“Good. Sounds like you’re organized. Bernadette has just gone into the Greenford Tower. There is a very expensive clinic called Saffron in there which provides wetwiring and baseline DNA modification among other things. So unless she’s taking the airship flight we think that might be her destination; presumably either to change her identity or to rendezvous with someone who has undergone the treatment.”
“Does she know you’re still following?” Alic asked.
“I don’t think so. We fell back to long-range observation at three o’clock this afternoon. As far as she’s aware she lost us.”
“All right. I’ll call you as soon as we have the Agent.”
“What’s happening?” Marhol asked. Conversation around the bar was drying up fast. People had surprised looks on their faces.
Alic’s e-butler alerted him to a priority news event. He didn’t even have to access it. The barman turned the portal behind the counter to a direct feed from the Alessandra Baron show. Wilson Kime was standing at a podium making a statement to the Pentagon II press corps. “The fleet of Moscow-class starships which were dispatched to attack the wormhole known as Hell’s Gateway have now returned and are in communications range with the Commonwealth. I regret to say that the attack was not successful. Our missiles did not manage to strike their targets. Hell’s Gateway remains intact and fully functional, as do the subsidiary wormholes which link it to the Lost23.”
“Oh, crap,” Marhol grunted.
“The Primes have developed a method of deflecting our Douvoir relativistic missiles while they were still in flight,” Wilson said. “I must emphasize that this setback is by no means critical to our campaign. The navy retains the ability to combat any further aggression by the Primes.”
“Bullshit.”
Alic wished he didn’t share Marhol’s opinion.
“Sir,” Lucius said quietly. “Is that him?”
The Agent walked across the bar as everyone was watching the news. He was wearing a suit of thin leather with a surface that glimmered like crude oil under the soft light of the trees. The girl on his arm was dressed in a small cream outfit with a tasseled hem; she was tall and muscled like a marathon runner.
“Robin,” the Agent said pleasantly, “how nice to see you again.”
Beard looked around from the projected image of the Admiral. His face softened into a forlorn expression. “Sorry,” was all he said.
The Agent’s mouth tightened with aristocratic disapproval. His force field came on, distorting the dark ripples flowing over his suit fabric. The girl extended both arms as small stubby nozzles slipped out of the flesh on her wrists. Blue and green OCtattoos came alight on her face and neck, sending out thin glowing lines to snake down beneath the dress fabric. She started to rotate slowly, covering all the patrons. The ones closest to her gasped and pressed themselves back in their chairs.
“Move in,” Alic ordered the arrest team. His own force field came on, surrounding him in a nimbus of soft scintillations.
“Do you want us, Chief?” Vic asked.
“Wait.”
The girl swung around fast, both her arms lined up on Alic. The skin on her forearms began to undulate in strange patterns. People sitting at the tables between the two of them jumped hurriedly out of the way, creating a wide empty corridor.
“Stand aside,” Alic murmured to the police officers. In a couple of seconds he was sitting alone at the bar. Admiral Kime carried on speaking behind him, voice muted to a buzzing drone.
“No way out,” Alic told the Agent. “Let’s everybody stay calm. Deactivate your weapons. Your bodyguards can walk. You come with us.”
“Was that supposed to be an incentive?” the Agent asked. He sounded truly intrigued.
“I can cut clean through his protection,” the girl said. “It’s just a government-issue suit, after all, weak as piss.” She smiled, showing a long row of silver-white fangs.
“Sounds reasonable to me,” the Agent said.
Jim Nwan landed on the bar’s wooden floor with a loud thump. He was in full armor, carrying a plasma carbine. Its targeting laser splashed a small red dot on the Agent’s forehead. His urbane smile faded. Two more of the arrest team jumped into the bar from their holding positions out in the jungle. Their weapons were leveled at the girl.
At a table a few meters away from a trembling Beard, three men stood up, cloaked in force fields, and targeted the arrest team with their wetwired weapons. The last two members of the arrest team arrived in the bar. And one more lone drinker swiveled around on his stool to aim at the detectives, who had switched on their force fields. The rest of the bar went completely silent as it was crisscrossed with the slender ruby threads of lasers. People were hunched down in their chairs, terrified expressions on their faces; couples clung to each other.
“I believe this is what they used to call a Mexican standoff,” the Agent said. “Now why don’t we all just walk away, and contemplate what the Admiral has been saying. There are bigger issues to consider right now, are there not?”
“No,” Alic said. He couldn’t stop his muscles from tensing up—he’d never known dread like it; during combat, the terror from being shot at lasted mere seconds at most. This was stretching out and out, and he couldn’t see a way to end it cleanly. The bastard Agent just refused to see reason. All he could think about was how long it had been since he’d backed up his memories in a secure store; if everyone opened fire there was no way his memorycell would survive. Even so, backing down just wasn’t an option.
“Chief, we’ve got the firepower to back you up,” Vic said. “We can be there in a couple of minutes.”
“No. You can’t fire while we’re in Treetops, it’ll be a massacre.”
“Just let us get out to you.”
“Wait!”
The Agent’s smile was constant. “Once weapons this powerful are fired, you can expect an easy eighty percent casualties among the civilians,” he said. “Are you willing to take that responsibility?”
“You can’t leave,” Alic said. “There’s only the cable car, and we control that.”
“For fuck’s sake, buddy,” a man shouted. “Show some sense. You’ll get us all killed.”
“I am,” Alic growled out.
“There are many ways out for me,” the Agent said. “I’m going to start backing away from you now. If you try and stop me, then you will be responsible for the subsequent slaughter. Think on that, government employee.”
For a brief moment Alic considered calling Paula to ask what the hell he should do. No! Not her.
“Chief?” Jim asked. “What do we do?”
“Move and I’ll fire the first shot myself,” Alic said.
“Well now, if I couldn’t see the panic in your eyes, I might just …” The Agent frowned and glanced up.
Alic heard a low roaring sound, which was rapidly increasing in volume. The few sensor inserts he had couldn’t detect the origin. “Jim? Can you see what that is?”
“Three large power sources, directly overhead.”
Alic risked a look up at the phosphorescent ceiling of fluttering leaves. “Helicopters? Vic, is that you?”
“No, Chief,” Vic replied.
“Descending too fast,” Jim said. “Those aren’t helicopters.”
“Vic, get out here,” Alic ordered.
“On our way.”
A plasma bolt slammed down into Treetops, blowing through the fragile canopy of branches and leaves to strike the wooden platform directly between Alic and the Agent. The oak planks detonated instantly, producing a lethal shrapnel cloud of hand-sized splinters. Alic’s force field flared bright purple as the smoldering daggers walloped him, their impact shunting him back into the bar. Flame swirled all around, drawing whorls of black smoke in its wake. The floor lurched down at such an angle he grabbed wildly, managing to hook some fingers around the counter.
Both the arrest team and the Agent’s bodyguard fired back up into the night sky at the intruders. The b
ar’s patrons were screaming, half from shock, half from injury as the scythes of wood stabbed into unprotected flesh. More plasma bolts struck the wooden raft, snapping it into ragged sections. People and furniture were flung about by the blasts. The leaves and branches above began to blaze, sending smoke fountaining down.
Alic saw the Agent on his back as the floor continued to tilt over with a violent creaking, opening a wide gulf between them. Flames licked along the edges. The Agent looked down between his feet, calculating a jump to the dark ground below.
“Don’t even think about it,” Alic shouted. He pointed his ion pistol at the Agent.
The Agent started to laugh. A couple of red lasers played across Alic’s eyes. “Kill him,” the Agent yelled.
Twin plasma shots pummeled Alic’s force field. A storm of seething white and purple vapor clawed at him. Tiny localized overloads allowed hot electron tendrils to gouge at his clothes and skin. The fast stabs of pain were incredible, sending him writhing helplessly. He lost his grip on the counter and wilted onto the dangerously angled floor. Roaring sounds broke out all around him as the arrest team fired back on the bodyguards.
Alic realized he was bent around the base of a bar stool. His retinal inserts filtered the glare away to show the Agent hanging on tightly to his own patch of flooring as he twisted to look above and behind.
Three armor-suited figures ripped through the inferno raging above the wrecked restaurant. They were wearing jetpacks, whose exhaust screeched with the energy of a sonic weapon. One landed on either side of the Agent. Plasma and ion bolts hit them simultaneously, sending out incandescent whip streamers to lash at the smashed tables and chairs. Smoke and jets of flame burst out from the contact points. Several of the flaring whips raked across the Agent’s force field, turning it dense purple. One of the armored figures bent down and slapped a dump-web on the Agent’s back. The Agent tried to push himself off the ground, but an armored boot stomped down on his shoulders, knocking him back down. A dark stain was spreading through his force field as the dump-web expanded.
“Jim, can you stop them?” Alic demanded. His e-butler was printing a list of insert and OCtattoo failures across his virtual vision. It was all in default-mode green text.
“Stop what?”
Alic fired his ion pistol at the armor suit standing above the Agent. It didn’t even strain the force field. “Where are you?”
“On the ground.”
Alic fired again, this time aiming at the wooden floor the suited figure was standing on. The planks smashed apart, and the suit dropped through the hole, arms grabbing at air. “There’s one level with you; take it out,” Alic said. The remaining suit was leveling a grenade launcher at Alic. “Mike, Yan, Nyree, can anyone get a fireline on the suit with the Agent?”
“Got them,” Yan replied.
An explosion sent Alic spinning back up the sloping floor to crack his head against the bottom of the bar counter. The force field only partially absorbed the impact. He choked at the pain. The blazing wreckage of Treetops rotated around him. People were jumping from the remaining sections of floor into the dark space beyond; they were on fire, trailing flames through the night, orange sparks fizzing out behind them. Screams pierced the air, repeatedly overwhelmed by the shot of another rifle, or a plasma grenade detonating. One of the big trees that Treetops was built around was starting to keel over, a ponderous motion that was speeding up.
The Agent’s force field flickered and died. Flames scorched straight through his slick leather suit. He screamed as his skin crisped. The armor-suited figure above him raised one arm. Alic saw a harmonic blade gleam in the garish firelight.
“Yan!” Alic called. “Again.”
The harmonic blade swiped down. A fusillade of plasma bolts hammered the armored figure just as it beheaded the Agent. Alic cried out in horror as the Agent’s head bounced away across the buckled floor planks, blood splattering out of the severed neck, its short hair singed and smoking. He was never going to forget the startled expression locked on the Agent’s face as his head skittered toward the drop.
The armored attacker had been pushed sideways by the carbine shots, losing balance to tumble backward onto the slanting floor. Twisting coils of energy wrapping around the suit grounded out through the fractured oak beams. The miniature lightning blizzard suddenly shifted around to streak upward as the vast weight of the collapsing tree crunched down. Suit, floor, and the Agent’s corpse vanished under a swirling mass of flame that shattered the remainder of the bar. Alic felt the planks finally give way, sending him tumbling through the air, waving his arms and legs frantically. He hit the ground hard, with the force field inflating out around him like a scratchy pillow. It absorbed some of the collision, but he felt several ribs crack. He retched helplessly. The Agent’s head bounced on the damp soil beside him, skin charred and peeling off blackened bone. Even through all the pain and nausea he knew to grab for it. The disgusting thing was nestled in the crook of his arm when an armor suit appeared above him.
“Jim?”
“ ’Fraid not, Chief,” Tarlo’s voice boomed through the bedlam. A plasma carbine was lowered. Its muzzle stopped five centimeters from Alic’s face.
“Fuck you, traitor,” he snarled.
A grenade went off right beside them, flinging both of them through the air amid a cloud of soil and tree fragments. Alic crashed into a tree trunk two meters above the ground and dropped like a stone. His force field was flickering around him on the verge of total breakdown, allowing overheated air to slide excruciatingly over injured flesh; green virtual vision text turned into random horizontal squiggles against the orange inferno. Through a haze of pain he saw the smoking black lump that was the Agent’s head, still rolling along the steaming ground away from him.
Tarlo was walking toward it. Alic tried to get up. His left side was completely numb. “Yan! Jim! Somebody help!”
Tarlo picked up the head. His suit’s jetpack spat out two spears of near-invisible blue flame, and he rose into the glaring conflagration that was consuming the jungle canopy. A cascade of huge blue and white sparks plummeted down in his wake.
“Vic, shoot him, just shoot him out of the sky, don’t let him take it, his memorycell’s in there. Vic, it’s Tarlo. Vic?” His voice fell to a whimper. He rolled onto his back, and pointed his ion pistol into the falling plume of sparks where Tarlo had vanished, ready to blast away. But there was only his empty hand, skin torn and bleeding, two fingers bent back where the knuckles had been broken. “I’ll find you,” he rasped at the swarming flames as the heat beat against him. “I will find you, fucker.”
Mellanie made it up to the Saffron Clinic’s third floor before she noticed something was wrong. The scrutineer programs she’d so carefully infiltrated into the arrays on the two floors below her were no longer responding. In fact, the whole of the net on those two floors was now dark.
She stopped and reviewed the tiny amount of data she could access. So far she’d only infiltrated three arrays on this floor, and her programs weren’t telling her anything. The clinic net certainly hadn’t issued any alarm, which was very strange. Management programs must have noticed the dropout. Not that she could query them.
So far she’d only passed a couple of staff on the evening shift, technicians in deep conversation. They hadn’t paid her any attention. The nurse’s uniform she’d put on was like wearing a stealth suit. There was nobody else in the corridor; she checked along it, uncertain what to do next. One of the rooms she wanted was right at the far end, barely thirty meters away.
Sections of the net on this floor started to drop out. “Damnit,” she hissed. Someone else must be infiltrating the clinic’s electronics, and they were a lot better at it than she was. They were shutting the whole place down one processor at a time.
There was a stairwell three meters behind her. Mellanie gave the Nicholas suite at the far end one last longing glance. She was so near … one of the lawyers was on the other side of the door. But it c
ould well be Alessandra’s newest set of goons creeping up through the clinic. And if they knew she was here, they would have told the lawyers.
Why would anyone working for Alessandra have to creep around? They’re all on the same side.
Mellanie hurried back to the stairwell door. She pushed at the release bar. There was no alarm; all the circuitry around it was dead. It swung open to reveal a vast source of electromagnetic energy in the stairwell. Mellanie let out a shocked gasp as an armor-suited figure pointed a gun at her forehead.
“Do not move,” it said quietly. The voice was male. “Do not shout or attempt to alert anyone that we are here.”
Mellanie manufactured some tears—it wasn’t hard. “Please don’t shoot.” Her legs were shaking. A second armored figure slipped around the first, quickly followed by five more.
If they’re Alessandra’s, she’s really taking no chances.
“Turn around,” the suited man said. “Put your hands behind your back, cross the wrists.”
The armored suits were moving along the corridor. Mellanie had no idea suits that heavy and big could move so quietly. Then a thin plastic cord tightened around her wrists. “Ow!”
“Quiet, or I will use a nervejam.”
She was half sure her inserts could deflect that. But she’d have to activate them—and even if she did get the sequence right, then what? “Sorry,” she whispered.
“In here.” She was pulled into the stairwell.
“Name?”
“Er … Lalage Vere, I’m a nurse in the dermal specialist unit.” She felt something being pressed to her hand.
“The name’s on file, but she doesn’t match the clinic biometric.”
“She wouldn’t,” said a female voice.
Mellanie knew who that belonged to. Even as she let out a long breath of relief she couldn’t help wincing. A hard gauntlet was placed on her shoulder, turning her around. There were about ten more armored people in the stairwell, one of them markedly shorter than the others. “Good evening, Mellanie,” the small suit said.
The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle Page 172