Close Proximity - An Aeon14 Space Opera Adventure (Perilous Alliance)
Page 14
He didn’t reply, and she peered around the edge of the table to see him laying on his side, a hole burned through his chest.
“Well, lucky me,” she muttered and dashed around the table and leaped over the man to jump through the shattered window.
Her legs ached as she landed on the street and her chest heaved as she caught her breath. Pain reminded Kylie that her arms were scratched and bloody. She looked down at what little remained of her dress and thanked what gods were in the stars that she had worn underwear. No need to be flashing her nethers at people as she ran from them.
Nadine’s going to kill me for ruining this dress; she really liked it on me, she thought and then stopped herself. If she ever saw Nadine again.
Kylie forced the thoughts from her mind and looked down the empty street. It was late, and she had gotten past most of the groups that were hunting her, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t run into more.
Going left would link up to a broad boulevard that would take her straight to the north docks—a smaller port than the one near Ventrella District, but closer to her current location. However, that road would put her out in the open. To her right was a warren of streets and smaller commercial buildings, but she didn’t know the best path through them. The last thing she needed was to end up in a dead-end alley with a band of mercs after her.
She could query the city’s nav NSAI, but that would be like sending up a flare announcing where she was. It sure would be handy to have an AI right about then.
Of course, she knew someone with an AI, didn’t she?
Kylie’s eyebrow arched, and she let out an angry breath.
Kylie held a shaky breath.
Well, at least he wasn’t dead yet.
Good news. Kylie let them get back to it, and she dashed across the street to the building on the map. It was a low-rent apartment building, and she jimmied the door open before slipping through the long hall to the back.
She followed Jerrod’s map until she rounded a corner and saw a group of mercs who had set up a roadblock. The street had a long line of groundcars backed up, and the mercs were checking them over before letting them through. A group of pedestrians were also milling about on the sidewalk, waiting for the heavily armed men and women to let them past.
Kylie pulled up the map and looked for an alternate route. There wasn’t a good one. Any way around this stop would put her on busier streets, and if this one was guarded, those would be, as well.
She leaned against a building, considering the rooftops, when she noticed a partially hidden symbol on the building across the street. It was cleverly blended into the sign, but a keen eye could spot it.
It belonged to The Mark—the almost defunct pirate outfit. It wasn’t one of their more commonly used identifiers, but she had seen it on some cargo in one of their ships she had salvaged. Had been a good haul. A lot of fresh fruit and vegetables on it—even though someone had made a mess of the produce in one of the holds before the ship had slowly frozen in the dark.
She walked calmly across the street and checked the building’s entrance for automated weapons. Nothing seemed to be visible—which made sense in what appeared to be a low-key stash house. She passed one of the Mark tokens she had picked up from that ship, hoping it would still work.
It didn’t. She tried a few others she had gotten over the years, and just when she thought that she might have to break in the old-fashioned way, one of the older tokens worked, and the mag-seal on the door unlocked.
“Score,” she whispered to herself. About time something went her way.
The building was a maze of halls and small rooms. Most were filled with junk, but in one she saw the symbol again, hidden above the door frame. Bingo. The room was filled with stacks of chairs and tables, and Kylie moved them aside as carefully as possible.
Behind them was another door. This one was also sealed, and she Linked to its control pad and passed the same token as the front door, praying whoever set up this safe house wasn’t too clever.
For the second time that night, her luck held, and the door swung open, revealing a treasure trove of weapons and armor.
“Finally!” Kylie exclaimed as she stripped out of the remains of her dress, and flipped through the racks of armor, looking for something light-weight, but still able to deal with beams and ballistics.
Most of the armor was heavy and bulky—and made for people a lot larger than her. Then she spotted a Sherman 843A full-body armor set and picked it out. It was better than the others, but she wasn’t a big fan of the Sherman 800 series. The ballistic mesh went over the ablative plates and always bound at the joints.
She decided to take a look through the rest of the crates to see if there was anything else. On the fourth crate, Kylie struck gold. Inside was a Trylodyne IA99 stealth suit and ballistic layer. She bit her lip, hoping it was sized right. The armor was worth half the value of the Dauntless. With it, she could slip right past the mercs guarding the adjacent street.
She shook out the ballistic under-layer and held it up. It was near perfect. Maybe a bit large, but it should snug up once she got it on. Kylie pulled it on and it made a physical connection with the hard Link at the base of her skull, courtesy of the SFF years ago. For the first time, she was glad for it as the armor wouldn’t have worked without a hard Link.
She pulled the hood over her face—grimacing as the rebreather filled her mouth—and the armor snugged up and seal the hood to the full-body suit. Checks scrolled across her HUD and she saw that the suit’s battery only had a half charge. It read good for ten hours, which should be enough to get back to the Dauntless. If it wasn’t, she’d be dead.
It ran through a full diagnostic on itself, and her body, testing her reflexes and providing suggestions for the best augmentations. Kylie accepted the defaults, recognizing that this suit expected the wearer to have an internal AI to manage its complexities.
Still a lot better than her tattered dress.
Once the base layer finished its diagnostics, it indicated that it was ready for the stealth layer. Kylie pulled the slick, oily-feeling layer overtop, and shrugged it into place. It self-sealed and adhered to the under-layer. Kylie held her hands up, now seeing through small optics on the outer-layer’s hood. Her hands glistened in the room’s dim light, and she allowed a small smile as they turned a matte gray, and then disappeared.
This was going to be fun.
The suit wasn’t as good as the ones that SSF black-ops units got, but it could fool optical and IR detection, and provided the scan wasn’t good, it would blend on UV bands as well.
She practiced breathing through the rebreather. Necessary to contain all the heat her body produced—it wouldn’t do hide her body’s heat just to have her breath pointing her out to any IR scans. However, it meant that the largest breath she could take was just a mouthful of air. It made for a lot of short, quick breaths, and she had to keep her breathing to a gentle rhythm and resist the feeling that she was hyperventilating.
As luck would have it, it was another technique the SSF had trained her for.
The armor had two pouches on her thighs that could conceal a pair of pistols, and she selected a pair of high-caliber slug-throwers for close combat. Inside the armor’s case lay three combat knives, and she slipped them into hidden sheaths on the armor. One of the features of the armor was that it moved her ‘outer sensing’ layer from her skin to the steal
th layer’s surface. The armor now felt like her skin, and secreting the blades away gave the uncomfortable sensation of sliding them into her body.
The last item in the case was a Spectre U5RA multi-function rifle. It had light kinetic, laser beam, electron beam, and pulse modes—all capable of firing in stealth. The rifle was also coated with the same material as her outer stealth layer, and when she picked it up, it faded from optical view.
Her HUD updated to show the weapon’s loadout and heat levels. A red line showed when the weapon would be too warm for the stealth systems to mask. Kylie slid the weapon onto a pair of latches on her back and filled every ammo pouch on the armor.
If she hadn’t been running for her life, sick with worry about Nadineand her crew, she would have been giddy with how powerful the armor made her feel.
The thought made her think of what lay ahead. Get past the mercs, get a shuttle up to Laerdo Station, get the Dauntless free, then find Lana and trade her for Nadine…. It was a lot to accomplish.
The thought tightened her chest, and she forced herself to ease her breathing once more—force down all the questions circling in her mind. They were in this mess, and she had to get them out.
She escaped out of the safe house and back onto the street, glad no one was around to see the outer door open and close on its own. She set a new token to the door’s lock. On the off chance, she was ever in Montral again, having her own personal arsenal on hand could come in handy.
She crept down the street, careful not to make any noise. The suit had sound suppressions systems, but they required a wearer to have internal AI to control the remote sound canceling drones. That was something Kylie would just have to do without.
She looked down the street where the mercs had set up their checkpoint to see a Montral police cruiser parked nearby and a cop arguing with a lithe woman who seemed to be in charge of the merc group.
The sounds of their heated discussion reached her suit’s augmented hearing, and she smirked behind the mask.
“Look,” the cop said, his voice rising in anger as he spoke. “I don’t care if Harken put out the mother of all bounties on Captain Rhoads, you can’t just set up your own barricades and checkpoints. That’s our job!”
“Like hell it is,” the woman retorted. “You just want to get the bounty yourself. Any idiot can see that. You want to take us on? Go for it, there’ll just be one more corpse in the gutter come morning.”
“You think I’m here alone?” the cop replied. “Look above you. We have gunships everywhere. I say the word and your barricade turns into a pile of debris decorated with your guts. Now take it down and get out of here.”
The merc leader responded with her own threats of surface to air launchers and Kylie ignored the cop’s response. In five minutes, they’d be claiming to have the might of entire armies at their disposal. The augmented vision Kylie’s suit provided did confirm that the Montral police had a healthy number of gunships in the air, but none were in their immediate vicinity.
Their argument, however, provided a great distraction, and she disappeared into the milling crowd, only getting bumped twice. Luckily, half the pedestrians were drunk, and no one took much notice of being jostled or brushed past.
Kylie had just made it past the merc’s barricade when a message flashed on her HUD and fed into her mind over the suit’s hard Link.
Shit! Kylie thought to herself. What happened to the ten-hour charge? She supposed that’s what happened when a suit sat in storage for years.
“Hey! You there, stop!” a heavily armored merc just five meters away yelled.
With the now-pointless rebreather in her mouth, Kylie couldn’t even reply with a snarky quip. Instead, she pulled one of the handguns from her thigh and fired three shots at the man, hitting him once center mass, then in the upper chest, and a final time in the neck.
She hadn’t meant to let the weapon pull up so much as she fired. It had more kick than she’d expected, but the result was hard to argue with. The first two shots didn’t even dent his armor, but the third—by some miracle—found a weak spot in his armor and a spray of blood came out of his neck.
The man fell like a rock, but a dozen of his compatriots were already firing on her as Kylie raced across the street behind the dubious cover of a parked groundcar. She slid the pistol back into its holster and pulled the UR5A rifle off her back and fired several electron-beam shots over the car in the merc’s general vicinity.
She heard cursing as the relativistic electrons hit the barricade with explosive force. She hoped she didn’t hit any of the pedestrians, but then again, they took their lives in their hands being on the streets of Montral this late.
Return fire peppered the car, and Kylie saw a few shots tear clear through the vehicle. In another minute, it wouldn’t offer much cover at all.
The suit powered the active stealth back up, and Kylie wondered if it was in The Mark’s hands because it was faulty surplus. She didn’t give it any further thought and made a break for it as soon as there was a break in the merc’s weapon fire.
The armor’s stealth held until she got a hundred meters down the street and around a corner, then it failed again. Kylie didn’t look back to see if the enemy was fanning out in search of her, and took off at a brisk run, the armor’s muscle augments still operating at full power.
At her current pace—provided she didn’t run into any more snags—it was still twenty minutes to the north docks. She had wasted almost thirty minutes getting the armor and getting past that barricade. She wanted to ask Rogers how things were going with the Dauntless, but he hadn’t sent her any distress signals and hadn’t confirmed that he had secured it, either—which meant he was busy and didn’t need a distraction.
She began to jog along the streets, the armor’s exo-muscles giving her extra bounce and speed. Her HUD showed twenty minutes to the north docks. Then she just had to figure out how to slip past the security there and steal a ship.
And not get shot out of the sky on her way to the Dauntless.
VENTRELLA
STELLAR DATE: 08.37.8947 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: City of Montral, Jericho
REGION: Gedri System, Silstrand Alliance
Grayson looked back down the alley, checking to see if their latest pursuers were still closing. With the bounty on their heads, the entire district would be out for them. He wasn’t sure how Rogers and Winter thought they’d make it to the docks on foot.
As if on cue, a groundcar pulled up to the head of the alley, and Betty—the waitress from the restaurant—peered out the window. “You guys want a lift, or what?” she asked with her plastic-looking smile.
“Right on time, Betty,” Rogers said with a grin as he ran around the car and jumped into the passenger seat. “Not only do you make the meanest bacon, but you also make the meanest getaway driver.”
Grayson and Winter piled into the back, and Betty took off before the doors even closed.
“What are you doing here?” Grayson exclaimed as he fastened his safety belt.
“Saving you boys from certain death,” Betty said with a laugh.
“Yeah, I get that,” Grayson grunted as Betty whipped around a corner and he slammed into the inside of the car. “But why?”
“’Cause I don’t want to see you get curb-stomped into Ventrella’s landscape, sweetcheeks,” Betty said in her trilling voice. “Plus, Rogers told me where to meet you back at the restaurant.”
Grayson cast Rogers a searching look. “You did? I didn’t see it.”
“I have Link, too, soldier boy,” Rogers said and grimaced as Betty careened around another corner. “I knew we couldn’t get out on foot. It would take all day.”
“You offer this sort of service for all your customers?” Grayson asked.
Betty laughed, perhaps the first real laugh he had heard from her lips. “Hardly
, dear. I owe Rogers here for a thing awhile back.” He saw her expression grow hard, and she glanced back at him. “He and Winter get a free ride, but now you owe me one, Alliance-man.”
“That obvious?” Grayson asked with a sigh.
“As the nose on your face,” Betty replied. “Mind you, I used to be a sergeant in the SSF, so I know the stick-up-the-ass look of an SA officer any day.”
“What?” Grayson asked. “A sergeant? What outfit?”
“The 43rd None-Ya-Business, sweetie,” Betty laughed.
“Betty runs a merc outfit that operates out of Jericho,” Rogers explained.
Grayson sat back in his seat. A former SA sergeant, and ran a merc outfit? Betty’s sexy outfit and curves had done a number on his powers of observation. Probably the whole point of her get-up.
“So that’s your restaurant, then?” Grayson asked.
“Well, not on the official record,” Betty replied with a laugh. “Oh, checkpoint ahead, someone shoot at the cops, okay?”
Betty aimed for a space between the two parked police cruisers—which was almost wide enough for her car. Grayson leaned out the window and fired over the heads of the police, and at their cars. Even though the cops were all on the take, there was no way he wanted a police killing in a Silstrand system on his record. At the last minute, one of the cruisers lifted into the air, and Betty ducked her car into the new opening. A pair of turrets slid out from the cruiser’s underside and opened fire on them.
“Shit!” Rogers exclaimed. “What did Kylie do? These guys aren’t messing around.”
“Knowing Kylie, something that we’re all going to live to regret,” Winter muttered.
“Die to regret is more like it,” Rogers said in agreement.
Betty swerved down an alley too narrow for the flying cruiser to follow and glanced at her passengers. “Oh, she killed Maverick. Harken’s in charge of his little outfit now. Real shit show. Harken is one hell of a bitch. Mav knew how to run things nice and easy.”
“Killed him?” Grayson exclaimed. “Killed him!”