by Cam Daly
“Huh? Okay. ‘Should I ever hurt Ormlan, or allow any Molu to come to harm?’”
“What did the blinking light show?”
“It flashed negative. What does that mean?”
“Nothing, I guess.” It meant that someone had been specifically trying to protect the Molu from Kery. Someone who had also handed over the core encryption keys to the Interloper. Ruut.
A traitor in Labworld Command. On any other day, that would have been the most unbelievable thing to happen. Today, it didn’t even surprise her.
“Okay. Whatever.” Mez’s Interloper feet were bare and still blackened, but that didn't seem to affect the magnetic and electrostatic grippers in them. She settled into a runner’s starting stance on her set of tracks, the long rifle attached straight along her spine.
Kery mirrored Mezerello’s pose. “Remember that the rails turn left at Beach Street but you keep going straight.” She eyed the target, two and a half kilometers away. “Go when you’re ready.”
“Just try to keep up. Whatever might happen, I won’t stop until I get inside Ormlan’s base.”
“Good girl. I understand. Now quit talking and GO!”
Mezerello sprang forward. Keryapt ordered the winglets to attack the four Photuris from their points of concealment to the east, waited a quarter second then dashed down her set of rails.
Hyde Street ran nearly due north from their location at the top of Russian Hill down to San Francisco Bay. It was a normal two lane city street, like almost any other in the city, except for the cable car tracks on either side of the double yellow line. ESWAT headquarters on the northwestern tip of Alcatraz lay almost perfectly in line with their path.
Horseplay wasn’t designed for urban ground combat like the Interloper, and its synthetic musculature reflected that. Keryapt had the same grippers in her feet, which made the smooth metal rail a perfect surface for running. With each step she gained speed, leaning farther forward all the time to reduce the wind resistance. It felt good to run, to test herself against the air, but she couldn’t let herself relax and enjoy the sensation.
Raising her cannon to a very precisely calculated angle and aiming at nothing up in the sky, she fired her first round. A few steps later, she lowered the barrel just slightly and fired again. She took two more shots before she reached the first intersection, each aimed a little lower towards the horizon.
As she cleared the first of six intersections that they had to pass through, she had her first clear view of the entire length of Hyde Street. She realized immediately that her timing had been off - there was a cable car already coming up the southbound tracks and Mezerello would have to switch to her side within a couple of blocks. A little ways in front of the cable car, a minivan was starting to back out of a driveway on her side of the street. She ignored the possible confluence of the two for a moment to deal with the air battle.
The winglets were unlikely to survive the engagement with the larger and more powerful Photuris defending the island, but Broaalg had revealed more about them than they knew about her. She set the winglets to minimal evasion/maximum speed as they approached. A salvo of micromissiles sprang out from the first four, lightening their load and distracting the defender’s beam weapons. Pinpoint explosions began to appear above San Francisco Bay.
Mezerello squawked her speed over their radio link. “60.” She was moving five times faster than any human had ever run and leaning even lower than Keryapt, working to keep herself aligned with the rails.
“Don’t overheat.” The defenders would spot them with radar once they cleared the city, but it wouldn’t do for infrared to give them away earlier than necessary.
Four seconds into their run, she crossed the second intersection as Mez reached the third. “Van ahead.” She was sure the Active saw the cable car in her path but didn’t know if she had a good angle to see the other vehicle. They were definitely going to have a problem with the pair of vehicles in a block and a half.
The Craven air defenders burned her lead winglet out of the sky before it was halfway to them. Three more right behind were nearly out of missiles, closing quickly with their targets. The unarmed pair that had been providing communications support were on a different mission, high overhead.
She was so distracted by orchestrating the air battle and firing her cannon that she almost lost her balance as she crossed the third intersection. One of the cable car rails was slightly loose in its bindings and it shifted under her weight, sending her twelfth round off into some unplanned direction. She relinquished control of the air units to the combat system and focused on the road in front. Two more blocks of cable car rail, one block of plain asphalt, then 150 meters of increasingly narrow and unpredictable sidewalk and pier to the end of the straightaway.
Ahead of her, Mezerello passed the minivan and leapt to Kery’s set of rails just before she would have crashed into the cable car. “120.”
A half block away, Kery knew the gap between the van and cable car was going to be too small for her to change rails. She had to go over. She switched the gun to one hand, cleared the intersection and made a shallow vaulting leap. Her legs went one way and her gun arm the other, while the empty hand palmed the roof of the minivan. She used that instant of magnetic contact to wrench herself back down towards the ground, leaving the vehicle rocking from side to side on its shock absorbers.
“Nice.” Mez had noticed Kery’s vault.
“Focus.”
At the next intersection, the rails turned left and Mezerello continued straight, slowing slightly without the metallic surface to grapple on.
Kery brought the cannon back into both hands and fired her last planned shots into the sky, then checked back in on the air battle.
Two of the four Photuris had been destroyed completely. The third was so damaged that it crashed into the Bay Bridge and plummeted into the water below.
Ten kilometers up, the two unarmed winglets she had sent ahead turned and dove towards Alcatraz. The Tumorish defensive emplacements on each end of Alcatraz, pre-fabricated domes of modular armor, swiveled towards them and opened fire with lasers and missiles. The tiny winglets jittered and dodged as they fell at meteoric speed. Their silvery metallic coating reflected the first few laser bursts away without suffering damage.
“Sorry!” Mez probably meant the apology to the early morning tourists she had just buffeted off the side of the pier, but there was no way they could possibly hear it. Keryapt passed the same position a second later as the humans landed in the water.
Mezerello reached the end of the straight section of Hyde Street Pier and leapt forward with all her might. She had reached 145 meters per second, nearly half the speed of sound. A second after she went airborne, she pulled the sniper rifle from her back. A half second later, Keryapt was in the air behind her. The wind roared past her like a locomotive but she ignored it, focusing on her own offensive task.
All but one of the thirty cannon rounds that Keryapt put into the air over the past six seconds had been aimed at a predetermined set of angles and velocities. The first shots were lofted high in the air, too small for defenders to easily spot and not even headed in their direction. Their trajectories were perfectly aligned with the descending winglets.
As each bullet flew up to one or the other of the winglets, it was caught in the tiny weapon’s gravitic generator field and whipped around and down towards the Tumorish. Not all followed the exact path planned for them but nearly a dozen were redirected towards each emplacement. Rising missiles were hit by the falling cannon rounds, their explosions blocking the defensive lasers entirely.
Kery’s combat control system counted the missiles as they flew. After twenty from each emplacement, they stopped. It would take them five seconds to reload. “Gotcha. Mez - you’re on!”
Mezerello opened up. Without any powered control over her flight path, she was forced to adjust her gun’s position slightly after each shot to keep herself facing the correct direction. As Kery had calcul
ated, the wind resistance and recoil from each shot incrementally reduced the young Active’s forward velocity.
Defensive sensors detected Mez’s gunfire even before the first bullets hit their Tumorish targets. The pair of missile batteries identified her as a major threat and turned towards her, ignoring the falling winglets.
They were too slow. Mez hit the water in a massive cloud of spray, skittered across the surface for a split second then disappeared below the surface just as the defender’s laser weapons started firing at her. Their missiles would have been able to follow her underwater, but they had none loaded to fire.
It was almost unfair that Kery knew the defender’s combat protocol and capabilities to such an extent. Just as Mez ceased to be a viable target, the pair of streaking winglets each rammed its target emplacement with a thunderclap, blasting chunks of rock and concrete hundreds of meters in the air and shattering what few windows remained on Alcatraz.
Keryapt hadn’t been able to run as fast or jump as far as Mezerello, but the arc of her leap ended where the younger Active had landed in San Francisco Bay. With the turrets destroyed by Kery and the Tumorish on this side killed by Mez, it was a clear shot to Alcatraz. Keryapt activated her gravitic drives and hauled the other woman out of the water.
Forward became down and they fell towards the island.
#
Meade tended to Connor’s hand in the ER right next to where Park lay unconscious. “Look, son, there are things going on that are clearly beyond me. Jason said those two were ‘Tumorish’ which sounds like a medical term but isn’t one I’ve ever heard before. The police are going to take over this building in the next few minutes.”
Connor started to say something but the doctor tightened the splint around his hand and forced him back to silence. Nearby, Sousa checked on Park, awkwardly clutching the shotgun which Taylor had dropped a minute earlier. The winglet had taken the Tumorish woman’s body to some unknown part of the hospital for fiery disposal.
Meade finished checking his handiwork on Connor and began to gather an armload of bandages and equipment. “I’m not decided yet on whether I want to know any more about who you are. But I know the chance you just took to stop those two maniacs, so I’m going to turn my back on you, get out there and help who I can. If you’re still here when the law comes through, that’s your choice.”
The doctor moved quickly down the hall towards the chaos of the lobby. Connor went to Sousa. Park’s breathing rate and heartbeat seemed slow, but he hoped that was a function of the drugs in her system.
“She seems okay.” He tried to sound quietly reassuring.
Sousa looked over at him. “For now. But what did you do with the phone back there?“
Connor considered lying for a moment, but the mere thought of more deception and uncertainty made him feel deathly tired.
“The thing DeVries mentioned before. Stopgap. It is - or was, rather - a weapon that Kery’s people made in case they couldn’t control what happened here on Earth. I think the Tumorish are the equivalent for the Craven. I would bet that Ormlan has something of his own. But the point is that all of them really only care about their own kind. We’re the only ones who really care about humanity.” He paused for a moment. “When Kery gave me the chance, I did what I could to protect us. I got rid of it.”
“Isn’t she going to be pissed at you?”
“I…maybe. I’m not sure. She’s one of them, for sure, but different as well. But wherever she goes, bad things seem to happen. Here, then Vegas, and now San Francisco. I know that her people are in danger and she needs to get back in touch with them, and Ormlan is the key.”
Sousa’s eyes suddenly widened. “Shit! I just had an idea.” He fumbled his phone from a pocket. Began searching through it for something. “There was a technician from CERN. He somehow got my personal number and called me, directly. To ask a question about their configuration.”
“So?”
“I can call him. Tell him to turn on the news, see what happened here. Tell him that the same thing will happen there unless they turn off the collider. They won’t be able to reach anyone here to double check.”
“Do it!”
#
A bolt of energy impacted where Kery had just been. “Third floor, northwest corner. Heavy beamcaster.” She dove behind a low wall.
Mezerello was somewhere on the second floor of the prison’s central building. “On my way. I wish we had a nerve agent that would only affect them but not humans.”
Kery was the bait on the outside, darting from one covered spot to another to draw enemy fire. She had dropped her empty cannon and was using a pair of human-made assault rifles. “Those are the last two. Once you finish them off then we can get into Ormlan’s bunker without worrying about being attacked from behind.” She used her gravitic system to rip a small tree loose from the hillside behind her and wave it above her hiding spot.
The Tumorish obliged her by burning the distraction to a cinder. A second later there was an explosion from their direction.
“All clear.”
Kery raised her head at Mezerello’s declaration to see her standing in the smoking rubble where the shooter had been. The younger Active had displayed a great affinity for grenade launchers when they first met, and apparently that was her weapon of choice. “Good work. Ormlan - we’ll be right there.”
She rose a few meters and turned towards the ESWAT buildings. The Tumorish attack had been devastating. Half of the hundred meter long Headquarters building lay in ruins, with bodies scattered throughout. The Active’s sixty second long assault had doubled the already copious amount of smoke and dust billowing up from the prison island.
“Coming.” Mezerello leapt in a long flat arc from the top floor of the main prison building. “We should work together more often.”
Kery studied her as she considered her words. From her accelerated perspective it was like watching a balloon float across the sky. She was wondering if it would make sense for Actives to be assigned as pairs when streaks angled up from behind the shattered prison complex, vectoring towards Mezerello.
“Behind you!” Kery fired her rifles as she launched, vainly trying to shoot some of the incoming missiles down. There were more and more coming, a spray too large to come from a man-portable launcher.
Mez turned and saw them, helpless to alter her course. She let go of the grenade launcher and tried curl into a ball. “I’m-“
The missiles were very small and very fast. At least two hit the younger Active or detonated next to her, sending her cartwheeling forward in a cloud of fire. Keryapt raced to catch her as the barrage passed.
As she cleared the corner of the prison building, the source of the attack came into view. It was the damaged third Photuris, apparently not destroyed when it crashed into the Bay a minute earlier. The front of the helicopter-shaped thing was open like the jaws of some giant primordial creature, missile tubes visible inside. Beam weapons on its side pivoted towards her.
She let go of the useless rifles and jerked backwards, gaining the cover of the ruined prison building before it could fire. “Mez? Status?” She wasn’t sure there would be a response.
“Right arm and leg are trashed. What was…wait…”
Keryapt had no time to wait. She crashed through a barred window into the prison, ignoring the transient pain in her shoulder. There were still four winglets playing cat and mouse with the fourth Photuris and she ordered two of them back to her. It would take them fifteen seconds to get here. She searched frantically for a heavy weapon amongst the Tumorish bodies.
“Kery, Ormlan is guiding me to a damaged Deep Thinker over here. It’s pinned under rubble but I might be able to free it. Distract that thing.”
The wall near Keryapt exploded inward. She dropped lower and raced into one of the last undestroyed parts of the prison, trying to figure out exactly where the enemy flyer was. “It’s definitely after me. Hurry.”
The fourth Photuris picked off one of
her rescue winglets as it tried to get to her. Straight line paths were too predictable. She set the remaining would-be rescuer to randomize its path more but that added another few seconds to its travel time.
She hoped that the enemy just outside would get close enough to the building for her to reach it and use her gravitic nodes to rip it apart, but it was keeping its distance and blasting any part of the structure that showed movement. It had been a large building before but now it was getting smaller by the moment.
“Found the Deep Thinker. It lost a leg and an arm, and its torso is damaged but Ormlan says it can still shoot. He will have it-“
“Running out of room to hide here.”
“Okay. Just a few more seconds. Hold on…”
The Craven airship blew apart the last support for the roof. The prison building, which had survived over a hundred years of history, began to collapse on and around her with a thunderous roar. Was there a way to hide in the rubble? There? No - there weren’t enough hiding places and the Photuris would just keep shooting from a safe distance. The Deep Thinker was the best option. She used her gravitic nodes to deflect the falling chunks to either side, creating a tunnel to freedom.
She emerged just ahead of the building’s total collapse. “I need it ready to fire, Mez! Now!”
Her winglet was approaching quickly but had no micromissiles left. She darted into one of the smaller secondary buildings, hoping that the Photuris hadn't tracked her through the smoke and dust.
It rose higher, surveying the wreckage from a few hundred meters away.
“It’s free and ready. It has three plasma cannons working.” Mez gave her exact location. She was two hundred meters north of Keryapt.
“Stay there. Face it southeast. The flyer will be right behind me.” Kery threw a large chunk of masonry through an open window to her south, drawing Photuris rocket fire.
She moved. Damaged walls collapsed, clouds of dust coalesced and strange eddies formed in her gravitic wake as she passed, leaving a dark streak of orbiting debris following her through the lighter clouds. A second later she was out of the buildings, accelerating north towards her would-be rescuers.