by Amy Field
Suddenly her reverie was blown apart by a burst of sound opening up outside the transport just beside her door. A flash went past and carried on into the traffic. It was an electromagnetic pulse bike, and the rider was taking it to its fullest limits. The three sat in the front of the transport and watched it disappear into the morning congestion, their mouths open the whole time. The rider was weaving in and out of traffic at high speed, like a flash of lightning splitting the atmosphere. They all held their breaths as the rider appeared to be heading straight to the back of a large transit module.
However, as he reached it, the daredevil threw himself from the bike up into the air, flinging the bike underneath the large transit as he did so. All the people on board watched as the rider glided over the top of the transit and then met his bike on the other side of it, landing perfectly back on the seat, before bursting off again.
“What the fuck was that?” Kale exclaimed.
“A shifter,” O instantly pronounced. “It had to be.”
They carried on towards their destination, saying no more about the rider.
Eventually, they reached the New World Stock Exchange on Neo Wall Street. Their disguises still had a minute and a half to go so that it would be tight, but doable. They reached the entrance security of the back gatehouse. The security had been beefed up for the chancellors' visit and the whole of downtown Neo Manhattan was crawling with presidential security.
However, the security was expecting them. Kale had hacked the security mainframe the day before and put in an order for ordinance equipment for that day. He then answered the order and set the whole thing up as a simple delivery. It meant that they would be expected as delivery men.
At the gate, they waited impatiently while their clearance was okayed. O began to feel her skin crawling and realised that her disguise was becoming unstable. She looked beside her at Kale and noticed that his face was twitching; Bow too was beginning to come unstable. She started to sweat. Two shock troopers came spilling out of the gatehouse to inspect them personally.
As they walked up to the window, O asked as casually as possible, “Everything good, guys— we kinda got a job to do. They need this ordinance pronto; you should have read the order— sounded really desperate.”
“Your paperwork’s fine,” a voice came from one of the shock troopers, his body covered in black armour, “it’s just we got a visitor today, and we've got to come out and do a little inspection of each vehicle. It’s a pain in the ass, but orders are orders.”
The two troops then went around the vehicle, checking the transport as it hovered there in midair. The three sat looking worriedly at each other as the counters on their wrists reached towards zero. The three transports behind them were feeling just the same level of anxiety. They were so close, but if their disguises failed now, the gatehouse scanners would immediately pick up their new genetic code frequencies. They had to get into the building before that happened.
Suddenly both troops stood to attention. O watched them in the mirror. “They must have just received something on their near transmitters,” she thought to herself. After a second or two, one of the troops jogged into the gatehouse while the other came up to O at the window.
“Sorry about this,” the troop said, “we just got a call saying that some guy is flying through the city like a maniac on an EPB; they think he could be some nut from the Cause coming to create shit. You guys go straight on.”
With that, the force gate opened, its blurred surface disappearing into clarity as it shifted. Bow instantly put his foot down, and they sped on into the underground of the New World Stock Exchange, their disguises fading as they got but a few feet beyond the gatehouse scanners. O looked in the mirror and was relieved to see the other three transports following them. They parked up deep into the underground car park, where there were no longer any scanners and only cameras that Kale could easily hack into.
Once they were down there, they all opened up the transports and began unloading the sentry droids. Kale and some of the others went around them, making last minute checks on their programming. There were fifty in all, and it had taken them years to get ahold of them, but if they got to the chancellor or even just one of his cabinet ministers, then it would be worth it. The carnage created would claim many lives, some of them amongst the men and woman assembled in that car park, but mostly amongst the civilians in the area. The government was always good at making sure that civilian casualties were always high. They controlled the media and the stream of information that the world, so were able to blame the high number of casualties on the Cause. In a world of bio-scanning, you could no longer fake deaths as everyone's heartbeat and life signs are continuously monitored; so you had to create them.
Bow had been a home world shock trooper at one time, stationed on Earth. He had carried out many atrocities in the name of the government within the cities of Earth as well as on the off-world colonies. The government would doctor security footage of the attack so that the blame for the atrocity was put squarely on the shoulders of the Cause. Death often created hatred, and if you could control who got blamed, then you could control who was hated. All you needed was death.
The Cause found themselves trapped in a catch; they needed to fight for the people, but with every fight they found themselves thrown further away from them. In the streets, the very people they swore to protect often openly hated them.
Once the sentry droids were ready, the others began loading up on plasma rifles and photon grenades. They each wore a shield suit that covered them in a thin ion field that looked like green static coating their body. This protected them from some of the lower frequency ammunition that was going to come their way. However, it wouldn’t protect them from a beam of light shot from a photon canon. This high-intensity beam of particle light shoots through your body, splitting each of your body’s cells into their individual atoms.
They primed the sentry droids, the droids instantly becoming animated. They were initially curled up in a ball, but when primed they curl out, stretching their mechanical limbs out like a waking child. When fully stretched out, they resembled mechanical scorpions and were around the size of a man. They each have six mechanical legs that carry their curved body. The body mostly contains ammunition and ion field generators. Jutting out of either side of the body are two large photon canons. These bad boys were some of the best military hardware available, and if you could capture one intact, without being killed by it first, and break through its firewall, reprogramming it, then you had a soldier straight from the depths of Hell on your side.
Priming them was always a worry. You were never sure if someone else, possibly working for the government, had cracked your firewall while the droids were asleep. They could wake up and then suddenly attack you. That’s why it was always useful to check them regularly.
The droids jutted into action. Kale then went over to one of the walls of the building they were within. He brought out a device and scanned the wall.
“This is it,” he called out to the others.
He then motioned to the droids and commanded, “Go on, boys— do your work!”
The droids immediately rushed at the wall, Kale jumping out of the way. Ten of the droids were fitted with drilling equipment and began tearing away at the wall. The twelve humanoid members of the Cause team stood behind them as the droids dug through the wall, their weapons primed.
No sooner were the droids through the wall than the building’s alarm system went off. The droids piled into the wall, followed by the members, O and Bow at their head. The droids at the front had been programmed to get them straight up to the stock exchange itself. The chancellor was giving a speech there that very moment.
In the main stock exchange room, everyone stood silently watching the chancellor give his speech. The day’s trading had been put on hold for the time being. They all watched the great man, once a day trader himself just like them, holding forth, expressing his love for the great manipulators of mon
ey who made planet Earth what it was: glorious!
Suddenly the alarms went off in a dirge, and all of the room’s exits instantly closed. A couple of the metal security shutters came down hard upon peoples’ heads, instantly killing them, scything through their bodies, blood spilling out everywhere. The chancellor stopped dead in his speech as his security team closed around him. Government sentry droids came spilling out on every side of him, creating a ring of protection.
Everyone stood frozen to the spot wondering what was about to happen. The room was filled with the sound of the alarm wailing and the ‘keep calm and stay still’ message playing over and over on the room’s intercom.
Everyone looked around, looking for a sign of action. Surely it wasn’t a drill, they thought. Not during the chancellor’s speech. Some thought they could hear a rumbling below their feet, in fact, they began to feel vibrations through their feet, becoming more violent with each second.
All of a sudden, the ground in the centre of the room began to cave in, forming a large crater. Some people fell into the newly formed pit as it opened up. They kept sliding down its sides, their hands clawing at the debris in an attempt to get back up, but dropping down through the hole. Others were merely thrown onto the ground. The government sentry droids that surrounded the Chancellor aimed their weapons squarely at the pit.
A brief silence ensued. Then a loud boom emerged from the pit, followed by a blinding light. Sparks and smoke shot out everywhere, and people began screaming and running, some of them on fire, green and yellow chemical flames eating into their flesh. Someone had let off a chemical blast in an attempt to clear the room. The pit erupted in a shower of coloured light beams that came shooting out from deep within it. The government droids began pulverising the pit with plasma, and the whole room erupted into a dazzling multicoloured firefight. The exits opened up so that more troops and droids could start piling into the room from outside. People started crushing each other in the stampede to leave the room through the newly opened doors. It quickly became carnage.
Vanda raced through the funnel of traffic, throwing his bike around, his reactions sharpened by his three-second lapse. He had caught the eye of several police pods on his day’s ride, but had managed to avoid any fire from them, and he ignored their repeated warnings on his comms that he risked arrest and death. He didn’t care, his contacts at the government bureau usually got him off any of his more criminally dangerous violations. He had an excellent success rate with his predictions for them and seen as a valuable shifter in their fight against the Cause. He could be afforded a few misdemeanors.
As Vanda shifted his bike upside down through a paper-thin gap between two cargo transits, he looked down and saw the same courtyard above Neo Time Square that he had seen in his vision that morning. Again his mind’s eye saw her face.
It had taken four hours of meditation and another pill to get Vanda’s time lapse down to three seconds that morning. The girl’s pretty freckled face had haunted him for hours, as it had been for weeks now. But only in the visions of that morning had he seen her die. He was struck with further images of her recurring death during meditation; her face shortly before it had gone dead touched deep into his soul.
He dipped the bike down through the thick traffic, the police pods racing down after him, and headed for the courtyard. He ran downwards through the different layers of traffic that clogged the airways, weaving and twisting the bike through the gaps. In his visions, he had been able to view the time on the big clock that covered one of the massive Time Square buildings. It had read 15:08:17. Vanda checked the time in the corner of his helmet. Seven minutes away. He decided to ditch the pods and twisted the bike around some service platforms that stood underneath the huge courtyard. He pushed his manoeuvring of the bike into overdrive as he shot it through gaps barely big enough to fit a man. He noticed one explosion behind him shortly followed by another and realised that he was no longer being pursued. He eased the bike off and then stopped on a service platform. He jumped off of the motorcycle and then swiped his finger across the face of his wristwatch. The bike instantly folded up into a small solid metal backpack, which Vanda picked up and strapped to his back, before heading up to the courtyard.
Usually, he was supposed to report all strange visions to his contact, Dr Kelvin, but the girl’s face had intrigued him. He had decided not to tell Kelvin, but he had also realised that it would be too dangerous to get directly involved. He had gone out on his bike purely to get his mind off of the vision, not to get involved in any way.
Once he had calmed his lapse he had headed out on the bike, but somehow had ended up riding through the city and coming to the precise place of the vision just seven minutes before it happened. He was sure that he had done it subconsciously. When he had looked down, while riding through the gap, he had fully expected to see the courtyard below him, as if he had always meant to be there at that point.
Now he really was getting directly involved.
Vanda walked onto the main boulevard of the courtyard, the huge neon advertising signs of Neo Time Square all around him peddling everything from clone servants to off world mineral stocks, the blue sky but a thin slither above his head. He checked the time: he only had thirty-three seconds with the time lapse.
He stood in the centre of the boulevard and waited. Suddenly a voice came in his ear from his comms link.
“What are you doing, Vanda?” came the voice of Dr Kelvin.
“What do you mean, Doctor?” Vanda calmly replied.
“You’re in violation of your contract.”
“I’m not allowed to be in Time Square?”
“Not now you’re not— leave the area immediately…”
Vanda switched his comms off.
“Shit,” he thought. “They must know about the attack.”
Suddenly the courtyard filled with government shock troopers and battle droids; much larger versions of sentry droids that resemble mechanical tanks. Vanda was looking all about him when the building in front exploded. The same screaming bodies that he had seen earlier in his vision came spilling out. He rushed forward— he still had a couple of seconds before it exploded for real. He felt the heat from the blast rush over him as the explosion went off in real time— he always felt things in the present. Vanda rushed to the spot where he had seen the girl get shot and waited.
He looked around.
There she was, a frantic expression on her face, running for her life, turning now and then to blast the troops that chased her. The battle droids on the courtyard started firing away, incinerating whole crowds of people, the stink of the chemical flames spilling into Vanda’s nostrils. She reached his position.
“I’m Vanda,” he bellowed at her as he grabbed ahold of her.
“Who the heck are you?” she exclaimed in surprise as he took her.
Vanda ripped the backpack off of his back with one hand while he held onto O with the other. The backpack instantly folded out into the bike and Vanda jumped onto it, pulling O onto the back with him. She wasn’t sure what was happening, but as they burst out of there and away from the carnage that crackled on behind them, she felt much safer.
They thundered along through the city traffic, which by now had become completely static due to the attack on the stock exchange. They weaved in and out of it, police pods and attack craft filling the airways in search of them. Vanda saw several police pods that would recognise them in three seconds. He instantly took the bike down through the traffic, the pods missing them entirely. He then saw that directly down through the traffic - a police frigate waiting for them. He immediately brought the bike upright and glided it down a narrow street way that took them below the plusher areas of downtown Neo Manhattan. He raced along, O holding on tightly to him from behind, when suddenly he saw that at a junction just ahead a police pod was about to cross; he instantly dived left, O almost coming off the back.
Vanda decided to dive down into the subterranean innards
s of t
he vast city. Down there amongst the desperate and the deserted, they would be safe.
A few moments later, they were deep down below the fog and no longer in danger. They both got off the bike and Vanda folded it up into a pack again.
O opened her mouth to speak, but before she could let out any sound, Vanda said, “My name is Vanda Kline. I am a shifter and saw you in a vision. I just saved your life.”
“Well, that clears that up, Mr Kline. I don’t recognise…”
“I don’t work for the Cause,” Vanda butted in, having already heard the question, “— I do some contractual work for the government.”
At that O jumped back and brought her fusion pistol out, placing it right up against Vanda’s temple. Vanda just stood there calmly — he, of course, knew what her reaction would be before she knew herself.
“It’s okay,” he calmly said, O’s pistol drilling into the side of his head, “I don’t think I work for them any longer. However, we do need to get out of here and to someone that can hack my chip. Yes, (O was about to ask about it, but Vanda began answering the question before she had the chance) I have a tracking device that doesn’t work so good down here, but will eventually give away our position. Please, I need your help.”
“Why did you take me out of there?” O interjected. “I left friends down there, who possibly needed my help.”
“You would have died— I’ve seen it many times.”
With that O went silent and the two of them headed into the deep labyrinthine streets of lower Manhattan. She knew someone that they could see who would be able to hack Vanda’s chip.
Down there in the lower levels, most of the telescreens were cracked or broken, but the odd one worked and as they passed them they saw the news of the chancellor’s death and those suspected of it. Vanda paused as he saw his face up there on the telescreens. He too was now a wanted fugitive.
Soon he and O were in a bustling collection of tight alleyways encrusted with little shops selling cheap goods. The place was a huge marketplace, and the two of them had to squeeze their ways through the walkways tightly packed with scruffy looking people of all kind. The smell of rotting meat seemed to permeate out of everything and the sun’s rays never made it this far down into the city depths, so the place was lit up with miles and miles of neon lights that hung from every ceiling and ordained every wall. Vanda began to worry that they’d be recognised, but no one seemed to batter an eyelid at them. That was because down at the bottom of the city nobody cared for the fugitives of a government whose jurisdiction doesn’t spread this low.