by J. N. Chaney
Raven smiled. “Get up on the roof and take out the cyborgs from above.”
“You got it. I’ll get Tycho geared up. He has a serious interest in killing some cyborgs.”
Bray grimaced. “Really? He doesn’t have our training; he’ll probably just get in the way. No offense, Tycho, you’re a solid guy. If you join the team, I’m sure you’ll be an asset. But… you’re not one of us right now. You ought to be the wheelman.”
“If I thought Tycho would be better as the wheelman, that’s what I’d use him for.” Andrea’s tone was calm, but it did contain a hint of warning. “I need you with Klein, Jonathan. I won’t say it again.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Thomas perked up. “Look, Andrea, I’m not questioning your authority or whatever you call it, but it won’t take you long to gear Tycho up. If you can spare him for a few minutes first, I’ll need some help with the lab. I can’t clean out something that complicated by myself in only a few minutes.”
“You could if you used an incendiary grenade,” Bray pointed out helpfully. Thomas glared at him.
“Alright, Thomas.” Andrea nodded. “You can have Tycho until the lab’s clear; I’ll use the time to wipe the rest of the house. When you’re all done with that, Tycho can come to me to get what he needs.”
She looked at me to make sure I understood. I nodded in response, and she wrapped up the meeting. “Okay, everyone, we don’t have long. You have your tasks, let’s get them done and get into place. This is going to be a workday!”
Thomas stood up and gestured rather imperiously for me to follow him. We went to the trapdoor and he pulled it open, then turned back at the last moment and spoke to me in a lowered voice. “You must never tell anyone what you’re about to see. It’s a matter of Sol Federation security.”
I didn’t know why he felt the need to even say that, considering that the whole existence of Section 9 was top secret on pain of death. If I couldn’t tell anyone about that, how could I tell anyone about his secret laboratory? But when we got downstairs, I was surprised to see what looked like a game on one of the screens. It was a 19x19 grid, with white and block dots scattered here and there.
“Um… Thomas?”
“Yes, yes. It’s a baduk gameboard; I was trying to beat the Harimbo AI. No one’s beaten the damn thing in two hundred years now. It has a weakness, I know it, and I think I’m onto something, but I can’t count on one dataspike to back up anything this important. I need you to back it up to yours before I trash this place.”
“Hold on a minute, Thomas. Are you trying to tell me that in between analyzing those cyborg bodies, looking up all that info about Misha Orlow, analyzing the spectral signature on that android material, and tracking down the routing IDs on Ornstein’s dataspike, you’ve also been playing a game against an AI no one’s beaten in two centuries?”
He shrugged. “It’s a little embarrassing, I know. I’m usually much more productive than that. But it’s a bit… sensitive. I’m not technically supposed to be playing baduk on company time, so I can’t ask any of my coworkers to help me with this. I need a favor here, Tycho.”
“So, you didn’t bring me down here because you need my help with anything.You only brought me down here to do an extra backup of your computer game?”
He looked at me blankly. “Why would I ever need your help with anything?”
I sighed. “Fine, Thomas. But if I’m doing you a favor, I get to name my terms.”
“Name away. This is terribly important to me.”
“No more condescension. I get the same basic respect you show everyone else.”
He had the gall to look hurt. “But Tycho, I assure you, I see everyone other than myself as exactly equal.”
“You see them as exactly…? Never mind. I’ll do the damn backup.”
He grinned, pleased to get exactly what he wanted and to get it so cheaply. When I was done backing his game up, he inserted a key drive into one of the screens and it instantly went haywire, showing a random string of digits. Then it bluescreened. “You can go upstairs now.” He waved me away. “I have no further use for you.”
I went upstairs and tracked Andrea down. She smiled when she saw me. “Are you done backing up his game now? Yes, I know. It pays to give a man like Thomas a little breathing room, but you don’t want him to know how much you’re giving him.”
I laughed. “What a strange little man. But yes, I backed his game to my dataspike. Can he really beat that AI?”
“No one can, it’s just the windmill he likes to tilt at. Come with me to the armory, I think you’re going to like what I have for you to play with.”
I wasn’t thinking of this as any kind of play, but a chance to take a little revenge. A small part of what was owed to me—just the interest, really. “Lead the way.”
She paused and gave me a searching look. “I don’t know what I think about the new Tycho Barrett. I’m glad you’re on our side, but I just don’t know.”
I didn’t understand the point of what she was saying. “Doesn’t really matter anyway, does it?”
She gave me a look like what I said might have hurt her feelings somehow. It surprised me, but at the same time I couldn’t make sense of it. Nothing made much sense to me right then.
She shook her head. “Forget I said anything. Come on.”
When we got to the Armory—a large walk-in closet filled with weapons and ammunition—Vicenzo Veraldi gave me a knowing smile. “This is going to be fun, Tycho.”
Andrea turned to go but couldn’t resist a parting comment. “Tycho’s not in a fun mood. He’s the dark, brooding type now.”
This didn’t seem reasonable, considering everything that had happened in my life in the past 48 hours. Andrea Capanelli was a strange one. She would ask you to talk about your feelings, then throw a Hagakure quote at you, then write you off because you weren’t all better yet. When it came right down to it, I didn’t know whose reactions to the situation were more disturbed, hers or mine.
“Don’t mind her.” Veraldi handed me a shotgun, and I heard Andrea’s footsteps receding. “She doesn’t have a lot of patience for trauma. Her own, or anyone else’s. I mean, she tries to help, but it’s all so you can get back to work as quickly as possible. I’m not saying she doesn’t care, but—”
I took the shotgun. “I’m fine. This can’t really do anything to hurt the Augmen though, can it?”
“Right, you’re fine. Dark and brooding it is, then. To answer your question, you’re making a big assumption here. When most people think of Augmen, they’re thinking augmented human. Right?”
“Right. I mean, that’s what they are, isn’t it?”
“Traditionally, yes. But full-body augmentation leaves a lot of room for variation, and some of those variations are like nothing you’ve ever seen before. I take it the ones who attacked you still looked human?”
I shook my head. “I thought so at first, but not entirely. The guy on the monorail had talons for fingers.”
“Well, that’s not the only thing that’s out there. Not by a long shot. In fact, it’s pretty mild. You should expect to see things that don’t look human at all. I wouldn’t think of them as Augmen exactly. Just cyborgs.”
“There’s a still a human foundation, though… right?”
Veraldi shrugged. “I guess.” He reached into the closet and pulled out a bandolier. It held dozens of shotgun shells. Then he pulled out another one and handed them both to me.
I took them and asked, “What am I, Zapata?” The image of me wearing those bandoliers seemed more comical than intimidating. I felt like a should be wearing a bandana over my face.
“Just put those on, they’re definitely your best bet. White phosphorus, one of the ugliest weapons known to humanity.”
I whistled. The thing about white phosphorus is that you can’t put it out once it ignites—not unless you completely deprive it of any trace of oxygen.
“Now you’re getting it, Tycho. You blast one of t
hose cyborgs with a white phosphorus shotgun shell, it will burn its way right through the fucker’s body. Get the idea?”
I got the idea. It might not be instant, but if anything out there could kill these things, this was probably it.
I put on the bandoliers, crossing them over my torso in the classic X shape. With all these shells, I wouldn’t run out of ammo anytime soon. Still, Veraldi wasn’t satisfied. He handed me a pair of strange-looking gloves. Black leather with studs.
“Electric gloves. If you hit anyone hard with more than two of those studs at the same time, the device will trigger. It’s a hell of a shock, but I doubt it will kill a cyborg. On the other hand…”
As I wrestled the gloves on, he pulled out a massive black Bowie knife in a black leather sheath. “Here’s a back-up weapon. I’m fairly confident that you can kill a cyborg with a knife, as long as you sever the head completely from the body.”
I took the knife, but my skepticism about Veraldi’s approach to arming me had returned. “They didn’t teach us anything about headhunting in the Arbiter Force.”
Channeling Andrew Jones, Veraldi simply replied, “Standards are slipping.”
I strapped the knife on and had to admit to myself that it did make me feel a little more confident. Any cyborg in close range would eat a white phosphorus shotgun blast, and any cyborg within reach would get an electric punch, followed by a messy and amateurish decapitation.
“I’m ready. Where do you want me?”
“Well said, Barrett. Thomas Young will be in the basement; his job is to run our surveillance cameras. That’s our only basis for command and control, so we don’t want anything bursting in there and slaughtering him. Could you take a position down there and just keep him alive if anything gets in?”
It felt a bit more defensive than I would have preferred, but I could see the strategic logic of it. Plus, with access to the camera screens, I’d have a better picture of the whole battle than I could hope to have anywhere else. Either way, something told me I’d do my share of the fighting. “Okay.”
“Thanks, Tycho. Happy hunting.”
I left the room and started straight for the basement, but I ran into Andrea along the way. She stopped in the hallway and put a hand on my arm. “Hey, Tycho… I’m sorry about before. I know you’re going through a lot.”
I was confused at first. It took me a minute to even realize what she was talking about. When I got it, I nodded. “It’s okay, Andrea.”
“The truth is, I’m worried about you. But you have to be able to process this in your own way.”
“Yeah.” In reality I had no notion of even trying to “process” anything. I wanted revenge for Sophie Anderson, and I didn’t much care about anything else.
“Okay, well… I’m glad we’re on the same page, then.” She still looked perturbed, but it seemed like she couldn’t put her finger on the reason. “I’ll go set up the diffraction jammer.”
She held up something in her right hand, a piece of tech I’d never seen before.
“What’s that?” I asked.
She smiled. “This is a neat little piece of tech. A diffraction jammer; works somewhat like going dark but with less hassle. The jammer creates alternating false positives on any nearby thermoptic or backscatter scans. It should be harder for the cyborgs to deal with than a complete blackout. It will basically force them to either chase a bunch of ghosts or disregard their scans and find us the old-fashioned way.”
“That ought to help. I’m heading down to the basement to guard Thomas and the surveillance cameras.”
“Yeah, Veraldi and I discussed that a few minutes ago. I’m cutting the power to everything else, but those cameras are hardwired separately. You should still be able to see.”
“Okay. Good luck, Andrea.”
“Good luck, Tycho.”
I went to the trapdoor and crawled down to the basement, where Thomas was now crouched over a single monitor. Everything else had already been wiped clean; the only thing left was this single monitor. It showed a split-screen image—the driveway out front, the car with Klein in it and Bray attaching a small cannon to the top, the empty living room, and Veraldi skulking around in one of the bedrooms. I wondered where Andrea was, then realized I wouldn’t be able to see her for most of the fight. Wherever she was right now, she’d spend the battle for the house in thermoptic camouflage.
“If you’re going to be in here, I would appreciate it if you didn’t spend the whole time looking over my shoulder,” said Thomas Young.
“Sorry, Thomas. If you want me to guard you effectively, I need a good spot to fight from. And the best spot I can see happens to be right here behind you.”
He scoffed but made no further attempt to argue with me. I closed the trapdoor and went back to my position, with my shotgun cradled in my arms and ready. The power went out, leaving the basement in total darkness except for the blue glow of the monitor. By watching the screen, I’d be able to follow the progress of the whole fight from beginning to end and, more importantly, I’d know when it was time to get ready to fight.
The wait was hard, but we didn’t have long by that point. I got in position, with my shotgun covering the basement steps. I saw a flash on one of the screens and realized it must be one of the perimeter mines exploding in the distance. That meant they were close, though whether the mine had caused them any casualties I had no way of knowing. There was another flash, and then another. Then nothing after that.
The last few minutes passed slowly, marked by nothing other than stillness and the sound of breathing. I tried to think—to remember Sophie and my last conversation with her, to conjure her ghost up out of my memories—but it didn’t seem to work. I couldn’t remember a thing she’d said, a thing we’d ever said to each other.
I put her from my mind, knowing it wouldn’t do me any good to think about her anyway. A car pulled up in the driveway, and a cyborg stepped out. I’d call him an Augman—in fact, I was used to calling all of them Augmen, no matter what Veraldi said—but this one was especially manlike.
It had the same neat beard, the same facial features as the one on the monorail. The only difference was the hands, which didn’t seem to be like talons at all. It checked its weapons, two arm attachments that looked like high-tech nunchaku, then it staggered once as a bullet from Raven’s rifle hit it straight in the forehead. The shot should have killed it, if it was anything that still resembled a human. But it just seemed irritated and reached up as if to pull the bullet out.
The second shot hit it in exactly the same spot as the first one. It took a step back and frowned at no one and nothing. I guess it frowned at the world, this strange place where it kept getting shot in the head. And then the third shot hit it, and this time it gave the world a ferocious grimace. It aimed an arm up at the roof and fired something out of one of its arm attachments—a stream of gunfire, dozens of bullets aimed at nothing in particular.
It was then I realized that the impact of the first shot had damaged its mental functions, and it was no longer able to aim effectively even though two further shots in the exact same spot had yet to kill it. That was probably why it never attempted to take cover, but still the sight of it getting shot again and again was downright eerie. It looked like a man, a man with a shitty little beard. Why didn’t it seem to care about being shot in the forehead until it was too late?
Well, it cared now. It was firing wild, taking off roof shingles and blasting out windows. Raven plugged it yet again. This time it bent over at the waist with the most pathetic expression of confusion and then sat down on the hood of its own vehicle. Raven shot it two more times, and it was only after that final shot that the thing finally died. It toppled off the hood, collapsed into the driveway, and lay completely still.
Thomas messaged us all. Multiple shots required to pierce braincase.
Andrea followed this up with a command. Don’t rely on headshot unless no other choice. Or incapacitate first. Raven, move. Position may be expo
sed.
Two more cars pulled up, and Andrea turned out to be absolutely right. A shape stepped out, and a grenade arced up toward the roof of the Grotto. It went off with a flash but was followed immediately by several others. I couldn’t see what was going on, because one grenade after another was exploding on the rooftop and the flashes were interfering with the surveillance camera. Thomas seemed to be undisturbed as he sent us another message a moment later.
Cyborgs have breached the building. Bray, one on you.
I looked at the screens, and sure enough a cyborg was attempting to breach the garage door to cut off our escape route. As Veraldi had warned, this one was not like the others. It looked immensely muscular, noticeably larger than Bray himself. But that wasn’t all.
As I watched in amazement, the cyborg’s arms split in some way I couldn’t quite see, tearing apart like unfolding tentacles. Two seconds later, the cyborg had four arms where it had previously had only two. With the added purchase this gave him, he was able to get ahold of the garage door in four places and simply rip it from its hinges and toss it aside.
I couldn’t remember ever seeing a display of raw power like that from something that looked even vaguely human, but Bray didn’t waste any time being intimidated. The cannon he’d mounted to the roof of the car blazed into life as soon as the door was tossed aside, and the cyborg staggered backward under the impact of the shots.
It staggered but it didn’t fall. Instead it pressed forward, like a man trying to make headway against a hailstorm. I could see the huge holes the gun was making in the cyborg, but none of them seemed to penetrate far into its body. On the garage camera, I saw Bray’s cannon adjusting upward slightly. He must have decided there was no other choice than to target the head, but the gun just couldn’t aim upward far enough.
The vehicle suddenly lurched forward, smashing directly into the four-armed cyborg. It pushed him forward several feet, and I saw his body stumble backward and fall over on the driveway camera. Bray pulled back a little and then came in again, a process he repeated several times, crushing and mangling the cyborg’s legs. It was a good thing Bray had a hard car, because anything less than that would have crumpled at the repeated impacts with the cyborg’s dense body. At some point in this awful process, a little hole appeared in the middle of the thing’s head and I realized Raven had found a new position to hunt from.