Opening sequence completed.
My weave warned me again when the barrier would be dropped. Less than an hour. Not nearly enough time. I heard teeth grinding and relaxed my jaw. A bad habit when I was angry. Extremely angry.
Eckon had eluded me at every turn, exhausting my eighty-three hour window for capture. The damn-Iman bastard was mine. I was done fooling around with him.
The volopter’s supercoils screamed under strain as I pushed the air vehicle beyond its safety limits, magnetic lines snapped and spit arcs from the tilted cowlings at the ends of stubby airfoils. Carthage sprawled horizon to horizon, a sea of multicolored lights under a dark sky. I followed the Offender’s backflow to a nexus in the Svant commercial zone. The weave told me the node was deep in the underground levels of a parking garage, emanating from a private, mobile wavecast server. That was a task in itself, infiltrating Eckon’s personal net. If I lost his weave’s presence, I lost Eckon.
I lost the mission.
I pushed on, following the main air streets straight to that source, watching the airspeed top out just under transonic. The volopter buffeted in the currents as I skimmed above the highest flight level for city traffic. It was a risky maneuver, but my clock was running out.
The weave piped through the irritated voice of a controller ordering me to get low and slow down. Told me I was in a restricted emergency vehicle air corridor. No shit. I had the weave ignore Traffic. It did without complaint.
I willed the craft to move faster as if my very need could give it more power. Then I had a reason to get off the legal corridors and follow a more direct route across forbidden air space. Aerial Safety Enforcement flashed me from their approaching interceptor, their signals slipping through my weave’s barriers. They forced a white-out across my visual field. My teeth scrubbed as I had my weave shut down its visual feeds, leaving me with nothing but straight eye. I blinked as my sight returned absent the data that usually hovered in my peripheral. Indicators winked to life on the dash.
The diamond shaped interceptor rushed toward me, hoping to scare me into submission. I had the weave tap aerial acrobatic profiles from the infonet. ASE sped on, intending to force me down with the threat of collision. Closer and closer the distance collapsed until the pilot realized I wasn’t budging. The interceptor peeled away, averting disaster. My heart slammed up into my throat as the weave guided me into a lurching roll and bank. I crossed the other craft’s wake and thought my volopter was going to shake itself apart. The aircraft wasn’t designed for these kinds of maneuvers, but that wasn’t going to stop me and my weave as we forced it to complete the roll and spiral down toward the canyons between the skyscrapers.
The interceptor wasn’t broadcasting proximity so I had no idea where the hell they were. That was unless I happened to catch sight of them. I hoped we were just as invisible. Prior to this fun, I had the weave penetrate the volopter’s primary intelligence. It wasn’t chirping its ident either. I’m sure the ASE were narrowcasting public over-ride commands per standard procedure, commands the volopter ignored. I imagined their frustration. But they should have seen the clue. We’re on the same side, idiots.
Powerful magnetic fields diminished, letting us drop like a stone as vortex engines pushed me onward between shimmering expanses of metamaterial walls. The weave insisted I slow to enhance maneuverability. I obliged, insisting it counter-act the white-out. While it worked that problem—and flight assistance— it had the volopter cast out the route across the windscreen. I wish I could say it was a simple matter of following it.
ASE pursued in a much more faster craft, its wings drooped for enhanced agility . No doubt they were closing, and no doubt other patrol craft would join the chase and try to cut me off. I had to lose them. I screamed rage past clenched teeth through weight crushing banks between buildings, my vision graying. The volopter groaned, its skin buckling. To make matters worse, sniffers were pinging my weave for a response, trying to find out who I was. They’d get no response from me, having to rely on external civic arrays. I should have expected I would make news. Damn-Iman sniffers.
I hoped this growing catastrophe wouldn’t reach Eckon.
My handler’s voice spiked through my skull, “This is a brash move, Bellero. Are you losing your touch?”
I skimmed across a spur line of midlevel traffic, grunting through a tight turn and climb, sending the little ship through a bright glowing cloud of advertising dust, dispersing it into angry insects. “You could do something about the cops,” I grumbled.
“What? And risk scandal?” There was a hint of amusement in Castle’s voice. I didn’t particularly care for it. The bastard.
“You know me. What’s another?” I asked. Data bloomed in my peripheral. The weave had the ASE infiltration deleted from itself and learned their attack algorithms against future assaults. The course snaked ahead of me, an ethereal yellow cable. I jinked around it, diving under a pedestrian bridge spanning two buildings.
“I can give you their traffic,” Castle relented.
I gained a clear run and swiveled my neck back, side to side, to catch sight of my pursuer. Should have sprayed the volopter with optic dust. Then at least my weave or coat could be scanning the skies. If I had their traffic feed, that might be just as good, if not better. But I’d rather they be off my ass, than I know where they were. “A couple of ghosts would be great, too.”
“Alright. I’ll throw in a ghost. I don’t think they will fall for two.”
Probably right. “Send ‘em, already.” I began banking through a crushing S-turn along crowded buildings.
“Sending,” he said as the weave anticipated my reflexes and snap rolled the craft to pull into another slot between cloud reaching buildings. I nearly blacked out and the little volopter shuddered with a burst of warnings. Castle added, “I don’t think it do much good. You’ll either run out of time, or get yourself killed.”
“Thanks for the support,” I growled. I don’t know if he received me, his presence was gone from my head, gone from my weave. In his place was an encrypted satellite feed. The weave decoded the signal and became saturated with live data. I didn’t see the traffic information ASE was using; the weave tickled that part of the brain sensitive to religious phenomenon causing me to feel where the interceptor was in the space around me. Creepy. And there they were, above me. Diving and closing.
They would try to pop me with a tag, which is what I would do. I could really use that ghost, but it would take Castle’s shop a little time to craft it together. If they could. There was no guarantee they could successfully slip into the interceptor’s systems or the pilot’s weave. Unbelievable. I could blow this whole damned operation on a traffic bust.
I couldn’t let that happen. Wouldn’t to let that happen.
I plunged toward the ground level traffic and told the weave I needed alleys, passages, anything that the volopter could fit through but the interceptor could not. I needed a map and I needed it minutes ago. The weave shunted the task to my coat. I felt it warming as it burned numbers. The narrow streets rushed up at me as I pushed forward through a slot vacant of air traffic. I brought the little craft down to the deck, coming out of the side street and banking hard into a main avenue. I screamed over the rollers below and under the mid-level lifters above, the volopter porpoising in pockets of magnetic disturbance. Saturated fields.
The interceptor followed but hung back, chasing me above the lifter traffic. The tight lines of hovering vehicles ruined any hope they had at popping a tag at me. They wouldn’t risk trying to get a projectile through that tangle.
An alley up ahead flashed green. My coat scored. Couldn’t make the turn at this speed and hit the reversers. The seat held me firm during the deceleration but my stomach still wanted to crawl out my throat. I hit the pedal to swing the stabilizer boom around and point the nose of the craft toward the tight dark passageway. I felt the interceptor close fast, trying to brake and hit his hover mode. Then the weave took over and shot me into the crushing space between the massive buildings, rolling the tiny aircraft on edge. I could feel the interceptor fall back, the beacon of its presence fading. It gained altitude, while I did the opposite.
Turned sideways, the supercoils had to be powered down so they could not naturally jerk the little aircraft into horizontal level flight and crash me. I was slipping toward the paved ground. I shoved as much yaw into the pedal as I could, trying to swing the nose up, and pushed the throttle to get some thrust under me. The vortex engines rumbled as if they were coughing on bits of their own turbines. The only good it did was reduce my rate of slippage.
My teeth hurt. If I could pull the weave out my head and snap it into pieces, I would. I didn’t want an alley this small!
C’mon! C’mon! The next street seemed too far away along the edge of the megarises. There came a bang from the right engine as it lost compression and I slammed the throttle for the left hard against the stop in hopes of not losing what altitude I had. Bad move. Caught it too late. I was losing yaw and had no more pedal to give. And I wondered if I would burn through all my fuel before this disaster was over.
“Relight the damn-Iman engine,” I shouted at the volopter’s primary. A bevy of new warning intrusions flared through my brain. I squeezed the control grip, wanting to snap it off and smash everything around me.
I wanted to smash Eckon’s face.
I was losing altitude, sliding down the wall, the next street seemingly out of reach. Police lifters converging on my planned exit.
The right engine recycled its compression flow and ignited with a horrible shudder. I slammed the right throttle forward and eased back on the left, using differential thrust to push the nose up. The volopter convulsed and I half expected it to disintegrate, but my plan was working. If I could just get the nose pointed straight up . . .
The throttle shook like a terrified animal in my sweaty hand. My stiff right leg ached from holding pressure on the yaw pedal. The aircraft obediently kept yawing, bleeding off the airspeed as the nose swung up. I welcomed the shift in gravity, gradually being pushed backward into my seat away from the nauseating tug on my right side.
I could feel the police lifters zooming toward the alley, and the interceptor loitering high above like a phantom. I cheered the little craft on. C’mon c’mon, you can do it. Just a little more. The nose gained inclination like it had all day to complete the maneuver. Past forty-five degrees, I added left engine thrust. I began to gain altitude like I was crawling up the side of the building. Ho-hum, what’s the rush?
If only I had something with a grav burner and thermoptic camo. This would be a breeze.
Once I was close enough to dead straight up, I tilted the supercoils to take some of the burden off the engines. The weave soaked the supercoils with as much power as they could handle and a large hand reached out and swatted the volopter. I bit my tongue as the craft screamed up the side of the building.
Yeah you damn-Iman sons-of-bitches!
I reduced throttle to save fuel, shooting skyward on mags. The volopter did not know it was sandwiched between two megarises and tried to level off, dropping its nose. No you don’t! I fought with the control grip to keep the nose up, but the craft had a natural tendency to right itself, like trying to hold an inflatable ball under water. The tip of the rudder blade struck the aft building. It didn’t add much more to the violent shaking. New warnings flashed across my mind, including a damage estimate cost. I mentally swatted them away—distractions! The jolt was enough to kick the craft forward and I did all I could to keep the nose from crumpling against the other rushing wall. To no avail it struck with a shower of sparks and new warnings blooming in my vision like angry faces. The volopter bounced away, but by then I had reached a level where the megarises began to taper and the my little rental had all the room it wanted for vertical soaring.
My weave attended to my wracked nerves, diluting adrenaline, and calming my pounding heart.
The orbiting interceptor fast approached. Once I had room to move around in, I eased the throttle open, trying to get back on course toward the signal from Eckon’s wavecaster. I banked around the wide obelisk cap of the megarise, and dove back down into the canyons of the city to make it as hazardous as I could for my pursuer. I jinked side to side, rose and fell, hoping he couldn’t get a good enough lead to cloud me with tracking or over-ride dust.
Just then I got a emote, either from Castle, or someone else at the shop, letting me know the ghost was ready. Emotes were always strange, like sudden inspiration.
My coat learned to filter certain alleys of certain sizes and highlighted another one for me. It was away from Eckon, which was better suited. I dropped low, almost down to the lifter traffic. Almost down to the Emergency Vehicle Level above that, which the police pursuit lifters used to come screaming after me. The lone interceptor stayed high and lost visual on me as I slammed the grip hard left, zipping like a madman into the alley.
I hit the reversers hard, coming to a chest crushing halt. The decoy sensor ghost seemed to catapult away from me, following a predicted path. I rose silently in the shadows and hovered under cover of darkness. I felt the interceptor follow what it and its pilot thought to be me before their traffic feed severed. Below me, several police vehicles, lifters and rollers both, stormed through the alley chasing the same ghost, their visual alerts splashing bright blue and red everywhere.
Fifteen minutes, my weave sulked, almost as if it were ashamed of its duty. I knew it wasn’t. Though a machine intelligent symbiote, I knew it lacked a true sense of I. It knew what it was the same as any smart machine knew its function and service, but it wasn’t another mind in my brain and body. Just an augmentative tool.
Fifteen minutes was awful tight. My weave computed the fastest route to the garage at legal speed limits. It was going to be close. I pulled out of the alley and rose to the volopter flight levels into sparse traffic.
At some time in those racing minutes, the cops had to have figured they were duped and knew they were up against professionals. They would be tracing backflow, which they would discover split off in a million different directions, most of those to dead-ends and loop-backs. They would never find the shop. I imagined the wavecaster used to send the ghost and the traffic feed would have been sprinkled with metal-phage and would be nothing more than new dust with no hint of its former composition. However, the police did not need to backflow. Oh no. It was one of those fucking sniffers from one of the ubiquitous journalist guilds that alerted them to my location.
I could run from the cops, but I couldn’t run from the news.
I was descending to the sector parking garage, a sprawling monstrosity for voles, lifters, and rollers, when suddenly a dust cloud exploded along my flight path. There was no avoiding it and I plunged right through. Tags! I hoped. Could be over-riders. Didn’t matter. Hell, I was here. I craned my neck around to take a quick glance behind me. The interceptor—or perhaps another one—followed, almost casually, as if they knew they had me bagged.
I dropped past the volopter parking towers. Didn’t exactly have the time to take the highest lift all the way down to the sublevels. The weave gave warning that the cloud was a mix. It and my coat began doing all they could to fend off the infiltrating dust with offensive malware. But the tiny machine could worm their way into the volopter’s brain and sever circuits, form their own control hardlines.
Well, fuck that. I cut the power to the supercoils and dropped like a stone, glided as best I could with the flanged airfoil body of the vole and its palm frond elevators. I slipped past the lifter platforms, extended the stubby landing legs and curled the thrust ducts on the vortex engines for vertical landing.
I lost the right engine. Maybe to the invading dust, maybe to too much stress. It sputtered and caught fire. Foam sprayed through it, bits of white fluffy stuff catching on the air like little clouds. The craft listed and began to spin, forcing me to shut down the other engine. The roller parking deck rushed up at me.
Moments before impact I ramped the supercoils hard. The volopter jerked as if snapped on the end of a rope, held buoyant on the local field. The coils gave a horrible electronic scream, like someone had their fist in the guts of a wildcat and were twisting with all their might. Both coils erupted in blue flame. The volopter shuddered as if to throw off this meddlesome problem, and crashed hard to the deck, right in the driving aisle, the left engine cowling resting on the hood of a rather nice roller. I imagined the owner would be none too thrilled at this discovery. It was the least of my worries.
The aircraft was dead, ticking and smoldering. I hit the emergency release and the canopy popped free. I pushed it aside, it slid over the edge of the craft, gonging on the concrete. I grabbed my pop-gun and jumped out. The skin of the vole was rippled, buckled, and gashed. The elevators twisted. It served me well. It died well.
I had less than five minutes!
I stood anxious and little disoriented, in a brilliant wavering spotlight from the descending interceptor. The pilot ordered me to halt, to get prone on the deck, his voice broadcast from an audio array on the bottom of his diamond-shaped craft. I bolted for the lift in the corner of the upper parking level, the spotlight following me.
I reached the lift, and started, spooked by a voice.
“Hey, you can’t park there,” an attendant shouted lament pointing at the wreck. He was there directing cleaning bots.
The weave was trying to calm me as I leveled my popper at him in one swift fluid motion.
The poor foolish man choked off a scream and ducked—actually ducked—and ran, stooped over, to some darker distant part of the garage; his weave without doubt tapping into the police wavecast to offer its report. As my own weave called the lift, I couldn’t help but to look around and notice the cluster of optic/audio arrays tucked into the corners of the walls and columns. I heard grinding. Forced my teeth apart and rubbed my sore jaw. Everyone in the damn-Iman Expanse could be watching this.
I set my weave and coat to blind the security system of my future presence.
The lift ascended. The interceptor came to a hover over the wreck of my rented volopter. The pilot was casting as much malware as he could muster at me. My weave shrugged it off, already having cracked his codes. His spotlight was blinding. I knew he was considering popping a dust cloud at me. He had to be wondering why he couldn’t subdue me with the normal means. I wondered why he couldn’t figure out that we were on the same damn side! If I had a badge, I would flash it.
The shop didn’t issue badges. We didn’t officially exist.
The lift door struggled open. I had confirmation the security system was compromised and stepped in toward my shadow hard and crisp against the wall. My weave sent the destination and the door shut out the white glare from the interceptor. As it closed I heard a loud pop. The bastard actually shot a dust ball at me. It did no good.
I was not going to make my deadline. That became more announced when the lift slowed and stopped at another level. An attractive couple stepped aboard. This was bad. These damn-Iman people with their important fucking lives interrupting me. I sulked in the corner, trying to keep my teeth from eroding each other.
A minute left and I wondered what they were going to do.
Castle called. “I’m aborting. This is a clusterfuck of unimaginable proportions.” I knew he was angry though he never shouted. His voice took on a razor sharp edge.
“Abort if you want, I don’t give a shit,” I thought-talked. “Eckon is mine.”
“The cops and the news are all over you. You’re not walking out of this unscathed.”
I said nothing back. I didn’t care. I don’t lose missions. No matter what.
Castle added, “We’ll get Eckon another time.”
Which meant someone else would be assigned to pick up where I left off. I loathed the idea. “I’ll get him now. You figure out how to extract me from this clusterfuck.”
I felt my handler sign off.
The seconds fell away. I closed my eyes.
The lift kept descending to the level my fellow occupants selected.
I had the sensation of the weave shrugging sheepishly. The barrier ran out of time. My weave had to do what it was required by court order to do. It recognized the presence of other weaves and flashed them.
The couple turned to me in shock and disgust, stepping back and bumping into the wall. I tapped my fingers angrily against my thigh.
The young woman’s eyes were wide with fear. She looked up at her man for reassurance.
The man frowned and did not drop his eyes from me. My weave detected the side lobes of his weave comm signals to his girl. It broke his low grade security. “—man from the news. Police are looking for—”
I lurched, grabbed his elbow and pressed the nerve there against the bone to incapacitate the arm should he desire to attack, and to shock him into inaction. That worked. Gaping and wincing, he tried to pull away. I jerked him to me and landed a powerful head butt that sank him unconscious or dazed to the floor. The girl screamed. I set my weave into combat mode pressed my spread hand across her forehead. She beat her ineffectual fists into my arms. From my finger tips the microscopic wirve endings of my weave snaked out, boring into the skin of her head, finding her wirve endings and jacked infiltration malware directly into her. Her weave was unaccustomed to such an assault and had little in the way of defensive postures. I put her to sleep and lay her down beside her companion. Messy, but I didn’t want to deal with these two potentially jeopardizing my mission.
I had the weave stop at the nearest floor and tossed those two out. I should have taken complete control of the lift. I was fucking up everywhere. I did that now and plunged to the sublevels. To Eckon.
I had the cops above, coming down. Eckon’s security detail patrolling below. What a mess. I sighed deeply and prepared myself.
My weave still had a hidden connection to the mobile wavecaster and I had an idea where it was. It wasn’t a visual idea. I had never been here before, but the weave had rendered a map of the place in my mind, tagged like a memory, like knowledge I gained through firsthand experience. The wavecaster resided in a storage room on the floor above the deepest level. Through that private wavecast network, I knew the whereabouts of each terminal, of each weave tapped into it. Most of them where at a nearby mausoleum, for what I had no worldly idea. Didn’t really care. They weren’t my problem.
In an office adjacent to the storage room was a terminal my weave had confirmed was Eckon. He wasn’t the only one there. He had his goons. At least three. And I had to expect maybe more. Those that were not linked. Or on a secure wave I hadn’t detected. These men were a problem. So were the ones guarding the lifts and the corridor to the office.
With control of the lift, I had falsified its location so that Eckon’s men would not notice it coming until they could hear it. I didn’t plan to be aboard what would become a death trap. They had guards posted for three floors of which an alert would give them time to vacate the area through a set of private lifts. Lifts I had no control over. I had to take them with what little surprise was afforded me. With the reprieve of my censure expired, that wasn’t a lot. My weave would be blabbing like a gossiper. Once things happened, I’d have no stealth.
I was a fool for trying this.
Floors slipped past, one after the other. I had my special toys and removed the small flat disc of a dust buster from the padded utility pocket inside my coat. I armed half the dust inside for weave-phage, the other half for paralysis, and stuck it to the wall facing the door. I set a timer to allow myself to exit, and programmed it to pop when the door opened next.
I got out three floors above the highest set of wavecast terminals, guards would hear it rumbling past and signal caution. I ran across the back wall of the lowest parking deck. The floors below were rented space. As I neared the stairwell a fairly attractive woman approached her roller. She looked at me and my weave flashed her. She gasped and slipped into her roller with haste.
I pushed through the stairwell doors and using the handrails, leapt down five steps at a time. I stopped at the highest floor the guards were posted and flung a similar armed dust buster onto the ceiling beyond the sweep of the doors. I raced back up a flight and out into the square corridor lit from glaring friezes that gave the place a sterile, hostile ambience. I raced toward the opposite side of where they should not expect me, to the private lifts. There was a service lift there as well that I could compromise and use.
By now the booby-trapped lift had stopped. Two terminals winked out as they fell off-link. The security detail mobilized, moving toward points of entry and exit. I reached the service lift and my weave slipped right into its system. It was already on the bottom floor and rose. Two more of their men down on the stairwell and they were on high alert.
Then the private lifts rumbled past and I laughed. My weave told me the police had command of it. Eckon was trapped.
The doors to the service lift spread open and I stepped inside. I pulled my pop-gun, the dustheads already armed for cyber-neural incapacitation. I kept a paralyzer round for Eckon. I didn’t want to damage his mind, or his weave. He had information I needed to retrieve.
They still hadn’t detected me on their wave. The detail regrouped. The down men they left alone. The three with Eckon ushered him out of the office. The other two guards above them positioned themselves to watch the lifts and the stairwell. Those at the mausoleum were on the move as well. No one seemed to bother about the wavecaster. It stayed put in the storage room.
I crouched and steeled myself for the madness that was about to ensue. The dust on my coat and skin was ready for anything. The weave calmed me, but it could do nothing about the unsettling apprehension filling me like neutron matter.
The lift stopped, the center of a t-intersection, Eckon’s men walking toward me. The door glided open. My weave flashed them: “Hello. I’m Roco Bellero. This is a public notice to inform you that I have been convicted of. ..” and blah blah blah. It startled them. Eckon and one goon held back, made for the office behind them. The two others dressed in business attire went for their guns, their arms moving slowly in the center of my tunnel vision. I aimed at the man on the left. Pop! Aimed at the other. The compressed air chamber fired again. Both men went down in sequence, thrashing, their dust unable to counteract my superior technology.
The third man unceremoniously shoved Eckon into the office and twirled around, his kinetic pistol swinging out. We fired. He went wide over my shoulder, the bullet puncturing the back wall of the lift. The dusthead exploded near his face, engulfing his head. He struggled and jerked, the heels of his shoes clapping on the hard floor. The door to Eckon’s office slammed shut.
I recalled my dust, what was left of it. It rose from the inert men like formless ghost, waiting until I passed through to settle upon me. I stood and loaded the paralyzer into the popper’s breech. The gun whined, sucking air to replenish its chambers. I stepped out. Started my way to the office.
A roundhouse kick lifted me off my feet. My right arm exploded into numbing tingles. I hit the wall hard near the corner of the intersection, breath coughing out of me. The popper went skittering and spinning down the hall, resting against the leg of a guard.
A shimmering figure loomed over me. Thermoptic camo, or. . . A cloak hack! I mentally shouted at my weave to give me straight eye, scrambling up to roll into a fighting stance. The weave did most of that work, turning me temporarily into an ambulatory puppet.
The figure assuming the combat posture was a woman with skull shorn hair, and a slim build packed tight in a black skinsuit. Her stealth compromised, she sneered through a dust screen over her mouth and nose in regards to my censure , “They let you off easy, didn’t they?” She flung a glob of her dust at me.
I tried to lurch out of the way but it hit me across the chest. A phage. And not one for weaves, but for flesh. The dust on my coat did its best to hold it at bay, to reconfigure it. Make it inert. For most of her dust, it did this, but some got through, tiny motes burning the skin of my chest. My weave would deal with it.
A cutting blade formed on the side of her right hand and she was slashing at me before I had a chance to formulate a plan of putting her down. My coat reflexively hardened into armor and I warded off her strikes with my sleeves. Her cruel slate-grey eyes glared.
The combat dust on her clothing and skin would be hard to penetrate. I needed to get my dust into her body. And with her face shielded, I had but another option. She slashed and stabbed and I blocked, inching my way closer until I had an opening. I forced my way into her arm span, punching the sides of her trunk. She cleaved at my back and arms, nicked my neck. We were so close our dust went to war, layers and motes fighting to penetrate the other. My attention was on the tab at her collar.
She was hard and solid, trying to push me away and almost succeeding. I wish I could say this was easy but I struggled to get my hand in position, to get it high enough to slap that tab. She had a hand on my jaw, pushing my face as if to spin my head around. My neck strained. Finally I brought my fingers to that tab, pressed it just so. Her skinsuit split down the middle to her groin.
The warrior woman snarled, tried to back away and mounted malware attacks against my weave. I shot my hand down between her legs, my fingers loaded with cyber-neural stunners. I pushed them into her.
She jerked away in the throes of a fit. Collapsed to the floor. Went still.
I stood over her breathing heavily. Wiped my fingers across my pants. “You shouldn’t send a woman to do a man’s job, Eckon,” I shouted, reactivating the weave ‘s visual enhancements.
A shot rang out and a sledgehammer smashed into my shoulder, twisting me off my feet. Luckily my coat was still in armor mode, and the bullet crumpled and bounced away, but it still hurt like a bitch. The other two guards had come down the stairwell in the other hall. I never noticed they off-linked. They were lining up another shot.
I rolled away behind the corner and got to my feet. I had a third dust buster. I tossed it into the hall, hearing it strike the walls and floor. One of them cursed. The dust buster popped. I heard shuffling and their bodies hitting the floor, guns clanging.
Anymore surprises and I would be a spent man.
Not a lot of time left. The privacy lifts were descending. I’d have to get what I came for, and take what was coming to me.
I picked my pop-gun off the floor and stepped into my lingering dust. I had some of it rise from my long coat and trail like strands of smoke to the closed door of the office. There it dispersed and slaughtered Eckon’s personal defense dust. Having compromised the garage’s security, the lock accepted my authority and let me open the door.
Eckon sat behind a desk facing the door, resigned to the inevitable. I had my popper aimed at his chest and pulled the trigger. The dusthead splashed against him, knocking him and the chair back against the wall. The dust settled and bored to his skin, overloaded his weave, took command of his motor functions. He slid out of the chair, unable to move but quite aware.
I jacketed the popper and went to Eckon who stared at me slack jaw. He was aged somewhere in his sixties, but he had the body of a twenty year old[1]. I pulled him out from behind the desk, to where I would have some space to work. I put my coat to vigilance and spread my right hand out across his forehead.
Being an invader, I entered his cyberscape. He had thrown up a Revulsion.
I found myself in some undefined room filled with gore. Mutilated bodies of various degrees of decomposition lay piled everywhere. Blood and fluids pooled around my boots, soaked into my pants at the knee. Carrion insects buzzed in thick swarms. The smell made me choke, my stomach twist. It was all I could do to keep my gorge from bursting. I buried my nose against the sleeve of my left arm. My eyes watered. I knew this wasn’t real, but tell that to my brain. The defense was well crafted. My weave began to work against it.
Eckon lay in this filth with a rictus grin. “Roco Bolo,” he greeted over the weave hardlink.
Well, Bellero, but I had gained a street reputation after the censure that was making my job more difficult. I was losing the anonymity I once relied on.
I had no time for idle chit-chat. “Where are the umashi.”
“The what?”
“Don’t fuck me pal. The human machines. We know they are here. Where are they?”
“I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“Oh, I know you do.”
“You gonna kill me. You don’t seem to have a problem with that.”
My weave had established a touchless connection. I grabbed Eckon by the collar and pulled him up to me, gagging on the stench heavy fumes. “I don’t need to kill you. I’ll get what I want. And you will spend an actual prison sentence—a long one—for harboring posthumans.”
The Pavona Expanse felt a special threat from the posthuman machine sapience. How they could have allowed their weaves to replace more and more of their biological functions, I didn’t know. I didn’t know how they could call themselves human. Wasn’t nothing human about them, except for their appearance.
Half the cyberscape went blank on my side, became an empty whiteness. The blurry demarcation line encroached across Eckon’s Revulsion like fractal tentacles, deleting it. Leaving nothing but some semblance of being in a white box.
“You think you can beat posthumans?”
“I can damn-Iman try.”
My weave won its battle to take command of Eckon’s visual cache. The walls in the cyberscape became blurred with projected scenes as the weave searched for anything concerning the human machines. Eckon laughed and a black figure appeared in the room, crouching, a defender ready to attack.
Before it could spring, my weave manifested its own fighting figure, and the two nondescript forms engaged in hand to hand combat. They were a whirling blur of motion. The visual search slowed.
Eckon’s face strained. He was losing the battle. He held out for seconds before going limp in my hands, unconscious. The black figure disappeared. And then so did my weave’s. The visuals increased speed, more than before as my coat lent its processing power. An image froze. Then another. And another. Each one being scattercast back to the shop. To Castle. Then they all coalesced into one. The umashi’s current place of hiding.
Then the frozen images vanished. Everything did. I was left in a mind numbing white void.
There was nothing but the screaming alert of my weave, tingling my skin like I was being electrocuted. Something was wrong with the mobile wavecaster. It was moving. I was dumped out of the cyberscape. Heard the door to the storage room open. I began to turn my head to see who was behind me.
And that is all I remember.
Castle told me the umashi were gone. They sanitized the place. It was like no one had ever been in the complex. The only reason they knew Eckon’s visuals were true was because no one but posthumans could cleanse the place so thoroughly. They left no traces. No dust. No DNA. Nothing.
The police found me unconscious next to Eckon. Eckon wouldn’t be going to prison after-all. He wouldn’t be able to offer further evidence of the umashi presence either. He was found dead, his weave removed. Not just from his brain, but the whole damn thing. Out of every cell in his body.
I was charged and fined for the traffic violations—added to my censure, of course—but I was not charged with his murder. No one in their right mind could claim that I took his weave. It could be done, but not manually in a simple office. And not that fast. An advanced medical suite was required, one peopled with a throng of technicians. That’s not something I carried in my pocket.
Only a being that could manipulate the nanotech machine matrix of a weave could pull a stunt like that. We had our suspicions of what.
And of that, I began to suspect that Eckon’s mobile wavecaster was a human machine, the one that took his weave.
I dreamt of her.
[1] 20 years equates to 27 Earth years. Pavona has a 27.57 Earth hours day and a 432.5 Earth days year. Calendarial ages are numerically lower than biological appearance. The characters are going to think in the time periods they are accustomed.
