Jack Bowie lay there for a second, feeling the sudden cascade of sweat erupt inside the smartsuit he was now wearing. It was always that way. Flying the AN-16 was pure danger. Unforgiving in the extreme. And did anyone mention dangerous? Because it really was. You only got one chance to stick her to the LZ and mistakes were often fatal. The sudden sweat always came at the end of every landing as the tense body of the pilot released all the stress and fear they’d been holding in while flying the approach. But it was better than plowing into the side of a dropship hangar on the way to smoke some target. So Bowie just lay there for a second and let the sweat come. Relaxing muscles that had become tension wire tight.
He didn’t have long to think about how close he’d come to death. Nor did he want to. When it came, it would come. No sense in giving it any moment until that final moment.
So, he twisted and popped the canopy along the dorsal fin of the fuselage and pushed himself out of the tiny craft. Satisfied he had his kit, he reached down and flipped the safety cover on the glider’s disintegration packs.
A quick set of numbers activated the arming sequence for immediate destruction and by the time Bowie stood to draw his silenced sidearm, the AN-16 was silently disintegrating in a dull green effervescence accompanied by a soft pop and crackle as aggressive nanites took the vehicle apart at the cellular level with extreme prejudice. In less than a minute, there would be nothing but black dust left of the AN-16.
They were a one-usage item.
Protocols required that the dust be scattered and hidden to the best of the operator’s abilities before the mission could continue. Bowie didn’t think that was necessary. It was just after three a.m. local and the roof was dark. And everyone inside the museum would be dead in the next thirty minutes.
No one would notice the dusty outline of some strange bat lying on the roof.
Bowie made sure there was a round in the pipe of the silenced Nine and whispered a soft reminder of what came next, “Time to clean.”
He disappeared into the silence of the night.
The dark figure took up a position around the corner of the wall from which the rooftop access door opened. Reiser was counting down to the appearance of the koob guard.
“These are good, Jack. Must be like some kind of elite ceremonial guard because they make their rounds on time. So, he’ll show in seven, six, five, four…” and then he went silent as per old protocols from Nether Ops.
The last three seconds were never counted down. Just assumed so the hitter could concentrate on his work. And right on time the door swung open on a whiny note and Jack Bowie heard the soft pad of koob steps coming out onto the grit of the roof.
Bowie followed the forward sight of the Nine around the corner of the wall with three swift steps and watched the laser dot inside his HUD lenses land on the koob warrior’s muscled belly. He’d come in a little low and that had been a problem all during his run throughs. He’d drilled anatomy for as much time as he’d had, which hadn’t been much. And still he’d come in low on his first target acquisition.
A gut shot wasn’t good enough.
Bowie raised the barrel and followed the front sights up in a long movement that was smooth. But to him, as the surging adrenaline began to have its way with him, it felt like an eternity. Felt the very essence of the word slow.
But it was slow, and slow is smooth.
The laser dot landed right above the koob’s brow. The central cortex stem and lower thalamus beyond that, protected by bone and brain matter. Instant lights out in the koob’s anatomy. And if he was low, he’d send a bullet through the airsac, making it impossible for the koob to croak a warning once ruptured.
And smooth is fast.
The dead koob had barely a second to open his mouth as he came face to face with the assassin before a bullet scrambled his brain and came out the rear lower pan at the base of the skull.
Bowie moved forward before the body could fall and pushed the corpse back inside the access door with one hand steadying and the other maintaining the pistol’s posture forward and ready to engage an unannounced buddy.
The lifeless koob warrior slumped against the wall as Bowie’s vision switched over to IR with just a simple thought. It was dark in the stairwell access leading to the roof and he’d merely wanted, yes wanted had been the right word, and the filter overlay for his vision turned everything to IR red. There was enough residual heat in the walls to give a good picture of what the short set of stairs leading down to the top two levels of the museum looked like.
No buddies.
Seven rounds left, he reminded himself. The downside of using so small a pistol.
Moving quickly but quietly he made the bottom of the stairs. Though the smartsuit was running some kind of active sensor system, it wasn’t picking up anything. No movement. No heartbeats.
“Not getting anything on sensors,” whispered Bowie over the comm.
“Yeah,” said Reiser quietly. Bowie could tell he was drinking a cup of kaff from a disposable cup. The comm was so good he could hear the soft material of the cup crinkle as Reiser gripped it while he spoke. “Everything’s still R&D, Jack. Give it a moment and it may come in once it figures itself out. All this stuff is just voodoo to an old spook like me. Back in my day, we…”
Bowie slid through the barely open door and out into a marble-floored hallway adorned with ancient Kublaren stone art. It was dark in here, and some powerful deep scan Reiser’s people had been able to run in the last few hours had shown most of the koobs within the building. On the top floor there had been five. The rover who was now dead. And two patrols at opposite ends of the massive building, walking alternating routes that intersected every fifteen minutes.
And here was the trickiest part of the night. Both patrols had to be hit separately, but before their standard intersection times. While doing the map recon back in the operations warehouse, they’d identified two places where Bowie could effect this.
Without hesitation Bowie moved to what they called Position One and waited behind a massive stone sarcophagus of a prehistoric Kublaren mummy. He waited, keeping the Nine down and letting his arms relax.
Up for too long and the arms cramped and the aim got bad when it was time to come into play.
Less than two minutes later the first pair came down the small gallery, each taking an opposite side, and one slightly behind the other. Bowie assessed both targets and confirmed he had them in sight.
“Engaging…” he whispered and got a “Standing by…” back from Reiser. If things went sideways now, other elements had to get out of the area of operation quickly before anyone could start capping footage and pinning blame. So Reiser would wait for confirmation on each kill.
“Tangos down,” whispered Bowie a second later. “Moving to Two.”
Position Two was not thirty meters away and near the Grand Exhibit of the Moon Monolith. One of the most sacred relics of koob society and culture. It was rumored to predate Kublar’s earliest civilizations and further rumored to be extra-terrestrial. But the House of Reason antiquities commission had never allowed any off-world scientist to have a go at it and verify if any of this was actually true.
Both guards were just entering the chamber from a side exit that marked their patrol route when Bowie entered, swiftly walking and firing at the same time.
He’d swapped mags on the way to Position Two, so he had eight rounds. His hands had started to shake during the first two kills and he’d felt it best to have a full magazine when he hit the next two targets. Unsure if his aim would start to go with the subsiding adrenaline and nerves as the mission clock wore on.
Instead he’d suddenly felt calm, and the brief bit of exercise moving from Position One to Position Two had shed some of the excess nervous energy. It only took a bullet each to put the two surprised koobs down. And the rest of the magazine just for general purpose.
Now there were five dead and seven to go. All of them on the lower level.
34
Counting down.
Number Seven died when Bowie let himself down in the main exhibition hall, eschewing the stairs and using a small nano-cable to sink to the ground floor. He came in right behind Number Seven who was tasked with watching the Hall of Wonders. Kublaren technology from their golden age. Technology consisting of an ancient printing press and other abortive attempts at devices much of the galaxy had long had access to before the Savages’ first leapt away from Earth.
If you believed that myth.
Bowie had never cared one way or another.
Number Six died near the entrance to the administration facility parking lot, standing watch and looking outward. Bowie moved up quickly and used the blade coated with nano-toxin. The smartsuit made movement easy and near silent, and so the dead koob had felt nothing more than the merest scratch as Bowie swiped a small cut across the wide neck and watched the creature go down, paralyzed and helpless as Bowie bent over and made a quick cut through the airsac to let the creature bleed out.
Reiser’s suggestion to scramble the brain was too much work. Paralyzed, the koob would bleed out in just a few minutes. Unconsciousness would come within thirty seconds.
So far, so good. And yet something about this whole thing was bothering Jack Bowie. What did Savage relics have to do with anything? And other than Reiser there wasn’t much Team Nilo. Which had kind of been a hallmark of everything he’d been asked to do so far. The audition hit. The chase. All of it had dangled Team Nilo. And now… here he was stealing stuff. For what reason? Why? What did Nilo, whoever he really was, stand to gain?
And then Jack Bowie reminded himself that none of this was his business. He’d been hired to do what he did. Rarely and seldom was the full picture given.
But one day, someone had once told him, you find yourself in a blind alley you never saw coming. And there’s no way out.
How, Jack had asked. How do you avoid ending up there?
That’s the problem, that other older, wiser hitter had said. You never see it coming because you’ve been going up blind allies all along. There’s a certain amount of blind trust doing what we do. And sometimes that gets used against you. And by the time you realize it… well… it’s too late.
Then what?
Nothing. Nothing you can do. You just face it like some lamb led to the slaughter.
Remind me not to be a sacrificial lamb, Bowie had quipped in the darkness between the two men. I’d rather charge.
Even bulls get sacrificed, Jack. Even bulls.
Number Five died in a small library of ancient scrolls illuminated in soft light. The koob was actually sleeping and all Bowie had to do was nick the rather prominent vein visible as the airsac deflated with each slumbering breath. Time did the rest.
Bowie was already onto Number Four when he ran into Three, who was supposed to be with Two. Not there.
He and Three practically walked up on each other. Bowie, blade in his off hand, Nine at the ready, turned and fired fast, pulling the trigger and walking hits up along the body of the jerking Kublaren guard.
The series of puffs was audible. They sounded loud. Some trick in the silent cavern of a room that featured ancient art magnified the sounds. The puffs became the sudden loud hisses of feral cats as Bowie shot the guard dead several times.
He heard the other guard, Two, coming into the room where the killing was taking place. The koob gurgling curses and trying to unlimber its new Black Leaf rifle to engage the killer with.
Five shots, Jack Bowie told himself as he pivoted away from the prone koob whom he wasn’t quite sure was dead when he took aim and fired at this new threat.
Two was just getting his automatic rifle off his shoulder when Bowie hit him in the upper chest, nowhere near the pump and pipes, and watched the guard twist away to get out from under the glare of the barrel spitting death in his face. The koob smacked into a wall, rebounded, and came up standing still for just a second to gather his bearings. Bowie had challenged himself to wait to fire his last shot, and the wait was rewarded because the sight picture for a kill shot in the brain stem was now as good as it was ever going to get.
He pulled the trigger and blew the koob’s brains all over a picture of some sunset.
He clipped the knife back to his belt, slapped in a new magazine, and chambered another round, listening all the while.
Had the last guard alive in the place heard anything?
Would the alarm suddenly sound? A high-tech thing in this modern monument to the ancient past.
Nothing.
Now there was just one left and Number One was the hardest one to get to and hit. Prior scans had indicated that the Kublaren guard watch leader stayed within a blastproof security station near the main door. That station was accessible by one door. The approach to the station from the rest of the building was monitored at all times, both visually and with broad knee-level sensor beams that swept the entire main entrance hall.
Bowie moved to a small gallery filled with onyx statuary that looked out upon the main gallery. From the shadows there he could see the security station, designed to look like some kind of information booth sitting dead center in the massive hall. The front doors to the museum, monitored and locked by high tech sophisticated security systems installed by Team Nilo, stood guard against the outside. Those were the final objective. Open them and his work was done.
And that tickled Jack Bowie’s brain just a bit. He found it impossible to believe Team Nilo couldn’t hack their own installed equipment. Didn’t put some kind of back door the near–Stone Age Kublarens couldn’t find. That just didn’t add up.
Not your problem right now, Jack. So far they’ve dealt straight-ish. Keep charging and maybe… just maybe you see the other side of this.
Even bulls get sacrificed, Jack.
But first there were two things to do.
Kill the guard.
And secure the artifacts down below.
Bowie got down onto his belly and began to low crawl across the meticulously polished floor of the main entrance. The smartsuit adapted to the viscosity of the surface it was being used against, shifted its molecular structure somehow and suddenly the small rubberized squeak it had been making went silent. And, amazingly, Bowie was moving faster.
The sensor laser was invisible so there was no telling where it was, even with the enhanced optics his HUD contacts provided. But if Jack kept down and just under its calculated depth, he could make it the whole way to the security station. Visual was the only problem. If the guard looked up, he was had. So he crawled with the Nine out and forward. Pointed at the koob’s skull the whole way. He crawled and watched the koob in the booth who seemed to be studying something, remaining motionless as death crawled toward him. The watch leader didn’t even look up once until something in his peripheral vision caused him to turn and look at the barrel of the sidearm Jack Bowie was pointing at his skull.
That was the last thing he ever saw.
Brain matter aside and dead koob lying on the floor of the security station, Jack scanned the controls and inserted the device Reiser had given him. It would run the hack and decrypt the passwords the koobs had added after installation. After that he deactivated the laser and left for the basement.
Last step.
Accomplish that, and then open the front door and done, thought Jack Bowie as he pressed a button and the false wall blast door folded away in a nearby wall, exposing a ramp leading down into the gloom of the lower basement.
35
The hack that opened the massive security blast door guarding the private collection of whoever it was who had funded the construction of the museum took longer than expected.
Reiser’s slicing device did the actual job and while it worked, Bowie switched modes from biologic en
gagement with the Nine and knife, to use of the fancy new EM blaster bot-poppers.
None of Reiser’s intel gave any indication of what to expect inside the private collection. It was anyone’s guess. The only thing known was that it had to be secured for Mr. Nilo.
That was the only priority. Jack didn’t know what. He didn’t know why. Despite all he’d done in the Team Nilo auditions… he still didn’t feel “in” enough to ask about it. And usually, he wouldn’t have cared either way. A job was a job.
It was just… things about this one didn’t add up.
The hack broke through the last of the security interlocks, each pulsing red until they shifted over into the open configuration identified by a soft mint-green glow. Once the last lock was opened, the gleaming titanium blast door opened vertically, the bottom half sinking into the floor, the top half rising into the foundation of the museum above. Buttresses behind the dual blast doors, providing support for any attempts to blow it inward, likewise retracted.
Beyond the blast door was a pristine room worthy of any fantastic deep government research and development think tank site or hospital operating room. Beyond the clean room was a simple, small door that had to lead into the inner sanctums of the collection. Where the Savages’ lost playthings were kept.
Bowie crouched behind some nearby lift-pallets and studied the entrance. There had to be a trap of some kind still waiting for him between blast doors and the collection itself. It wasn’t this easy. And through the suit he could feel some kind of immense… unholy… power emanating out in waves across the basement.
Unholy, thought Bowie incredulously. His mind was not given to the use of such hokey words. But that’s what it felt like. Something forbidden. Something dangerous. Something the soul could feel, and felt that it was wrong. Whatever it was.
Galaxy's Edge: Takeover: Season Two: Book One Page 24