Messiah

by S. Andrew Swann

  Tetsami found the right port on the comm and plugged in a short lime-green cable. Two little lights embedded in the knot of tape shone green up at her. Flynn felt her smile as she took the black cable and attached it to the port on their neck. Flynn felt the click of the connection in the bones of their jaw.

  Flynn braced himself mentally as his view of the world dropped away.

  The two of them shared the same sensory input, so when Tetsami dropped into a software interface, he dropped along with her.

  The world went black and silent, and he knew from experience that it meant that whatever Tetsami had jacked into had no actual interface for someone using it like this. The void only lasted a moment. Tetsami walked across the face of the deep and pulled existence out of nothingness. A blue field, an infinite plain, emerged from the dark, covered by geometric forms in every color that Flynn could imagine. Glowing trails sprouted between the shapes, arcing and looping in a three-dimensional tangle.

  Flynn knew that she was designing a user interface on the fly, and he was somehow seeing the network this comm was connected to.

  Then, he felt Tetsami using their hands, or some analog of their hands, to start picking up the shapes, twisting them, manipulating them, pulling conduits from one and plugging into another. Soon, her individual actions were indistinguishable as shapes and lines sped by too fast for him to absorb. He was left with a staccato sequence of machine-gun impressions.

  Embedded in the abstract movement of shape and line, he caught flashes of the outside world: Kugara firing her massive cannon at the closing gunmen; twenty armed men charging the entrance of the motor pool; people in some sort of control room yelling commands; a warehouse with workers abandoning crates of weapons to run toward the exits; Nickolai standing, fur matted with blood from a shallow wound in his side, holding a gory length of chain, five men face-down on the pavement in front of him.

  Over all of this, his ears remained in the real world, hearing gunshots and sirens.

  Tetsami’s voice came to him, almost too fast to understand, “holyshitgetouttotherealworldnowdamnitnow”

  He felt a mental push and the virtual world tumbled away, and he found himself blinking and looking at the underside of the motor pool’s ceiling. “keepmepluggedingodhelpuskeepmepluggedin”

  He blinked and reached behind his neck, feeling the cable still firmly plugged in. Above him, something blew through the partition wall, sending burning debris raining down on him. He raised his arms to protect his face.

  “damnitsonnymoveyourasshescomingaroundtheaircargrabaweaponnowmoveitnow”

  Flynn sat up and grabbed a large wrench, just as a man with a gun rounded the corner of the aircar. He was lucky because the guy was focused on eye level. He swung the wrench overhand to land in the guy’s crotch. The man doubled over. Before he recovered, Flynn cocked back and brought it down on the guy’s unprotected head.

  Holy . . . did I just kill someone?

  “grab thegungrab thegun”

  Flynn reached and felt a tug on the back of his neck, and he clamped his left hand there to keep the cable in place. He stretched again, and heard the comm unit scraping on the ground.

  “dontunpuguspleasedontunplugus”

  The siren cut out, and somewhere near the front of the motor pool, something mechanical started grinding.

  His fingers brushed the handle of the fallen gun just as someone else stepped through the hole blown in the partition wall. He grabbed the butt and scrambled back around the side of the aircar as a bullet whizzed by, striking sparks and shrapnel off the ferrocrete floor, close enough to draw blood from his cheek.

  Flynn raised the gun as the figure came around the corner.

  They fired almost simultaneously.

  “FLYNN!”

  The gunshots echoed through the suddenly quiet garage, and Flynn’s attacker fell to the ground with a large-caliber hole disfiguring most of his face. Flynn’s wrists ached from the recoil.

  “I’m fine, Gram.”

  He wasn’t. He knew that as soon as he took a breath to speak. Something hard and painful squeezed his gut. He looked down and shook his head. “We’ll be fine, Gram,” he lied. “Keep up what you’re doing.”

  His abdomen was scarlet, deepening to black where a crater formed above his left hip. He balled his left hand into a fist and shoved it against the wound.

  “fuckfuckfuckfuck”

  “Get a grip and finish the job,” Flynn whispered. We knew this was a one-way trip anyway.

  Flynn raised his knee so he could brace the gun one-handed, and waited for the next attacker.

  We are so fucked.

  Kugara risked a look out from the cover of a bullet-riddled aircar and saw a group of guards charging the entrance of the motor pool. The brief glimpse she got told her that the new guys were actual security personnel, with body armor and guns with more than seven shots in them.

  At least one of them had a powerful energy weapon, because as soon as she moved back behind the aircar, its paint bubbled and the interior burst into flame.

  She dodged and ran down an aisle of vehicles, away from the burning aircar. Three cars away from the fire, she saw one of the guards ducking around the end of a six-wheeled earthmover. He led with his gun, but the angle wasn’t directly on her, and before he brought it in line, she swung her massive fifty-cal hand cannon down, pistol-whipping the guy’s wrists where there was a gap in his armor. The laser carbine fell from his hands, but the strap was still wrapped around his upper arm.

  She didn’t know what backup he had behind him, so she grabbed the strap with her left hand, pulling him forward to bring his exposed face down on her knee. She leveled her gun across the guy’s back with her right hand as the next guy came around the back of the earthmover.

  She fired the last bullet she had into that guy’s face.

  She backed up, tossing aside the empty weapon as she untangled the laser carbine from guard number one. She had to knee him again, in the side of the temple, to get him to stop fighting her. When the carbine came free, she took it and jumped into the cab of the earthmover. Just as she dove inside, a trio of guards came around to back up their two fallen comrades.

  At least the sirens had stopped.

  She dove out the other side of the earthmover as the guards started peppering the cab with laser and gunfire. She hit the ground on the other side and brought the carbine up while she was still prone. She faced the main door, which was rolling shut with a grinding noise.

  At first she thought they were sealing them in here, but she saw five or six of the guards outside, trying to hold the thing up with their hands. As she watched, two of the men lost their grip and the door slammed to the ground.

  No one was in front of her, so she rolled on her back as she thumbed the controls to max the power and the aperture of her commandeered carbine. She swept the carbine around to cover the aisle behind her just as one of the guards looked around the other end of the earthmover. The man ducked behind the cover before she could draw a bead on him, so instead she focused on a nearby passenger aircar, aiming through the windshield and into the cabin. She held the pulse on for a full second, long enough for the window to turn rainbow colors and warp before the plastic padded interior flashed over, blowing out the half-melted window in a belch of black smoke that would have to do for cover.

  She rolled over, under the next aisle of parked vehicles. She no longer had any idea how many guards she was dealing with, or where they were. She rolled out from under the vehicle and found herself up against the wall of the motor pool.

  She flattened her back against the wall and cast glances up and down the line of vehicles, and the only sign of the home team was the upturned card table by the front door.

  She crouched and ran in the other direction, heading toward the rear where the mechanics shop was, and where Flynn had crashed the contragrav.

  I hope one of him knew what he was doing.

  She heard more gunshots as she ran, none anywhe
re near her. Above her, the ceiling had nearly disappeared behind toxic black smoke. Whatever fire-control measures the building had were unresponsive, even with two vehicle fires going.

  Was he able to disable that? Along with the door and the alarm?

  She reached the partition wall and looked down along it. The half on the other side of the garage had been severely damaged, first by the contragrav van blowing through part of it, then by several hits by energy weapons more potent than the carbine she held.

  A gunshot came from that end of the garage, from behind the van and a couple of disabled aircars. She could barely see past the wreckage of the wall.

  In response, she saw a white flash from a focused plasma weapon. Unlike most lasers, this was very visible and left an afterimage on her retinas. The burst tore through another chunk of the partition wall and washed against the van and the nearer of the two aircars. Both burst into flame.

  If Flynn was still back there, another shot like that would probably take out whatever cover he was using. She needed to neutralize the guy with the plasma weapon. She needed the high ground.

  She leaped up on the back of a small flatbed truck, then, from there, climbed up on the cab. A quick survey showed her nothing, so she jumped the two meters from the top of the cab to the undamaged part of the partition wall. Her wounded foot objected, and she almost fell off, but she steadied herself. In a balanced crouch on top of the wall, she swung the carbine around. The plasma guy obligingly revealed himself by firing at the truck she had just vacated.

  She blinked the afterimage from her eyes, and fired a swath down on his position, pulsing the beam until, almost by luck, it clipped his weapons containment cell in the midst of charging. The plasma sniper disappeared in a flash of blinding white fire that consumed the five vehicles nearest him.

  She looked around the motor pool, and it seemed now that half the building was on fire. Columns of black smoke billowed to the ceiling, and the shroud covering the ceiling had descended to just above her head.

  She didn’t see any hostile movement.

  She jumped down from the wall and limped around to the other side of the garage, past the burning van and air-car. She stepped over four guards to get to Flynn. “Are you all right?”

  He groaned, and his leg slid down, revealing the wound in his gut.

  Oh, shit.

  “Found our subway,” he muttered.

  “Got to get you out of here,” she said, setting down the carbine.

  Flynn waved his hand and said, weakly, “No.”

  “What? You’re shot.”

  “Gram’s working,” he slurred.

  Kugara only then noticed the cable leading from a small comm unit to the back of Flynn’s skull. “Jack out, then. There’re still who knows how many armed assholes crawling around here. It’s not—”

  “Four.”

  “What?”

  “Four left, and they’re headed out the fire exits.”

  “And the place is burning dow—” Kugara was interrupted by the sprinklers coming on full blast everywhere but their little corner of the garage.

  “Get the others,” Flynn said. “Gram’s getting you out of here.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Underworld

  “Live each day as your last, remembering that it might not be.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “None meet life honestly, and few heroically.”

  —CLARENCE S. DARROW

  (1857-1938)

  Date: 2526.8.10 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725

  Nickolai operated on the assumption that the rest of his party was in the direction of the most chaos. Ever since the sirens began sounding, he’d headed toward the sound of gunfire. While he tried to keep to cover, twenty people had attempted to get between him and his objective. Only one had managed to do more than slow down his progress. The man had stabbed him in the side while he’d been concentrating on two others armed with guns.

  The sirens had since ended, and he barely thought about the shallow wound across the left side of his rib cage. His chain, now tacky with blood and hair, was wrapped diagonally across his chest, providing impromptu storage for five pistols he had liberated. A sixth and a seventh, a gamma laser and a slugthrower, he carried in his hands.

  The last three people he had come across had taken one look at him, seen his snarl, and had run the other way.

  He should be making his own way to the subway. Their mission was to get to the Dolbrian sites in the mountains. But he didn’t know what use he would be alone. It was the scientists who might be able to figure out what the Protean had been directing them toward. He was to get them there, not to go there himself.

  More importantly, he was not going to leave Kugara here with a trio of humans who were useless in a fight.

  He stopped across a large courtyard from the obvious site of the gunshots. A massive garage sat off to one side of the compound. A group of twenty or thirty armed men surrounded it, backed up by three armored security vehicles.

  Smoke billowed up from the building’s roof and out a few open windows. Nickolai squeezed the butts of his two undersized weapons until his knuckles cracked.

  If he charged, he could probably kill or disable six of them before he was in hand-to-hand range. Then three more, before someone put a shot through his skull. He might risk charging eight or ten, in a desperate situation. Not thirty.

  Not without a few grenades anyway.

  He was still pondering his options when a four-story-tall rolling crane gantry moved into view. It rolled slowly on two sets of three wide tracks, each one as big as a good-sized van. The crane itself, suspended above everything on its skeletal legs, was lowering a massive claw as it moved.

  The first tracked foot passed Nickolai, giving him cover from the guards surrounding the burning building. He ran forward, shoving the slugthrower into his chain bandolier, and grabbed one of the massive metal treads as it moved up the back of the leading foot, pulling him up on top of the massive track.

  As the tread made its slow progress up and over the rolling track, Nickolai hooked the claws of his feet into a lower tread and sprang up into the superstructure supporting the gantry.

  When he was secure, he swept the gamma laser to cover any guards who might have seen him climb aboard. No one was paying attention to him. They were running away.

  With good reason. The gantry was headed right toward them, and the building they surrounded. The foot below Nickolai pitched up as it rolled over one of the security vehicles, crushing it. The gantry kept moving forward, turning very slowly until another security vehicle was straddled between its two sets of legs. Nickolai watched as the vehicle’s occupants piled out the doors in a panic, just before the massive claw under the gantry went into free fall, slamming the vehicle into the ground.

  Nickolai prepared to jump from his perch before the machine started rolling through the building, but the gantry stopped short of the structure. Whatever was happening, the machine was not out of control. He looked up, but there didn’t seem to be any obvious control cabin—it was probably automated ...

  “Nickolai!”

  He looked down and saw Kugara. He didn’t realize how tense he had been until he saw her, and some deep part of his psyche relaxed its grip. As this point, death didn’t concern him so much as did facing it without her.

  Nickolai jumped to the ground between the gantry’s legs as Kugara emerged from the smoke-filled building. As she approached him, he saw that the scientists followed her. Between them, they carried a pale, wounded Flynn.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Bastard was shot,” Kugara said. “What’s your better hand?”

  “Right—”

  “Grab his right leg, then.”

  She had been leading, carrying both Flynn’s ankles. Nickolai reached down and took Flynn’s leg in his left hand, keeping the gamma laser in his right. “I can carry both,” he said.

  Kugara looked at him, and the
n at Flynn’s foot dwarfed by Nickolai’s grip. “Forgot how big your hands are. Here, don’t drop him, he’s driving.”

  Nickolai took a grip around both Flynn’s ankles, tucking them against his hip. He glanced back and saw the two scientists holding Flynn’s shoulders. Flynn looked unconscious. His torso was stripped naked, and the contents of some first-aid kit had been sprayed on his abdomen, and the spray bandage was already turning rust-colored at the edges.

  He’s driving?

  A black comm unit sat on his chest, one end of a rat’s nest of cables plugged into it. Another cable snaked from the tangle to go around Flynn’s neck.

  She couldn’t mean—

  The gantry started moving.

  “Come on,” Kugara told him, running ahead to the forward moving part of the gantry and unslinging a laser carbine.

  Progress was nerve-rackingly slow, the gantry never moved faster than a walking pace—a walking pace for someone with a stride considerably shorter than Nickolai’s. He felt as if he strode through molasses.

  At least the guards had decided that they had enough. No one came after them while they walked underneath the lumbering gantry.

  After what seemed to be an eternity, the gantry came to a stop and Kugara looked back at him and said, “We’re here.”

  They walked up next to her and saw that the gantry had crunched to a stop about fifteen meters shy of crushing a small outbuilding. The single door on the structure had a sign reading, “Maintenance Access. Authorized Personnel Only.”