Gina didn't move.
Marcia stood. Gina bolted for the open lab door.
She ran. "Gina, wait!"
The door slammed closed, and the LED on the swipe-card lock went from green to red.
"Fuck!" Gina had been her ticket into the lab – an ID without a code couldn't do it, nor a code without an ID. She banged on the door with a fist. "GINA! Gina, listen to me! I need to get in there!"
The alarm cut off. She closed her eyes, listened at the door. A sob, then nothing but hyperventilation.
"Gina? Babe? I need you to open the door."
* * *
Matt fired two shots and rolled left, the triangles splitting wide on his HUD. One dove to the corner and ran straight up the wall, the other bolted right, both much faster than a normal. The microgrenades detonated, shredding drywall, rolling chairs, and computers, tangled bits of red-hot metal pinging off of cubicles and ceiling tiles.
Both men – if they were men – came up firing. Projectiles sailed from their weapons, expanding into webbing as they reached where he'd just stood. Matt fired twice around a pillar to keep them down, then rolled out and fired twice more, his foot landing in the sticky mess left behind by their weapons.
A microgrenade detonated on impact with the left man's chin, another in his torso. Chunks of bloody meat and bone splattered the ceiling and walls, leaving most of his legs and pelvis the only indication he'd once been human.
Matt ducked another web. A thin tendril of goo nicked the side of his helmet and the mass jerked him back half a step. The rest of the net fell, adhering to his left arm and back. He stretched out and it pulled like taffy before hardening. He fired another two rounds and then jerked, tearing the sole from his boot to separate it from the floor.
"Are you getting this?" He ducked behind the pillar at another shot.
"Looks like they want you alive."
"Not mutual." He rounded the corner, dove under two shots of webbing, and came up under his opponent's weapon. The barrel of his AA-12 punched through the man's abdomen and out his back, and as the body fell to the floor intestines spilled in a reek of shit and cumin that permeated even through Matt's helmet.
He slammed the hardened resin against the pillar. Twice. Three times. The concrete chipped, but the hardened goo didn't budge. The Dragonflies indicated two hostiles, large, coming up the elevator three floors below. Leaning the AA-12 against a filing cabinet, he pulled a combat knife from his belt and cut away his suit at the shoulder, hissing as the line of red appeared across his skin and then healed. He grabbed the ruptured seam and tore, peeling the hardened gunk off like a glove.
The elevator dinged, and he choked up the shotgun and fired. The projectiles entered the opening doors and exploded, showering the inside with high-velocity shrapnel. A figure stepped out, a ten-foot monstrosity of steel and hydraulics, construction-yellow paint scraped here and there from the explosion. Huge claws scissored at the end of each hand, each big enough to cut a man in half, and a .50 caliber machine gun tracked the room along with the gaze from the thing's helmet. Smaller, sleeker cousins of the suit worn by Murdock Yardley, with inch-thick armor and a portable generator it might as well have been a humanoid tank.
Which meant with a little luck he might be able to exploit its weakness before it killed him. He braced himself to charge, the whispers already keying up to the path of the incoming bullets.
It stepped out, making room for a twin behind it. Matt turned and bolted for the windows.
* * *
The bruise on Marcia's palm ached as she banged on the door. "Gina, babe, look around you. What are they doing to her in there? You have to let me in."
Something clattered to the floor, metal shelves or trays and instruments. A muffled male voice carried through the door. "Ma'am, put down the knife." He repeated himself, then, "I'm not going to ask you again."
The door beeped and the LED flashed green.
Marcia yanked it open and Gina stumbled back into her arms, narrowly missing the knife Marcia held in her right hand. She caught her, so familiar a feeling, the panicked tension so alien. A technician in a blood-spattered white coat held out a pneumatic mortician's saw, the air hose snaking up to a gantry in the ceiling.
Between them lay a steel bed, and on that bed lay suffering. Sakura's skin had been peeled back to reveal muscles underneath, and filaments of new tissue wormed their way across the bloody, naked meat. Her breasts lay in a tray to her right, misshapen light brown blobs in a pool of blood. A crack in her sternum – a thick plate three times as wide as an unaugmented human's – knitted closed as Marcia stared in horror.
Blood-slicked shackles bound her wrists and ankles, held in place with spring-pins, so easy to remove if you could push the button, impossible if you couldn't. The quarter-inch thick steel had warped over who knew how many escape attempts, and Sakura's flesh had partially healed around the metal.
The tech revved the saw and stepped forward, the blade's whine a dagger through Marcia's throbbing head.
She let Gina fall to the floor and flipped up the butterfly knife, holding it out to the side in a stance more dramatic than practical. A sluggish shadow of her augmented self, she could still go toe to toe with the world's best normals, and the tech's shaking hands didn't radiate confidence. "I'm going to give you one chance to drop that cutter and run. If you're still here in twenty seconds, I'm going to gut you. One… Two…"
He bolted for another door as Marcia rushed the table.
She jerked one pin free, then another. Sakura sat up with a sticky, wet tearing sound, yanked the pins from her ankle shackles, and slid off the table. She put her hands together, gave a small bow then bolted for the closing door.
The tech screamed as Sakura jerked him back into the room by his hair, straightening her arm to force him down to his hands and knees.
"Please! I was only doing—"
She dropped to the floor, pulping his skull beneath her fist, and disappeared out the door before it shut, leaving only bloody footprints in her wake.
"Sakura, wait! We need…" Marcia looked down at the broken body, and back to the exit door where Gina huddled, knees to her chest. "…we need to get out of here."
* * *
The tile floor ice cold on the new skin of her bare feet, Isuji Sakura flashed through the lab, shattering refrigerator doors and demolishing centrifuges with her bare hands. She didn't bother with the computers – anything important would be backed up off-site.
Stein's voice buzzed in the background, a distraction as she shattered the next security door and tore it from its hinges. A startled guard fired two shots, slow and clumsy. She sidestepped and struck his temple with iron-hard knuckles, shattering his skull and turning his frontal lobe to useless jelly.
Snatching his pistol as he fell, she whirled and fired three shots, one each at the forms cowering behind gurneys and sample racks. Another door led to a freezer. She tore the power plug from the wall and turned, weapon raised.
Marcia Stein stood before her, hands raised.
"How many times have I put you down?" The English came to her lips unbidden, a welcome reminder that she could think and feel beyond pain and the table.
Marcia closed her eyes and gave a small bow.
"Too many to count, sensei."
"And how many times did you stand back up?" The Japanese accent rang too strong in her mind, an unwelcome side-effect of too much time without practice.
"All of them, sensei."
Sakura returned the bow. "I'm going to kill everyone here."
Marcia held up her hands. "Please, not the girl in the next room."
Sakura ran forward, too fast for a normal to see, and brought herself up beneath the white woman's gaze. "Why not?"
"Because I care for her."
Sakura closed her eyes, and only saw red. "Not good enough."
Through the door, she swept up the dead guard's pistol and swept room after room, killing seven, three with her bare hands, before reaching the stairwell up and the dead man guarding it.
"Blossom, please!”
Sakura turned on the balls of her feet.
Eyes filled with tears, Marcia held out both hands from the far end of the hall. "We need to get out of here before they call reinforcements. Matt Rowley is upstairs. And he's in trouble."
* * *
A bullet grazed Matt's ankle as he hit the ground, rolled, and dove behind an industrial dumpster. The fully-automatic .50 caliber weapons overwhelmed all other sound, including his own breathing. The wound throbbed, the warm pulse turning to a burning itch as blood vessels rejoined and muscles knitted. A quick stretch told him he had full mobility.
His back to the cold metal, Matt popped the fragmentary rounds out of the AA-12, dropped the drum magazine in a satchel, and pulled out another. He slapped the UHVAPTS – ultra-high velocity, armor-piercing tungsten sabot rounds – home and chambered the first. They lacked the guidance systems of the fragmentation rounds, but a razor-sharp tungsten dart at two thousand feet per second could punch through the depleted-uranium armor of a tank, come out the other side, and lodge in the tank behind it.
He turned and aimed straight through the dumpster. Lights on his HUD directed him left and up from his initial guess, and the crosshairs flashed when the FoF locked with the Dragonfly data. He pulled the trigger and held it a full second, sending five rounds into and through the steel barrier.
The deafening roar of the .50s vanished. The ground trembled. Matt backpedaled as the dumpster crushed inward, a huge metal claw reaching over the top to shred the air an inch from his face. He spun left just before the metal smashed into the brick wall, ducking under a crushing claw and taking a metal knee to the stomach. He choked up the shotgun and got off one round before hydraulic pincers sliced the barrel short.
One exosuit stood silent and still, dark red blood spurting from its abdomen. The other body-checked him through the wall.
Bones creaked. Brick and rebar tore at his bare arm. He stumbled back and pulled out his Barrett WildStang .50 caliber pistol, a tiny smirk turning up the corner of his mouth. The metal behemoth had him dead-to-rights, but this time hadn't fired its machine gun. They wanted him alive, a critical handicap in any combat situation.
Screaming, he charged. A huge metal arm batted him to the side. He rolled with it, placing the pistol against its elbow and firing. The weapon bucked. Sparks flew.
He hit the ground in a roll, came up on his feet, and met its lumbering charge head-on. A metal claw grabbed his left wrist, jerking it wide, and held.
He fired again, same spot, and the metal dent grew.
No prisoners, asshole.
The claw closed, and blood spurted from the bloody stump that remained of his arm. Endorphins and adrenaline flooded his system, muting the pain without hiding it. A dull sheen of suppressed shock overlaid his reality without slowing it down.
He shoved the bloody mess of his wrist in the thing's faceplate, covering the bullet-proof visor with red mess, and fired again. The covering sheared free.
Flailing, blind, it clipped his bicep, shearing off a chunk of meat. He accepted the punishment and reached into the exposed gap. His fingers closed on a warm, pulsing hose. He yanked, and hot, orange-yellow fluid spurted from the ruptured tube. Its arms lifted as if to crush him to the ground, then sagged.
Matt put the pistol against the visor and pulled the trigger. A spiderweb crack spread across the reinforced polycarbonate. He fired five more times, shredding the plate and pulping the head beneath.
With a grunt, he holstered the pistol and picked up his left hand and the chunk of meat next to it. The claw had sheared his wrist in two places, crushing the bones clean through by sheer force.
"Dammit." He schooled his breathing, forced his mind away from the maddening itch. "Status?"
"Choppers incoming," Janet said. "You've got four more of those behemoths on the south side, heading your way. They look grumpy."
"What about those drones?"
"Ordered B2B. Someone above my paygrade."
"Sakura?"
Marcia's voice broke in. "I've got her. We're coming out the East entrance, hot."
A grin split his face, and excitement coursed across his skin. "I'll meet you there."
He took off at a run, long strides eating up the rain-soaked pavement, meat held against the ruins of his wrist. Ropy tendrils of shredded flesh grasped, connected, sought their like.
A Vietnam-era jeep shrieked out of an underground garage, Marcia's double-green triangle highlighted on his HUD. Sakura stood in the back, manning an M240 machine gun wearing nothing but heavily-stained a lab coat and a lot of someone's blood. Muscle glistened in exposed patches under her light brown skin. Tracers streaked across the campus as she found a target and opened fire.
Matt veered as Marcia approached without slowing, and he dove into the back. Lurching against the seat as the jeep accelerated, he found his feet and stood, still holding the barely-connected hand against his stump.
"It's good to see you, Blossom."
She shifted sideways. "Take this." As he tucked his injured hand into his armpit and grabbed the gun she kneeled, coming up with a Stinger missile.
She readied the SAM, and he yelled, "Marcia, open your mouth!"
He hollered, "Ease!" as Sakura pulled the trigger. The force of the launch buffeted his helmet as he turned the M240 on the truck approaching from the left. The belt of ammo disappeared into the machine as the metal hammered bullets through the feed. Streaks of white light walked across the ground and along the side of the truck, painting the drab green with pinpricks red hot in the infrared.
He'd aimed for the cab, but between the careening jeep, recoil, and his severed hand, he couldn't quite manage the aim.
A fireball blossomed in the sky half a mile back. In the billowing orange light he could just pick out rotors coming free from a fuselage, and another helicopter banking wide to avoid the shrapnel. Sakura grabbed the machine gun and washed the cab of the truck in hot lead.
Their jeep skidded out onto the highway and took off, engine humming with clean efficiency as they streaked past a tractor trailer. The driver gaped at the afterimage of the fireball in the sky, and Matt searched for the other chopper behind it.
"We're not going to outrun a helicopter."
Sakura tilted the M240 up. "Don't have to. It pulled off."
Janet broke in. "I got SACLANT to pull surveillance satellites offline, thank you Roger Smith, and Anacostia-Bolling grounded the drones. They're flying blind, and so are we."
Sakura closed her eyes. "But only we know we had only one missile."
* * *
Matt gritted his teeth as Sakura scraped muscle away from the last bone. He flexed his fingers and she slapped the back of his hand.
"Be still."
He knew better than to complain. Even before her ordeal, Sakura ‘Blossom’ Isuji had endured more than most could survive with a grim stoicism that rivaled that of any tree. The former Tokyo PD officer had gone undercover as a drug runner, a courier, and eventually a Yakuza enforcer, living lives filled with untold violence and pain as a ruse to destroy some of the world's worst criminal enterprises. She had no patience for complaints and even less for whines.
They'd smuggled her up the back stairs and let her shower. Janet's pajamas dwarfed her short, stocky frame, and though most of her chest had healed the flannel top still hung off her like a fuzzy blanket. The light blue penguins
did nothing to offset the cold flatness in her eyes.
He let her finish and blot the wound with toilet paper, not bothering to dress it or use antibiotic cream, then flexed again. Everything worked, so he stripped down his WildStang, spreading the parts across the bedsheet to clean and oil them. Sakura stood by the window, watching the storm through the crack in the floral curtains.
"Are you okay?" He broached the subject with tactical precision – sudden and to the point.
Her eyes didn't leave the window. "I am alive."
"That's not what I asked."
"Arigato. You honor me with your concern, but it is unnecessary. I will be okay when Keene is dead and the OPD destroyed. Meantime, I am alive, and that is enough."
Nothing in his experience would ever make him think she might go to counseling. He licked his lips. "If you need to talk—"
"I don't."
"But if you do—"
"I won't. I need my knives and a replacement rifle and sidearm to my specifications, I need my standard field kit, and I need a place to sleep."
He couldn't bring himself to smile. "We can do that."
CHAPTER FIVE
Matt smiled. Monica collapsed on top of him, chest heaving, slick with sweat, her naked body quivering and tensing around him. After a long moment she settled, giggled, then nibbled his chin.
"Welcome home, baby."
He stroked her hair and breathed her in, strawberry shampoo and femininity and an undercurrent of stark worry. "It's good to be back."
They lay together, basking in the closeness another several minutes before Monica rolled off of him and padded toward the master bathroom. He watched her go, smooth curves and tight muscle, a crystal lioness, hard but brittle and so, so soft.
She kissed her fingertips and slapped her ass on the way out of the room, shattering his musing.
"Bring it back here and I will!"
She stepped back into the doorway, rolling her eyes at him. "Shush. You'll wake the little man." With a quirk of her eyebrows she disappeared around the corner.
Jade Gods Page 4