Rescue (an Ell Donsaii story #11)

by Laurence Dahners

  Whoever it was didn’t say anything, but he didn’t hear them close the door either. That was definitely against protocol. He turned and padded back down the stairs to give them hell.

  The door was shut and no one was there. But I heard it open! Cable leaned down to look farther down the hall than the door.

  A woman stood on tiptoes in the hall, holding something against the wall to Stockton’s room! Cable could see the door to the utility room standing open. The woman looked like she had some kind of plastic bag over her head. Cable took all this in as he was scrabbling to pull his 9mm out of its holster.

  He swung it up and began pulling the trigger.

  ___

  Focused on the images of the President and her two guards in her HUD, Ell didn’t notice the guard coming down the stairs in his stocking feet. Her first indication was the stinging punch of a 9mm slug flattening itself against the armor over her left thigh. Starting to drop into her zone she lowered herself and turned towards the man as another bullet struck her left lower abdomen. Her left hand rose, seemingly slowly as her pulse thundered then slowed in the zone. Her index finger pointed and a Taser dart appeared in the air in front of her, flying towards the man as his 9mm barked again. This bullet struck her on the chest. Each of the bullets felt somewhat like someone smacked her with a ping pong paddle. The armor stopped the bullets, but did it by spreading their considerable energy out over a wider area.

  The man spasmed and fell. Ell’s right hand pointed at him and shot eight milligrams of midazolam into his thigh while horror bloomed in her. Those three gunshots would bring everyone in the house down on her. Even worse, the men in the room with the President might injure her.

  Ell told Allan to send the message she’d composed to the FBI as she turned to the wall, pulled the big tunneling singleport out of her jacket and pointed it at the wall.

  ___

  Cable felt proud of his reactions as his 9mm rose and barked its first death message at the intruder in their sanctuary. He saw the impact of it striking her leg, though something about it looked funny. Crossbow was going to be proud when he saw how immediately Cable had reacted. Crossbow had talked to them about reacting immediately. Not doing stupid things like saying, “Halt!”

  The woman started to turn as Cable’s gun fired again. Hey, she’s quick, he thought as she spun. Again Cable saw an impact like something had hit her. Nonetheless, she pointed a finger at him.

  Though he was astonished to see that she was still moving after he’d shot her twice, his gun barked one more time.

  Then his muscles spasmed.

  He started to fall forward. His face was going to smash into the floor! Shit! he thought, as his cheekbone shattered on the tile floor.

  As Cable twitched on the floor, his head lay at an angle that let him see the woman, still on her feet, turn to the wall again. She didn’t seem hurt. Did I completely miss at a ten foot range?!

  ___

  Art stood up to walk around and fend off his drowsy nodding. Stockton lay cuffed in her chair, asleep. Redman glanced at Art and then looked back down at his screen.

  Suddenly the distinctive bark of one of the SCDF’s Glocks sounded from out in the hall. It fired three times, then it stopped, Seconds later they faintly heard the thud of a body hitting the floor.

  Art found his own Glock in his hand. He glanced over and saw Redman, his own 9mm in hand, stepping toward two AK-47s that leaned against the wall by the door.

  With a “whoosh” an eight inch diameter circle of the wall disappeared. The hole moved around, enlarging itself. Redman reached the AK-47s, picked one up and tossed it to Art, then Redman suddenly appeared to get stiff and he fell twitching out full length onto the carpet. Art dropped the muzzle of the AK toward the hole and his thumb reached up to pull the safety lever down.

  Then something hit Art in the chest and his own muscles locked up. He began to fall off to his right. What the hell just happened here?!

  ___

  Stockton jerked awake at the sound of the gunshots. She blinked repeatedly, trying to clear eyes that were dry and cruddy with sleep. She couldn’t rub them because her hands were cuffed to the arms of the chair. She saw her guards up, moving around, guns in their hands. With a bizarrely quiet whooshing noise a big hole appeared in the wall.

  First one, then the other of her two guards fell quivering to the floor as if someone had electrocuted them. She could hear shouts from upstairs as if a lot more men were responding to whatever had happened.

  The hole in the wall got bigger and someone wearing a semitransparent bubble helmet climbed through it.

  Moving faster than Stockton could believe!

  It looked like a girl! She didn’t even have a weapon!

  What the hell?!

  ___

  Ell could hear the shouts of the men upstairs. They’d been awakened by the gunshots and were preparing to do something about it, though she couldn’t know what they might do. Reaching into the big pocket of her jacket she pulled out one of the deflated 2.5 meter graphene balloons. She tossed it up onto the stairs so that it landed on the sixth step then told Allan to emergency inflate it.

  As the balloon rapidly swelled to fill the stairwell, Ell pulled out the big tunneler and opened a bigger hole in the wall next to her. As she stepped through she pointed her right finger at each of the guards, giving them the big 8mg dose of midazolam to keep them down, though she expected that she might need to Taser them again before the midazolam kicked in.

  Turning to the President, she had Allan set the single ended ports in her right index finger to cutting mode and quickly cut through the steel handcuffs on Stockton’s wrists. She leaned down, cutting the ankle cuffs. As the cuffs fell away she gripped Stockton’s wrist preparatory to helping her stand.

  In a dismayed tone Stockton said, “Don’t try to get me out of the chair! There’s a bomb underneath it. It’s set to go off if my weight comes off without a code keyed in!” Stockton pointed to a digital keypad, set at an angle where she wouldn’t have been able to see the key being entered.

  Ell’s eyes narrowed as she looked at the pad. She also took in the heavy stainless steel collar around the President’s neck. She could hear a lot of shouting from the general direction of the stairwell outside, then a couple of gunshots followed by an agonized sounding scream. She crouched to look under Stockton’s recliner, thinking, Sounds like one of them ricochet shot himself, or a friend, trying to break the graphene balloon, but that balloon isn’t going to hold them forever. Pretty soon they should realize they can go through the sheet rock walls and around the balloon. If nothing else they could get in the same way I did if they think to go outside.

  As Ell looked under the chair she saw that indeed there was a block of something, presumably of some kind of explosive, strapped to the underside of the chair. A lot of wiring under the chair extended to what might be sensors. Ell wouldn’t have wanted to trust anyone’s life to such a hodgepodge of sloppy wiring. She wondered how they had ensured that the sensors wouldn’t go off if Stockton simply shifted her weight. Or whether this bomb actually worked? Could it just be a dummy meant to slow down any rescuers?

  Ell had been hearing some hard thumping from down the hall toward the stairs. She feared it represented someone trying to kick through the wall just above the graphene balloon in the stairwell. Then feet pounded into the kitchen above Stockton and Ell’s head. A gunshot rang out above them. This one sounded like one of the AK-47s. Worse it sounded like they’d shot it into the floor!

  Ell stood, grabbed the back of Stockton’s recliner and dragged her toward the door in the corner of the room that she hoped connected to the next room. Sure enough, moments later the sound of an AK on full automatic opened up in the kitchen above. Right after that, rounds started punching through the ceiling, spraying out around the room, fortunately falling just short of Stockton’s new location.

  In the zone, her distended time sense let Ell count each of the twenty two rounds in the thir
ty round magazine that managed to punch through both the floor and the ceiling to enter the room with them.

  Ell tried the door.

  It was locked.

  She cut through the latch using her right finger’s single ended port.

  Before she could pull the President into the next room, she heard an AK begin firing into the floor almost right above the President.

  Then the first of two bullets punched through, narrowly missing Stockton’s leg.

  By the time those bullets penetrated, Ell had already pointed her right index finger up into that area while giving staccato commands to Allan.

  As the rounds started coming through, she had begun waving the finger around—feeling both horror and resolve.

  ___

  In the kitchen above, a four foot long, three millimeter wide line of cutting ports appeared over the floor. The first thing it cut was a longitudinal oblique slice through the proximal barrel of the AK-47 that Ell had been aiming to disable. The next round the AK fired tumbled out of the oblique opening in the now one inch long barrel, departing at an angle displaced by the portion of the barrel that extended along just one side of its path. Then the cutting ports passed through the forearm holding the gun and the finger relaxed off the trigger. Next it cut through the ankle and head of the man.

  Then through the body of the man next to him.

  Then the thigh of the next man.

  The three men fell to the floor, blood pouring from their horrific wounds.

  The other four SCDF members in the kitchen took in the ghostly dismembering of the men next to them with wide eyes.

  As a man, they turned and bolted, one of them bellowing his fear.

  ___

  Ell pulled out her one way “observer” port. She aimed it in the direction of the stairwell where the SCDF were trying to get past the graphene balloon. Allan adjusted the distance using the dimensions from the floor plan he’d downloaded off the net. She aimed it high in the direction where she thought the stairwell would be and had Allan point the opening downward. When it opened she saw that it was inside a wall. She adjusted the direction slightly and when it next opened, she saw a group of men gathered in the stairwell. They were all around one who appeared to be kicking his way through the wall. A command to Allan had Ell’s waldo back in the hideaway tunnel pouring the “sand” Ell had received from Gary and Viveka through the observer port. At another command the observer lens was put back through the port and Ell could see several men looking up, shading their eyes and apparently cursing as the sand fell on them. Another command inflated the small graphene balloons.

  ___

  Salem poked at the translucent balloon blocking the stairs to the basement while he waited for Pickaxe to finish kicking his way through the drywall of the stairway just above the balloon. It looked like some kind of funny plastic but felt hard as steel. It had resisted knives and, as Pepper had found out, trying to shoot a hole in it had turned out to be a terrible mistake. He wondered if they’d be able to get Pepper to a hospital in time to save his life. Being shot in the gut was supposed to be bad, but Salem had no idea how fast it would kill you.

  Suddenly sand started pouring down on them. Squinting upward, it looked to Salem as if the sand was just appearing out of thin air. He assumed that it must actually be coming out of a hole in the ceiling, though he had no idea why there would be sand in the attic. The men around him were bitching, so Salem barked, “It’s just sand! Ignore it!”

  A moment later something made the sand granules swell to become something a little bit bigger than BBs. Thousands and thousands of them. At first he didn’t think it was a problem, but then the little balls started getting under people’s feet, making them slip and fall down. It looked like a goddamned slapstick movie! “Don’t move your feet! If you have to move ‘em, slide ‘em so these damn little beads don’t get under them.”

  Pickaxe cursed as he slid back on the tiny ball bearings that seemed to be covering everything. Each time he kicked at the wall he skidded away from it. But then several of the guys knelt beside him, bracing him so that he could keep kicking. A minute or so later he said, “I’ve got a pretty big hole. I’m climbing through.” He turned onto his stomach and pushed himself through the opening feet first, grabbing his AK-47 off the floor and pulling it through with him. He turned somewhat sideways to get his chest through between the studs. Breaking free, he dropped to the floor in the room beside the stairwell and turned, moving off to Salem’s right.

  Salem turned to the group of men waiting and said, “Go, go, go!”

  One by one they dropped to their knees and shuffled backwards through the hole.

  ___

  Down in the room, Pickaxe saw another one of those funny balloons in the doorway to the next room. Someone was standing behind it, but it didn’t look like one of the SCDF!

  ___

  Ell had spared a moment to look through the observer port again in order to judge the effectiveness of the small graphene “ball bearings.” She could see the men slipping, sliding, and falling down. For a while, the one trying to kick his way through the wall couldn’t brace himself well enough.

  Ell grinned, but before she could congratulate herself on the effectiveness of her little ball bearings, she suddenly realized she could have achieved the same effect, much more cheaply, by pouring oil or some other lubricant through the port. She did grin then. A wry grin, accompanied by a snort of self-derision at the lengths to which she had gone to make them slip and fall down. Keep it simple, stupid, she said to herself.

  Ell turned to look behind herself. Without the sound of the weapons fire above, she suddenly realized that she could hear the thumping of the men kicking through the wall of the stairwell behind her. Looking back she realized with some further embarrassment that the room she’d been about to pull the President into was the one next to the stairwell. As she looked, a large piece of sheetrock burst outward as a boot came through it. More pieces of sheet rock broke open around it as the man enlarged the hole.

  Ell pushed Stockton’s recliner back into the room she’d just pulled her out of. She reached in her pocket and dropped another 2.5 meter balloon into the doorway. It rapidly inflated, blocking off the doorway and cracking the doorframe with its pressure. Through it, she could see a man squirm through the hole in the sheetrock, turned sideways to fit between the studs.

  The man dropped to the floor and Ell reset her fingers to left Taser and right midazolam. For a moment she regretted the seconds it had taken her to reset because she wondered if she could have blocked the hole in the wall with his Tasered body.

  Then Stockton said, “Look out!” and Ell turned.

  ___

  Wide eyed, Stockton had watched the woman in the bubble helmet who’d entered the room. The two men she’d knocked down when she first entered the room lay twitching but still breathing so it looked like the woman must have taken them down with some kind of electrical device like a Taser.

  Stockton felt astonished by the way the woman reached out to Stockton’s hands and ankles, moving like a striking snake. Startled to realize that somehow the woman had cut her cuffs off, Stockton had panicked when it looked like the woman was about to try to pull her out of the chair without disabling the bomb underneath it. The woman moved so quickly that Stockton had barely been able to stop her in time.

  Stockton had barely registered feet pounding into the room above her head when a gunshot rang out and something slapped into the ceiling.

  To her absolute astonishment, the woman immediately towed Stockton’s chair out of the middle of the room. Stockton knew she was heavy and could hardly believe the way this slender woman moved her bulk, somehow both smoothly, yet very rapidly over into the corner. Then a sudden fusillade of gunshots signaled the onslaught of bullets pouring through the ceiling into the area where she’d just been sitting! They were trying to kill her rescuer, but apparently they didn’t care if it killed Stockton as well! Where was this woman’s backup? Was s
he from the FBI? Why had it taken them so goddamn long?

  Then more bullets punched through the ceiling right over her! Only a few, then they stopped with a scream, the woman’s backup must have arrived up there and taken out whoever was shooting at the floor.

  Stockton glanced at her rescuer and saw her drop something on the floor. It blew up into a large gray translucent balloon, filling the doorway to the next room. Through the balloon Stockton saw a man crawling backward through the wall. Damn! We can’t get out that way either, Stockton thought. She looked around the room she was in. One of Stockton’s guards was rising drunkenly from the floor and woozily bringing his pistol to bear. Knowing it was far too late, Stockton bellowed, “Look out!”

  The gun went off. The bullet must have missed because Stockton heard it spang off across the room after ricocheting off of something hard. The woman pointed her hand faster than Stockton could believe and the man went down again spasming. His fellow guard spasmed too. The woman turned to peer again through the door and pointed her fingers at the men in there. The closer one twitched and fell down, just like Stockton’s guards had. How is she Tasering them, or whatever she’s doing, right through that balloon? And just by pointing her fingers at them?!

  The woman crouched down behind Stockton’s chair, out of sight, but Stockton could still see the men dropping out of the hole in the wall in the next room, taking a couple of steps toward them, then spasming and falling.

  She realized that, hard as it seemed to believe, it had only been a couple of minutes since the woman stepped through the wall into her little prison.

  ___

  Dupree felt all his months of careful planning falling apart around him. Neither Brick nor Redman were responding to his calls on their AIs. They’d been down there with Stockton when the shooting started and they had those PGR chips in their headsets that weren’t supposed to be able to be blocked, though they only had PGR Comm’s word for that. He didn’t trust big corporations.