Nanoshock

by K C Alexander

  My legs screamed. Thigh muscles burned. The turrets didn’t see me – and if dogdick stupid operators weren’t the reason, I’d shoot someone on principle.

  “Where the fuck is she going?” Damrosch demanded, shrill on the comms.

  “To get herself killed,” Lindsay snarled.

  Feliz’s voice crackled with impatience. “Riko, stay with the team.”

  Nooooope.

  My glove sheared down to a thin layer as I sprinted across meters of siding. Vanished entirely in a wisp of smoke as the groove hit my tech fingers. An additional layer of metal grinding against metal made the cacophony worse, grated nerves and ear canals and my body right down to the bone.

  Finally, a turret saw me coming.

  It raised its sights, started shooting reams and reams of ammo before it locked on. Two seconds and I’d be too close to target.

  Only got one.

  Bullets slammed into my right hand, hit the assault rifle I carried outstretched for balance. The impact numbed my arm to my elbow, but not so much that I didn’t feel my fingers snap when the momentum tore the Sauger from my grasp. I screamed bloody fucking murder as it sailed into the chaos, stumbled with it. Agony, fiery splinters shoved into every nerve of my hand and all the way up into my brain, howled.

  So much for the ugly hum I fought. Between bullets and pain, I ran out of processing power for anything else.

  I didn’t stop. Wouldn’t.

  I’d seen the double doors behind the turrets. And where turrets had been set up, something juicy lay beyond.

  Every thudding footstep, every flex of muscle to keep me upright and moving hurt so bad, but it didn’t matter now. What was done was done; street rule number two: broken bones and bullet holes mend. Just don’t get killed on the way to the win.

  Wrenching my sliding fingers out of the seam, I launched off my vertical runway and sailed over the turrets.

  Landing, I admit, wasn’t nearly as cool as I’d hoped. I collided with the doors, absorbed the impact on my tech arm, hip and leg. My knees knocked together so hard that I felt it through the armor, head slamming against the inside of my helmet. My damaged hand crunched, raw torture rolling tears and sweat down my face. Don’t care who says otherwise, without pain dampeners – which were a stupid risk among the reckless – the flesh does what it does. Tears of pain are as regular as blood and piss.

  I fell gracelessly to the floor and sucked in gasps of air through gritted teeth, body locked in a clenched spasm until I could get ahold of it.

  “Holy shit,” Damrosch said on the comms. “She did it.”

  “Get those turrets offline,” Feliz ordered.

  Oh, so now I was the hero?

  Extra nope. With that bag of dicks Malik wouldn’t touch, just for flavor. I’d warned him I’d do what I could to get ahead of his people. I’d played nice all the way here. Now I had the perfect excuse to keep them off my back.

  I wasn’t just being a bitch. If I let them tail me, Feliz would demand access to every bit of data and I’d have to shoot her if she found anything I needed to hide. Like any more evidence incriminating me in a series of mercenary flesh trades. Or maybe that I was somehow involved with the necro jacking of the bandwidth back in the Vid Zone.

  The others wouldn’t like it if I shot their coordinator.

  So I’d have to shoot them too.

  Which Reed wouldn’t like.

  Fuck it all. Saving their stupid lives was the easier option. They could thank me later.

  I struggled to my feet, gave the machines a cursory glance. The extra thick guard protecting the processors didn’t cover the back end. Could circle round and rip out the targeting, but fuck it. I wasn’t wasting four bullets of my six-shot Adjudicator on tech, nor did I want to risk electrocution.

  Leaving the turrets to their rapid fire spray, I turned my back on the group and kicked the doors.

  They slid open.

  “Riko!” shouted Feliz.

  “Fuck you, traitorous bitch,” Lindsay yelled at the same time. I wondered if his face was red. “I’m going to jam this gun up your ass so hard, you’ll wish you were never born!”

  “I’ll let you know what I find,” I said as the doors closed behind me. “Stay in that hall and you’ll be fine.”

  A slew of voices, curses, orders crackled through the comm. Too late for me to make sense of them. I pulled my helmet off, dropped it behind me as I studied the new hall.

  Always with the halls.

  Always with the metal on metal on boring.

  Sighing, I lifted the Adjudicator from my harness and paced silently onward. Fortunately for me and my fuckingly bad luck of late, I could only reliably use the heavy gun in my left hand. I’d fired it once in my right, and the kickback had nearly shattered my forearm. Lesson learned. Not that I could right now.

  My flesh hand burned. A trail of blood spatter left behind me meant enough blood loss that I’d need a recharge, some protein boosts, and enough alcohol to put everything else to sleep. Either that or Orchard would look at me with those sympathetic eyes again.

  Just what I didn’t need.

  Too late to worry about it now. Between the bone rattling landing I’d only barely achieved and the ache in the back of my head, I wasn’t walking out of this one unscathed anyway. May as well add some blood to the bruises. Made for a better story. No shit, there I was in a necro factory…

  The first door on my right was closed. No windows on either side, no signs of anything around it. I paused, metal hand tightening on my weapon. Last time I’d been in a place like this, it’d been crawling with ambulatory meatsacks torn to shreds by godknowswhat. Each other, maybe. More than one door like this had spewed murderous necros.

  Sometimes, I still heard the screams as they shredded our last teammate alive. A corp kid. A rookie.

  He hadn’t gone pretty.

  My breath shook, and I was glad I’d tossed the comm. I could feel my blood humming in my ears; stress made the throb in my head worse. So bad that my eardrums vibrated with the interference, overwhelming pain.

  I closed my eyes. Took another deep breath. Let it out slow.

  Adjudicator raised, I reached out and nudged the keypad with the heel of my flesh hand. That hurt, too. Everything smegging hurt. I’d deal.

  The door slid open.

  I braced, flinching. Which pissed me off more. I was better than this.

  Especially since nothing came at me. Nothing moved in the room. Nothing even decorated it. No furniture, no lab desks, no chairs. Bare floor and bare walls, not white. Thank fuck, not white. Metal walls, unpainted, lit to a faint sheen by fluorescent lights built into the ceiling.

  Something, I realized as I looked up at them, I hadn’t considered.

  If this place was so empty, why were the lights on? They’d all said it was empty. Greg had even logged it as up for sale. The whole area had been buried under that façade Channing had blown, and its entry hidden.

  So why the lights? Default generator?

  Maybe I was overthinking it. Hooking into the power grid wasn’t that hard.

  I proceeded down the corridor, passed doors that opened under a simple tap of the locking screens. Scoped them from the outside before continuing. Door after door, hall after hall. All empty. All lit.

  My nanos eventually sealed the shredded meat ammo had made of my hand, knitted the bones I hadn’t set. I’d have to re-break them to get them straight again, but I didn’t have time now.

  Another door slid open, this time without my triggering it. I immediately leapt to the side, gun up, shoulder blades colliding with the opposite wall. Another sharp jolt to my head had me wincing, but not nearly as bad as the guts that had sloshed up into my throat. I breathed so hard, I hurt.

  At least the Adjudicator didn’t shake in the unyielding grip of diamond steel. Even if the rest of me sure as shit did.

  “Zen it,” I whispered. “There’s nothing here.”

  Nothing but a bank of monitors lined up along
the far wall. The first ray of cancerous sunshine today. “Hello, babies.” I dropped my arm, barrel pointed at the floor. No cameras mounted anywhere in sight. No turrets; lucky me. Nothing but empty floor and metal walls.

  With twisted fingers, I poked at the various dashboards built into a counter beneath the digital ribbon. It didn’t take me long to figure it out. I was no linker, much less one of Indigo’s caliber, but I knew my way around standard stuff. The netware installed in my metal arm allowed me to bypass minor security measures, which provided my first clue that it was my turn to be sniffing the wrong ass.

  Or in this case, assholes.

  No data found. Please try a different command.

  My lips tightened as I ran input after input. Line after line of data scrolled down the screen, most involving systemware and mechanics. No matter what I tried, large text blinked on every monitor at the end of every scroll.

  No data found. Please try a different command.

  Son of a necro whore.

  18

  A helmet hit the ground at my feet as I strolled back into the blistering heat. It only kind of bounced, leaving a dent in the softened asphalt. I nudged it off my boot. “Hey,” I said brightly, “you made it.”

  Lindsay, Bahn and Feliz faced me in a semicircle, helmets off and murder in every stare. Lindsay’s fists clenched and unclenched, his blue eyes spitting raw hatred. “You are the worst–”

  I frowned at him. “If you start frothing, Lindsay, I’m putting you down.”

  “That is fucking it!” He launched himself at me with his whole body, tense as the iron rod shoved down his throat. Skill be damned. I caught him chest to chest, staggering under his weight, and took the opportunity to slam my head into his. He howled as the bridge of his nose cracked, jerked back and stumbled with his hands covering his streaming nose.

  I swore upside down and sideways, holding my forehead with my crooked right hand. Don’t care how badass I am, my forehead had no reinforcement. It hurt.

  Feliz stepped in, seizing me by the collar of my armor and hauling me close enough to feel the fury burning in her eyes. “You left your team,” she gritted out. I tracked Banh circling in my peripheral, heading me off at the back. “You left us to fight through the mess instead of finishing the mission and getting Channing out.”

  I grabbed one of her wrists. “Is he still alive?” I demanded.

  A curt nod.

  “Then he did his job.”

  “You bitch–”

  My only working set of fingers bit down on her wrist so hard that her skin paled. The pressure I cinched in wasn’t enough to shatter bone, or so my optic reading assured me. Instead, as she let me go with a jerk, I stuck a leg out and yanked her arm past me like a dance gone very wrong.

  She tripped on my foot, and with my help, whirled right into Banh as she came at me. Shouldn’t have discounted Lindsay. As the women tangled together, struggling to right themselves, a hand twined into my hair. Pulled hard enough that my back bent before I could rotate into it.

  That was mothercunting twice.

  Fire crackled across my scalp as roots pulled; I spared a moment of empathy for Father Assmichael and his scruffy beard. Shortlived. I pulled an arm up, too late to brace. “Fucking bitch,” Lindsay panted, and drove his fist into my face.

  It hit my blocking arm, but without strength behind it, the curve of my elbow slammed into my own face. The edges of my armor gouged in to my skin. My lip split open.

  “Cunting traitorous street trash!” he yelled, going for another shot.

  Enough was goddamn enough.

  I always carry interceptors. Knives, steels – hell, even swords come in handy, though the short ones are easier to conceal. Only thing that made me think they weren’t out to kill me was the lack of sharp things in their hands.

  I wasn’t as nice. They got their chance.

  I snatched the serrated blade from my harness, flipped it edge out. Lindsay went for another punch, fists honed to hurt, and I slashed out and up – caught his hand and my own hair in the edge and yanked.

  My hair pulled. Roots tore. Lindsay howled as hunks of my hair fell to the ground. Blood soaked a good portion.

  I snapped upright, grabbed Lindsay’s arms – his hand bled like a bitch – and used his effort to leap back. The momentum fueled the boot I rocked into Banh’s chest. She staggered back, barely avoiding Feliz.

  Who’d pulled out an asp.

  Fanfuckingtastic.

  I rotated so hard against my grip on his arms that Lindsay shouted. Elbows hyperextended. One shoulder popped out, obvious even beneath his armor. That hit a high note of raw pain muffled when my forehead slammed again into his face. Blood spattered mine. Bone dug into the ridge of my eyebrow.

  More blood, this time dripping into my eye.

  Rage fueled every nerve, lit my senses with napalm and gasoline. The pressure in my ears whined under the thundering roar of my aggression, but I didn’t care. Didn’t stop to think about it, to analyze. What mattered was that somebody, everybody, died.

  The word popped out of nowhere: eradicate.

  With fucking pleasure.

  Lindsay landed back on his ass, hands plastered over his face, blood welling between his fingers. Verbally losing his shit into his palms wouldn’t save him. Only a miracle could.

  I ducked as a leg sailed over my head, dropped to a knee and jammed my metal elbow back into Banh’s thigh. Femurs are hard to break. I managed it, felt every splintered snap of it radiate into my shoulder. She shrieked, swearing upside down and too fast in canto I couldn’t follow.

  It left me exposed to Feliz’s silent assault.

  The baton whipped into the side of my neck, a halo of red and white pain exploding in my sight. Cold sweat erupted from stinging scalp to booted toes. For a strained moment, I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t hear anything but the shattered pulse of a hammered artery struggling to keep up; fury carved in stinging wasps.

  Sheer muscle memory kicked in. I dropped, rolled, kipped up to my feet and blocked the next attack with nanosteel. The asp was already up and swinging again. She was fast. Hell, she was fuckingly fast. Steel in her expression, she sidestepped me and drove the weighted baton into my side. My knee. This stuff I wore wasn’t geared for this.

  Torture radiated from each spot. Rippled out and met somewhere in the middle. Gasping for breath, I set my jaw. “You are,” I said between gritted teeth, “overfuckingreacting!”

  “That,” Feliz panted, still managing cold as ice despite the quick pace of her assault, “is why you will never amount to anything but guttertrash.”

  Fine. Bracing myself, I sidestepped and threw myself at her. She hadn’t expected me to risk the barrage of pain she’d already leveled. Clearly, she hadn’t watched me with those turrets.

  A baton to the side of the head is nobody’s idea of a good time. Only thing that kept me from screaming was the fact I’d surprised her. She tagged me with the middle of the length, lashed out again and hit my left shoulder. At least that part didn’t feel anything. Mostly.

  Soon as I stopped swearing, I’d feel the shit out of this.

  For now, I surfed adrenaline like the drug it was and launched myself to her left side. I hooked an arm around the back of her neck, rocked my knees forward and carried her full force to the ground. By the time she caught herself, I’d already clambered around her back, wrapped my legs around her waist, locked my ankles, and squeezed hard enough to drive the air out of her lungs.

  My diamond steel fist drove into the back of her head. Her head snapped forward, hit the ground. Flesh grated, blood ran. My right fist wasn’t in the best shape, and I screamed with her as I followed up with another punch from it. Didn’t stop me. Adjusting my knees on her biceps, I pinned her in place and delivered heavy punch after agonizing punch after metal punch. Until her face was a bloody, sticky mess against the tarred street and bone shone yellow and red through her flesh and she’d stopped screaming.

  I didn’t notice when
the extraction team arrived. Burly arms thrust under my armpits, locked behind my neck and dragged me spitting and swearing off Feliz. Banh was already being carried out, her leg held out and knee sidewise.

  Lindsay’s face was a shockvid in progress, disinfectant wash turning his mask of blood into a horror show.

  Didn’t see Channing or Damrosch. Didn’t fucking care.

  Malik Reed owed me big. Shitty team, shitty intel. Shitty fucking contract.

  I was so far over fed up, I longed for the days I wanted to tear out his throat. So, so much nicer than what I wanted to do now.

  19

  A holding cell. They’d put me in a shitsucking padded cell, white on white on white – which made no sense because by the time I was done, I’d punched the door bloody. I barely had room to measure the fucking thing in three strides. Punched that wall, too.

  They hadn’t counted on metal shredding whatever cunting fluff covered the scratchproof walls underneath. Or on my anger overwhelming any sense of pain or ugly I should have been wading through.

  Hell if I even knew where I was. All I knew was that I’d savaged the white until I was no longer screaming curses and threats at the cameras. Until I could breathe through panic cut with a hunger for blood so intense that I swore to every lens watching that I’d rip the intestines out of whoever came through that door. And eat them. For funsies.

  I ran out of epithets long before I ran out of steam, and by the time I’d thoroughly wrecked the insultingly spartan prison, I ran out of that, too. I stood quietly in the center of the room, bloody hands hanging at my sides, face tilted up to the ceiling. Closing my eyes gave me only shadows.

  Capturing any kind of zen felt impossible.

  They hadn’t even let me change. I’d shed the armor pieces all over the floor. My skinsuit, shiny black and formfitting, kept me from soaking in the icy air. Like they blew it in on purpose to either cool me down or make me uncomfortable.