Crossover

by Joel Shepherd

  She ran, burning wreckage on the pads beyond these to her right, and more people shooting, then into the building and what would have been the reception foyer in saner circumstances—patterned tile floor and corridors off to the sides. Used the smooth tiles to come to a sliding halt on her rear, back pressed to a side wall. Quick check of the magazine—sixteen rounds left—chack! Levelling that arm back the way she'd come, scanning the corridors around—bang! as a pursuer grenaded his approach for cover, then two figures diving through the smoke ... she dropped them with a rapid volley whilst barely looking their way, which gave her the warning to dive-roll explosively left as someone burst around a left-hand corridor and sprayed that spot with bullets, Sandy already returning fire from a left-handed tile-slide, up and still shooting as the body snapped backwards, and blew his partner three metres down the corridor as the recoil thumped comfortingly through her arm.

  Quickly recovered his weapon, scooping left-handed while emptying the pistol's remaining rounds down the corridor to keep it clear. Saved a last pair for the wounded man at her feet, two shots point-blank to the head, necessary precaution with GIs. Sidestepped the corridor mouth, pumped a grenade from the newly acquired rifle into an adjoining corridor, then another back the way she'd come. Then she ran.

  She was not frightened. She saw no people, only targets. Her world held no straight lines, only the shifting stains of colour and movement, heat and vibration. Everything blended together. Everything made sense. Pieces fit into place, like a giant, moving puzzle. The corridors, landing pads and intervening walls seemed abstract, as if seen from a distance, or in a VR sim. And within it all, she was now confident that she knew what was going on. Someone was trying to kill either her or the President, or both. That narrowed down her options, because she could take care of herself. The President was another matter.

  They hit the convoy during landing with a mobile attack force—the only way it could be done, considering the nature of permanent ground security. How they had got so far, and past the Parliament perimeter systems, was something she did not have time to ponder. Equal forces down on both landing pads, one airborne to provide cover ... ten troops in each flyer besides the crew, that meant forty on the ground.

  She had seen where the convoy cars had landed. Knew how the security would be stationed, and how they would react. And most importantly, she knew how the attack would go, if she had planned it herself. The relevant question was simple: if she was going to screw up her own attack plan, what would she do?

  * * * *

  When the attacking craft had first broken standard flight patterns, Shigeru Mishima had failed to believe what his security posts, defence grids and his own eyes were telling him. This state of disbelief lasted a touch over five seconds. Those five seconds proved fatal.

  Mishima was head of Security detail Alpha. There was no detail more important than Alpha. Alpha meant the President, and Mishima was the best that the Callayan Special Service had to offer. His capacity to handle technical detail down to the last micro-digit on his command override frequencies was nearly inhuman, even for rare augmentations of his type. And his capacity to handle his job, while simultaneously juggling all of these details, had got him his position as the President's senior bodyguard.

  Mishima ran a tight ship. He tolerated no oversight among his juniors, no matter how small. On this particular day, the Parliament Building's aerial defence grids had been functioning perfectly. All transgression coding had been altered and secured according to the random numerical programming that Mishima himself had provided. Emergency interlink channels with all security, administrative and legal units throughout Tanusha, and over all Callay, were fully established and locked out.

  His people were On. They were focused. They had left no procedural, technical or conceivable stone unturned. And so, when his feeler networks had relayed an air-traffic control alert regarding five Andra-model transport flyers suddenly breaking away from established airlanes at a number of random points, Shigeru had made a microsecond judgment of the possible reasons.

  It may have been a hardware-related problem—the model of all five bogies was identical, making a manufacturer-specific cyber-glitch seem entirely possible. And then there were various hitches and cyber-echoes the controller systems had been suffering at the interface levels recently—electronic figments of the system's own imagination emerging from cyberspace as object reality.

  Even when it became plain that they were diving at the Parliament Building in a loose but rapidly assembling formation, Mishima had hesitated. Stickler for detail that he was, he simply could not perceive of the incredible range of factors that would need to have been manipulated in order for this to actually be an attack. Without the knowledge of those factors, he was dealing with an unknown quantity. In order to take effective counter-measures, he had taken the time to assemble those factors in his mind.

  It was a full five seconds later when he realised that not only did he not have that time, he had never had that time to begin with.

  Code Red was issued, effectively activating every security measure in Tanusha, right down to the lowliest police officer on his downtown beat. The President was grabbed, and rushed inside at a sprint. The grounded aircars, Alphas One through Three, began to lift to draw attention and possible fire. Alpha Four had aborted landing, accelerating and evading. Alphas Five and Six changed to intercept. The ground security grid went up, armed and active. It should have meant death to anything airborne and unidentified crossing the perimeter.

  Everything went wrong. The security grids failed to recognise the attacking flyers as Threat ID Positive, and did not fire. The first incoming rounds destroyed Alphas Two and Three on the pads. Alpha One was riddled by door-cannon fire ten metres off the edge of the building, exploding in the utility personnel car park below. Alpha Four was struck by a homing projectile which blew the front end apart and sent it skidding into a tumbling collision with the wreckage of Alpha Three. With no fire support from the grids, Alpha Team's small arms had little effect on the armoured flyers, and the mounted weapons had cut them to pieces. Mishima was inside before that happened, sticking with the President while his men were slaughtered outside, fulfilling their oaths as they'd sworn they would.

  Additional pad security was armed only for escort and watch duty, not for an armoured frontal assault with air support. Two landers grounded on each of the two main pads, disgorging heavily armed and armoured troopers who moved in precise, military patterns. As Mishima ran with the President and her remaining personal guard through the inner corridors, listening to the helpless, panicked shouts and screams of the outgunned, outprepared Parliament internal security staff, he knew very well who was after him. It could only be Dark Star. Only Dark Star could have got this far in the first place. And his estimations of what they might be after altered yet another notch.

  Inside was chaos. Frightened staffers ran every which way, bulldozed and flung aside by the running wedge Alpha team had formed around the President, half carrying her as they rushed down the corridors while the forward and rearguard support yelled at staffers to evacuate to the ground floor. Behind them was shooting, and things exploding. The whole building shook, bits and pieces fell from ceilings, screaming, panicked staff colliding in doorways, blocking the exits.

  Alpha Team found a deserted office three levels down, bundled the President in and began securing their perimeter. Her senior advisor, Aw Sian Thiaw, had been accompanying her in the convoy car—he crouched near the corner in which she sat, hovering protectively, face drawn and frightened.

  "Thiaw," Neiland gasped, watching the frantic activity of Alpha Teamers running out of corridors, weapons ready, covering approach points and shouting in an unintelligible code that sounded like tactical geometry. The hastily fitted vest was very tight, restricting her breathing. "Thiaw," she grabbed his arm hard, "what are we doing here, why don't we go to ground level and get out?"

  "They've got transports, they can cover ground leve
l." Swallowed hard, eyes darting about, a crash of overturning desks and cabinets. "They'll come up and meet us in the middle. We need to buy enough time for Central Security to reach us, or SWAT—they're only down the road." He grabbed her hand, tightly. "Don't worry, we'll nail these fuckers. We just need a few more minutes."

  "Thiaw, for Christ's sake, what about the staff?" Neiland was panicked, red hair sprawled in disarray, eyes wide and wild. "They're heading downstairs, they'll get run over ...!"

  "It'll buy us some time. We just need a few minutes...!"

  "No!!!" Leaping to her feet, starting forward as Thiaw grabbed her, bodily restraining her as she screamed, "No fucking way do we leave them to die!" Fighting him desperately. "Mishima! You fucking get them back here! Don't you fucking dare ..." Umph! Another body hit them, knocked them to the ground, pinning her.

  "Ms President!" the man shouted in her face, pinning her from above. It was Johnson, Mishima's second. "We don't have time for this bullshit! We're going to keep you alive, and that's it! Do you hear me! I'll break your damn legs if I have to, but you're going to do what we say! That's final!" Neiland stared up at him, stunned.

  Johnson pulled himself off her, ripped a pistol from his belt, grabbed Thiaw's hand and stuffed it in. "Last resort," he told him, eyes blazing with controlled fear and adrenalin. "If you use it, make sure it's them you're hitting." Thiaw nodded wordlessly, eyes wide, and Johnson darted off.

  "Oh my God." Neiland was sitting up again, huddled, shaking and terrified, her voice quavering. "This can't be happening, this just can't be happening..."

  Gunfire snarled nearby, answering pops, then an explosion that made everything rattle. More commands from Alpha Team members down the corridor, suited and crouched, guns levelled and searching with muscle-trembling intensity. Mishima was nearby, crouched, talking fast into his throat mike. More gunfire, and screams. Shots intensified, a two-way firefight, rattling explosions and more shooting. Still the screaming.

  Neiland whimpered, still shaking. Five steps up the corridor the ceiling exploded, and everything vanished under flying debris and smoke. Then gunfire exploding all about, shattering the senses. Someone grabbed her arm and hauled, half carrying her through the chaos and screams. Blue lightning ripped through the side wall, turning all to exploding flame.

  Running then through the next doorway, Johnson dragging her like a sack of grain as she tried to find her feet to assist, vaguely aware that people were following, fighting a retreat. Into another, bigger room with scattered desks across an open floor and windows that let in the sunlight, running hard as Johnson dragged her nearly to the far wall, then shouts of warning and throwing her flat and sprawling, bullets striking about with impossible force, splintering desks and kicking over chairs, return fire answering and then it was on, and hell broke loose for the second time.

  Neiland scrambled on hands and knees to the wall beside a filing cabinet and stayed down, Johnson crouched behind a splintered desk and returning fire with the remainder of Alpha Team, a deafening roar of small arms fire. One man fell into a wall painting and collapsed over the pot plant below, leaving a bloody smear down the white wall behind. The glass partition to the adjoining executive office disintegrated beside Neiland's hiding place, the conifer-timber door kicked open by multiple strikes. Johnson lurched backwards in a spray of blood as a terminal screen exploded. Neiland screamed, and lunged forward to where he'd fallen as a grenade went off and blew everything to hell, knocking her flat.

  Johnson was up and shooting again left-handed, right arm dangling as dark shapes leapt through the smoke, guns blazing. An Alpha Team woman made a defiant dive for new cover amid a tracking hail of fire, popped up to return fire and was blown back two metres into a bookshelf that collapsed on her. Another stood his ground, refusing to cover, dropping one attacker and wounding a second before a third blew his guts out. Neiland scrambled backward over shattered glass, into the exposed executive office, watching in a mesmerised, unnatural calm as Johnson covered long enough to reload with his damaged right hand, then up again to keep firing. He was still shooting when the shots found him again, and what remained of his bloody corpse thudded limply to the ground.

  Suddenly silence. Neiland huddled backward, beneath the big desk of the executive office, staring through the wall-to-ceiling frame where the window had once been and across the shattered main office, desks and chairs askew, obscured by drifting smoke. Johnson's body barely three metres away in a thickening pool of blood. Time slowed. Each heartbeat, each passing moment, lingered to eternity.

  A human figure appeared, cradling a heavy rifle. Looked at Johnson. Looked at her. And raised his weapon.

  And vanished as the ceiling exploded for the second time, debris collapsing in a confusion of smoke and dust. Too stunned to cover herself, Neiland stared straight into the confusion, and saw something dark and human-sized fall straight down through the opening. Gunfire roared in rapid, staccato bursts, a fast, dark shape that moved like a ghost in the wind.

  A brief moment of chaos, and the room was suddenly empty. A burst of fire from down a corridor, moving away. And another, and a thud like a body falling.

  Moving suddenly of her own accord, Neiland was scrambling out from under the desk and into the main office, feet crunching over broken glass. Looked wildly about at the destruction, the sprawled, bloody corpses ... saw several new ones with large weapons. One's head was mostly missing. Another had a fist-sized impact hole through the chest.

  Her stomach churned and she was suddenly on her knees, vomiting helplessly. Her head spun. Nothing seemed real. None of this could possibly be happening, and in her mind it refused to register. Another painful, stomach-cramping retch. And gasped, desperate for clean, clear air. A deep breath, gasping, her ears ringing, nausea passed for the moment. Eyes unfocused, seeing only a blur.

  And began to come clear again. On a pair of bare feet and grey track suit leggings. Stared, not having heard the arrival. The owner of the feet crouched alongside, and Neiland looked up, hardly daring to breathe. Untidy blonde hair, burning blue eyes. Cassandra Kresnov. The GI. The one whom all of her closest advisors were telling her to sentence to bureaucratic hell.

  "You okay?" Kresnov asked her. It was unthinkable that anyone should sound so calm in the midst of this nightmare. Everything was insane. She managed a faint nod, unable to speak. "Are you going to be all right here? There are some people I'd like to kill on the lower floors—they were shooting running civilians, last I saw."

  Utterly serious. There was no malice in her voice, only a statement of fact.

  "Be my guest, please," Neiland rasped. "Kill them all."

  The GI nodded. "Thank you, I will."

  More shooting from downstairs, then, before she could get up. An explosion shook the floor. The GI listened, expressionless but for a slightly raised eyebrow, as if hearing something of mild but not enthralling interest.

  "Hmm. Reinforcements just got here. No point now, they'd just shoot me into the bargain. And they'll be down on the roof in another minute."

  "Who will?" The Presidential mind was refusing to function. The Presidential mind was registering a wetness between her thighs, and a warmth that just had to be urine. The Presidential mind didn't care.

  "SWAT, if I recognise the signature. They started taking out the flyers two minutes ago—you were probably too busy to hear. I'll stay here and make sure no stragglers get flushed this way."

  Explaining herself calmly as she knelt in firing position on the floor, covering the ruined, bullet-ripped corridor entrances. Sitting helplessly on her knees, Neiland stared at her. The right forearm and hand, now gripping the trigger handle, were red with blood. Her white T-shirt was torn and bloodstained. And she was utterly, utterly calm.

  Neiland got to her feet, swaying slightly. Staggered through the strewn wreckage to the first of her Alpha Team men, finding him messily, unpleasantly dead.

  "Don't bother," Kresnov said from behind her. "There's no one alive in this r
oom but us. I can tell." Neiland stared down at the dead man. Lim, she remembered his name was. His face was intact, young, Asian and handsome. So young. Oh God. Tears blurred her eyes.

  "I'm sorry," Kresnov added.

  Neiland fell to her knees by the body of the young man named Lim, whose first name she had never learned, never thought worth bothering to learn, although she saw him nearly every day, every time she travelled certainly... She cried without restraint, while the GI who by all rights should want her dead guarded the corridors to her back, and waited for the fighting downstairs to stop and help to arrive. She was still crying when the confused thud of heavy boots sounded in the outside corridors, and Kresnov called out. Laid her weapon down on a desktop in full view, and stood, hands on her head.

  Armed figures burst in, weapons levelled. Took in the scene.

  "Down on the ground!" one of them yelled at Kresnov. "Now!" Kresnov complied, as calmly as before.

  "It's the President!" shouted another one, rushing forward and shouldering his weapon while the others covered him. "We've found her, we've found her!" Crouching alongside, then, in awed concern ... "Ms President, are you hurt?"

  "It's the fucking GI!" another shouted as Kresnov's hands were bound behind her back. Planted a boot on her shoulders, pressing the gun barrel to her head ... "I should blow your fucking brains out right now, you fucking bitch!"

  Neiland staggered to her feet fast, rounding on the troopers who were suddenly gathering around where Kresnov lay face down on the floor, weapons held ready. Too fast. Everything faded, and noises dimmed.

  "Bind her feet man, she's fucking dangerous!"

  "Don't move, bitch!" The thud of a boot landing, hard. And again.