by Adam Thielen
Almost there, he thought.
* * *
Roland watched with amusement as an armored vehicle rolled up to the meeting spot. No one was behind the wheel, but he could sense his sister Desre must be inside. No matter what she planned, her brother had ensured that the vehicle would become ensnared if it tried to escape from back the way it came. Danliti stood ready with his rifle, and another man had a shock-ram, capable of disabling almost any electric vehicle.
In the rear compartment of the armored van, Desre lay with her arms crossed over her chest. Her eyes were closed. She sought tranquility. She cleared her mind and breathed deep and slow. Her aura left her body, floating above the vehicle, observing Roland and his men. The male psion became impatient.
“Come out, Desre!” he called. “Come out, or I’ll have to kill your new toy.”
Desre did not move. She kept her aura clear of Roland, as he would complicate her efforts if he sensed her. Eventually, he and his thug moved toward the van while Dan stood next to the SUV containing the neuro, Kate.
Her aura swooped into the SUV, passing through its layers of metal and plastics. Desre floated in front of Kate, who sat sullen and oblivious. The disembodied seer reached out her ethereal hand, touching Kate on the forehead.
“Hello, Kate,” she said. The hacker jerked her head, jangling the mesh hood about.
“What? Who—”
“Don’t speak,” commanded Desre. “I am here, but so is another thug wondering who you are talking to. Right now, Tsenka and Drew need your help.”
Roland and his man began banging on the armored car, then shooting at the lock. He tried to peer into the glass but could not see inside. “Open this door, you cunt! You have ten seconds.”
“Activating entanglement drives,” Kate said under her breath.
“Huh?” puzzled her guard.
In that instant, Kate’s mind connected to two fairly obsolete supercomputers via quantum-entangled particles that communicated digitally at a speed of six gigabytes per second. Slow by modern standards but easily capable of sending those computers the commands she needed to. The connection put stress on her already degraded synapses and, combined with her lack of sleep, made the compartment spin around her.
The hacker shook it off and commandeered several hundred proxy servers in the mainland for her own use, then followed a list of database exploits for the software Chantech used on their personnel servers, deploying one after another. The seventh one worked, allowing her to create a fake user session and download the records.
She looked up com ID numbers and began sending emergency messages to each of the city’s managers and assistant managers, claiming that a hacking group was attempting to access their account, prompting them to reset their password. One after another refused the attempt, deleting the message.
“Five,” yelled Roland.
Kate queried com manufacturer databases, using the identity numbers she had collected to compile a list of com makes and models. She plugged them into her exploit database and found an older model among them that had no firmware update since its last discovered security hole. She sent that com the message again, then accepted it herself after taking over the device.
“Two!”
The com authenticated Kate into the city’s emergency system, and she executed the safety protocol for the section of the city Desre had told her to.
“Time’s up,” said Roland, starting back toward his SUV.
* * *
The rain poured down on the vampire as she waited. Seven camera bots now surrounded her position, and she began to feel a little nervous that perhaps one or more of them might be a security drone in disguise, just waiting for its moment to strike.
Several officers stood around the fence, content to watch her kneel on the ground. They had received reports that there was a violent uprising exploding on the lower tiers and found themselves intrigued as to why this woman was just waiting.
“Are you here to save the people of Beijing?” a voice boomed from above Cho.
The vampire looked up, realizing it must be a reporter using a voice-link to one of the drones. She shook her head.
“Save them?” she repeated, looking into the camera with a blinking red light, in hopes she could address the people directly. “I cannot save you. Only you can save you.”
“What is your goal?”
“Is there anything you’d like to say to the Chantech board?”
“Are you a New Republic weapon?”
Tsenka did not answer their questions. She heard the sound of metal grinding and felt the metal disc below her vibrate. The former agent activated the cylinders attached at the edge of the circle, and a small flame shot up out of each.
Small carbon fiber shutters inside Cho’s ear canals shut the sounds of the external world out, and she scrolled through a list of music tracks using her HUD. She kept scrolling, passed one called “Thunderstruck”, then looked up at the storm in the sky. One of Matthias’s oldies, she recalled, scrolling back up. Fits the weather at least. She set it to play.
Even with multiple remastering and post-process enhancements, it sounded ancient to her sensibilities. But as it continued to play, her psyche acclimated to the style, and she took a deep breath, nodding along with the beat.
She looked up at the cameras and thought of her vampire mentor and his battle against Makida. You are not allowed to be mediocre, he had told her. She had come for revenge but had started a war and inspired an uprising in the process. Whatever followed, she knew that she would be remembered. That she would be held to account.
She thought of Desre’s version of reality. Perhaps she was delusional, and this life was it. Perhaps she was right, and this moment would repeat a thousand times or already had. It seemed that either way, Cho had been brought to a pivotal moment in her life, if not history, and had better get it right.
While the floating bots trained their eyes on her, Tsenka Cho decided she didn’t want to look like a victim of circumstance. She wanted to look like she had planned this all along, like this was her destiny. And most of all, she wanted the world to know that she was not afraid. Not of the past, present, or future. She wanted them to think that she gave no fucks about what challenges awaited her. She thrust her arms up at the drones with her fingers curled into a fist. All but one, that is.
The grinding stopped and the officers, bystanders, cameras, and viewing audience all gasped as a huge disc, twenty-five meters wide and a full meter thick, dropped through the floor of the sixth tier, taking Cho with it, still holding her profane pose.
The world around Tsenka flew upward. Each tier of the city had a disc vertically aligned with the one Cho rode. As the platform began to tip or wobble, jet propulsion from the cylinders she had placed balanced it out, keeping it descending evenly. They were aided by the slightly pointed shape of the underside of the iron plate.
As part of the protocols, the disc from each tier was timed to release so that they would come together near the ground. The tops were slanted inward to match the bottoms, allowing them to fuse into a solid object. The jets would modify the timing of the plates’ collisions, but in an advantageous way for Tsenka’s objective. The fifth tier’s sky fell away and its ground rushed toward her.
CLANG!
The tier six plate collided with tier five’s. The sound was deafening, like the world’s largest gong. The second platter had been released early and had fallen twenty meters when tier six banged into it. Magnetic plates locked them together and the jets adjusted their angles imperceptibly to keep the discs on course.
Cho slowly lifted her knee off the surface, opting to crouch instead, knowing that when her HUD told her to, she would need to spring upward with all her might. The vibrations from the collision continued to shake her feet and ankles and, as the speed of descent increased, the one-way vehicle began to whistle, then shriek like a banshee. “What the hell was I thinking?” Tsenka yelled.
She looked around as she passed
tier four. The houses were smaller than five and six, but still individually placed and fairly new-looking. Even from high in the air, it appeared that tier four had an abundance of eateries. Tsenka pondered this as she fell. Perhaps it was perfectly placed to attract customers from above and below.
CLANG! The tier four disc joined five and six in their downward flight.
Tsenka gazed down at tier three, the former home of former sergeant Teo Gao. It was packed with a perfectly designed grid of housing and roads, with only a few commercial zones. The buildings were all joined side-to-side, all but a few with completely identical designs. All of them were five stories tall, outside of the penetrating skyscrapers.
Each tier seemed to have more people standing in the streets than the last, protesting, fighting, and cheering. The third level was no exception, with roughly double the total number of the upper echelons.
CLANG! Again, the octave was lower as the stack of iron thickened. Tsenka wasn’t sure if her feet were going numb or if the initial collision was getting smoother and less jarring.
The first thing she noticed about tier two was that it was dark, at least compared to tier three. Cho looked up, and the sky looked like a normal cloudy day but simply discharged a lower amount of luminescence. Teo had told her it was the home of the nocturnal population. Dim neon lights lined the downtown district filled with clubs, halls, and bars. Houses were small nondescript blocks, and in contrast with tier three, the streets were barren.
CLONG! Cho’s HUD warned her that the counter would soon reach zero. It was a six-digit readout that passed under one hundred thousand when the stack entered tier one airspace. It turned from green text to red and began to flash. The vampire cleared her mind and prepared to leap.
* * *
“Wait!” shouted Desre Somer. She had climbed into the driver’s seat of the armored car, so as to be in full view of Roland and his men.
Her brother turned to face her. “I knew you were in there. Now get out here!” He stepped closer to the van then cocked his head to the side.
“What the shit happened to your face?” Roland turned to Nurat, then back to Desre. He switched off his crown, unable to resist the desire to be surprised. “Dan… did you shoot my sister in the face?”
Dan’s eyes moved to the dirt at his feet. “Yes.”
Roland doubled over laughing. “Oh, Danny, you are lucky I like you.” He righted himself and looked at her bruised face again. “Serves you right, slut. Now get out of the fucking car.”
“Let Kate go,” demanded Desre, gripping the steering wheel. “You know I can’t escape. You have me. But I’m not coming out until she’s safe.”
Roland, his gun already in his hand, put the tip of it to his chin, considering his options. He pointed it at Desre, then holstered it. “Alright,” he said. “I don’t have time for this nonsense.” He looked to Dan then pointed at the SUV. “Get her out.”
Danliti nodded and moved to the back of the vehicle. He had just reached the door when a loud clanging sound echoed through the air. Roland held up his palm to stop Dan. Something about the sound unnerved him. He switched his crown back on and looked to Desre.
“What was that?” he asked her, his eyes managing to widen even more than usual.
“Sounded like a bell to me,” said Desre, who couldn’t help but grin. “I wonder for whom it tolls.”
Confusion strained Roland’s face. He glanced back at his SUV, where Dan looked at him expectantly, and then back at Desre. A second clang rang in their ears, this time at a lower octave. The psion rushed up to the windshield of Desre’s car.
“What is that!” he screamed, slapping the hood of the vehicle.
“That is the woman you wanted to meet,” taunted Desre. “Hurry, and maybe you can catch her.” She knew that Kate wasn’t leaving that SUV now, and she had to hope she could frenzy her brother.
It worked. Roland front-kicked the grill of her car and then ran back to his own, stopping at the door and turning his head to face Desre. “Whatever you think you have done, you have just ensured this bitch’s demise,” he said, hopping into the passenger seat and yelling at his driver to gun it toward the city, his men in tow. On their way, Dan, sitting across from Kate, pointed his gun at her head, then looked to Somer for confirmation.
CLANG!
Roland stared at the woman as she sat deathly still. Blood streamed from her nose, then around her lips, down under her chin, then crept down her neck, toward her shirt. The lousy whores tricked me, Somer thought, then pushed his doubt aside. Despite his anger, Roland did not want Kate dead, he wanted her alive, so he shook his head at Dan.
“Not just yet,” he said, then connecting his com to Chantech intelligence services. “I want to know what’s making that sound, and where,” he demanded.
“Goodbye, brother,” bade Desre as his vehicles departed, kicking up dust behind them. She powered on her own car and began to follow him, but the seer let him get a healthy lead on her first.
* * *
With several pillars destroyed, Drew calculated a small but non-negligible probability of structural failure if another nearby pillar were to fall. He sprinted as fast as his mechanical legs would take him, which was not very. He went past the fenced-off area, putting the chain-link between himself and the Behemoth.
CLANG, Drew heard in the distance. He was running out of time.
There was a pillar not too far away that could be sacrificed if needed, but should the walker destroy it and a few more between the two locations, Drew figured the stresses on adjacent columns could prove too much to resist, and the chain reaction would bring the entire city down. It was a worst-case scenario, but even with a minuscule chance of it playing out, he could not risk it.
As the dust slowly came to rest, targeting lasers assisted the machine’s vision in finding Drew and locking on with its Gatling guns. The android moved behind an abandoned and rusted-out truck. This did not dissuade the walker. The guns made a sharp buzzing noise as they fired several hundred rounds per second each, cutting through the rust like tissue paper. Drew lay flat while the guns sliced the vehicle in half with a horizontal arc of constant fire.
CLANG! The gong repeated, cutting through the noise of the barrage.
Metal tore from the truck’s body and pinged against Drew’s frame. Rounds sliced into the robot’s right elbow joint, tearing his lower arm off. Drew lifted to his knees and glanced at his stump. He then looked to the walker through the truck’s window holes. The machine was not finished destroying the antique and began charging the particle cannon. Drew got up and ran out from behind the truck. He realized he had no choice but to risk one more pillar and made it behind one right as the cannon fired, whitewashing the ground, ceiling, and building textures for a brief moment. The center of the truck imploded downward while the front and rear thirds separated and exploded away in opposite directions.
CLANG! This time the noise was much louder. The sound waves rattled the windows and metal siding of nearby buildings.
Drew knew how the Behemoth was calculating its pathing decisions, but he didn’t know if it would chase him further. He didn’t know if it would realize the peril it placed everyone in by destroying the city’s supports. The android picked a rock from the ground, peeked out from behind the column, and threw his improvised weapon. It bounced off the circular waist joint above the walker’s legs. Again the particle cannon began to glow... but then dimmed. The walker then clomped forward, crashing through the chain-link fence, entering the forbidden circle to get a clear shot at Drew.
CLONG! the ceiling above roared. Drew’s sensors felt the ground quake with the reverberations of tons of metal colliding above.
The robotic man pulled a small cylinder from one of his chest cavities and tossed it into the air. It arced high then came down toward the walker as it reached the center of the recessed circle, exploding in a bright flash of light and an electromagnetic pulse directly in front of the Behemoth’s upper torso where its sensory a
rray was located.
A shrieking sound took the place of the blast from the concussion grenade, quickly growing in volume. Blinded, the metal monster stopped in its tracks, rotating the metal collar that contained various cameras so as to bring the rear-facing ones to the front. Its AI then decided it needed to discern the cause of the growing noise coming from above it. It bent the knee joints forward, then leaned back with its body, as if taking part in a limbo competition.
Just as the Behemoth positioned itself to look up, the huge column of stacked iron plates slammed into it. Sparks flew and the stack pushed the walker flat against the ground, then followed it several meters into the foamcrete landing zone, finally flattening it with over twenty thousand tons of metal traveling at over thirty meters per second. The Behemoth was dead.
Fire shot up from the edges of the impact, then quickly receded. The ground shook, and all glass within a kilometer shattered. Nearby parked car alarms began to howl. The shock wave of compressed air flung Drew’s metallic body back toward a large lot of old machines and piles of scrap metal. He bounced off the side of a shipping container, landing on his stomach. The android’s motor functions failed to respond, and a team of nano-machines went to work attempting minimalist repairs to get him up and moving.
* * *
“Do you think Ms. Cho went rogue in East Asia?” asked Perry Walters, continuing his interview with Kirsty Blain.
Kirsty shrugged. “I ain’t really part of that world, but you know hows government stuff is. Just like the movies, lying and coverin’ arses.”