SINdicate

by J. T. Nicholas

  “Of course,” he said. But that hunger was still in his voice, and it did little to assuage my doubts.

  “My lead,” I grunted, and he just nodded.

  We rounded the last corner and came face-to-face with not one, not a trio, but six security types. Two of them were wearing the same slacks and blazers as the guys I’d disabled in the elevator, but the other four… The other four were NLPD. And not just regular cops. They wore the battle rattle and ballistic helmets of SWAT. And they were carrying the fully SOPMOD-ed ZR-8 assault rifle, the successor to the venerable M8. Worse, I recognized one of them.

  I was shocked as hell to see the hulking form of Tommy Thompson, but there was no mistaking his young and open face, even behind the Lexan of his visor. How the rookie had gotten tapped for SWAT, I had no idea. It probably said something about just how thin NLPD had been stretched over the past month, but I felt the bile rising in my throat at the thought of what I was about to do.

  There would be no bluffing our way past these men, not with four NLPD officers on the other side. Even if they didn’t know me from the force, they were cops, trained to observe, to be on the lookout for wanted criminals. They would, sure as shit, recognize one of their former brothers in blue who was now topping every most wanted list. Talking wasn’t an option.

  I moved to the first security guard, aware of Al’awwal moving behind me. I didn’t want to shoot anyone, but I knew that we might not have a choice. The guard was surprised by my action—they might have been looking for something, but they clearly hadn’t expected to find it right after they got off the stairs. I grabbed the first guy by the lapels of his blazer and spun, dropping my weight as I snapped him around in a semicircle, sending him stumbling into his compatriots. I didn’t do any real damage, but it did get him momentarily entangled with his friends in a confusing bundle of limbs and weapon harnesses. Enough of a tangle that no weapon popped up immediately to put three into my chest. I was in their midst, and Al was right on my heels. Close enough that the carbines would be of limited use.

  That still left us outnumbered three to one. And they all had sidearms.

  Cursing under my breath, I snapped out a front kick, catching the guard I’d sent tumbling into his fellows. I didn’t hit body armor, nor had I expected to—the boys in the elevator hadn’t been geared up, either. The man folded in half and fell backward, worsening the clusterfuck of bodies. And buying me time to draw my gun.

  Al’awwal hadn’t been idle. He’d reacted almost as quickly as I had, peeling off to the side. One of the SWAT officers—not Tommy—had avoided the initial tangle by lunging to the side and flattening himself against the wall, letting the parade of bodies pass him by. Al was on him in a heartbeat, not bothering to draw his own weapon, pushing the officer’s ZR-8 up and away, so the muzzle pointed at the sky. Al’awwal used the weapon strap against the officer, yanking it first up and then down and over, pulling the man off balance. He dropped to the floor, and I had just enough time to see Al drop, knees to chest, on top of him. I winced and, despite everything, silently prayed that the officer’s body armor would protect him from the flail chest that particular technique could generate.

  Then the others were back, balance regained, and coming at me. I couldn’t tell who had pulled iron and who hadn’t, but I knew that with a gun in my hand, I was fair game. Hell, even without it, I was fair game, and one mistake by me or Al’awwal and we were as good as dead. Al was finishing with his target, rolling away and to his feet, and I knew if I backed up, I’d clear a lane for shooting, and not only would I be dead, but Al with me.

  I couldn’t back up, so I pressed forward. I was already at damn-near grapple distance with the officers. I couldn’t afford to be grabbed, particularly not with Thompson in the mix. With his jiu-jitsu training, I’d likely be screwed even without the four other bodies bearing down on me. With them… Well, I definitely didn’t want to be grabbed. The SWAT guys were good, trained to move and fight as a unit, but that training focused on things that went bang. They weren’t supposed to get to hand-to-hand distance. Individually, I’m sure they were all skilled, but in the tight confines of the hallway in front of the service elevator, they got in each other’s way.

  Which is the only thing that kept me alive in those first few seconds.

  I intentionally angled away from Thompson—I knew the big man had skill, and there was no way I could deal with him while worrying about the others. So I broke one of the cardinal rules of footwork and took a big crossover step with my left foot, stepping past my right foot as I moved forward, pivoting on the left as it landed. If you got caught in the middle of the step, with your feet crossed, your balance was shit, but if executed well, you could cover a lot of ground in an unexpected direction. I executed it well.

  It put me beside an NLPD officer, one who still held his ZR-8 in both hands. He had been raising it to butt-stroke me, but I stepped clear around him, taking his flank and putting him bodily between me and the other officers—who were now moving in the wrong direction. It put me against the wall. Not the best place to be, since it limited my mobility, a key to surviving against multiple attackers, but it also insured that none of them would be getting behind me. I was in a tight spot, though. I couldn’t afford to simply knock the officer I’d stepped around down and hope he forgot where the trigger was…. And yet, I didn’t want to shoot him either. I didn’t have a lot of options, and the most effective were also the most nasty. He was going to be in for one hell of a headache.

  As I cleared the officer, I punched forward with my forty-five, careful to keep my trigger finger flat along the slide. I rammed the barrel into the side of his neck, below the ear and behind the jaw. He twitched once and dropped hard. He was still conscious, but his eyes were wide and locked with tendrils of pain as the blow overloaded his occipital nerves. I felt a weird surge of triumph and regret as the officer dropped—I needed to take these guys down, but dammit, I still thought of myself as one of them. But the victory, such as it was, didn’t come without cost.

  I managed to raise my left arm, hand protecting my cheek and jaw, elbow covering my upper ribs as the next officer reached me, his rifle already in full swing. I rolled with the motion as much as possible as the polymer stock smashed into my shoulder. I felt the blow from my fingertips all the way to my head, but only for a moment. Then my left arm went numb and tingly, hanging loosely at my side. There was a look of victory in the officer’s eyes as he raised the rifle once more to finish the job.

  And instead caught a couple hundred pounds of flying synthetic as Al’awwal bowled bodily into him.

  I didn’t have time to see what became of that, because three more officers were still moving toward me—including Thompson. Feeling was starting to return to my arm, and I managed to raise it as the security guard came in swinging. I covered up and took the blows on my arms, protecting my ribs and head, but it gave them the opening they were waiting for. One of the officers lowered his head and shot in at my legs, looking for a single leg takedown to drop me to the ground. If that happened, it was over for me. No way I could fight off three of them on the ground.

  The setup wasn’t ideal, and that saved me. The security guard, still actively pummeling me, blocked the best line to my lower extremities. The wall at my back further complicated things, forcing the officer to shoot in from the side, with only a couple of feet of viable space to maneuver. Had he managed to get ahold of my leg from that angle, it wouldn’t have been pretty. Knees really only bend in one direction.

  But he didn’t manage to get a grip on me. As he shot in, I broke off my defensive posture and launched both my hands forward, creating a wedge in front of me that split through the wild swings of the security officer. I didn’t bother striking him, instead using the opening to drop my right arm—the one still working at normal efficiency—into the crook of his neck and shoulder, and then twisted, using the motion of my arm, torso, and hips to send him s
pinning into the wall…and directly into the path of the charging officer.

  They both went down, neither really hurt, but on the ground and, at least for the moment, out of the fight. A quick glance showed me Al’awwal on his back on the ground, the officer he’d tackled lying on top of him, his back to Al’s chest. The synthetic had his legs wrapped around the officer’s hips and his left arm wrapped around his neck, hand in the crook of his right elbow. His right hand was on the back of the officer’s helmeted head, locking in the choke. I hoped that Al’awwal was just planning on putting the officer to sleep and not killing him outright—a very real possibility with the choke he was employing—but I didn’t have time to worry about that. The cop and security guard to my left were still trying to get untangled from each other and back to their feet, but I was looking straight into the eyes of Thomas Thompson.

  He had dropped his rifle, and it dangled from his harness, barrel down and away. But in his meaty hands he held his sidearm, a standard-issue nine millimeter. He looked me right in the eye. “Drop it, Campbell. Don’t make me shoot you.”

  He should have shot me. All the rules of engagement said so, and it would have been a justified shoot in anyone’s book. In that situation, you didn’t stop to talk. You pulled the trigger and went home to your family. In another time, another place, I would have gotten all over Thompson for not taking the shot when he had the chance. Just this once, though, I was glad the big man hesitated.

  Because I didn’t.

  I pulled the trigger. Repeatedly.

  I was firing from the hip, but the distance was short enough that it didn’t matter. I held the forty-five tight against my body and used my entire torso to aim, like the turret on a tank. It was risky, but Thompson had me dead to rights. I fired off three rounds in less than a second, and all three found their target.

  In his vest.

  I’m an asshole, but I’m not that big of an asshole.

  Still, the shots struck like hammer blows. They didn’t knock him down. That’s just netshow bullshit. But imagine three hard punches to the sternum. Sure, it might not knock you on your ass, but it sure as shit is going to hurt and make your attention wander just a bit. I was moving right behind the shots, darting forward as soon as I stopped pulling the trigger. Conventional wisdom said to move to Thompson’s outside, angling away from the gun, but also in the direction that the human hand and wrist had the most limited range of motion. I moved to the inside, instead.

  Thompson’s reaction to the impacts—and probably the sheer surprise of getting shot by someone with whom he was friendly—had thrown his gun hand wide as his other hand moved instinctively to the impact sites. I stepped inside his gun arm, driving my left hand, palm open, into his left forearm. The pressure trapped that arm against his chest, if only for a second, giving me the opening to deliver a straight right. I didn’t put that right into Thompson’s face. The visor of his ballistic helmet would have shrugged off any blow, even given that I was holding a three-pound chunk of steel in my fist. Instead, I drove the barrel of the forty-five into his exposed gun arm, striking just beneath the point of the bicep. I put the full weight of my body into that shot, carrying it forward with the long stride I’d taken to reach Thompson.

  It wasn’t a nice thing to do. The barrel dug into his medial antebrachial cutaneous nerve and I knew from personal experience the lightening arcs of pain the strike would send up and down his arm. More importantly, the blow, delivered properly, would cause numbness and muscle weakness in the arm and hand.

  I delivered it properly, and Thompson’s gun dropped from his nerveless fingers to dangle from his sling.

  Then, without missing a beat, he smashed his helmeted head full into my face.

  I went down.

  Hard.

  The rim of his helmet had caught me just above the bridge of the nose. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I’d heard the crunch of breaking cartilage. Blood poured down my face, and pretty lights and colors flashed in front of my eyes. All that happened as I fell, but I tried my best to compartmentalize the pain, to focus on the fact that if I slipped up, even now, it would mean capture or death.

  As my butt hit the carpet, I threw myself back and to the side, rolling over my left shoulder in a move I’d practiced a thousand times on the mats. It wasn’t nearly as smooth on the carpet, with a tangle of injured men scattered about, but I managed to pull it off, rolling awkwardly back to my feet.

  I had an instant, no more, to assess our situation. Al’awwal was on his feet but pressed up against the wall with the two remaining officers tight on him, grabbing and pummeling. Three of the enemy were down for the count, and we’d managed to cut the odds from three to one to three to two, doubling our chances. But not without cost. My head was ringing and my left arm still responding sluggishly, and in that brief moment, I caught the flash of bright red standing out against Al’awwal’s skin as well.

  Then the moment passed, and Thompson was on me, barreling in like a bull, head lowered, trusting in his helmet to absorb anything I could offer. I’d lost my forty-five in the midst of the roll. I couldn’t remember dropping it, but my head was spinning from the pain of the broken nose and maybe a concussion. My legs felt wobbly beneath me, so I did the only thing I could. I shoved my own arms out in front and sprawled, absorbing the charge of the bigger man. Thompson still knocked me backward, despite the nearly forty-five degree angle I was making with my body, my boots sliding along the carpet, but at least he didn’t get ahold of me. His right arm—his gun arm—was moving even more sluggishly than my left arm, still suffering from the pistol punch to the biceps.

  “Fucking stop already, Campbell,” he growled at me. “It’s over.” His left arm was clamped around my neck, right arm reaching—weakly—for my hip.

  “Sorry, brother,” I said. “Can’t do that.”

  He grunted and exploded into movement once more, dropping to one knee while keeping his torso upright, and then passing his rear leg to the front, switching the knee that was on the ground, and his body flowed forward, inside my sprawl, arms reaching around to the tops of my legs. If he completed the technique he would have lifted and dumped me, smashing me to the ground, and almost certainly dropping right on top of me. Given my current state, the only advantage I had was mobility. If Thompson scooped me, it was over.

  As he shot in, he had no choice but to release his controlling grip on my neck. He tried to weave out of my own grip on his, using the quickness of the maneuver to take me by surprise. I’d been expecting the move, or something like it, and I responded by rolling my right hand, forcing his head around as I pivoted. I continued the motion with my right arm, ending in what many Chinese-inspired arts would have called a low bong-sau, framing Thompson out and away from my legs while simultaneously smashing my left palm into the side of his helmet. Not waiting to see the reaction, I freed my right arm and slammed a barrage of hammer fists onto the back of his head. He managed to stay on his feet for a few heartbeats before his legs went boneless and he dropped to the ground.

  I immediately disengaged and scanned around, trying to assess Al’awwal’s situation, but there was no need. It was over. He stood over the bodies—I hoped just unconscious and not dead—of the last two cops. He had a nasty cut over one eye that was oozing blood and a split lip. Other than that, he seemed to have fared better than me. Well, he hadn’t had to deal with Thompson.

  Judging by my ragged breathing, the entire fight had lasted a minute, maybe two. I surveyed the bodies on the floor, watching for the rise and fall of chests. Everyone seemed to be breathing. I didn’t doubt that some of the damage would be lasting, maybe permanent, but at least we hadn’t dropped any bodies. I found Al’awwal’s eyes and saw the emotion burning there, anger and fear and excitement. And hope. Hope that we might actually pull this off. Hope that the data his father had made his life’s work would have meaning.

  I opened my mouth to spe
ak, but before I could, the elevator dinged, and the doors opened, revealing Silas’s pale face. No doubt, he had been watching the whole thing on the lab’s cameras and had waited until we had finished the job before triggering the doors. Not that I could blame him. With his conditioning, he wouldn’t have been much help, and had we lost, he was the last hope for the revolution.

  “Time to go, gentlemen,” he said.

  Time. And past time.

  Chapter 22

  “Did you get it?” Silas asked as the elevator doors closed.

  He seemed completely unconcerned about the pile of bodies we’d left in the hallway, and a very un-Silas-like edge of excitement burned in his tone.

  “We got it,” I replied. “Whatever it might be.”

  “Good. But we have problems. Police have entered the building and begun systematic searches.”

  “Yeah. We kinda noticed.” I was probing at my nose as I spoke, wincing through the pain as I tried to determine if it was broken. The bleeding, at least, had stopped, but damn did it hurt. Al’awwal held a folded bit of gauze against the cut above his eye, hoping to stem the flow of blood there, as well. Our lab coats, mediocre disguise that they had been to begin with, were now useless, dirtied and bloodied in the scuffle.

  “Our exit plan has been compromised. And it is only a matter of time before questions are raised about this elevator. A matter of rather short time, I imagine.”

  Silas had stopped the elevator between floors, giving us a few minutes to think in relative safety. Well, so long as the bad guys didn’t regain control and guide the elevator to a convenient location the cops and security folks had turned into an abattoir, anyway.

  “What’s the situation?” I asked. I gave up on my nose. If it was broken, there wasn’t anything I could do about it now, so I resolved to just deal with the pulsing throb of pain that shot from my nose throughout the rest of my face and, for some reason, settled at the base of my skull with every heartbeat.