Eve maneuvered the suit behind a large, antique cauldron and put the nearly-empty suit into a crouch. “They’ll be here in fifteen seconds, Soze.”
“Got it,” Masozi nodded as she made her way to the edge of the roof opposite the street. There was an entry to the kitchen on the ground level, and they had drilled this particular entry hundreds of consecutive times in a VR program. Even without the pre-programmed algorithms which Eve had crafted to control Masozi’s suit, Masozi was confident she could make the insertion manually if needed.
Masozi reached down to her suit’s waist and produced a tether with a wire that ran into her suit’s upper back. After attaching the tether to a nearby support column, Masozi stood on the edge of the building just as Eve said, “Jump!”
Masozi did so, and her body went into a perfect swan dive as the wire connecting her to the building’s roof quickly unspooled. The brake clamped down at the precise moment it had done in the VR simulations, and Masozi’s armored body hung in the air for a split second before swinging pendulously toward the kitchen window.
In the moment her armored bulk crashed through the modestly reinforced glass, three things happened. First, the nearest door opened and a pair of Agents moved into the room with inhuman speed. Second, Eve brought Jericho’s suit out of its crouch and fired a hail of energy bolts toward the incoming Agents. And third, Masozi’s armored body crashed into the second Agent while the first dove behind a nearby stove.
Masozi quickly found herself grappling with the Agent she had slammed into, and a series of red alarm lights went off on her side of the HUD. Arching her back, she barely managed to buck her adversary off of her before he could plunge a slender, deadly-looking blade into her visor.
The weapon sank to the hilt in the ferro-crete floor beside her head, and Masozi knew in that brief instant that she had gained the initiative. With a subtle manipulation of her suit’s controls, she maximized the power output of her left arm servos and slammed her left gauntlet into her foe’s ribs. The force of the blow caused his torso to cave in, but he returned the favor with a vicious, twelve-to-six downward elbow into her helmet. Another round of alarms went off, and Masozi thundered another blow into his ribs.
This time she broke something important in his torso, because the Agent’s right arm went limp briefly and she used the window to reverse position by bucking her hips up and driving him off-balance.
The ensuing scramble saw her land on top of him, and it took only a trio of savage, maximum strength elbows to flatten his skull against the now-cratered ferro-crete floor.
She looked up to find another Agent was at the door, and she hurled herself at him unthinkingly. It was only after she knocked his plasma pistol off-target that she realized he had even held it—and only then did she realize that her quick reactions had likely saved her life, as the bolt of superheated plasma spewed from the pistol and turned a nearby kitchen appliance into a pile of molten slag.
Her suit’s power supply was down to 22%, but she poured as much as she could into her legs as she grabbed her new adversary waist and drove him into a nearby structural pillar. Hundreds of pounds of concrete fell off the pillar from the first blow, but the Agent’s body remained intact as he cracked punch after punch inter her armored flanks.
Keenly aware that each of those blows would kill her if she had not been wearing her armor, Masozi reached up with her gauntlets while keeping her enemy pinned against the column. The Agent fought against her, but after diverting her suit’s power to the servos in her arms she was able to overcome even the Agent’s superhuman strength and managed to sink her armored fingers into the soft parts of his skull.
He did not scream or make any other sign of panic as he landed precise strikes against her elbows and knees, but after just a few seconds her fingers found purchase and she squeezed as hard as she could against his metal skull.
He continued hammering blows against her armor far longer than she would have thought possible, given the hideous deformations she was inflicting on his skull, but eventually she succeeded in neutralizing him and his body went limp. Just to be certain the job was finished, Masozi stood and stomped down on his head with her augmented leg and finished the job her gauntlets had started.
She looked back into the kitchen and saw that Jericho’s nearly-empty suit was engaged in a losing struggle with the Agent Eve was battling. “I can’t hang on much longer, Soze,” Eve said with unmasked annoyance as Jericho’s HUD showed 2% power remaining.
A pair of blue icons appeared on the virtual representation of the theater, and those icons were streaking toward Masozi’s position. “Looks like that’s it, then,” Masozi said sourly as she saw that her suit’s left knee was nearly ruined from the second Agent’s surprisingly effective counterattacks. “I’ll offer up token resistance and then we’ll bug out.”
“Sounds good,” Eve growled as her avatar bobbed, juked and twisted on the HUD in almost perfect synchronicity with Jericho’s nearly-empty suit.
Masozi drew De Rossi’s hand cannon and spun the cylinder to visually check that each round was where she remembered putting it. It was a ritual, nothing more, since she knew that nothing had touched the pistol since she had loaded and holstered it.
The Agents split up at a nearby intersection, with one making his way to the other side of the kitchen and the other coming straight for Masozi. But before the inbound Agent came around the corner, he stopped and waited—presumably for his cohort to gain a flanking position.
Having fully expected such, Masozi aimed De Rossi’s hand cannon at the Agent lurking around the corner forty two feet away and, after a quick calibration of her suit’s sensor suit, fired an armor piercing round through the reinforced ferro-crete post behind which that Agent hid.
The round penetrated the relatively soft material and sent the Agent spinning like a top. But the Agent managed to remain mostly behind the corner. During the brief window where Masozi could see her latest adversary, she saw that this particular Agent appeared to be a woman.
“You’ve got inbound,” Masozi said as Eve’s side of the HUD flashed with all manner of critical status alarms.
“We need to scram,” Eve said as Jericho’s nearly-empty suit went limp.
Masozi saw the Agent at the other end of the hall dive across the intersection, and decided Eve was right. Masozi turned and ran back into the kitchen, to see that Jericho’s Infiltrator suit had been irreparably wrecked by the fight with the Agent.
Just as Masozi leapt for the window, the Agent decapitated Jericho’s suit with a violent, two-handed twist of the suit’s helmet—which caused the explosives buried inside the nearly-empty Infiltrator to go off, the force of which actually helped hurl Masozi’s armored body out of the window and onto the pavement outside.
“Scramble, Soze; they’re already in pursuit,” Eve said as Masozi shook her head to clear the cobwebs caused by cracking her forehead into the helmet. Knowing it should have been impossible for her head to hit the inside of the suit, Masozi pushed herself to her feet and concluded that her helmet must have taken more damage than she had previously suspected.
She tried to run, but the ruined left knee servos made that impossible. So she half-limped, half-loped her way to the nearest vehicle—a bakeshop delivery truck, of all things—and snapped, “I don’t want to hear it, Eve.”
“I didn’t say anything…cupcake,” Eve said mischievously.
Holding her suit’s vambrace beside the vehicle’s door, Masozi only had to wait a few seconds for Eve to crack the truck’s locks. There wasn’t room inside for Masozi to sit in her armored suit, so she reached down and tore the driver’s seat from its moorings and discarded it onto the pavement.
“Incoming!” Eve snapped just as a series of energy beams struck the truck’s cab.
Masozi dove haphazardly into the vehicle and its tires squealed as Eve remotely directed it toward the chain-link fence. The bakery truck smashed through the flimsy barricade, and a hail of weapons fire imp
acted against the truck’s cargo box as Eve turned the corner and sped off down the street.
“Can this thing get us to our pick-up?” Masozi asked as she righted herself and moved to where the driver’s seat had been a few moments earlier.
“Not sure yet, cream puff,” Eve said testily, “how about you take the wheel and I’ll jack into the local comm. feeds?”
Masozi did as requested and, though the wheel was relatively easy to grip with her gauntlets, it took her a few seconds to position her armored boot over the accelerator pedal. Once she managed to do so, she drove the makeshift getaway vehicle as fast as it would go down the road and toward the nearest roadblock.
The roadblock was filled with two dozen law enforcement officers whose primary concern had been keeping people out of the area rather than keeping a runaway bakery truck in. Only a few of them got turned around in time to send a smattering of small arms fire into the truck’s cab.
“Hang on,” Masozi grunted just before the truck slammed into the portable metal barricade which had been placed between a pair of police vehicles.
The impact was severe, but the truck managed to crash through the barrier—again due to the fact that the barricade had been erected to keep vehicles out, rather than in—and Masozi sped off down the street as the ping-ping-ping of small arms struck the rear of the van.
It only took a few seconds to realize that her tires had all been flattened, but Masozi didn’t need to go far before she could bail out of the vehicle entirely.
“We’ve got a tail,” Eve said as soon as a flashing blue icon representing an Agent appeared on the virtual map nearly two blocks behind them.
“Good,” Masozi growled, knowing that every Agent she could peel off from the President’s security detail was one less obstacle in Jericho’s path.
“I’m also picking up encoded comm. chatter,” Eve reported. “It’ll take a few seconds to descramble it, though.”
“By all means—take your time,” Masozi said dryly as she made a turn at an intersection, where she very nearly T-boned a vehicle as the bakery truck’s impaired maneuverability nearly robbed her of her tenuous control over her vehicle.
Thankfully the other vehicle swerved out of harm’s way, and Masozi saw the underground garage entrance—where her real getaway vehicle was supposed to be stashed—come into view.
“She’s closing,” Eve said anxiously, and Masozi saw the blue icon representing their foe was now less than a hundred yards behind.
“Come on,” Masozi growled at the useless bakery truck. Then a violent explosion rocked the rear of the bakery truck and she lost control of the vehicle. As it slewed to the left, then to the right, the battered truck slammed into a pylon which separated the street from the sidewalk.
The force of the impact, combined with the truck’s wild trajectory, caused the vehicle’s front half to launch up and over the meter tall barrier device before the rear axle caught on that same pylon. Masozi was thrown through the windshield when the vehicle finally caught firm on the immovable pylon, and she landed against the concrete wall of the building beyond the sidewalk.
“Gotta get up, Soze,” Eve said quickly as Masozi did her best to do precisely that, “this one’s got a plasma pistol.”
A quick glance at the rear of the bakery truck showed that at least half of it had been vaporized by the Agent’s weapon, and Masozi had no intention of finding out whether or not her suit could withstand the weapon’s deadly jet of plasma.
She picked herself up and found that she was still unable to run, and she spotted the Agent—who was riding a sleek hover bike—just as the other woman leapt high into the air from the speeding craft with her plasma pistol trained precisely on Masozi.
Time seemed to freeze as the woman squeezed the trigger, and Masozi thought she imagined a bolt of blue-green fire erupt from the barrel of her foe’s pistol just before Masozi drew De Rossi’s hand cannon and hurled herself sideways in an effort to escape the deadly weapon’s fire.
Whether it had been solely her reflexes or if Eve had somehow contributed, Masozi was uncertain. But the one thing she was certain of was that her lower half was quickly enveloped in a blast of heat unlike anything she had ever experienced.
As she fell to her side, Masozi fired a blind round in the Agent’s direction as her vision went black due to the horrific pain she felt in her legs. Not a second later she felt a wave of euphoria come over her and she immediately realized that Eve had pumped her body full of some kind of painkillers.
She heard De Rossi’s gun fire again, and again, and Masozi was vaguely aware of the fact that her arms were moving the pistol to the left and right. But her senses had very nearly left her, and it was all she could do to focus on the sound of her own screams as soon as she realized that the horrible cries of agony filling her ears were her own.
“Stay with me, Sis,” Eve snapped. “Your legs are still there, and your prosthetic’s right as rain.”
Several seconds passed before Masozi’s vision returned and she looked around stupidly. The Agent’s hover-bike was floating serenely in the middle of the street, the nearby traffic had slammed to a halt, and the Agent’s body was lying just beyond the ruined bakery truck—at least, most of her body was lying there.
Masozi slowly realized that Eve had managed to hit the Agent with one of the hand cannon’s explosive rounds, and that round had destroyed everything above the woman’s breasts including her arms—which, like her head, were nowhere to be seen.
“Get on the hover bike, Soze,” Eve prompted. “Crawl if you have to, but we’ve got to scram!”
Masozi nodded stupidly as another wave of chemicals washed over her senses. This batch of drugs sharpened her wits and she shook her head vigorously, doing her best to ignore looking at her legs as she tried to stagger to her feet.
Her prosthetic leg seemed to be fine, but her other leg felt completely useless. Looking down at it, she saw that the armor appeared more or less intact. Aside from a few cracks near the knee, and the scorched marks caused by the plasma pistol, everything seemed fine.
But the pain she had felt a moment earlier made clear that she had suffered a horrific injury, and if she did not receive medical attention quickly she would probably lose the leg.
These thoughts came to her more or less clinically and without accompanying emotion. For a moment she thought, This must be how doctors think about injuries. Then she snapped back to the present and began to crawl her way to the hover bike.
“Just get us on it, put your hands on the control bars and I’ll take care of the rest,” Eve said, her voice seeming to echo in Masozi’s ears.
A few seconds later, Masozi heard approaching police sirens wailing. She ignored the crowd of spectators—many of whom had gotten out of their stopped vehicles—as she dragged herself onto the hover bike. She reached up with her left hand and gripped the far handle bar, and after her right hand grasped the near bar she saw a pair of virtual, wire-frame gauntlets appear on Eve’s hands.
“I’ve got it from here, Sis,” Eve said confidently. “You’ve done your part; now you need to take a nap.”
“No, wait—“ Masozi protested, but the world quickly spiraled into darkness and her objection vanished into the void.
Chapter XXIX: Sic Semper Tyrannis
Jericho had not slept in twenty hours. He lay within the casket, which was little more than a stealth-modified emergency life pod that had been stashed inside of a large crate. That crate, which ostensibly held foodstuffs reserved for a dinner event scheduled for after the show’s completion, had been brought in among several dozen others which had actually contained such foodstuffs.
The timing of the event, and the fact that there were so many people present for the President’s public address scheduled for the beginning of that dinner, meant that there would be no chance of the crate being inspected after it being locked away inside the theater’s pantry.
And so it had provided the perfect opportunity for Jericho to li
e in wait for the optimal opportunity to strike. He had watched every single second during the last twenty hours and three minutes tick off the small clock inside the pod with him. And when that timer reached zero he immediately, but calmly, reached for the handles and popped the lid of the pod open.
There was a barely audible hiss as the lid cracked open and he rolled outside the pod to come to the inside wall of the large, plastic crate where the pod had been hidden. Reaching over and finding the hidden clasps inside the crate, he undid them and carefully lifted the lid of the crate to peer out into the room beyond.
The lighting was minimal, but he could make out two other crates inside the room with him. His crate had been stacked against the backmost wall and, just as he had anticipated, there were only three total crates left inside the chamber. The rest had already been taken to one of the theater’s three kitchens and, had he been a superstitious man, Jericho would have taken this as a good omen.
But he didn’t believe in omens or portents; Jericho believed in preparation and planning. He was counting on his ability in those arenas being every bit as good as it had been throughout his career as an Adjuster, and every indication suggested that he had succeeded in accounting for the variables involved.
He reached into the pod and collected the items he would need for the Adjustment: a wrist-link; a single-shot, custom-made .44 caliber pistol; Blanco’s Tyrannis Mark of Adjustment; and a wire-type, end-weighted monomolecular whip-blade with which Jericho had practiced extensively during the recent weeks. The whip-blade was Lady Jessica’s favored weapon, and she had been gracious enough to give it to Jericho for this particular Adjustment.
He had seen Lady Jessica improbably split hairs with the whip-like blade at a range of ten meters. While he had no illusions of being able to do likewise, he did think the weapon would do what he needed it to do in his hands.
Sic Semper Tyrannis: The Chimera Adjustment, Book Two (Imperium Cicernus 5) Page 42