by J. N. Chaney
We were both interrupted at the same time by our dataspikes alerting us to an incoming group call from Andrea.
Raven pulled out a little plastic container and handed it to me. “Bring that with us, it might be important.”
She took the call, and I opened up the small container and scraped the skin and composite fragments into it. I heard Raven saying, “What? Where are you?” Then I clicked the sample container shut, slipped it in my pocket, and joined the call.
The only thing I could hear at first was Andrea breathing. That made me nervous on its own, because anything that could make Andrea Capanelli breathe heavily had to be bad news indeed. Raven looked me in the eyes and put a finger to her lips, telling me to stay silent as long as Andrea did. She must be in danger, or she would never have gone silent right after calling us.
All we could do was sit and wait, but I went to the window in the back to see if there was anything out there that could give me a clue to what was going on. The only thing I could see at first was that the street was empty, but then I figured out why that was bothering me. The polar bear was gone.
Moving a chained-up polar bear is something you just don’t do on a whim, but the people at the Iron Mountain had done it. Not only that, but their security guard seemed to have retreated inside, and their lights were out.
With a sense of approaching doom, I crossed the apartment as quietly as I could and checked the windows in the front. The Mary Rose was just shutting its lights down, and someone was closing the doors. As the lights flicked out, I could see through the windows that none of the chairs were stacked up. This wasn’t closing time; this was something else.
Raven looked at me again and sent a dataspike message. What?
The polar bear’s gone. Lights are out on both sides. Something’s happening.
Be ready to move. Stay away from windows.
We could still hear Andrea breathing over the dataspike, but I couldn’t figure out why she wasn’t just sending us a message. If she was in so much danger that she couldn’t spare any of her attention…
I heard something else. A voice talking in the background, behind Andrea’s breathing. “Get around back but stay out of sight. Don’t alert the target; you know his training.” Wherever she was, she was within a few feet of whoever had just said that.
This was a raid of some kind, but who was carrying it out? Corporate mercenaries, or StateSec maybe? Were they about to bust one of Sif’s organized crime families, or had they figured out we were here somehow, and they were coming to kill us?
Raven motioned for me to draw my weapon, and she did the same even though she was clearly reluctant to use anything other than her familiar rifle.
When the silence broke, it was like a dam bursting. There was a rattle of gunfire, and it sounded like it was happening right next to my head. It even echoed, although I realized a moment later that I was hearing the same sounds twice. Every shot I heard over my dataspike was followed a fraction of a second later by the same sound from outside. Andrea was close, which meant the raid was happening somewhere nearby and she was right in the thick of it. She must have crept up on the attackers with her thermoptic camouflage, then jumped up without warning and opened fire.
Glass exploded all over the floor in the back, and a bullet whined its way through the wall and up into the ceiling. Andrea’s voice came through the dataspike.
“Get out of the building! Get out now!”
We bolted, startled into movement by the urgency in her voice. Windows burst on both sides at once, and I heard the dull clunk of gas grenades as they hit the floor, followed by the hissing sound of the gas dispersing.
I threw the door open, knowing we only had seconds before the gas overpowered us. Whoever this was, they were definitely here for us—or, more likely, for me. They probably wouldn’t know who Raven was, but if they had tracked me down somehow, they’d kill anyone who happened to be with me.
I ran down the staircase, fully expecting to meet a cyborg killer on his way up to finish what they’d started back in the city. I didn’t see anyone on the stairs, but the fish thief was poking his head out when I got down to the hallway below.
“Are they raiding the Iron Mountain?” he asked me, confused.
I hadn’t expected to ever speak with the man, but I gestured with my gun for him to get back in his apartment. “Get down on the floor and stay away from the windows, this is going to get bad!”
“Okay. I already left my IOU by the way.”
I didn’t know who he thought we were, but if we were welcome to go in the landlord’s apartment then we must be someone he could talk to about his rent.
He disappeared behind the door, and Raven and I tore down the hallway. The door opened, and another grenade came sailing in. I fully expected to be ripped to shreds and filled with shards of jagged metal in the next two seconds because we had nowhere to run, but it turned out not to be fragmentation grenade. Instead it was a concussion grenade, a “flash-bang,” intended for stunning a target into terrified submission.
I couldn’t tell why the Augmen were trying to stun me rather than blow me up, but I didn’t have time to think about it. In accordance with my training, I wrapped both arms around my head and pressed them tight against my ears, while turning away from the grenade.
When it went off, the flash of light was so bright that it seared a photographic image of Raven’s face onto the space in front of me, which lingered for several seconds before fading away. At least I knew she had covered her ears, because I could see it in that fading image. The bang was so loud I couldn’t hear anything else for several seconds, which might as well be an eternity when people are shooting at you. I spun around in agony and fell to the floor, stunned into helplessness. Raven did the same.
15
The explosion outside was so powerful it shook the building, and the flash of light under the door frame was so bright it left me blinded again, just as my sight was starting to come back from the flash-bang grenade. I couldn’t recover right away, or even get myself oriented well enough to realize that whatever had caused the explosion had probably saved me from whoever was about to come in the door.
When enough time had passed for my head to clear a little, I dragged myself to my knees and then my feet. I still couldn’t hear properly, but I was able to stagger over to Raven and helped her up.
She shook her head with a violent gesture, like she was trying to shake off the aftereffects of the concussion grenade. Then she sent me a dataspike message. What was that?
I shrugged, knowing that she must not be able to hear any better than I could. We held onto each other’s arms for a minute so we wouldn’t fall over, then limped back to the door. There was no way to know what was on the other side until we opened it, but opening it exposed us to potential attack. The door solved that problem for us by falling off its hinges, sinking slowly, and then clattering to the floor. I had to jump back a little so it wouldn’t land on my toes.
On the street outside, there was a small crater, black around the edges. Raven laughed, and I looked at her and shook my head. She must be losing her mind, to laugh at a smoking crater in the middle of the street. She started to send me a message: It’s Andrea… fuck it, then she leaned in and put her mouth over my ear.
“Andrea had a rocket launcher, she kept it in the car! She must have seen them coming after us and fired the rocket launcher to drive them back!”
“Holy shit!”
From a nearby street, I could hear the sound of a firefight. “Come on, we’ve got to get to her!”
“What?!”
“Come on!”
It isn’t realistic to carry on long conversations via dataspike message, because the subvocalization-to-text software is just too irritating. You either have to subvocalize with the most painstaking care, or words get messed up and sent incorrectly, sometimes in embarrassing ways. However, neither of us could really hear the other yet. There was nothing we could do except yell and keep all com
munication as simple as possible.
I was feeling steady now, so I started toward the sound of gunfire at a swift jog. As we ran down the street, every business we passed was closing its doors. I glanced at the windows as I ran by and saw men and women with guns, peering out with masks over their faces. The clan militias that dominated this city must be in a panic, thinking an all-out clan war was breaking out.
A block or two from Misha Orlow’s place, we ran past City Hall. By far the most impressive structure in Sif, City Hall featured marble pillars along the front and a row of battlements along the top. Behind the battlements, armed men paced along the roof. As we passed their location, a single shot chipped the pavement a few feet away from me.
Raven glanced over her shoulder. “They’re shooting at us!”
They certainly were. It’s a good thing that untrained militiamen are not usually good shots, because neither of us were wearing any kind of armor. They fired down the street at us as we ran by, but only succeeded in breaking out the window of a bakery and putting holes in a few cars. I was glad they didn’t get any closer, because then I would have had to shoot at them too, and I didn’t have any quarrel with Sif’s gangster-politician families.
We only ran a few blocks, but that wasn’t the only time we were shot at before we caught up with Andrea. A group of Polar Bear fighters opened fire on us from behind a dump truck, and a civilian with no obvious clan affiliation took three shots in our general direction from an upstairs window.
My dislike of Sif was growing by the minute, and my reluctance to kill its inhabitants faded every time one of them took a potshot at me. If whatever was going on right now caused a full-scale gang war, a lot of the locals were going to die. On the other hand, it would take most of them a long time to die because they just couldn’t hit anything.
I heard a BOOM and saw a flash of light and knew that Andrea must have fired her rocket launcher somewhere nearby. With her thermoptic camouflage, she could wait in hiding anywhere she wanted and then unleash a powerful rocket, maybe even powerful enough to give the Augmen pause. Whether they were scared or not, they certainly seemed to be retreating in the face of this invisible threat.
“We’re almost there!” I called, and Raven nodded. Just one more corner, and we would join the fight, but with our sidearms it wasn’t at all clear that we could make any difference. I knew for a fact that they wouldn’t hurt the cyborgs, so trying to catch up with Andrea was arguably a suicide mission. On the other hand, we didn’t have anywhere else to go.
I stopped short. “What are we doing?” I yelled. “We can’t fight them with these!”
To my great surprise, Andrea suddenly stepped out of camouflage and tossed something to Raven without warning. Her sniper rifle. Raven caught it in midair and gave a whoop, and Andrea turned to me.
“Turns out we should have gone in heavy. Keep your head down, and we’ll try to get you out of here alive. This is going to be dicey, though.”
She disappeared again, leaving me the only person in this gunfight who couldn’t hurt the enemy at all. Raven’s rifle was not extended yet, so she slung it over her shoulder. “We need to get to cover. You can be my spotter.”
She turned and ran, heading for a nearby building. I was happy to follow, knowing that my weapon was all but useless. As we got to the door, it slammed open and a man with a wild red beard peered out. He was armed with a shotgun and aiming it directly at my face. “This is my hole. Fuck off and find your own!”
I turned out of the line of fire, then yanked on the shotgun barrel so hard that the man stumbled forward. He fell to his knees on the street, and I threw the shotgun down next to him then slipped through the door behind Raven. We closed the door and locked it behind us, leaving him out there to find whatever hiding spot he could.
Raven laughed. “That was kind of rude!”
“If he hadn’t stuck that gun in my face, I wouldn’t have done it. Come on.”
We were in an office building. The fact that Sif had office buildings was a little hard for me to credit, but it wasn’t something I was going to worry about right then. We ran up three stories to the top floor, then pushed our way into a doctor’ office.
“Alright, spot me a target,” she said, unslinging her rifle. I looked out the window, expecting to see one of the Augmen somewhere below me. What I saw instead was an armored Arbiter turning his head from side to side and advancing cautiously down the street. A few feet behind him, a second Arbiter brought up the rear.
“What the fuck?!”
She came up behind me, glanced out at the men below us, and frowned. “Huh. An Arbiter drop team. What are they doing here?”
Andrea appeared, kneeling down to aim her rocket launcher from the end of the block. The Arbiters fired at her but fell back rapidly. Their bullets hit the windows behind her head, showering her with shards of glass. She dropped back into camo without firing her rocket.
“I have to get down there!” I stood up. “There’s some kind of misunderstanding!”
“Good idea. You get them talking and try to do it down there where I can see you.”
“Don’t shoot at anyone, Raven, those are Arbiters!”
“They’re also shooting at Andrea, so if you don’t want me to kill them, you’d better get them to stop. I don’t know what’s going on down there, but if they keep it up much longer, I won’t be able to stop something bad from happening.”
I turned and ran without another word and was back on the street inside of a minute. The Arbiters had retreated, but I could still hear shooting from a block away. Couldn’t Andrea see they were wearing Arbiter uniforms?
There was another flash, and all the windows along the street exploded. More shards of glass fell everywhere, and I covered my head with both arms. I heard the sound of running feet, and Andrea dropped out of camo. “What are you doing out here, Tycho? I’m out of rockets, I can’t hold them back any longer!”
“What are you doing?” I yelled. “Why are you fighting Arbiters?”
“Those are the guys who were coming after you. They shot gas grenades in the window and then a concussion grenade through the front door. They would have charged in to finish you off, but I fired that rocket near them. They had to pull back, but they won’t keep retreating now that I’m empty.”
“They’re the ones who fired the grenades?!”
“Yes, it was them.”
“What a fuck up. They must have been there to arrest Misha Orlow for some reason. Or maybe whoever he was staying with.”
“I don’t know, Tycho, but we need to move!”
From the end of the street, the shapes of two Arbiters could clearly be seen. They approached slowly, unsure whether Andrea was out of rockets or not. When they saw us talking, one of the two men leveled his weapon at us. The other one put a hand on his arm to tell him to wait.
“Tycho Barrett! Tycho Barrett, put your weapons down!”
Now that they saw us, the two men began to approach more rapidly. The one who had leveled his weapon went to the right side of the street, and the one who was talking went to the left.
I still didn’t get it. “Misha Orlow’s dead!” I called. I was making assumptions, taking it for granted that they must have been there to arrest Misha. After all, why would the Arbiters be arresting me?
“Barrett, surrender your weapons and lie down on the ground!”
That was when I first recognized Byron’s voice, although my mind still resisted the idea that he was here for me. He was closing in, as rapid and confident as any Arbiter would be, but I wasn’t scared.
“Byron? What are you doing here, Byron?”
“Tycho, surrender your weapons and lie down on the ground! By order of Commander Urich, under the authorization of Director Singh, I’m here to take you into custody for the murder of Sophie Anderson.”
The murder of Sophie Anderson?
The next few seconds were like a fork in the road, one of those moments where your whole future depends on doi
ng one thing instead of another. In some alternate universe, maybe I fell down on the street and just gave up on everything or stood there with my jaw hanging open stupidly while they came in and cuffed me. In that alternate universe, I’m probably still sitting in a prison cell right now. But that’s not what happened, not in the universe we live in.
Instead, I got mad. Mad on a level I can’t even articulate. I had trusted Byron to check on Sophie for me. I had treated him like Gabriel, someone I could count on to have my back. In my stupidity, in my naivete, it had never even occurred to me that they could have gotten to him too.
But of course they could have. They had corrupted a StateSec officer, why couldn’t they do the same with an Arbiter? Everyone has a price, or so they say. I didn’t know Byron well enough to know his price, but with the resources they had already spent on trying to kill me, it would just be one more budget item.
Byron had betrayed me, using my dataspike contact to track me down. I had walked right into it, endangering not only myself but my new friends in Section 9.
And Sophie was dead.
Was he personally involved in killing her? I had no way of knowing, but it didn’t matter. He was trying to frame me for her murder, and that was more than enough.
Sophie was dead, and her blood was on Byron’s hands.
Grief hadn’t hit yet. Anger was first. Rage. It wasn’t really broken down into discrete parts like that. It was more of a feeling, a sick-to-the-stomach lurching sensation, and then white heat.
As Byron and the other Arbiter came running down the street, I leveled my weapon on them and pulled the trigger until the magazine was empty. I was shouting while I shot at them, something incoherent, and I wasn’t even thinking about the fact that I couldn’t pierce their armor.
They could have killed me right then—another possible alternate-universe outcome—but two things stopped them. One was the fact that they wanted to arrest me and my sidearm was no more dangerous to them then a rioter’s brick would have been. The other was Raven, who took her shot as soon as they came into view beneath the window.