Molehunt

by Paul Collins

  Only it was not going to be easy.

  A stinging sensation on her leg told her she was being followed. Glancing down, she saw a scorch mark, melted jumpsuit material and an ugly red burn on her flesh. An instant later the pain hit but by then she had snap-rolled aside, narrowly avoiding a second silent pulse of invisible energy.

  Spiffle, she thought. A bit rough when you can’t see it coming!

  She scrambled away on all fours, and then dodged into a laneway packed with market stalls and busy marketeers. Still keeping low she threaded between the stalls, slipped into a quiet alleyway, flicked on her sticky fields and swarmed up the side of a building, and onto its rooftop in a manouevre that kept her profile flat.

  Momentarily safe, she yanked a wirescope out of her belt and pushed it over the edge of the building like a questing worm, flipping a vid screen over her left eye. Its tiny camera picked up activity in the street below, projecting it onto the vid screen.

  In a few seconds she identified her attacker – the alien Envoy. Still cowled, he scanned the market stalls. She had an eerie feeling he was picking up more than just visible light; maybe scanning for individual heat signatures, or other telltale signs she could not imagine: pheromones or skin cells, she assumed he could sense them all.

  Then he looked up – straight at her. His hand movement that followed blurred, but as her screen went dead Anneke felt the heat of the shot that burned off her wirescope. Panicky screams erupted below. Perhaps his hood had fallen off? Anneke didn’t care. By the time the screams had died down she was half a rooftop away.

  The chase that followed reminded her of a similar one a long, long time ago. On that occasion she had been tracked by a horde of inept hunkies. This time it was a frighteningly lethal non-human. Only one, but much worse.

  She wondered briefly about the connection between the alien and the mole, but decided to leave that for another day. She wanted to be sure there would be another day.

  Ssszt! Ssszt! Ssszt!

  Invisible energy beams stitched into the wall beside her, vaporising fist-sized holes and blasting out fragments towards her. Dropping onto her stomach, Anneke belly-crawled under rows of ventilation tubes, leaped to her feet, and broke into a run. So far, she had not returned fire. She was sure if she stopped long enough to scan for a target and take aim, she would be dead.

  Anneke was aware of being scared, but it was an academic awareness rather than a feeling. Her Normanskian musculature evened one aspect of the scenario: the alien did not seem able to run any faster than she could. On the other hand, it did not run any slower. Her reserves were finite. She knew nothing of the alien’s.

  Anneke came to a narrow corridor between high plasteel walls, making her an easy target. But she could not backtrack now. She bolted into the corridor. The walls on either side blurred past her, but a patch of skin between her shoulderblades itched and sweated, as though someone had painted a bullseye there.

  She’d almost reached the end of the corridor when she heard – or sensed – something that made her duck. An energy beam scorched through space where her head had been a split second before. The reek of singed hair filled her nostrils.

  Then she jumped.

  Anneke’s enhanced muscles, combined with the low gravity of the floating cloud city, resulted in her making a spectacular leap twenty metres straight up. Flicking on her sticky fields mid-air, she clawed her way up the last few metres, flinging herself over the top edge of another building. As she did so she heard a pulse hiss by, ionising the surrounding air. Anneke fled across the articulated roof.

  The pursuit continued for the next twenty minutes, by which time she was soaked in perspiration and stank of fear. Anneke received three more pulse burns, one serious. She couldn’t go on like this much longer.

  Anneke spun round a corner, hitting a chest-high parapet. The impact winded her for a moment and she stumbled on, gasping for breath. She had to end this chase, she realised. But how? The alien was implacable and relentless. It would never stop until she was dead – or at least until it got the e-pad back.

  That was it. Give it the e-pad! But she couldn’t just hand it over – not without knowing what was on it. There was no way her belt unit hard drive or the neural jacks in her neck could hold all the memory in the e-pad interface.

  She looked around frantically for a download site. Eight storeys down on the other side of the street was a mall. A sign indicated an e-comm shopfront. How ironic. If the mole discovered she was planning to download the lost coordinates and send them over a public network, he’d have an aneurysm. Pity there was no way to let him know. A dead mole by any other plan is just as dead.

  Sliding over the parapet, she switched on her sticky fields and slithered down the wall, using the scraping end of the thinsword as an improvised brake. I’m getting good at this, but it’s a hell of a way to make a living. At street level she dodged traffic, discarded the blunted thinsword and raced through the mall into the e-comm shop. Throwing a cashcard at the operator, she found a booth at the back, selected hi-speed download, jacked the e-pad in and hit Download All. The interface was the size of a large chair. It lit up impressively, humming and clicking. Dashing out the back, she shot out the lock of the rear door. As she returned, the machine pinged. Anneke felt a rush of emotion, akin to love. Anyone could pick up the first coordinates now, over the Web.

  She quickly typed in her electronic destination and hit SEND. In a blink, the data was gone, for good or ill. Snatching up the e-pad, she ran to the door and flung it out into the mall, before crashing out the back door. ‘Get out! There’s a bomb!’ she screamed at the shocked staff and customers, before exiting. Anneke was halfway up the side of a neighbouring building when the e-comm shop exploded into roiling, smoky flames behind her.

  Did I get away with it? Does it think I went up with the building? she wondered.

  Anneke crossed over a rooftop to a street leading into the mall, and waited. The alien was not far behind her. She watched it stand still amid the scattering, terrified crowd, then home in on the e-pad and pick it up.

  Smart alien. It figured once I had thrown away the e-pad as a diversion, there was no longer any reason not to ash me with heavy artillery.

  The alien fiddled with its belt unit and spoke briefly into the air. If it had been human she would have lip-read what it said, but obviously it was telling the mole that it had the e-pad. It listened, nodded, then turned away and began walking.

  Lost interest? thought Anneke, regarding the blazing mall. I suppose I look dead.

  Flopping onto her back, Anneke heaved a sigh of relief. She was lucky to be alive. Whatever happened, she intended to do research on that species. The alien had to have a weakness somewhere, an Achilles heel. She would find it. And next time, she would be ready. Right now she had other business to attend to.

  Instead of going to her hotel directly to collect the tracker, she detoured slightly and scoped out the Block. It was buzzing, surrounded by hunkies and ambulances. Floating in the air a hundred metres up were the eerily blue platforms of the patrolling Sentinels. She couldn’t see the pilots from there, but the sight sent a chill down her back. Like many of her generation, she wondered who the Sentinels were, and if they were human.

  Still, it looked safe enough to approach and try to pick up any information she could. Anneke blended into the crowd, listening to the conversations around her. Near the ambulances her blood ran cold when she saw Arvakur on a stretcher.

  Forgetting herself, she pushed her way through the knot of people to his side. For a moment she thought he was dead, then his eyes opened and he blinked dazedly. Recognition lit up his face and he grinned weakly. She could see he had bad burns and had lost a lot of blood.

  An orderly tried ushering Anneke away but she ignored him.

  ‘Fancy seeing you here,’ Arvakur said.

  ‘Funny,’ she said, trying to stay cheerful, ‘I was just going to say the same thing.’

  She took his hand and squeeze
d it.

  ‘Just tell me one thing,’ said Arvakur. ‘Tell me you’re not with Brown.’

  ‘I’m not. I’m trying to nail him.’

  ‘To stop him?’

  She nodded. His voice was soft and raspy and his skin was pale. This man on the stretcher seemed a hollow memory of the strong young captain she had met on Se’atma Minor. She turned to one of the medicos.

  ‘Will he be okay?’

  The woman made a face. ‘I’ve seen worse who are still alive.’

  They bundled him into an ambulance pod that rose into the air with a whine of jets, and then streaked away at high speed. There goes another potential date. Anneke watched it vanish into the distance before losing herself in the crowd. She now felt even more determined to exact payback.

  At her hotel she unpacked the tracker and activated it. Reading the mole’s exact location, Anneke frowned. She couldn’t understand why he was where he was: an insignificant service district near the centre of Arcadia, far from the docking points. If she was the mole right now she would be on a swift ship, ordering her swift ship, ordering her straps to fasten and preparing to blast the hell out of there, blockade or no blockade.

  Yet clearly he could not do that. Sentinels had interdicted the floating city. The mole knew this, and was not trying to flee. Yet. He didn’t have the grunt to punch through the blockade. What else? A diversion? A way to distract the Sentinels so he could slip past? Anneke could think of nothing else.

  She checked schematics for his location, all the while growing more perplexed. Then she saw what lay beneath the mole’s coordinates and felt a cold chill.

  Anneke reached the mole’s position in a time that would have surprised his alien. Her tracker told her the mole had already left and was heading towards the space dock. He was moving at walking speed, confident of whatever he had done.

  But what had he done?

  Anneke searched the area, discovering a storage closet. She yanked open the door. Her heart missed a beat. A field shaper lay broken on the floor, next to it a gaping melted hole.

  She leant over it, peering straight down several decks. Molecular acid was burning its way towards the repulsor field generators that kept Arcadia and its one million inhabitants floating in the sky, perfectly and permanently repelled from the gravitational field of the planet below.

  If the generators went out then backups would kick in. The mole must have disabled those as well. He only needed the backups to stay offline long enough for the repulsor field to destabilise, and the city begin to fall. That would secure everyone’s attention and break the blockade. It was hard to believe even the mole would be willing to kill a million humans just to save himself. She should have killed him when she had the chance. Next time, she thought, I’ll pull the trigger, no gloating, no final words, no handing him over to RIM, no forcing him to clear my name, just splattering his head and ending everyone else’s nightmare.

  As she was thinking this Anneke was falling down a droptube, heading to the lowest levels of the city where the generators were based. She stopped three levels up. There she encountered security and had no option but to drop the guard, then she ran, looking for signs that the molecular acid had reached that level.

  It was nearly the last thing she did.

  A hiss above her head made her dive aside in time. She used the sound to calculate the trajectory of the noise with her specialised add-on software. A split second later a single drop of acid fell through the space where she had been standing and hit the floor, which bubbled and blistered instantly. Anneke looked up. A hole appeared in the ceiling, widening as she watched. More acid poured through, pooling on the floor.

  Jumping up, Anneke raced down to the next level, trying to use her field generator to shunt the acid aside. However, her fields were annulled or distorted this close to the generators. No doubt the mole had anticipated that.

  The acid kept burning through. Three minutes later it reached the generators with a loud sibilant sound, like water hitting a hot skillet. Lights blinked on and off several times. Anneke felt a slight yet terrifying lurch, as if the whole world shivered.

  Sirens screamed. A moment later a series of small explosions detonated two levels down. Generators were going, one by one. More eerie shivers ran through the superstructure, making Anneke stumble.

  She ran back to the droptubes, finding several techies cramming into an elevator nearby. She grabbed one and hauled him from the lift while his team took off for the upper levels.

  ‘What the hell are you doing, lady?’ the terrified man screamed at her. ‘Do you know what’s about to happen here?’

  ‘I know. But talk me through it.’

  ‘I got no time for this!’

  ‘You’re not going anywhere till you do.’

  The man struggled for a moment but buckled beneath her Normanskian muscles. ‘Okay, okay. The generators are blowing out. Don’t ask me why. In about six minutes they’ll all be gone.’

  ‘What about the backups?’

  ‘If they were coming online they would have done it by now. Gotta be somethin’ wrong with them, too. It’s crazy. It’s all crazy!’

  ‘What happens when the last generator goes?’

  The man stared at her, fear making him blink stupidly at her. ‘What happens? Why, why, the whole thing goes! What do you think, it’s gonna sit up here in the sky by itself?’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Jeez, how do I know? They built this thing a thousand years ago. It’s an end-of-empire relic!’

  ‘Think!’

  The man, sweating profusely, wiped his sleeve over his face, clearing drops from his eyes.

  ‘It’ll take the field a while to destabilise but then it’ll snowball. Twenty minutes. Tops.’

  ‘How can we get the backups restored?’

  ‘You can’t. They take at least thirty minutes to warm up.’

  ‘Then something else. There’s got to be another way!’

  ‘Listen, I don’t know, I’m just a third-level techie. Jeez. You would have to hook in a mobile generator.’

  ‘Like from a starship?’

  ‘Yeah, that might do. It’s gotta hold the main field, which is already there, see. It wouldn’t be strong enough to create a new field from scratch, but it could hold the old one together, give the backups time to clear their problem and come back online.’

  ‘One last question.’ The man slumped further, whimpering. ‘Where do I hook in the mobile generator?’

  He indicated a place on the schematic of the floating city. Anneke whistled, and then let him go. Seconds later he’d darted into an elevator and was pounding on the ascent pad.

  The mole’s diversionary tactic was brilliant. Anneke manoeuvred the ship she had hijacked under the belly of the floating city, noting the total disarray behind her. Every available ship and skimmer was being used to ferry people off the doomed city. Rats streaming off a sinking ship.

  No doubt the mole was one of those rats, already streaking away into deep space and safety. The Sentinels could not contain such a mass exodus. Anyway, the stream of humanity would probably be jammed solid with others they wanted to arrest, question or ash.

  Anneke checked her watch. Even by the techie’s rough calculation she was cutting it fine. Ironically, if the repulsor field hadn’t been weakening she could never have managed to manoeuvre a spaceship of modern materials close enough to the generator. As it was she would have to effect a ballistic crash-landing, bringing the ship into the precise location before reining it in, almost without power, and cushioning the impact with tractors.

  She was in position just outside the field. Taking a deep breath, Anneke activated the flight sequence. The ship slipped in beneath the city into partial darkness broken only by coruscations of multicoloured sparks as the field harmonics destabilised. At once the field started to affect Anneke. She found it difficult to swallow, and time lapses between the act of willing her body and the execution of that action were slowing, as if she we
re manoeuvring the radio-controlled device several light minutes away.

  Meanwhile, the bulk of Arcadia’s underside flashed towards her, filling the forward screen. She covered her face and braced, hoping the killing field was also down. It was.

  The shock of the impact was minimal. Tractor beams functioned as designed, cushioning the crash then clamping the ship in place.

  Anneke did not waste any time. Within seconds she was outside the ship, dragging the heavy conduit cable with her. Finding the jack took three minutes, her brain refusing to function properly. When she found it, she couldn’t open the panel cover, and had to risk burning it.

  She peered inside at the jack receptor. If she had damaged it slightly there would be no point in doing anything, but it looked okay. Anneke breathed a sigh of relief.

  Her left arm suddenly flopped down by her side, useless and lifeless. Worse, she felt the cold paralysis creeping from her arm to her chest. Then her left leg became sluggish and unresponsive.

  ‘Come on,’ she snapped at herself. ‘Get this done!’

  With her good arm she dragged the cable closer. For one terrible moment it would not reach, it had become snagged on a projection. Anneke yanked it free. Next, she drove the jack nozzle into the receptor until it clicked home. A small control panel beside the receptor displayed instructions and controls.

  She followed the step-by-step process, becoming more dizzy by the second. Confusion clouded her mind. Did it say initiate the lock sequence first and then the field linkage sequence, or was it the other way around?

  What would happen if she got it wrong?

  Anneke took a deep breath, trying to clear her head. Finally she initiated the download from the ship’s generators. The light strobed green. That a good sign? Who knows, who cares? There was no blinking green light for her. She was growing rapidly weaker. The city had moved, and was now slowly and inevitably sliding down the outside of the cone-shaped repulsor field.

  The air was stifling. Perspiration lathered her skin. She remembered another important detail: a byproduct of a degrading field of this magnitude was heat. Lots of heat.