The unique signatures of four Justice dynes rushed through the entrance while the other four blew a hole in the right wall where no equipment blocked ingress. The thermal outlines of two officers followed the dynes through the entrance while he and Officer Bradley moved through the jagged hole they’d just created.
Adlai Weiss (M1): Squad 1A, guard the perimeter. Weapons fire lit up the warehouse so brilliantly it almost masked the backup generator coming to life. Everyone else, engage all attackers!
A dyne rushing forward into the firefight beside him exploded. Shit! The layout of the warehouse offered scant cover; he manifested a defensive shield for his chest and face and ran for the generator. Attackers have custom weaponry modifications, so set all defensive measures to maximum. Drone 2, to me.
While the power grid delivered its juice directly through conduction plates in the floor, hardlines snaked from the generator to provide for the emergency needs of the servers. If at all possible, he didn’t want to blow up the generator outright, as doing so posed too much risk to the servers abutting it. He was trying to preserve the sapient entity they contained.
Drone 2 arrived in a whirl of electric smoke, and Adlai marked the hardlines. Burn through these lines.
A huge chunk of metal slammed into the outside frame of the generator; he couldn’t tell whether the smoldering pile that hit the floor belonged to one of his dynes or not.
A cacophony of screeches filled the air as three of the Justice dynes closed to within melee range of their foes.
His shield crackled. He dove to the floor, letting the bulk of the shield slide up and over his head and shoulders as he tracked the weapons fire to its source, sighted down and fired on the enemy drone until its core ruptured.
The energy in the air around him began to dissipate, a sign the drone had succeeded in its task and the generator was now offline—then weapons fire zig-zagged across the room and cut into one of the server columns. The protective shielding burned brightly and began to falter. Whatever is firing on the servers, put a stop to it!
In his peripheral vision, Officer Bradley dove for the dangling, partially unattached arm of one of the warehouse security dynes, ripping it the rest of the way off as his forward momentum sent him crashing into the legs of a fully operational enemy dyne.
Adlai recoiled as blood sprayed across the wall. Dammit!
Two of his dynes, having disposed of their initial opponents, moved in to overpower the last attacker standing. Too late for Bradley, but they prevented further damage to the servers.
And like that, it was over.
Squad 1B, remain on combat alert. Adlai set an internal diagnostic routine running to confirm he hadn’t overlooked a gaping hole in a vital part of his anatomy. “Thompson, check Bradley and see if there’s anything we can do for him. Alvarez, try to determine the operational status of the servers and other equipment.”
After checking the generator to make sure it wasn’t about to overload and blow them all up, he took a couple of steps toward Thompson, but stopped when the officer shook his head grimly. He diverted toward the one area of the warehouse that had stayed silent and passive during the firefight, the cordoned-off alcove in the far-left corner.
Behind a shredded privacy screen, a remote-controlled doll of Anavosa hung in a protective glass enclosure, still and lifeless but intact.
He’d seen Joaquim Lacese’s vid from the Platform. It should have prepared him for what he saw now; it hadn’t. Cognitive dissonance battled itself in his mind with enough vigor to make him feel nauseated.
He’d always considered Anavosa to be quite lovely, if in a delicate, fragile way—an appearance that contrasted markedly with her shrewd, piercing intellect yet somehow added to her mystique.
Chills ran down his spine as he stared at the empty form now. In a trick of light and shadow, one side of her mouth almost seemed to curl up into a cold, macabre hint of a smile.
He swallowed heavily as Thompson came up beside him. “Gods….”
“Yeah. There are power cables running to the enclosure from somewhere. Disconnect them, just in case there’s another power supply hidden in the attic or underground.”
“Y-yes, sir.” The officer looked physically ill as he began inspecting the outside of the enclosure.
The doll would be fine without power for a while. It wasn’t constructed of living tissue, but rather a synthetic imitation of skin and bones. No organs, no brain, no pulse.
Adlai forced himself to turn away from the doll and assess the state of the warehouse.
The column of servers struck by weapons fire had sustained light damage, but at a cursory glance, all the data they held should be intact. Three of the eight Justice dynes and one of the drones he’d brought remained functional; the rest of them and all of Anavosa’s security forces were headed for the scrap pile. Alvarez had sustained a shoulder injury and Bradley total body loss. Luckily, Justice employees enjoyed a priority bump to the front of the regen line, so he’d be welcoming the officer back to life in a few days.
“Cables are cut, sir.”
“Thank you.” On the main mission channel, the reports began to come in. Spencer’s team reported a successful incursion, having suffered some squad damage but no officers lost. The others reported greater and lesser casualties, but it soon became clear that all locations were now under Justice control.
Adlai Weiss (Mirai): Great work everyone. We can afford to take a breath now.
Selene Panetier (Namino): A short one. But sure. This is me breathing.
Adlai ordered the transport crew he’d staged down the block to start securing and packing up the equipment. Two hours from now, the building would be empty and sealed up.
4
* * *
JUSTICE EVIDENCE WAREHOUSE
Ebisu
The muted hum of a pervasive low-power state danced along Nika’s skin, and narrow rows of lighting glowed in subtle patterns across the equipment stacked against two walls. Beyond these telltale markers of life existent, the room was quiet.
“You’ve shut down the others’ servers.”
Nika nodded, but didn’t elaborate. She’d wanted to join the Justice teams in their mission, or at a minimum help coordinate the effort from the Justice Center, but Adlai had made it clear how important it was to him, and arguably to most of those involved, for everything to be handled by the book. And taking a wanted terrorist on a raid of the Guides’ secure backup facilities was decidedly not by the book.
Everyone assured her that she would be officially pardoned soon, with the rest of NOIR following shortly thereafter. But a pardon required a functioning government to issue it, and they were still working on that particular detail. So, she’d stayed out of Justice’s way while they acted on the intel Parc had so skillfully obtained for them.
Transport crews had, for now, brought all the Guides’ backups to this central location, where they could be guarded more efficiently in the short term. Justice—or at least the portions of Justice they believed they could trust—was stretched thin. On the verge of breaking, one might assert, though Adlai and Spencer both would shame her if she dared to assert it.
“It’s safer for everyone this way until some decisions are made regarding their, and your, futures. But the data—their memories and psyches—is intact and undamaged, I promise you. They’re just sleeping.”
“But not dreaming.”
She considered the woman/doll standing beside her curiously. “Do you? Dream, I mean.”
Delacrai Iylish smiled, but it conveyed only wistful sadness. “In a manner of speaking. We regularly run routines—” she cut herself off “—it’s not important. Thank you for keeping my own servers running. It would have been easy for you to flip a switch and watch this body crumple to the floor like a marionette loosed from its strings.”
“You helped us. You continue to help us, and we’re grateful for it. I’m grateful for it. Listen, the Justice Advisors have determined that you will be charged w
ith multiple crimes alongside the rest of the Guides. There’s no getting around the fact that you were complicit in the actions the Guides as an institution approved and pursued for eight years. But I’ll fight to make sure you’re granted leniency. If you serve any prison time, it should be brief and, perhaps more importantly, comfortable. And for now, you have your freedom.”
“Other than the constant armed escort and the tracker burned into my skin.”
“Yes, other than those precautions. They’re for your protection as much as our own.”
“I understand. An illusory freedom is preferable to no freedom at all.”
Nika wasn’t so certain she agreed with the sentiment, but she opted not to argue the point. Not when Delacrai was cooperating; not when her cooperation was making tasks that should’ve been impossible not only feasible but, in many cases, already checked off the list. “Tell me, if you will…before we shut down their servers, the others were awake, weren’t they? Were they communicating with one another? With you?”
“Yes, yes and no, but not for lack of trying on the last point. I hovered at the edges of their communications several times, but to do anything further would have revealed my presence and put me in terrible danger, tracker and escort notwithstanding.”
“Of course. Still, the backup locations included additional dolls. It took us almost thirty-six hours to find and secure those locations. After the Platform exploded, why didn’t they simply transfer into those dolls and get themselves out into the world? Try to wrest control of the government back away from us?”
“If asked, they will tell you they were assessing the situation, conferring with one another about potential strategies and devising a suitable plan to respond. In truth, however, I believe they were…afraid. With our fortress destroyed and our Advisors in armed revolt, our many layers of protection had vanished. I expect it all came as something of a shock to their psyches.” Delacrai lifted an arm and gazed at it oddly, as if it were a mysterious alien artifact. “This body feels so very fragile. To walk the streets within it is to feel vulnerable.”
“Vulnerable? But if the doll is disabled while you’re occupying it, your psyche isn’t damaged. The doll’s merely a remote avatar.”
“I said to ‘feel’ vulnerable, not to be so. The others like to proclaim their superior logic and reason, but though they—we—have drifted far from our Asterion roots, we are not base machines. The others like to proclaim they are not hampered by foolish emotions as the rest of you Asterions are, but I suspect the previous two days have proved them wrong on several levels.”
Nika quite enjoyed the idea of the Guides having spent recent hours being overwhelmed by such emotions as fear, as panic and distress.
“You realize, they will have attempted to activate countermeasures against this transfer of power. They have access to many resources they can use to do so.”
She nodded. “And we are shutting down those resources as quickly as we can identify and track them. Again, thank you for your help in that regard. As for me, personally? I’ve been hunted for the last five years. I can handle it.”
“I am sorry, though these empty words do nothing to change the past.”
“I know you are.” There was nothing else to do here, and Nika started to turn and leave, then pivoted back. “Can I ask you a question?”
“You have done nothing but ask me questions since we became reacquainted.”
She laughed. “I suppose that’s true. How did you—the five of you—end up like this? Why did you retreat into hardware and stop inhabiting bodies as anything more than remote avatars? When?”
Delacrai’s stoic expression flinched, and she stared at the stacks of servers for several seconds before answering. “As with all life, evolution is a thousand tiny adjustments occurring over the span of countless millennia. It wasn’t a single decision, but rather the soft seduction of a winding path that ultimately led us here.
“We needed to be objective in order to rule wisely. We increasingly withdrew, cutting ourselves off from the daily workings of society, from our friends and our former lives. In the resulting absence of real, physical connection to the world—to the sensation of sand between our toes and the warmth of another’s skin against our own—the synthetic roots of every Asterion grew far stronger in us.”
The woman sighed deliberately. “The details are a dull, dreary tale. By the time it became more convenient for us to default to a quantum state and discard a physical, fully functioning body, our minds had long since abandoned all semblance of an external, vibrant life lived among our people.”
“Do you want to return to being a true Asterion?”
Delacrai’s expression flared—her eyes widened, her lips parted—and she took half a step back. “It’s such a long road to traverse.”
Nika, however, knew something of the sentencing options the Justice Advisors were mulling over. “It doesn’t have to be.”
5
* * *
MARIS’ LOFT
Mirai
“Because we don’t store people.”
“Not as a policy, no. But if there were ever special circumstances calling for it, these are them. As things stand at present, the Guides are too dangerous to be allowed to be conscious.”
Adlai had missed the first part of the conversation, and he listened long enough to get the gist before joining in. “Nika’s right. If we start storing people, we’re already halfway down the slippery slope to what the Guides became. Sorry I’m late. New pockets of civil disobedience popped up here on Mirai as soon as the sun set.”
Julien frowned at him but let the storing issue go for the moment. “Riots?”
Adlai found an empty chair and collapsed into it. After they’d gotten kicked out of Mirai Tower by repair crews this afternoon, Maris had hastily converted her dining/living area into a general-purpose meeting space, and she’d somehow managed to make the loft look as if it had been designed for it.
“So far, we’ve only seen two incidents of organized violence, both of which were subdued without significant trouble. But crowds are protesting outside government offices on every Axis World and half the Adjunct ones. Worse, people are refusing to follow orders from Justice dynes, even in routine interactions at transit hubs and Admin offices.
“I recognize you all were discussing the Guides’ sentencing when I arrived, but now that we control the Guides’ hardware, I submit that we need to deal with more pressing matters first. Namely, restoring civil order.”
Harris shrugged helplessly, which Adlai didn’t care for. Justice Advisors were never helpless. “People are afraid, and they don’t know who or what to trust. We have to find some way to calm them down, but I’m at a loss. Frankly, they should be afraid. I know I am.”
Scattered chuckles rippled around the room, and Adlai pinched the bridge of his nose. He ought to take the levity as a sign to lighten up a little himself, but how?
Nika leaned forward in her chair. “Radical transparency.”
A few chairs down, Selene perked up in interest. “What do you mean?”
“The Guides acted as they did under the rubric of ‘protecting the people’ and ‘averting a panic.’ Well, we see how that worked out. People are afraid of what they don’t understand. The more they find closed doors and hear furtive whispers, the more the conspiracy theories will spread like wildfire, with panic a step behind. So, no closed doors. No whispers. We tell everyone about the threat from the Rasu. We tell everyone what the Guides did. We tell them what we’re doing to repair the damage already done and to meet the threat. We make good on my promise to ask for their help.”
Despite her limbo legal status, Nika certainly seemed to be making herself at home among the Advisors. Adlai wasn’t surprised, but it had been a while since he’d seen her work a room.
“But won’t this cause greater panic, from genuine, justified fear this time?”
She gestured in Harris’ direction. “You said you’re afraid, but I don’t see yo
u running around in circles hysterically, bashing in windows or flailing your hands about and tearing at your hair. Asterions aren’t children, and we shouldn’t treat them as such. The Guides worked hard to make us forget this, but the government only exists for convenience and consistency. It’s not a caretaker.
“Right now, we’re smack in the middle of a civilization-threatening crisis. I say we tell the citizens that we’re getting our shit together as fast as we can, and they need to do the same.”
Harris raised his hands in resignation, if half in jest. “Fine. I’m convinced if the rest of you are. It beats the other terrible options, anyway.”
A few mild grumbles followed, but no one argued, and Nika shifted toward Maris. “Could you write up some talking points and make them sound eloquent?”
“As I do. Of course.”
Nika sank down in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. “Okay, what’s next?”
Adlai realized then that she wasn’t merely making herself at home with the others—she was in charge. He caught Dashiel’s attention, who sat to the other side of Nika, and received an amused shrug from his friend.
Katherine Colson spoke up. “Cargo ships will be arriving at Hokan Station within the hour. They will take the occupied stasis chambers to medical facilities where the individuals inside them can be revived safely. Gemina has provided the necessary login credentials for the server at the station as well as the ADV Tabiji’s systems, and a forensic team will analyze all the data stored there.”
Nika arched an eyebrow. “Gemina’s cooperating?”
“She’s bitching about it, not surprisingly, but she’s honestly been helpful so far. I don’t want to presume, but I think she’s relieved.”
“About what?”
“Not having to carry this burden alone any longer.”
Adlai shook his head. “She wasn’t alone. She had Satair to commiserate with.”
Asterion Noir: The Complete Collection (Amaranthe Collections Book 4) Page 64