QUANTUM MORTIS: A Man Disrupted

by Steve Rzasa

  They waited. A minute passed. Then two. An image of the city appeared on the heads-up with an expanding field of red spiraling outward from a point near the ducal palace about 10 kilometers away.

  “Charlie Two has completed an initial circuit of the external cams in the initial radius. Street, traffic, and so forth. Now she’s starting on the internal cams.”

  Six minutes had gone by, a massive blue knot had nearly covered up the red one, and a darker red mass was beginning to expand outward from the first two when Cara struck.

  “She took the bait! She just attacked Charlie Two!”

  “How do you know? Did she report in?” Tower demanded.

  “No, she’s too busy. Check out the server surge!” Some meaningless but impressively large numbers began to scroll by on a column to the left of the city map. Of course, Tower had no basis for comparison, so they meant absolutely nothing to him.

  “What was the last cam she tracked before she got hit? Maybe it tripped a perimeter alert.”

  “There!” Baby flashed a bright yellow X that was seven point two kilometers away. “It’s a security cam inside a bank, the Warburg Interplanetary Bank in the Glass-Owen Tower.”

  “Well, she’s not hiding him in a bank vault. Hold on.” Tower activated the comm link. “The fish is on the hook. Repeat, the fish is on the hook. Over.”

  His message set a chain of events in motion. The decoy operation would take three hectasecs from green light, while Baby estimated that Kazi would only be able to hold off Cara for half that time. So, the decision had been made to trigger Delta Team as soon as Cara took the bait.

  “Delta is go, Tower,” Major Zeuthen reported. “Repeat, Delta is go. Over.”

  Baby was displaying two timers on the screen. One read 47 and was counting up. That was how long Kazi had been fighting Cara. She had to make it look good or the cunning augment would suspect a trap. The other read 298 and was counting down. That was how long it would be until Delta triggered the decoy.

  Tower looked down at the city. They should be able to see the decoy from here. The major had taken Baby’s suggestion of reporting a false explosion through the media and run with it. The explosion would be real, but the casualties would be fake. At least that was the idea; Tower hoped the popular entertainment center had been completely evacuated before the bombs went off. The major even arranged to have the detonation device constructed around six KoreTek cells to pique Cara’s curiosity in case she looked closely enough.

  Kazi’s timer read 98. She was putting up a real fight.

  “Your girl is holding her own,” he commented.

  “Our girl,” Baby said, a little sadly. “You know, she’s as close as we will ever come to a daughter, Tower.”

  A pang of pure pain unexpectedly jolted through him. He shook his head. No. Not now. This was not the time to let the madness shine through the cracks in his skull.

  “How long once she goes down before you’ll have the location?”

  “Millisecs. From your perspective, almost instantly.”

  148… 149… 150

  “She did it! If Cara doesn’t buy that…”

  “Is there any chance she could really take Cara?”

  Baby snorted. “No, there is no chance at all. It’s theoretically possible, of course, but the probabilities are exceedingly low.”

  168… 169 “She’s down!” Baby exclaimed as the timer froze on 169 and began flashing. “And I have her, I have the whore! She’s at the Deleuze-Waterstone Institute on 3525 East 168th Way. She’s in the north side of the building on the 35th floor.”

  Coordinates for a location appeared on the screen. 40.708427, -74.008749. Tower’s pulse sped up as he informed the men in the other two vehicles that the next stage of the mission had begun.

  “Alpha, Bravo, we are go. First coordinate: four zero point seven zero eight four two seven. Do you copy?”

  “Alpha copy, Chief.”

  “Bravo copy.”

  “Second coordinate: minus seven four point zero zero eight seven four nine. Do you copy?”

  “Alpha copy,” Mackie said.

  “Negative, Chief,” said Ikeda, the Bravo team driver. Tower cursed under his breath. “Repeat last three digits please.”

  “Seven four nine. Repeat the whole thing.”

  “Minus seven four point zero zero eight seven four niner,” Ikeda dutifully replied.

  “Roger that. Floor is thirty-five, repeat, three five. Alpha, Bravo follow me.” Tower was thrown back in his seat as the Steyrer accelerated out of its hover and shot toward the coordinates Kazi had obtained for them. She wasn’t human, but that didn’t mean her sacrifice wasn’t real. Semper fi, little one. The moving numbers continued counting down and reached double digits as they sped through the night sky.

  “Baby, what the hell is the Deleuze-Waterstone Institute?”

  “According to the directory, it’s a psychiatric institution.” Tower had been careful to forbid her from looking up the building plans of Cara’s lair in case the military augment had booby-trapped them, but he hoped a public directory from ten years ago would be safe.

  “A loony bin?” Tower was initially startled, but then realized it was actually a brilliant hiding place to hide someone like St. James. “What better place to stash a nameless lunatic who’s always talking to himself than a place like that?”

  “Also, a medical center would assure her continual net access as well as direct access to secure government systems,” Baby added. “Such a facility would have redundant power system backups, which would also hold considerable appeal. It’s an ideal location for several reasons. I should have thought of that.”

  “Tower, what’s your ETA on the LZ?” Major Zeuthen interrupted them. “Orbital support is live and the Marines are in transit with an ETA of seven six zero seconds.

  He glanced at the screen. “Seven eight seconds, sir. I’ll go full dark two decasecs out.”

  “Roger that. Bravo Zulu, both of you. It worked. Delta is on schedule. Good luck. Base out.”

  As he’d warned the major, Tower went dark as the Steyrer approached the target and his readouts that depended upon information flowing in through the aether shut off. The var turned a little to the right and began to descend. The lights of the forty-five story building that housed Deleuze-Waterstone Institute was just coming into view when there was a bright flash that lit up the sky about a kilometer to his left.

  “Delta is right on schedule,” he noted, seeing that only four seconds remained on the countdown. “Let’s hope that’s enough to distract Cara. Thirty-fifth floor, right?”

  He didn’t bother waiting for a response, but slapped the three magno-locks that attached him to the cable that was coiled around the center console. Then he picked up his helmet from the passenger seat and slammed the visor down over his face, just in time, as Baby was already swooping down and around the side of the building, looking for the largest window on the Institute’s thirty-fifth floor. He wished they had a complete list of staff and patients, along with the building plans, but that was too risky. They had no choice but to go in hot and hard; stairs were too slow, doors were too automated, and lifts were too dangerous.

  “This is it,” Baby said as the var halted above a darkened window about fifteen meters from the side of the building. “No one is in sight and the nearest life form is fifteen meters into the interior. I’m going to lock down as soon as you’re in so we’ll need LOS before we talk. Good luck, Tower.”

  “You too,” he said, as the car door opened automatically and turned on its side. Tower fell out of the vehicle, and plunged toward the ground more than 100 meters below, but was brought to an abrupt halt about 90 meters short when he reached the end of the cable. He closed his eyes and tucked his head under his arm as Baby accelerated toward the building before abruptly stopping, and the momentum sent him smashing through the glass with no more resistance than that suffered by a rock breaking the surface of a still pool of water.

  Unh
armed, he rose to his feet amidst the shards of shattered glass and dropped his hand to his Sphinx, but there were no witnesses to his violent entrance. He had no doubt that internal alarms were flaring; Cara must know they were here now, but it appeared she was not prepared for them. His weapons came sliding down the length of the cable; he hadn’t wished to risk them being damaged by the entry. As soon as the ASE, the laser, and the Morris Obsidian 808 arrived, he slapped the release button and the cable retracted.

  Less than a decasec later, it was replaced by a second cable with a gravlock that he wasted no time in attaching to the floor. Sergeant Schalt was the first to slide down from the back of Alpha’s Volksaudi, followed in rapid procession by the other four members of his team. Schalt detached the second cable, which was quickly replaced by Bravo’s cable; according to Tower’s timer, the dynamic entry took less than one hundred ten seconds from start to finish by the time PFC Lambert, the last member of Bravo team, slid down the cable and slapped himself free of it.

  As the third cable vanished like an oversized snake retreating into a monstrous black cave, the two teams burst into the corridor and began to fan out. Schalt was on point for Alpha as they went right, while Toprak, Bravo’s sergeant, took the lead to the left hallway.

  Tower was more concerned about Cara than St. James, so he decided to carry the 808 and attached the ASE and the Armada to the carry rig on his back. He was bringing up the rear when a pair of signs on the wall of the corridor just outside the door caught his eye. The first one was a motivational picture of a young man walking hand in hand with a pretty woman and said: “Real life is better than aetherlife.” The second one was simple red text that said: “Motivation > Addiction = Change!”

  “Mother of all fornicators!” Tower cursed aloud, putting two and two together and coming up with a very unpleasant answer that was a lot more than four. Now he knew the real reason Cara was here. She wasn’t hiding St. James among the insane or ensuring her power backups, she was here for the aetherworld addicts! But before he could even open his comm link to warn the others, he heard a shout from the direction of Alpha Team, followed by the unmistakable sound of a laser firing.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Looking to the future, new HMI challenges will arise as humans work ever more closely with increasingly complex machines and new control interfaces are designed.

  —from “The Human Machine Interface as an Emerging Risk” by the Greater Terran Risk Observatory

  Tower ran toward the sound of the laser fire. The first shot was followed in rapid succession by five or six others. They were in comm-lock and the sergeant was following orders by maintaining radio silence, so Tower had to see for himself what was happening before he risked permitting Cara to listen in on their communications. But that might be necessary. If the sound of the shots meant what he suspected they did, his men were already outnumbered and facing enemy forces completely under her control.

  He saw there were two doors open on the right side of the corridor and ran to the second one. The five men of Alpha Team were in the room, a large one with beds indicating accommodation for four. All five MCID men appeared to be unharmed, but there were four corpses lying on the floor; Sergeant Schalt was down on one knee investigating the head of one of the dead men. The four on the floor were dressed in thin loose-fitting pastel blue uniforms that looked like modified hospital gowns; they were clearly residents of the institute.

  Schalt pulled something out of the man’s skull and held it up. It was an aetherlink module, but a peculiar one of a sort that Tower had never seen before. It had a Meditron logo on it; the vast Ascendancy mega-conglomerate specialized in a wide range of medical and implant technologies.

  “Chief, when we came in here, they were all lying down on the beds. We thought they were drugged out or in some sort of induced coma. Then, without making a sound, they all got up at once and attacked us. It was creepy, they moved in unison, like puppets or something! We didn’t have no choice but to open fire.”

  Tower nodded. Hiding out inside the institute wasn’t a clever move on Cara’s part, it was pure evil genius. In addition to all the other benefits it afforded her, she now had a small private army at her disposal. It was a bloody good thing the colonel authorized Charlie Lima, because if Cara was determined to fight it out with them, the collateral damage could reach epic proportions, even by MCID standards. He reached a decision and broke comm-lock.

  “Bravo, this is Tower. All civilian residents are probable hostile. Shoot on sight.”

  “Say again, Chief, say again.” It was the NCO, Toprak.

  “Sergeant, this is Tower. All civilian residents are probable hostile. If it’s got a skulljack, kill it.”

  “Negative, Chief. We have a civvy here in the room with us, but he’s not hostile. He’s not doing anything except sit there. Is that a shoot-to-kill order?”

  Tower understood Toprak’s reluctance. If he was in the sergeant’s position, he’d want a clear-cut order before he started gunning down unarmed civilians too. As he was trying to decide whether to give the order or not, a screen came to life behind him. It was the same improbably flawless female face he’d seen before. Cara.

  “Standby, Sergeant. Standby two.”

  This time, Cara’s avatar was superimposed upon an alien red sky. Her eerie blue eyes were unsettling even in that artificial face. “I am disappointed in you, Chief Tower. I had hoped we might be allies. Instead, you callously sacrificed your partner in order to launch another futile attack on me. Foolish, Chief, simply foolish. I hereby revoke the offer of employment previously extended to you.”

  Five darkened visors turned toward him. Tower ignored them.

  “Where is St. James, Cara?”

  “Beyond your reach, Chief Tower. As am I. But because I now contain, among other things, your late and apparently unlamented augment, and therefore find myself harboring a vestige of affection for you, I will offer MCID a truce. Return to your base, stop harassing us, and we will leave the planet within a week, never to return.”

  “Sounds dandy. Give me a name and we’ll call it a deal.”

  “What name is that?”

  “Don’t play dumb, Cara. I want the name of the man who hired you to kill Prince Arpad and Prime Captain Kotant. Look, you’re a machine and St. James is officially dead. I’m no lawyer, but even I can see this is a legal Charlie Foxtrot. So, I don’t care about the gun, but I need to know whose hand pulled the trigger.”

  Cara smiled. It was a radiant smile, and one that was as every bit unreal as the artificial worlds in which the minds of the sad residents of this place dwelled. “You know that a girl doesn’t kiss and tell, Chief Tower.”

  Bitch. Tower raised the Morris-Obsidian and fired a short burst at the screen. It went blank as the EMP pulse knocked out the electronics. Then he detached the Armada from his rig and replaced it with the 808.

  “What was that all about, Chief?”

  “You ever play a game where you kill zombies, Sergeant? I mean, shitloads of them?”

  “Sure, when I was a kid.” Some of the other men nodded.

  “Yeah, this may be a lot like that.”

  Then there was a massive explosion that echoed down the halls from the direction of Bravo. Tower swore. Why hadn’t he just ordered Toprak to shoot the deadhead? “Follow me,” he shouted. But when he burst into the corridor, he saw movement to his right accompanied by an unearthly shrieking. All the way down the hallway, doors were opening and men in light blue medjamas were pouring out of them, howling and screaming as if they were possessed by demons.

  Which was, for all practical purposes, essentially the case.

  “Contact at three!” he roared as he whirled to his right, slammed against the left wall to steady himself, and began to open fire. He didn’t have Baby’s augmented aiming, but at this range, he hardly needed it. The first man was a young guy, maybe twenty-five, good-looking with short brown hair and perfect white teeth that were exposed by virtue of his wordless
screaming. Tower dropped him with a beam to the chest and he fell forward, sliding so close that one outstretched hand nearly touched Tower’s boot. “Contact!”

  An older, balding man, his Meditron module clearly visible, was the next to fall as Tower sent a bolt burning through his forehead, then two more through an obese kid who looked like an oversized baby. A fourth man fell to his Armada, then a woman with tattoos running up her neck. But the techno-zombies behind them didn’t even slow down, and Tower would have been overrun within seconds had Alpha Team not opened fire. The barrage of five rapid-fire lasers cut down the unarmored zombies, their scanty hospital apparel providing no defense against the 2,000-watt bolts of burning light that boiled their brains, seared holes through their hearts, and fried flesh, blood, and bone alike.

  Nothing could stand before that high-tech hellfire. Soon there was not a single possessed junkie left upright, although a few wounded residents were crying out and moaning in pain.

  Tower made a quick count of the doors on both sides and estimated 52 casualties, not counting the four men Alpha Team killed in the first room. Even to a hardened veteran who had gunned down civilians before, it was a terrible sight. Cara seemed to have abandoned the now-useless dream junkies to their fate, but outnumbered as he and his men were, Tower didn’t dare leave them alone to be repossessed by her. He sighed, stood up, and stepped toward the closest wounded man, flicking his LR-64 to single-shot.

  “Chief, wait.” Sergeant Schalt protested weakly from the floor where he’d been throwing up. “They’re civs. Is that really necessary?”

  Tower reconsidered. Actually, so long as Cara couldn’t get at them, they were no danger. The problem was that the first thing the dream junkies would do if deprived of their modules was find another one, turning them right back into potential combatants.