Tashi and Malik met us on the other side, and as much as I fucking hated his guts, I admired his form. I’d never seen him get his hands dirty before. Right now, with his Manticore hitting every sec goon he aimed at and his defensive pace smooth as conservatory silk, I never would have guessed he wasn’t one of us.
Maybe corporate executives went through training. Most were just too pussy to put it to the test.
We fanned out, one by one as we hauled ass, cover fire laying the groundwork for Indigo to get his data in the game. We closed ranks around our linker, even Malik. As the eye in the sky man, we needed him aware and focused, not bleeding out and useless.
“About thirty feet northwest,” Digo yelled. Hard not to yell in this chaos, even though we were connected by helmeted comms.
Gunfire rattled the hollow garage, made everything hammer and crack and echo and rumble. A few stray bullets pinged my chest armor, and one hit my helmet. I glanced down, whistled. Not one left a dent. “You finally made armor that works!” Even the heads-up hadn’t faltered.
Reed said nothing. A definite professional. Boring, though.
Although Tashi didn’t wear much armor as a rule, she’d made an exception this time. Given our lack of intel, it was the smart move. Underneath it, she rocked a level of dermaplating that acted as light armor, and she preferred mobility to extra impact resistance. Here, we had to shoot it out before we could get in close enough to splatter everything that moved.
I couldn’t help but grin fiercely as I riddled three security mooks in black with half a clip of 12mm. It was even more gratifying than shredding the scouts.
Finally. This was my team. At least, enough of them to make me feel like no time had lapsed at all.
“Behind us,” Indigo shouted.
“Noted,” Reed replied, calm as ice. I focused front, swept the path ahead of us while Muerte covered my right. I trusted them to do their jobs, like I trusted nobody else.
Yeah, Malik Reed was a cunt. Okay, so Tashi had tried to kill me, still didn’t trust me.
Indigo still cut me out of too much of the loop.
I had somehow killed his sister. We still needed to figure out how and why.
But goddammit, I knew these runners. And they knew me.
Enough of me to count.
“Brace,” Reed added, seconds before the hauler behind us went tits up on the back of a magnificent explosion. Fire and smoke and jacked-up metal went flying, hit the ceiling with enough force to spiderweb it, and skittered, shrieking. The impact of the blast rolled over us twice – once for the bomb, and second for the cab and trailer that came down like a ton of diesel-fueled bricks.
We all stumbled. Only Malik, who was ready, made no sound.
The rest of us varied curse to surprise to irritation. That was me. “Ballsy, asshole. How’d you know it wouldn’t floor us?”
“Basic math.”
I growled. “Eat me.”
“Shut it, focus in,” Indigo cut in. He crouched in the center of all of us, fidgeting with the personal comp unit attached to his forearm. No matter how slick and shiny his units started, no matter how fancy and high tech, Indigo always christened them with black. Even the inputs. Only he knew what he was typing and pushing and whatever.
Rather than project to everyone, his data rolled through optic projectors only he could see. The fact his processing ability beat that scroll at some ungodly rate, and that he was smart enough to work it on the fly, is what made him the best linker I’d ever teamed with.
We huddled around him, squinting through smoke, cement dust and debris and popping off shots at anything that moved. Some hit the floor, stayed there. Others ducked behind the stray containers, took potshots at us.
Some of those hit too damn close to home, while the unwavering inferno behind us turned it to sweltering hell.
“Hurry up,” I snarled. “I’m tired of getting shot today.”
“Hold your dick already,” Indigo shot back. Behind his eyewear, his mouth worked – like he was crunching numbers. Formulating something.
I let him. This wasn’t some balls new enforcer team, this was a group who knew how to cover a job.
Even Reed, who calmly took aim at everything that moved on his side.
I whistled in comm. “Why, Malik Reed, you shoot like a cop.”
“Top of my class,” he replied shortly.
Muerte tipped her head in his direction, dust smearing one side of her helmet in white and gray ripples. “You were a cop?”
He said nothing.
I covered Muerte. Swinging over her head, I tweaked the trigger just hard enough that a three-round burst chewed up the air in front of her face. A brave and stupid security specialist dropped, skidded. “Keep your eye on your side,” I shouted.
She whipped back around. “Lo siento!”
“Sorries are for funerals,” I growled, and shot the guy again for luck. I whirled back to cover my ground. “Digo… shit!” My turn to misjudge. Muerte cursed, slid in front of me fast enough to create eddies in the cloud of dust.
A security force in heavy armor froze. Had her – had us both – dead to rights with a Sauger 877 that would have chewed identical holes in the both of us. Anything we’d done would be too late, and everybody else covered their own sights.
I braced, swinging my Valiant up. Too late. All too fucking late.
The shots didn’t come. No bullets. Not from that gun, anyway. From the other direction, Malik popped the trigger. The guy – girl? whatever – dropped like a bricksucking meatpuppet.
“Asshole,” Muerte muttered, and then elbowed me. Hard. “Take your own advice, Riqa!”
“Fuck you,” I snarled, shaking it off. Goddamn, I was tired of being shot. It never gets easier. Just another wave of pain to ride until you relearn how to breathe around it. She’d saved me one. Or, anyway, Malik had.
Why that enforcer hadn’t killed us both made me wonder if he’d been a rookie. I’d seen it happen before.
Reed returned to his sweep. He didn’t even gloat. On a run like this, you fucking well gloat. It’s part of the fun.
“I got it,” Indigo called, standing. “They’ve got heavy shielding up, all signal is blocked. We need to blow it.”
“S’what she said,” I muttered.
“Not to you,” Tashi said quietly. Ha ha. “Where to?”
“Tash, three meters north-northwest,” he replied, too professional to be amused. “Riko, cover her. Muerte, by me. Reed, take the rear, keep our asses clean.”
Normally, that would have been me by Indigo’s side.
I swallowed down the knife – I was too fucking awesome to be jealous – and hurried after the thin, ghostly splatter specialist. Made more sense to send us out ahead, anyway. We wrecked more shit.
Forging through layers of black smoke and heavy dust made me rethink my process. If some asshole got the jump on me because Reed’s worthless helmets gave up the ghost now, I was going to haunt every last jerkoff in the building.
Indigo included.
That the rate of gunfire slowed, and then stopped altogether, wasn’t what I’d expected.
“Last one down,” Muerte reported. “Can’t see shit in front of us, but looks quiet.”
“Forward pair?”
“Quiet here too,” I said. “What are we looking for?”
“This,” Tashi said, coming to a halt at the far end of a recessed wall. She waved away a swirl of thinner smoke, popped a light on – attached to one of her steels, that was handy – and passed it over a tall cylinder set into the corner. Half had been set into the cement, the rest protruding outward. Tubes of metal ran over its surface, and as Tashi’s light traced them up, they vanished into the ceiling.
“Well, fuck a truck,” I said, surprised. “Think we’ve found it.”
“Great. We’re moving toward the southern edge of the interior, you need to dismantle that thing.”
“Indigo.”
“What?”
“I am not a m
echanic.”
“Engineer,” he corrected, and Tashi chuckled faintly beside me. “I didn’t send two splatter specialists for finesse. Take it down, or we’re going in blind and scrambled.”
Oh. Well, that made more sense. “This cover that shielding?”
“No doubt.”
“Will this trigger a self-destruct in there?”
“Probably not.”
I paused. “Probably not?” I repeated. “You don’t know?”
“Riko.” A thin edge of pride. “It’s shielded. The only thing coming in and out of there are meatsacks intent on blowing holes in us, so if you don’t mind?”
“Right, right.” Tashi and I looked at each other, nodded in tandem. Putting her steel back into its thigh sheath, she withdrew her Sauger. She’d modded it. Better at closer range, which upped its rate of fire to serious crunch. Also heated the barrel at an ungodly rate, so not meant to be used for prolonged contact.
We stepped back far enough that if it blew, we’d admire the pretty colors without catching ourselves on fire.
“On three,” she said.
“Come back when it’s lit,” Muerte added in the comm. “We’re going to need you two.”
Well, now I just felt all warm and mushy inside. “One,” I said.
“Two,” she followed.
In tandem, we said, “Three,” and opened fucking fire on a tube of metal that hadn’t done anything to us. Except exist.
Didn’t take much. The whole thing lit up like a blue nova, sparks flying and metal crumpling, clanking. The lights overhead dimmed, a deep resonance rolling through the warehouse. I flinched.
The shield generator erupted in a series of electrical currents and went black.
So did the lights.
My head twitched violently to one side. I blinked hard. It twitched again, neck muscles spasming. It rolled down my left shoulder, jerking my tech arm. Everything around me vanished beneath a crashing hum; a wave of so much crushing pressure that I slammed my real hand into the side of my helmet.
It didn’t help.
I crouched in darkness, hand pressed violently to my head, as my chipset went haywire. In my ears, nestled deep in my skull, the angry buzz of a million wasps threatened to sting.
40
Abort. I think that’s what I heard outside my shrieking eardrums.
Abort!
I staggered up. “We are not aborting!”
Everybody went still. I mean, I think they did. Tashi’s torch only cut so far into the settling dust. After an awkward moment, she put a small hand on my back, below the shoulder. “You’re acting weird.”
“Who said otherwise?” Muerte asked, dry as bone chuckle crackling the comm. “What do you think this is, easy mode?”
Shit. Shit. I shook my head, beckoned Tash as I stepped out of reach. “I misheard something,” I muttered.
“Get over here,” Digo added, “we’ll need everything we can get for this.”
Tashi and I forged back the way we’d come, tracing the smudges we’d made in the settling dust on the way to the generator. They were filling in fast. I could feel her glancing at me every few steps, gauging me.
This was becoming a problem in a big way. I’d already had my chipset recalibrated. It still happened. This one, though. This one hurt. I remembered the pressure last time my frequency had shifted, but I didn’t recall the noise feeling so… thick before. Like a literal swarm of pissed off wasps bouncing around. It made my eardrums ache. Made my jaw hurt.
So bad that I almost didn’t recognize it when tremors rippled under my feet. Almost. I jerked my gaze to the ceiling; more cement crumbled, fell all around us.
“Shit,” Indigo hissed, and again. “Shit, shit, shit!”
“Failsafe?” Muerte asked, voice suddenly very, very serious.
“Shit,” I echoed, and launched into a full sprint. “We need in there!”
“I know.” Digo came into view, already running for the entry he’d found. A simple double door, built to slide sideways. It was already open, but nobody was running out. No gunfire, no bodies. No security. Not even bullets.
No necros, either, thank fucking Ganesh or whatever the hell a cosmic elephant was supposed to be.
Instead, as we approached, sparks lit in every direction. Electrical failures. Mechanical failures – shit, engineering failures, I don’t know! We slammed into the large, single-room structure just in time to watch whole walls lined with banks of machinery pop, spark, and catch fire.
Abort.
A failsafe. Somebody had triggered it. But from where?
I clenched my teeth. “Are you shitting me?”
Digo slammed past me, flung a hand out to Muerte. “Go hit the upper bank,” he said hurriedly, turning his back on us all. He worked fast, efficiently, pulling meatspace wires out of his comp unit and inserting its plugs into a system not yet burning.
I stared in rising fury as machine after machine went up in smoke.
Muerte ran fast hands across the inputs arrayed in front of two monitors. One had shattered. The other scrolled through so much data, I couldn’t parse it.
Tash and I stood watching them at work. I was impressed. Indigo often impressed me. Me, I felt like we’d hit a dead end – crackle, pop, whoosh!
Reed walked through the chaos, back straight, Manticore in hand. His helmet turned side to side.
Our tech gods pushed harder. Worked faster. The air inside turned acrid and sharp, plastic melted and aluminum warped. We watched the exit we’d come from. One exit, which seemed like a bad choice. Made covering it easier.
In my head, the fire fed the wild buzz until I could barely hear what the others said around me.
There had to be something here. Had to be. I hadn’t busted my ass in a three-sixty just to find nothing after all.
“Yes!”
Followed abruptly by a rasped, “No, fuck!”
I blinked. “Which?”
Muerte skipped away as the last system in front of her shattered. “Lost it,” she seethed.
“Almost lost it,” Indigo countered. He backed away from his efforts, raised his arm unit. Fiery shadows painted his faceplate in demonic orange and red. “Let’s boost before the place comes down on us.”
Relief swamped me, so heavy that I almost sagged. He’d gotten something. Finally. Something good, too. No way this place held junk. MetaCorp wouldn’t go to all this trouble, rig the place to burn, if there wasn’t something important in here.
“Perhaps we should refrain from leaping to assumptions.” A longwinded counter to my relief. Malik’s voice suggested curiosity.
“What?” I demanded.
“Reed, let’s–”
“A door,” he cut in. “A hidden one. There’s more to this center than it seems.”
Something beneath. I stared down the corridors as strings of melted plastic dripped around me. A fan of hot air spat flames and smoke behind Muerte, and she leapt ahead. “Somebody decide something,” she yelled.
Digo and I, we looked at each other.
Neither of us had to speak. Not about this. We wanted so much more than just surface data. We needed in.
“Let’s go,” he ordered crisply.
Linker’s orders. We all knew what we’d come for. Two of us just wanted more.
“Move,” Tashi said sharply, the last of our line in the back. “Now!”
As we booked towards Malik’s position, the damn place came down around us.
Malik got the doors open just in time. We all slammed through it. Muerte and Reed slid to either side, backs flat against the wall as a fireball rolled in on our heels. “Stairs!” I shouted, two octaves up.
I jerked suddenly, shoulders and waist armor cracking hard against the harness hooked around me. My head snapped forward, actually slammed chin to chest, and then the floor fell out from under me as I was hauled back. This time, when my shoulders slammed into the wall, all the breath whooshed out of me and the back of my head cracked against the anchor
.
Malik’s arm pinned me in place, faceplate turned my way – away from the roaring fire sucked into the open air. I couldn’t see his expression with the backlighting. Didn’t keep me from snorting out what air I’d managed to take in and gasping, “Basic math, huh?”
“Hang on!” Digo’s order.
We all did, until the fire faded and we could see again.
I was right. Past the larger platform we stood on, stairs vanished. Going ass over asshole on that one would’ve sucked.
Malik’s arm dropped, leaving me to pull away and check the other side of the door. Indigo and Muerte, in roughly a similar position as I’d been, peeled away from their fire shield.
Tashi remained missing.
Indigo looked around. “Tashi?”
Nothing.
I ran to the top of the stairs, peered down it. No green signal. A platform led to the next set, curved left. “Tashi!”
The comm crackled. Then, “Here. Down. It’s empty,” she added. “And dark.” Faintly, a blue glow bloomed. Her glows, always handy. “I don’t see anything.”
Indigo tapped across his comp unit. Rapid, without looking.
Abort.
My chin snapped to one side. Another spasm.
Nobody saw in the dark. I gritted my teeth. Another break in the worst of the buzz. I could still hear it, feel it, droning somewhere in the back of my brain, but not as viscerally.
I blew out a breath. “Hang on, Tash, we’re coming.”
Digo didn’t argue. Reed filed in behind me. Too fucking close. I rocked an elbow back, digging in some space I didn’t have to ask for. He faded back a step. Probably smirking.
My heart thudded. I was sweating in the armor, even through my skinsuit. These weren’t temperature regulated – the only temp control suits Malik had brought required constant vitals reports. I wondered if anybody else was sweating, too.
Tash waited for us at the bottom of the stairs, two lines of glow sticks tossed out at ninety degrees. The initial area was too large to light up entirely. It felt…
It felt like the Vid Zone lab I’d crawled out of.
Heavy. Even as our footsteps echoed, even as the lights revealed nothing but open space, I felt confined. Abort.
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