"Citizen Swift you are under arrest. Prepare to be terminated."
At first the shock of hearing that she had been identified and put under arrest blocked out the fact that the mech had just told her she was to be put to death. Immediately.
In a whir of machinery extra weapons protruded from the top of each leg where it connected with the body. As they tracked around to target her Carla panicked and dropped to the floor. The security mech opened up with all of its guns and hell came to earth. The reports of gunfire thundering all around her filled her head with noise and confusion. Bodies were falling all around her. Bloody shells torn apart in the hail of bullets fell on top of her and covered her in blood. She was crawling through pools of the thick hot fluid as she sought to escape. Get away.
Screams made themselves heard even over the deafening shots and Carla realized that some of them were her own. The crowd stampeded around her and she was kicked and stamped on in their urgency. One woman tripped over Carla's body and shouted a curse at her even though it may have saved her life as bullets ripped through the space where she had only just been.
More guns opened up but Carla couldn't tell if they were shooting at her, the deranged security mech, or randomly wherever they chose. She still wanted to escape, to get somewhere safe where she wasn't being shot at or hunted. But she had known that there was danger if she came here and she had accepted the risk of being taken.
But this should not be happening. Security mechs didn't just decide to execute people whether they were under arrest or not. And they sure as hell didn't fire indiscriminately into a crowd of civilians just to kill one little target.
Carla wanted nothing more than to get away but she was frozen to the spot. On her hands and knees amidst a manic crowd of people, with corpses and mud and blood all around and all over her. She just curled up on the floor and hugged her knees to her chest. Her clothes were sodden with rain and blood and clung to her body chilling her. More blood and mud was kicked up into her face and Carla closed her eyes against it. The ground smelled wet and faintly metallic.
She no longer heard gunfire, nor did she hear screams. In fact she heard nothing at all. Her senses were shutting down as she retreated from the madness back inside her own mind.
I don't wanna die I don't wanna die I don't wanna die I don't-
"Get up quickly."
A hand grabbed her roughly by the elbow and her peace was shattered by the return of the noise and confusion.
"Get up come on."
Carla blinked mud out of her eyes as she pushed herself up to her feet, half dragged by the black clad woman pulling her arm. The security mech was being kept occupied by numerous security personnel. With them the mech was firing to injure not to kill, taking more time lining up its shots with a greater degree of accuracy. A half a dozen officers were writhing on the floor in pain. As Carla watched the mech took down another with a shot to his upper right thigh.
"Whatever you did you sure got that thing pissed." The woman guiding her said.
Carla wanted to say that she didn't do anything, that she was just standing there when it started trying to kill her, but she found that she couldn't force her dry mouth to form the words. She was shivering in a way that had nothing to do with her being cold and wet. The other woman was all that kept Carla on her feet as she moved her as fast as she could away from the danger area. The other woman kept looking back over her shoulder even when the passed out of a direct line of sight with the out of control machine.
Most of the crowd had vanished into the night. Her rescuer escorted Carla past the few remaining news crews who were reporting on the additional news of the slaughter of civilians by an out of control machine. Carla tripped over the raised edge of an old flagstone path but the other woman caught her before she hit the floor.
"Thank you," Carla said finding her voice again. It seemed such an odd thing to be able to thank this woman for saving her from a fall when she hadn't even thought to thank her for action that had very probably saved her life.
"Don't mention it, I'm just doing my job." The other woman was still looking back and with a start Carla realized that she was itching to be back there where the action was.
As quickly as possible the woman handed Carla off to a pair of official looking men who weren't dressed in any sort of uniform Carla was immediately familiar with.
"Sara Fox under Marc Ash," the woman said as she gave Carla to the men. "Get her checked over then take her to ECSIS HQ for debriefing. We can't risk any of the other security mechs getting sight of her in case this malfunction isn't isolated."
Carla felt suddenly afraid as Sara left to return to the situation with the mech. Feeling as though she was a child and had been left alone in her bedroom at night and her parents had just closed the door, cutting out the light. Not that that matches any of my childhood memories.
The two men nodded and started escorting Carla over to one of the medical units that were standing by. There was already a sizeable crowd gathered around them and medics walked through the crowd assessing patients so that those in most need of treatment got it fastest and those who could wait would.
Her escorts were on either side of her holding an arm each just above the elbow. When they were almost upon the medical teams the men tightened their grips and steered her off to the side. A black van rushed up alongside and came to a sudden stop. The back doors opened and Carla was bundled inside. As the doors were slammed closed plunging her into darkness she felt a prick on the side of her neck and her mind was plunged into a darkness of its own.
***************
Sara left the young woman, young woman she's only a couple of years younger than I am. Of course you grow up quickly in this line of work. She left the young woman and hurried back to the malfunctioning security mech. She didn't expect to be a great amount of help as she was still only minimally armed. Her pistol would have as much effect on the mech as is she was using a pea shooter and little paper spit balls. Hopefully someone had had the presence of mind to get an EMP grenade from someone on the intrusion team otherwise it would take some heavy artillery to slow the mech down.
It would have been much easier if the mech's programming could have been accessed and modified by remote control, or if a remote control signal could cause the mech to shut down. The trouble was that if either of those things was possible, it meant almost anybody with even an eliminatory understanding of the technology would be able to manipulate the mechs at will, making them worse than useless. The only way to reprogram a security mech was to issue the changes when the mech was recharging in its maintenance alcove. They were always well guarded but not impossible to get access to. The CDM's commandeering of a couple of units was testament to that.
The mech had certainly been busy. At a glance Sara saw over twenty dead civilians piled on the ground in bloody little mounds. There were over twice that number wounded who writhed on the ground amidst the dead or struggled to crawl away. There were also a growing number of police officers sporting injuries surrounding the mech. Out of uniform as she was Sara knew that the mech would not recognize her as a member of an official security force and its targeting systems would not limit it to inflicting only non-fatal wounds to her. And as the mech lumbered towards her in pursuit of its target and Sara stood there in its path with her pea shooter in her hand she suddenly decided this wasn't such a good idea.
Why do I always try and play the hero. I'd done my part I should have left this to the rest of these guys but oh no I had to get involved. Like I'm the only one who could do it right. Idiot.
Sara raised her weapon knowing that by taking that action the mech would identify her as a threat and target her accordingly. She started firing as she threw her body to the side. She kept her shots on target even as she carved through the air and only stopped pulling the trigger as she was about to land in case hitting the ground caused her aim to go off and hit someone else.
Just before she hit the ground there was a blinding flas
h of light and the grating sound of a static burst. Sara hit the dirt with a bump and looked up at the abruptly immobile security mech.
"Very impressive, Agent Fox. Of course if we hadn't hit it with an electromagnetic pulse just then you would be dead right now."
Sara slowly got to her feet getting her breath back and started knocking dirt off her outfit. "I was only trying to buy time for just such an event, sir."
Supervisor Marc Ash stood there looking her up and down, evaluating her. "I thought I told you to return to headquarters for a debrief?" he said at length.
"I heard the shooting and came to do what I could to help, sir," Sara replied. "I got the woman the malfunctioning mech seemed to be targeting to a pair of ECSIS officers back there. They should be taking her to HQ while we investigate what happened."
"If there is any investigation it will not be carried out by us, this is not an ECSIS matter."
"With all due respect this could be indicative of something we should be looking into. If the people who reprogrammed that mech have done similar things to others . . ."
"We don't know what happened here. All you are doing is imagining possibilities. After a proper factual investigation it will be determined whether this is something that we need to look into. That decision will be made by people rather more informed that you are."
Sara bit back a reply that would have landed her with a disciplinary hearing. Her supervisor was a bureaucrat first and foremost. She didn't know anything about his past, whether he had worked his way up slowly through the ranks to get to his present position or whether he had fast-tracked and got where he was today by astutely taking advantage of situations and sucking up to those in charge. The fact that he was still only quite young, Sara gauged his age at being late thirties early forties but the full beard he wore probably added a couple of years, indicated that he had most probably arrived where he was by the latter route. Still he had come in at the forefront of the full assault on the terrorists just now proving that he wasn't all talk with nothing to back it up.
"Yes, sir."
Ash then offered her a rare smile. "You did good work today agent. You came to help sort out a problem when you could just have sat back and said that you had already earned your pay. That kind of dedication to duty is good to see, just be careful that you don't take it too far."
Sara smiled back releasing some of the tension that had started to build from the confrontation. "Thank you, sir."
"Dismissed agent, get yourself back to HQ for that debrief. And try not to get involved in any more action before then, your activities earn you enough in the way of bonus pay to take a sizeable chunk out of our budget as it is."
Chapter Six
They slammed the door open and dragged her out of the tiny, barren cell she called home. The men who took hold of her seemed like giants. Their hands, covered by black gloves, seemed as big as her head. Where they gripped she would have bruises the next day. To match the bruises she had already received on the previous occasions.
The men were walking too quickly for her to keep up on her shorter legs. The men didn't break stride when she tripped over her own feet in her hurry, they just dragged her along the corridor. Even though the tiled floor was smooth the friction between her feet and the surface was enough to open the wounds she had suffered on the other times that they had come for her.
They stooped at the end of the corridor as they always did and one of the men slid a key card through the panel beside the door and entered the access code on the door's key pad. Like usual the man stood with his body obscuring her view of the pad as he entered the code. The thick metal door hissed open and she was dragged into the chamber. It was even smaller than her cell but they only waited inside for a moment, but that moment was the signal for the little girl to start being afraid. The fear started as soon as they came to take her from her cell but here, when she was on the verge of passing through into that den of torture was when the terror fully took her.
She struggled against the men holding her but she knew it was in vain. She screamed at them to stop, to let her go but they never gave any sign that they had heard her. These weren't men, they were devils. Only a devil's heart could fail to be touched by the sound of a little girl screaming in mortal terror. Only devils took little girls to hell.
When the door closed behind them there was a hiss of air and then the inner door opened. She was dragged kicked and screaming inside to her eternal torment.
***************
Carla woke to find herself laying on her back on a cold, hard surface. She was staring up at a plain dark ceiling with no features on it whatsoever, there weren't even any small cracks that she could make out in the dim light. In those first few seconds Carla had no clue what had happened that she would end up in a place like this.
Then in patches she started to recall. She had wanted to go to the memorial park to see if her friend was there, but there were terrorists in the statue in the middle of the park and the police weren't letting anybody through. Carla concentrated, why had she wanted to find her friend so urgently?
The terrorists. Her friend might have been at the statue when the terrorists took it over and she had wanted to see if he was all right. She had tried to get someone's attention so that she could ask them about her friend, but the only attention she had got was from a security mech that had told her she was under arrest and then had tried to kill her.
Oh no. It had all come back to her now. The security mech firing at her. The people falling like flies all around her as they were struck by bullets that were intended for her. She had been dragged out of that situation by a barely glimpsed woman dressed in black. Carla had thought she was saved but then she had been handed off to a pair of men who had stuffed her into the back of a van or something. And then . . .
Carla strained to remember what had happened after that but try as she might it wouldn't come. The next memory she had was of waking up here.
She wanted a better look at where she was being held. Perhaps she would see something that would let her identify who was holding her and why. With an effort Carla pushed herself into a sitting position. Swinging her legs off the edge of the concrete shelf that had been serving her as a bed. As soon as she did so she regretted it.
The wave of nausea washed over her all of a sudden. There wasn't time for her to look for anywhere better to do it, she had to throw up there and then. Vomit splattered the cement floor and spread into a puddle amidst other stains. Carla clutched her middle as her gut was wrenched by debilitating cramps. She kept trying to throw up even though there was nothing left in her stomach to expel. She dry heaved for what felt like hours. After a long while the cramps started to fade and Carla slowly tried to straighten up.
Her legs were unsteady and as she strove to balance she felt light headed and dizzy. She half expected to have to throw up again but the dizziness passed quickly. At first Carla had to use the concrete shelf to keep herself upright until her strength gradually returned. She used that time to look around and study her prison. It was a quick exercise.
The cell was about four meters long by three wide. It was all the same color as the unstained sections of the drab grey floor. There was a plain metal rectangle on the wall opposite that Carla took for the door since there was no other break in the featureless walls. Faint illumination was provided by a small panel in the middle of the ceiling. Apart from the concrete shelf there didn't seem to be anything that resembled furniture. As she surveyed her surroundings Carla was struck by a weird sensation of déjà vu. She looked underneath the shelf and found a bucket that would have been useful to have had before she made a mess of her cell.
Further study revealed a small circular opening in the back corner of the cell up against the wall. There was no chance of escape that way though, she couldn't even fit her whole hand into the opening. It took her quite a while to work out that the hole was there for her to empty the bucket into. She was glad of the task though because it kept her mind fro
m wondering about other things.
Like where I am, who has me. And worst of all what they are planning to do to me.
Carla had never worn a watch regularly and had no way to measure the time except by her own dead reckoning. She didn't have a clue how long she had been unconscious and so there was no way for her to guess at what time of day or night it was. She gave up trying to keep track of time after what she thought was an hour and a half.
She started out lying on the uncomfortable shelf waiting for someone to come and get her. For something to happen. When she was bored with that she stood up to stretch her legs and paced around inside the cell.
She sat back on the shelf and pushed herself back so that her feet were off the floor and she could swing her legs back and forth. The smell of drying vomit started to get to her. Carla slipped off the edge of the shelf and looked at the crusty puddle trying to come up with a way of getting it into the drain. She could push it over with her hands or feet but then she would be left with it on her hands or her shoes and then the smell would go with her even if she was taken out of here. In the end she removed her shoes and pulled her socks off. She put her shoes back on over bare feet and then put her socks on over her hand to sweep the vomit into the drain.
She was only partially successful. In some areas the vomit had already dried to nothing but yet another stain. There was a trail of vomit leading from there to the drain when Carla was through. She had got rid of a reasonable portion though and so declared herself victorious. She took the sodden socks off her hands and put them on the floor and put the bucket upside down on top of them. She had thought about stuffing them down the drain to join the rest of the vomit, but if they caused a blockage things could get much worse in the cell. Especially if she was forced to stay inside much longer. She kidded herself that her efforts had made the room smell any nicer.
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