Exin Ex Machina

by G. S. Jennsen

  Alerts flared in Nika’s internal OS as electrical pulses flowed over and through her skin and the layers of her disguises were forcibly stripped away. Technologies not available to the rest of them, indeed.

  The woman gasped, for a brief second looking genuinely shocked. “Nika Kirumase?”

  Nika forced herself not to flinch. “You have me at a disadvantage, Advisor…?”

  “You haven’t managed to recover some hidden stash of your memories? Then how in the hells is it that you are again here, in this room, standing in the exact location where I came upon you five years ago?”

  So this was almost certainly Gemina Kail. Rage surged out from her neurotransmitters along the pathways cleared by the adrenaline to flush her skin, and she contemplated flicking the Glaser to full pulse and pressing the trigger right then and there.

  But this woman—her apparent murderer—had answers she still needed. She breathed in through her nose and lifted her shoulders dramatically. “Talent?”

  “Remarkable. You are a persistent bitch, I will give you that much.”

  A squad of drones zoomed through the air to surround her. “Intruder. Disarm and prepare to be taken into custody.”

  The woman held up a hand. “Simmer down, Security. I have a few questions for our intruder before you take her away. Such as—”

  “What’s going on here?” A blond man in tailored but far less ostentatious attire hurried down the server row, trailed by a cadre of dynes. She recognized him from the memory—Justice Advisor Adlai Weiss, and Dashiel’s friend. She expected she was about to find out how good of a friend.

  He stopped and stared at her, shaking his head. “Nika Kirumase. I guess I had to see it to believe it.”

  She was so damn tired of everyone saying that name as if it meant something. “Nika Kirumase is dead.”

  “Not dead enough, apparently,” the woman grumbled. “Advisor Weiss, what a fortunate coincidence that you were in the building. I found her breaking into the data vault while projecting an illegal identity alteration.”

  Nika kept her attention on Weiss. “You authorized my presence and my use of an altered ID.” Not all the altered IDs, but who was counting?

  He shook his head. “I authorized your entry into the building and your audience with the Guides at Dashiel’s side, not your infiltration of a restricted data vault. I’m sorry, Nika, I truly am, but I can’t turn a blind eye to such a flagrant crime.”

  “Then arrest her.” She pointed at the woman. “She’s responsible for psyche-wiping me five years ago.” Probably. The pieces all fit.

  “Is this true, Gemina?”

  And there was confirmation.

  “Everything I did, I did with the Guides approval—no, with their blessing. I’m guilty of no crime.”

  The instant Dashiel stepped into the data vault, he knew things had taken a bad turn. The lights were tuned to full vibrance, with strobe alarms adding color to the lighting. Sounds of movement and muffled voices echoed through the server stacks.

  As he crept toward the voices, each step brought with it mounting dread about what he would find. Theirs had been a foolhardy plan, far too fraught with risk, and they never should have attempted it. He’d leapt blindly at what presented itself as a chance to solve everything in one fell swoop and to not have to give up anything. Stupid!

  And now someone, perhaps everyone, was going to pay the price for his transgression.

  He rounded a corner. Halfway down the long row of hardware stood Gemina Kail, Adlai, a half-dozen security dynes and another half-dozen drones. At the center of the gathering stood Nika, stripped of all disguises to reveal fiery, beautiful defiance in her stance and her eyes. And her weapons.

  He surveyed the scene for another two seconds, then made a decision.

  “So it was you. Color me not surprised.” Dashiel appeared from around the corner to approach their little gathering.

  Relief at seeing him unharmed asserted itself first, but it swiftly gave way to concern at the casual, unoffended tenor of his voice and complete lack of alertness to his posture.

  Gemina arched an eyebrow. “Dashiel. I should have known that where Nika was, you wouldn’t be far behind, lapping at her heels like a loyal canine.”

  “You wound me. Adlai, I must apologize. Nika slipped away just as I entered the Platform d-gate for our audience with the Guides. I couldn’t very well chase after her at that point, but I’m glad you caught her before she could cause too much trouble.”

  Shock punched the air out of Nika’s chest before transforming into disgust, roiling her stomach and sending acid into her throat. “You bastard!”

  “Now, Nika. You didn’t honestly think I was about to run away with you to be a fugitive, scraping out a pitiful existence in the shadows, did you? My life is far too valuable for such nonsense.”

  She was going to be sick. But she couldn’t be, not here. Alone in the enemy’s lair, surrounded by the enemy’s minions, she had to escape and survive. Right now, nothing else mattered.

  She snarled at Dashiel to buy herself time to formulate a strategy. “How much of it was lies? Was anything you told me the truth?”

  He shrugged nonchalantly. “A few things. You are in fact fabulous in bed, my love. However, it is not so rare a skill as to make me give up riches and power to enjoy your regular demonstration of it. I can find it elsewhere.”

  Weiss stared at Dashiel nearly as suspiciously as she did. “So you didn’t know she intended to break into the data vault?”

  “Of course not, though in retrospect I should have suspected it. She was obsessed with her past and what happened to her five years ago. I suppose I allowed myself to be temporarily blinded by her evident…attributes. I hope you’ll forgive me for any trouble my lapse has caused.”

  He was lying to his ‘friend’ to cover his own ass, because he was a skilled actor and nothing more. Her instincts were smarter than her too-emotional consciousness, and she should have listened to them.

  Adlai nodded vaguely. “We’ll get everything sorted. Security, take this woman into custody—full restraints, I’m afraid. Nika, please don’t resist. I don’t want this to be any more difficult than it has to be.”

  She glared at Dashiel as the dynes drew near, her eyes sending virtual waves of malice and a healthy dose of hatred his way. If any regret flickered in his own eyes, she could not see it.

  Her fingertip discreetly nudged the setting on her Glaser to wide-field pulse.

  The instant the first dyne touched her, she activated a stun wave through her skin and into the surrounding air, overloading its circuitry and the circuitry of every other dyne in a two-meter radius and sending the squad jerking to the ground.

  The next second she brought her Glaser up and fired it in an arc to sweep across all those present, perhaps lingering for an extra nanosecond on Dashiel. Electricity crackled through the air as the wide reach of the pulse spread to encompass the hovering drones.

  As they fell like dominoes, Asterion and drone alike, she spun and sprinted for the far glass wall. When she was thirty meters away, she started firing at it.

  Twenty meters. The glass cracked and shattered.

  Ten meters. She readied her wingsuit deployment and primed her calves to leap through the opening—sharp pain lanced through her side as fire from a roving drone found its target. She instinctively grasped for her side as she staggered forward and tumbled out the window in free fall.

  45

  * * *

  Nerve endings flared painfully back to functionality in a series of staccato jolts. The muscles they interwove gradually and more sluggishly began to respond to autonomic instructions.

  Adlai opened his eyes.

  Before taking any other action, he processed what his eyes saw and collated it with what his internal routines and the Justice nex web told him:

  • Dashiel and Gemina also lay on the floor, the slapdash sprawl of their limbs suggesting they, too, had been knocked out by a nasty energy projec
tile.

  • Wind whipped through the data vault, its source a shattered window at the end of the server row. The jagged edges of glass on the left side bore scattershot stains of blood.

  • Because one of the roving security drones reported a successful hit on the intruder just before she exited through the window.

  • No additional disruptions in the building were currently reported.

  Satisfied that he was no longer waking blind, Adlai climbed to his feet and accessed the Patrol department comm system.

  “Security patrols in Sector 1, sweep the area for a female fugitive. Physical appearance is subject to change due to multiple layers of disguises. She’ll have an injury on her left side…” he eyed the broken window “…and may be more seriously injured.

  “The target is armed and should be considered dangerous. Apprehend and pacify, but do not render nonfunctional unless absolutely necessary. I repeat, nonfunctionality is only to be used as a last resort option.”

  Dashiel had now recovered enough to rise to his feet as well, and his friend stood staring at the shattered window, his jaw locked and rigid in profile.

  Adlai approached him. “She wouldn’t have jumped if she wasn’t prepared. I’m sure she wore a wingsuit or something similar.”

  Dashiel’s throat worked for a second. Then he turned and shrugged coldly. “Whatever. She betrayed my trust. Used me for her own ends. She’s obviously not the same woman we knew, so when you catch her, do what you will with her. I do have one favor to ask, though. If she gets sentenced to another R&R, see to it that she’s shipped offworld first. I don’t want her randomly showing up in my life a third time. I’m done.”

  How the hells should he respond? Later—later is how he should respond. Currently, he had a job to do…albeit not one he relished.

  He studied Gemina as she rose to her feet, straightened out her jacket and smoothed down her hair. “Advisor Kail, tell me about what happened five years ago.”

  She tilted her head, and her lips set into a thin line. “No.”

  “No?”

  “By direct order of the Guides, those events are to be kept under the highest confidentiality protections. If you want to challenge the order, be my guest, but that challenge doesn’t begin with me—it begins upstairs and through the d-gate.”

  Adlai sighed. He’d pull up the relevant files as part of his investigation into the data vault infiltration, but if they were redacted they weren’t likely to tell him much beyond what Gemina had already disclosed.

  By the most common interpretation of the Charter, the Guides could not commit a crime. If they agreed by majority vote to take an action, it was inviolate. If they had sealed the files containing the details of Nika’s psyche-wipe, that was the end of it.

  As he listened to the curt updates from the patrols sweeping the sector on the comm channel, though, he couldn’t help but wonder: what had Nika discovered five years ago to warrant both an involuntary R&R and a secret sealing of the incident from even the Guides’ most trusted Advisors?

  It shouldn’t matter to him. Once it was determined that a crime had not been committed, it fell outside his purview and thus outside his concern. But she’d been his friend, too.

  Nika crashed onto a grassy slope way too fast and tumbled wildly forward. Pain shot through her body in jarring spikes. The only thing that kept her from rolling all the way down the hill and careening into the street below was the left branch of her wingsuit tangling in some underbrush and yanking her to a violent stop.

  She tried to rise to her knees—and promptly doubled over in agony, collapsing back to the ground in a heap. Tears stung her eyes to drip-drip-drip onto the ground, and if asked she wouldn’t be able to truthfully say whether they were a result of the wound cutting through her side or the one ripping into her heart. The bitter sting of betrayal would be easier to wrangle into submission if it bled, because then she’d simply patch it up at a repair bench and be done with it.

  But she couldn’t think about that now; instead she had to think about its very real and tangible consequences.

  She pinged Joaquim. Shut down door #3. Right now.

  He must have guessed #3 was the door she’d brought Dashiel through, but in a rare kindness, he didn’t toss it back in her face. Done. You don’t sound good. Do you need help?

  A response formed in her mind, but it ran into trouble making its way to transmission. Was her locator on? She didn’t remember if she’d turned it on before entering Mirai Tower, and now she couldn’t find it beneath an avalanche of internal system warnings and emergency routine activations.

  She gingerly lifted her shirt and peered down at the wound, but in the shadowy darkness all she was able to make out was a mess of sickly slickness and torn flesh. Next she tried to shut off her pain receptors, but her OS refused to comply…something about shutting them off likely resulting in more serious self-inflicted injuries. In other words, if it hurt too much to walk, then she probably shouldn’t walk….

  Nika, answer me.

  Damn did it hurt, though, and she was just lying there—a sweeping light passed a few meters overhead. Security patrol? Great. Just lying there where anyone but mostly security patrols could find her.

  She half-crawled, half-dragged her way over to a nearby tree and pressed her back against it on the opposite side from where the light had originated. Her left leg didn’t want to work, so she grabbed her pants material and towed it into alignment, then let her weight sag against the tree trunk.

  Crawling all of two meters had exhausted her. If patrols were sweeping the area, they were certain to catch her, and she was helpless to prevent it from happening.

  It had all gone so horribly wrong. She had a trifling few of her answers now, but they were going to come at the cost of everything….

  Her eyes drifted closed, and no matter how much she fought to keep them open, she failed at that, too. Her OS insisted on stealing energy from healthy systems to funnel into injured ones, and her overrides kept being overridden.

  But she’d rather her body expire and escape detection than survive and be captured. At least if it escaped immediate notice, eventually it might be found by someone from NOIR, or some other altruistic wanderer, and she could perhaps be revived.

  But the park…the tree…was too close to Mirai Tower. The patrols would definitely find her first, which meant she needed to get farther away.

  She planted her hands on the ground and pulled herself forward. One hand…drag…then another…the cool grass met her cheek as blackness consumed her.

  46

  * * *

  Joaquim sprinted down the stairs while fastening a loaded weapons belt around his waist. Rather than search for everyone individually, he simply raised his voice over the din of the half-repaired Floor.

  “Ryan, grab every security-suppressing tool you have and all your combat-rated pets. Ava, we need heavy weapons. Enlist two of your best people to use them. Maggie, you’re in charge of….” He squeezed his eyes into a pained grimace. But he’d slipped up for good reason. In Maggie’s absence, who did he have left with the right combat skill set, never mind the right experience? “I’m sorry. Dominic, can you provide wide-field camouflage for us?”

  Dominic nodded, though his eyes were a bit wide. “Yes, sir.”

  “Thank you. We’ll be outdoors in heavily trafficked areas, so throw together whatever you require to give us some cover. Perrin, where are you?”

  All chatter on The Floor had quieted by his third or fourth word. Perrin scrambled to her feet near the back, where she’d been sitting with a couple of relative newcomers. “I’m here. What’s wrong?”

  He grabbed his tactical jacket off a hook in the equipment storage area. “Nika’s in trouble. Perrin, we need a fully loaded field repair kit. I’d ask each of you if you’re up to this, but I’m afraid we don’t have the luxury of waiting until our wounds are healed if we want to save her. Everyone suit up. We’re moving in two minutes.”

  Nik
a’s locator put her three blocks from Mirai Tower. A not-so-small lucky break that she had activated it, since she’d declined to tell him where she was heading, what her plans were once she got there or where she’d ended up when she briefly contacted him before going unresponsive.

  But Mirai Tower? Godsdamn, she was nuts.

  The locator also hadn’t budged since she’d pinged him. On the positive side, it meant she likely hadn’t been captured yet…unless her body had fallen so completely nonfunctional that Justice wasn’t in a hurry to move her. A slightly more favorable scenario was that she was surrounded and had security patrols closing in, because his teams could take care of security patrols. Still, even if they found themselves facing the latter situation, things were going to get messy.

  Ryan: “I’m picking up three patrol squads in the sixteen-block region ahead. One is moving diagonally away from Nika’s position—it looks as if they bypassed her location without discovering her. One is circling around on the periphery of the small park she’s in, and the third is heading straight for her from the northwest.”

  Joaquim: “Let’s give the first squad a wide berth and let them go on their way. Ava, take your team and flank the second squad. Remove them from the equation so we don’t get blindsided. Oh, and Ava? You have my permission to shoot everything.”

  Ava: “Roger. Moving to fuck up some shit. You know, for Maggie.”

  Joaquim: “Everyone else, follow my lead and advance on the third squad. We’re going to neutralize them before they reach her.”

  They moved as swiftly as stealth allowed, which was made more difficult by the reality that they were moving through the busiest area of downtown.

  Mirai’s citizens filled the streets, engaging in the evening’s many pleasures downtown offered. Even a glimpse of someone in combat gear would be apt to send a pedestrian into a screeching panic, and shortly thereafter there would be a lot more than three patrol squads on the streets. This was why he’d brought the smallest team he could justify, trusting their tools and skills to win out over numbers and firepower.