Unarmed with a ranged weapon, anyway. Backed up by cybernetic nerves and augmented muscles, the laminated bones of her fists and feet made them into pile drivers, especially armored as three of the limbs were. With Muzik to cover her, she sprinted in a curving path even as she took stock of what they faced.
An inoperative BTR-90 armored vehicle provided cover to a couple of soldiers, their weapons spouting muzzle flame as bullets quested for her augmented flesh. Serpentine, she jinked and dodged, then leaped. One armored boot slammed into the enemy’s AK, smashing it to pieces and breaking the bones of the man’s hands and arms that held it. As she scrambled for purchase atop the tank-like vehicle, she reached out and snatched the barrel of the other weapon, twisting it like a plastic hose.
The man made the natural mistake of pulling the trigger, or perhaps her wrenching grab had mashed his finger down on it. The tough Kalashnikov loading and firing mechanism did its job only too well; not one but two rounds smashed into the barrel blockage, and the swelling gas burst the stamped metal apart along its seams, shredding the man’s face with shrapnel.
He would probably live, but unless he got infected with Plague, he wasn’t going to be pretty anymore.
Repeth turned back to see Muzik following at a more deliberate pace, firing his weapon on semi-automatic, single shots. Several more infantry blazed away at her compatriot, slamming full automatic fire into his armor. He staggered but did not fall.
The two cybercommandos’ survivability seemed amazing, but even as she leaped from the top of the BTR, she remembered the North Hollywood shootout of 1997. A standard case study for tactical police, two bank robbers in full body armor using military-style automatic weapons had fought dozens of lightly armed cops for more than twenty minutes, being struck hundreds of times by pistol and shotgun rounds before finally succumbing.
Repeth’s and Muzik’s capabilities were at least two orders of magnitude greater, lacking only firepower. As long as their armor fended off the rifle bullets, the enemy would need heavy machineguns or RPGs to take them down.
Unfortunately, she knew that eventually someone would come up with such weapons.
Accelerating to over fifty kilometers per hour within five strides, she launched herself flat like a linebacker, knocking two soldiers senseless even as her hands closed on one of the weapons. This time she did not twist its barrel, but set it down gently on the asphalt and quickly stripped the fallen men’s ammo-laden belts off. Loading the AK with a fresh thirty-round magazine, she ran back toward Muzik. Once she had him located, she hosed down the source of enemy muzzle flashes with profligate bursts of ammo, driving back the guards.
Handing him one of the ammo-pouch belts, Repeth checked her HUD and followed the flashing pip, trusting Muzik to come along. She could hear his harsh breathing as it triggered the voice-activated comm, telling her that he had been badly injured. Between Eden Plague and nano, he should be doing better. Perhaps his suit’s nutrient pump had been damaged, or maybe a bullet had penetrated his armor and was lodged somewhere in his body, inhibiting the healing.
“Roger, turn on your oxygen,” she instructed him as they jogged down a darkened street. Their pursuers had lost track of them for the moment, but people and vehicles still raced around like a kicked-over anthill and they could be discovered at any moment. Fortunately the nearest emplaced breaching charges were just ahead.
“I might need it to swim down,” he mumbled heavily.
“You have ten minutes internal for that. Use the suit’s O2. You’re fading. Give yourself a stim.”
“Already did,” he responded. “Run out.”
Repeth swore under her breath. If he had exhausted his stims, he must be already juiced to the maximum. Something was seriously wrong, and she had to hope that the oxygen would revive him and help him make it to the sub. Once there, she was fairly certain he’d live.
“Here we are.” She grabbed his arm as he almost lumbered past her. They stood near a blank wall on the side of a street. “Back up.” She wrapped her arms around him, holding him upright as he swayed. “Three, two, one, fire in the hole.” She triggered the charge they had set on the ceiling of the drainage tunnel below.
Gravel and asphalt fountained into the air just as a truck rounded the corner at the end of the block in front of them. The explosion threw a cloud of dust that rolled over the two commandos, and Repeth held on to Muzik’s arm as she strode forward, her sonar showing her where the hole in the ground was.
“Grip the stock of that AK. I’ll lower you down,” she said, and he locked both hands around the weapon’s tough wooden butt. Not caring if she damaged the mechanism this time, she took hold of its barrel and guided her partner until he stepped out into the air above the hole.
He took a little hop and Repeth lowered all two hundred kilos of him down into the darkness. Eventually she lay flat on the street in the midst of the dust cloud as unaimed rounds sparked here and there around her. Her right arm extended downward into the hole as far as she could reach. His weight still dangled, so she told him, “Letting go,” waited one full second, and then released her grip.
She heard a clunk and a grunt from his comm. “Clear,” he said, so she rolled forward into the hole and twisted around, scrabbling against the sides until she found herself feet-first, then jumped.
Five or six meters down she struck concrete slimy with algae and detritus, and fell to her knees. Her own AK seemed undamaged.
“Let’s go, soldier. Home stretch, just a few hundred meters.” She wrapped her arm around his waist and he threw his over her shoulders, and so they shambled. Any minute now the reaction forces would find the hole in the street and follow.
If they were clever, they might race ahead and try to block their outlet. She tried to increase their pace.
Muzik mumbled something, then his legs went out from under him. Barely conscious, it was clear he couldn’t go on under his own power, so she clamped her hand on the top of his back plate between his shoulders and started to drag him. Taking her own advice, she told her suit to feed her pure oxygen and triggered her first stim of the night.
With this blast of artificial energy, she ran down the big pipes, the slime on the rounded bottom an aid this time as she dragged Muzik along like a rag doll. In only a minute or two she approached the large outflow grate.
Dropping her burden, she sidled up to the barrier and looked through its bars, not seeing anything. With time of the essence, she kicked the rusty locking pin, breaking it so the hinged grill swung outward. The motion detectors had undoubtedly told the enemy they were in the tunnels anyway. Triggering the perimeter alarm wouldn’t matter much.
Racing back, she picked Muzik up bodily like a tossed dwarf and charged forward to fling him ten meters out into the water. Unexpectedly, a hail of bullets splattered the lake’s surface before he sank out of sight. Then the fire shifted to the tunnel mouth, tearing chips out of the inner edges of the concrete.
She felt a sting and looked at her left hand, and noticed she’d completely lost her little finger somewhere along the way. If that was the worst of her wounds, she’d feel fortunate. Then she noticed she couldn’t move any of the digits. Something had struck her just right. Perhaps a bullet was lodged in the nerve in her carpal tunnel.
Repeth realized she was drifting a bit mentally, always a danger with the stims when combined with the adrenaline of combat and inevitable fatigue. Forcing herself to focus, she backed up, then took a run and dove flat into the water.
Bullets slapped the surface around her, some punching her in the back before she sank. Her sonar fed her HUD images as she drifted downward, and a moment later she stood on the bottom next to her motionless comrade.
Snatching him up, she trudged along the muddy lake bottom toward the submersible. It seemed to take forever, though it must have been less than five minutes. Fish investigated her now and again, and she had to walk around what speared to be a jumble of World War Two era T-34 tanks, either dumped into the lak
e or perhaps abandoned there before the water rose.
Finally she reached the little vehicle. As she triggered the one-time sequence that allowed them to ingress without surfacing, she heard engines in the water. Looking upward showed her nothing with her eyes, but her HUD displayed a predicted location based on sonic triangulation. Somewhere above, a boat already hunted for them, and where there was one, there would soon be several, and probably aircraft as well.
The submersible flooded its inner compartment, which allowed her to open the portal on top. Dragging Muzik upward, she placed him atop the thing and then climbed in, pulling him in after and laying him on the narrow bench-like bunk in the rear. Then she dogged the hatch and hit the water evacuation button.
Compressed air shoved wet lake out one-way valves, in less than a minute leaving them dripping and cold. Repeth removed Muzik’s helmet, placing her ear next to his pale lips. He still breathed, and she started praying under her breath. She’d gotten out of the habit lately but now seemed a good time to start again.
Stripping his clamshell cuirass, she checked his torso for damage. It wasn’t hard to find. An AK round had sneaked through a gap and traveled between the hard armor and his skinsuit, shattering the armor’s implanted nutrient pump. With nothing to feed the Plague and nano, all the stims he shot up had done little but help his metabolism spin its wheels until it started to come apart.
Opening a compartment by her head, she pulled out a preset IV and threaded it into his jugular. Its memory plastic would gently squeeze its entire contents into him without her assistance, and that was the limit of her ability to help him in the close confines of the sub.
Lifting her faceplate, she took the time to wrap her left hand in bandage, being careful not to even think about triggering the electrical charge. Jill had no idea what shape the mechanism was in. Pulling up her internals menu in her eye, she scrolled though systems until she found that one, and shut it off.
That task finished, she squeezed into the pilot’s seat and powered up the sub. In a moment the screens came on and she lifted off the bottom, carefully turning toward the west and the opposite shoreline. She kept near the lake floor as her passive sonar recorded the sounds of screws in the water hunting, hunting.
An hour later the distinctive sound of active sonar pings struck the hull, and she damned the efficiency of the Russian military machine. Now they no longer merely had to worry about running out of battery power, but also about being detected. She quickly grounded the boat and shut down all but the essentials.
“Sonobouy,” Repeth heard Muzik say from behind her. She turned to look, seeing him blinking at the low ceiling.
“Roger. Glad you’re awake. Thought you were going to nap the whole way, and it didn’t seem fair.”
Muzik chuckled, then coughed. “Concussion, I think. Nano doesn’t pass the meniscus, and Eden Plague heals the brain very slowly. Damned cyborg punched me and I swear I saw stars.”
Repeth clambered to sit facing backward, her knees on the outside of his feet as he lay. “What do you know about sonobouys?” she asked.
“Not much. Just that they can be dropped by helicopter. No idea if they can see us sitting here.” The pings still struck the hull like a metronome. It was disconcerting.
“Well the longer we sit, the more the batteries run down. Eventually we’ll have to move.”
“Yeah. Can you see anything on the passive sonar?”
“Just a few powerboats racing here and there.”
“Nothing coming toward us? Or are they taking up positions around us?”
She looked over her shoulder at the displays. “Nope.”
“Then they can’t see us here.” Muzik closed his eyes. “I think I’m going to sleep some more…” His head lolled and he began to snore.
Good sign, she thought. Checking the batteries, she saw they had about eleven hours if they just sat there, four hours of propulsion at their most efficient speed. After that, they would have to risk the snorkel, or abandon the craft and swim. They had no scuba gear, though, and even with their advantages, swimming thirty or forty kilometers just didn’t seem practical.
So in the classic tension-drenched style of submariners everywhere, they had to hope and pray they could creep out from under the hunters and slip away.
***
An encrypted landline rang next to Scott Stone’s head. Awake instantly, he plucked it from its cradle between two large fingers and held it to his ear. “Professor,” he said.
“It’s me,” Winthrop Jenkins’ hoarse voice bleated from the line. “Salmi Base just got hit. Some kind of commando raid, a dozen or more. I got forty or fifty casualties and the main computer vault has been compromised.” Stone could hear gunfire and helicopters in the background.
“They wanted the data. What about the backup?”
“I don’t know. I have my hands full here. Alert the rest, lock everything down. You know the drill.”
“I wrote the drill. I’ll be on my cell.” With that, Stone hung up and pulled on his clothes, listening to the creaks and groans of the old mansion. Unlike the other ministers, the Prime Minister had to be kept in his traditional residence. To do otherwise would be to look weak in the eyes of the people and the world, perhaps even invite a coup. To make up for it, there were three cyborg minders and a cordon of fanatical Spetznaz for security.
Stone called the number that dialed straight into the internal radio of Kratz, the Shadow on duty. “Kratz, this is Stone. Alert status one. Wake up Melcher, and lock the mansion down. Get the civilians into the panic room. I have to go to the Bank.”
“Acknowledged,” came the synthesized voice. Now he could be confident that the Prime Minister and his family would be hustled into their safety vault in case some kind of attack was imminent. If necessary, they could be evacuated through the new tunnel system he’d had built during the last few months.
Picking up the landline again, he dialed his counterparts in Skolkovo and Barvikha one after another, receiving no answer each time. Then he tried to contact them directly through the cell network to their internal radios. Both returned “unable to connect” messages.
That told him all he needed to know. Someone – the Americans, the South Africans, maybe the Australians, had made their move. Probably the latter, he thought. I told Winthrop not to sell that Aussie bitch a Shadow, because it would just lead back to us. Well, asshole, guess what just happened? And they call us Psychos.
Time to cut his losses. If the Salmi base had been hit and the program wrecked, and the Cabinet enclaves taken, one Prime Minster would not a government make. He had to move fast, on his own, which was just fine. A wise man always had fallback positions and options, and he was nothing if not very smart.
He contemplated destroying his phone, but decided to hold on to it for the moment. Easy enough to crush it when the time came. Then he stuffed his getaway packet with his extra passports and money in a cargo pocket and hustled down the stairs.
In the front of the house, he hopped into one of the Mercedes parked there, slowing next to the Spetznaz guards as they hurried to open the gate. “Alert status one,” he called as he roared past, for all the good it would probably do. One never knew; perhaps his concerns were overblown and everything would be back to normal in the morning.
Through sparse traffic he wove, his foot mashed to the floor, hitting at least one hundred fifty KPH along some of the straightaways before slowing to take corners at seventy. Four miles to the bank, one of Moscow’s oldest and most secure, the location of their backup data and, therefore, one enormous bargaining chip. If his instinct was right, it was the nexus of risk and opportunity tonight.
For Professor Scott Stone, anyway.
Pulling up at a side entrance, he parked and immediately charged the portal. A heavy steel pull-down barrier covered the door proper. He reached down with both hands and lifted, grunting.
With a screech of metal it tore away, frame and all. Tossing it aside, he then attacked the
metal door, kicking it several times until it bent enough for him to get a grip on. Ten seconds later that lay on the sidewalk as well, and he ran inside.
At this point the bank’s alarms should have been sounding, proclaiming its violation loudly to the world, but there was nothing. Switching to low-light and infrared vision, he bolted down the corridor toward the stairs to the vault, his head swiveling left and right as he looked for anything out of place. At the top of the steps he froze, staring downward.
A flickering glow showed faintly from the bottom, two flights below. Then he heard a movement from off to his left. Looking over, he saw two bound figures lying on the marble floor: security guards, apparently captured and wrapped in tape. He could see their eyes strain into the darkness in his direction, but without his enhancements all they saw was a shadow.
He chuckled to himself. Better than a Shadow, actually. He’d never wanted the metal skin, the external armor, the glowing eyes to terrify the sheep; he was far too pretty for that. But he’d availed himself of all the other improvements the program had come up with, all except for the brain chips, and he’d made sure he stayed conscious for everything. There’d be no deadman charges or mind control for the Professor. His fate would remain his own.
Stone slipped lightly down the steps far more quietly than someone of his size and weight should have been able to, and held at the bottom. Slowly, he peered around the corner, then eased back before the lookout ten feet away noticed him. He’d had on NVGs but the goggles looked like older monocular models with a narrow field of view. The man would have been better served just taking them off and letting his eyes adjust to the night.
It wouldn’t matter, though, for him. The only question for Stone was whether he could take the man down before he alerted the rest of his comrades.
Then he paused for a moment, thinking.
No bank alarm meant whoever this was had disabled it. Presumably they were professional enough to have also rendered the silent alarm to the police inoperative as well. The flickering he could see meant some kind of cutting torch, perhaps a thermic lance hot enough to crack the vault.
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