rounds into a doorway where a figure had been raising something long. The figure dropped sideways into shadow. The girl was three steps behind him. He caught her in his peripheral vision scanning upward, chin lifted, eyes tracing the strip of sky visible between rooflines. A second time. A third. No time for that conversation.

“Vehicle, eastern passage, now—”

The truck came off the cross-street fast, suspension bucking over broken paving, a gunner braced in the open bed swinging a mounted piece in a wide arc. Ragnar dropped to a knee behind a concrete planter, already acquiring. The gunner fired first, a burst that chewed the wall above him in a line of dust and fragments. Ragnar put two rounds into the gunner’s chest. The man folded over the mount. Ragnar shifted, fired three more into the driver’s door panel in a tight group, the metal dimpling and sparking. The truck swerved, clipped a wall with a grinding shriek of bodywork, then punched hard into a side passage and disappeared.

“Driver is wounded, probability high. Vehicle is out of the engagement for now.”

Ragnar was already moving. He grabbed the girl’s arm and pulled her under the overhang of a collapsed facade as she turned her face skyward again, expression tight with something that wasn’t fear of gunfire.

“Gar. What’s she looking at?”

“She has detected additional recon units. Two, possibly three. Currently outside your visual range.” A pause that carried something close to discomfort. “I cannot determine how she identified them.”

He looked at the girl. She looked back at him with flat, certain eyes. He filed it then swung around the corner and pulled up hard. Movement ahead, thirty meters, shapes cutting between parked vehicles and doorways. He pressed his back against the wall and brought the girl in close with one arm, pinning her there.

“Dense population signatures throughout this block,” Garfield said. “Multiple movement contacts. I cannot separate hostiles from civilians at this resolution. Not enough data.”

He scanned the facades on both sides. Residential. Narrow windows, most of them dark, a few showing pale light behind curtains. A door to his immediate left, wood frame, old deadbolt, hinges surface-mounted. He kicked it just below the lock. It came in on the first hit. He pushed the girl through and followed, pulling the door shut behind him. Dim interior. Ground-floor apartment stripped to bare walls, furniture reduced to a toppled chair and a mattress against the far wall. He moved through it in sequence, rifle tracking corners, checking the back room, the bathroom, a short corridor. Empty. Long empty, by the smell of it. He posted near the front wall and steadied his breathing.

Then he heard the truck. Ragnar heard it before he saw anything. A heavy engine groan, air brakes releasing, the specific sound of something large settling its weight on the street outside. A pause stretched long enough to tell him they weren’t parking.

Then the wall came apart. The burst hit like a sledgehammer dragged sideways at speed. Heavy rounds punched through the exterior wall in a continuous tearing line, plaster and brick and insulation erupting inward, the ceiling fixtures exploding, the toppled chair disintegrating in a single hit. The floor kicked. The air turned white with dust and debris. Ragnar threw himself flat and pulled the girl down under him. She screamed. Sharp, alien syllables, loud and cracking in his ear, and he couldn’t catch a single sound of it. She screamed again, and he felt her hands grabbing at his chest, frantic. He followed her eyes. The left side panel of his armor sat at a wrong angle, ceramic plating fractured outward in jagged points. A dark stain spread across the floor beneath him, moving slow and wide toward her knees. He pressed his palm flat against his side. Brought it up to his face. Dark red dripped from the crease of his hand.

“Multiple signatures emerging from structures across quadrant seven through nine.” came from Garfield.

“Light arms, mixed formation, no IFF tags. I am marking all contacts hostile—cannot distinguish pursuers from locals at this point. Recalculating route to extraction point.”

He pressed his back against the inner wall, away from the shredded facade. Dust hung in the air like fog. He could feel his heartbeat in his side now, thick and wrong.

“Copy.”

He looked down at the girl. She’d pulled herself into the corner where two interior walls met, knees drawn up, his oversized vest pooling around her like a collapsed tent. Her green eyes tracked his face. Not crying. Not frozen. Watching him the way someone watches a machine to see if it will keep running.

“Can’t hold previous tempo, Gar.” He swallowed. Tasted copper. “I’m hit. Lateral left, below the plate break. Girl’s intact. She’s—”

Scared. The word sat in his mouth. Her hands gripped her own knees, knuckles bloodless, and the skin patterns along her fingers had gone from pale to almost translucent.

“She’s scared.”

“Understood. Switching to contingency bravo. Activating Kestrel-Four.”

Garfield’s voice shifted register, shedding the conversational edge for something locked and calibrated.

“Dropship is currently holding in standby at forty-two hundred meters altitude. Platform carries twin-linked GAU-nineteen rotary accelerators and a rack of thermobaric munitions.”

A beat.

“I should note that Kestrel-Four bills at eight thousand credits per deployment hour. If we lose that bird, replacement liability is north of four hundred thousand. That is approximately everything we have, plus everything we do not have, plus whatever organs you are still using.”

“Send it.”

“Kestrel-Four is inbound on your position. ETA forty-six seconds. Suppressive fire commences in twelve.” Garfield paused for exactly one second. “Your suit’s biometric feed is reporting a penetrating thoracic fragment, left lateral, with probable intercostal hemorrhage and onset pneumothorax. You need to stop moving, get low, and stay away from any opening facing the street.”

He slid down the wall until he sat on the floor. The room tilted. He corrected. It tilted again.

“Ragnar,” Garfield continued, his tone flattening to something Ragnar had heard only twice before in their years together, “I am suspending all humanitarian engagement protocols, including Geneva Convention compliance, Rules of Engagement Article Seven, and civilian proximity safeguards, effective immediately. I am going to level everything within a two-hundred-meter radius of your position. Confirm you and the girl are secured in hard cover.”

Ragnar pulled the girl toward him with his free hand. She resisted for half a second, then came, pressing against his good side, her small body rigid as rebar. He dragged the mattress from the far wall with his boot, kicked it over both of them, and pushed them both as deep into the corner as geometry allowed.

“Secured. Send it.”

The world outside the wall split open. The first salvo hit like a freight train dropped from orbit. The rotary accelerators opened up in a continuous pour, rounds chewing through rooftops and walls and vehicles in a grinding roar that didn’t pause or breathe. Buildings shook. Somewhere close, a structure folded in on itself with a deep, wet crunch. Then the thermobarics landed. The overpressure wave punched through the gutted facade and flattened the dust in the room sideways, the air compressing against Ragnar’s chest like a giant palm. Heat followed. A second detonation, further south. A third. The girl buried her face against his arm. He could feel her shaking through the vest. Garfield worked the grid with mechanical patience. North side. East pocket. The avenue. Each impact rolled into the next. The floor bucked and settled and bucked again.

Then—footsteps. Close. Through the back corridor, through the dust and the ringing in his skull, he heard boots on broken concrete. More than one pair. Voices, raw and desperate, pushing through the chaos toward the only structure still standing. The room swayed. The ceiling beams doubled, tripled, collapsed back to single lines. His hand found the rifle grip. He brought it up across his knees, muzzle aimed at the dark mouth of the corridor, and braced his shoulder blade against the wall behind him.

The girl’s voice came from somewhere near his shoulder blade. Barely a breath. A few syllables he couldn’t parse, soft and deliberate against the din of settling rubble outside.

“Gar.” He spat. The floor between his boots turned dark. “What’d she say?”

“She said her name is Lissa.”

The corridor stayed dark. Boots scraped closer, cautious now, feeling out the debris. Ragnar kept the sights level on the gap.

“Ragnar.”

The word came out wetter than he intended, a gurgle catching somewhere mid-chest before it cleared his teeth.

He watched the dark. Steadied his grip.

“Nice to meet you.”