“Ange.”
“Yo.”
Indigo turned to glance at her. “Can you plant one of those mines?”
Ange snorted something amused and not even remotely modest.
He let it slide. “Carter, you’ll blow it on my mark.”
“Can do,” Carter confirmed.
He gestured to Hooker. “You, can you see enough to cover her from here?”
“Why aren’t we going around?”
“Because out here, we’ll see them coming,” I answered, scouring the looming shadows between walls. “Or at least enough that we have a fighting chance.” There was no telling what forging through the checkerboard string of back alleys would net us.
“If we go around,” Indigo added, “it adds time we can’t afford to waste. Can you do it or not, Hooker?”
The kid nodded. “Pretty sure. The smoke is tough, but if Ange calls out markers, I’ll make sure not to shoot her.”
“I’ll buy you a drink if you manage not to,” Ange tossed back.
As plans went, not a bad one. “Everyone ready?” Indigo asked.
Ready as we could get.
Ange took the proffered mine – a plate slightly bigger than Falk’s hand, disc-shaped and concave – and slipped into the street. I was intensely aware of the faded blue dot mapping her progress, long after she vanished to green-tinged shadow and smoke.
“What’s the obstruction?” I asked.
“Not sure, but it looks like a carrying truck.”
Carter nodded beside me. “That mine will at least shift it so we’ve got enough room to maneuver, and if there’s any fuel left, it’ll burn.”
“Necros don’t like fire?” I hazarded.
“Would you?”
Good point.
“I’ve got her,” Hooker said, crouched in front of us, his eye plastered to his scope. “I don’t see any movement nearby, so–”
“Do you hear that?” Falk demanded, staring up into the sky.
The only thing I could hear out there was that brain-wrinkling whine, and it wasn’t even out there I heard it. I felt half deaf, like a cacophony filtered through too many layers, but a low hum – whirring on a completely different frequency – suddenly cut through even that. We all looked up, weapons out, scanning the open sky.
There was nothing to see.
“She’s ten feet out,” Indigo said. “Hooker?”
“So far, no ticks.”
“Maybe we got all of them.” But even Digo didn’t seem to buy it. I didn’t have to see his face to know he was worried. He was probably triple-checking the overview even as he spoke.
“Falk?” I waved him over. “You ready to–”
“Heads up!” Carter shouted, her weapon tracking something round and black, nearly invisible against the sky. We all ducked; I flinched as it narrowly missed Falk’s head. A metallic thunk crunched into asphalt.
Indigo’s helmet jerked. “Cover!” he ordered. “Ange, withdr–!”
Bullets ricocheted off the street in a shower of white sparks, and Falk staggered beneath the impact. They scored his heavy armor, spattered a narrow ream of blood where a lucky round clipped his elbow. Falk grunted, turned, big body angled to leap out of the way of the trajectory pinning him down, but too late.
A white-hot ball blossomed from the black globe three feet away, enveloping Falk in a fiery arc that saturated the smoke-laden air with the stink of melting armor and charred flesh. His screams blasted through the feed, brutal and mercifully brief.
The column seared through the night vision in a painful white flare that left wicked afterburners floating in front of my eyes. The blast slammed into us a breath later. Indigo grunted, staggering, and Carter yelped, but it swept Hooker into the building’s façade like he weighed nothing. Windows exploded overhead, shattered into a rain of glittering orange fragments, and the only reason I didn’t kiss the pavement came down to sheer luck.
Carter’s voice crackled across our feed. “I’ve got unknown processes activating my trigger–” A beat. “Ange! The bandwidth is lighting the fuck up, drop the–”
“Shit.” Ange’s line fuzzed with static. It figured she’d sound more pissed than worried.
Too late. A second detonation echoed from the street beyond us. Ange’s comm signal winked out.
“Falk.” Hooker stumbled, the rifle clutched in one hand by habit. Somehow, half blind, I caught him around the waist, halted him before he lurched after a man whose twisted shell was still glowing white hot in the center of the green street.
“It’s too late.” I wrestled him back from the open street as Indigo shouted at us to get our asses out of the crossfire.
“Dios.” Carter’s voice, high and tight. “Ay Dios. It went off. It’s gone, ay–”
“Carter,” I barked, struggling to keep a hold of the kid trying to brain me with his weapon. I don’t think he even knew how close he came, but I was suddenly grateful for the protection of my helmet. “Haul it.”
Carter’s comm went silent. We withdrew fast, me wrestling with the kid until Indigo fisted one hand into Hooker’s harness and dragged him, twisting and howling, back into a dingy, narrow avenue.
He was still fighting a sweat-drenched adrenaline high seven minutes later. We stopped, gasping, and Indigo shoved him hard against a peeling metal facing. “If you don’t want to be necro bait, shut up and don’t move.” Hooker sagged. “Control, what the fuck?”
It was like the distance had pulled the plugs from my ears. The whine faded to a muted thrum, a low-frequency signal hovering at the edge of my hearing, though my head still felt too full.
Some kind of jammers? Or an active power line packing serious juice? Maybe I was sensitive to a certain frequency out here, or this damned helmet was giving me claustrophobia issues. I’d take the thing off after we got out of here and see if that helped at all. I wasn’t used to working in a full suit. Decent visual capability, sure, but it was too confining for me.
Which was all much better shit to think about than what the hell went sideways out here.
“Control!” Indigo snapped.
The operator’s voice clicked over the feeds. “We’re working on it,” she said calmly. “What just happened?”
“Assault out of nowhere. And way fucking more than twelve fucking necros!” Leaving a shaking, cowering Hooker, Indigo gripped Carter’s shoulders and stooped to peer into her helmet, faceplate to faceplate. “Carter, you with me? Carter.”
“I didn’t…” Her voice was hoarse. She stood there, Bolshovekia hanging limply from her hands, and let him shake her like she didn’t have the strength to shrug him off. “The mine triggered. It was still moving, I could track it on the bandwidth. She still had it. It was in her hands, she was– she–” The words cracked.
“Shit.” Digo glanced at me. “Riko, I need eyes.”
It was him or me, and I didn’t have the patience for two corp enforcers losing their collective shit. I nodded, glanced around and spied a fire escape barely in reach.
“Ange and Falk are paste,” Indigo told control flatly.
“Noted.” Two peas in a pod, except I could hear the anger stomped thin in Digo’s voice. Control sounded like she was taking notes, disseminating information. Cool as ice. “We’re gathering data.”
And orders, probably. Protocol demanded she call in Malik, at least update him.
That was going to be a fun conversation.
I jumped for the bottom rung, gloved fingers wrapping around the rusted, pocked metal. Hand over hand, I pulled myself up, shoulders and back aching with the effort. I was halfway to the roof before control’s voice clicked back on to my feed.
“Drone activity was marked over parts of the Vid Zone moments before contact. You’re not the only team in there, but it’s unclear who’s in the lead. Riko, your vitals are running high.”
I leveraged myself onto the ridge encircling the rooftop, my gaze on the green-shaded, too-dim environment but my attention on the sinking pit her
question opened up in my stomach. “You can track our vitals, too?”
“Yes.”
Fuck me. “Which? Blood pressure, brain activity?”
“All of them,” she said patiently.
Just what I needed. “Any hope Ange made it?” I asked instead, ignoring her question.
She didn’t miss a beat. “No. Your brain activity is still hitting high ranges of activity, is that normal for you?”
“I’m just peachy,” I said dryly. “Shot at by unknowns, lost two teammates, looking at a shitstorm of more-than-twelve necros, hey! What’s not to be freaking about?”
“Point.” She was reasonable, at least. “If there’s anything abnormal, the techs will pick it up later.”
Oh, good. Brain techs. Maybe one of them could be Orchard and I’d have to go put the squeeze on her after all. “This other team,” I said, changing the subject. “We playing capture the flag?”
“It’s unclear what they want.”
“Find out,” Indigo cut in. “I can’t do my fucking job without all the data.”
“Understood,” she said, surprising me. Go, professionalism.
I let the data dweebs talk around me as I made my way through the metal rigging bolted to the roof. Some kind of signal tower, maybe. Aside from the far distance on the outskirts of the quarantine, no lights gleamed in the dark, which made details fuzzy in the night vision. So far, I seemed to be alone.
“The data indicates an enormous heat signature moments before Falk and Ange died,” the woman continued. “What created the heat source that killed them?”
“I think it was a drone,” Indigo said slowly. “No identifiable logo.”
“Both of them?”
“No.” He spoke very softly, like he was making an effort to keep Carter or Hooker from hearing him. Closed-feed, then, between us and control. “Ange was twenty meters away. One of Carter’s mines detonated early. She claims her frequency lit up with the trigger command without her.”
There was a short, charged silence. “According to the extensive data I’m looking at, that shouldn’t happen.”
“Yeah, no shit.”
“I’m at the roof’s edge now,” I told them. I peered over it, down at the street we’d run across and both ways. Nothing moved, no creepy crawling psycho machines, no drones humming. Only the slightly less irritating pressure behind my eyes.
“Marks?” asked Indigo.
“Nothing.”
“That’s one thing going right, anyway.”
Or was it? I crouched on the ledge, cradling the Sauger with one hand, balancing myself with my left. “Zoom in twenty-five percent.” The heads-up acquiesced, turning the faceplate into a telescopic lens and magnifying my view. “Digo, you saw Falk get hit, right?”
“Yeah.”
A nerve twitched in the curve of one shoulder. I resisted the urge to rub at it. It wouldn’t help. Paranoia was settling over me in a big way. “So there shouldn’t be nothing,” I pointed out. “Unless there’s a necro we missed with weapon enhancements. Not impossible, I figure, but how probable?”
“The Vid Zone doesn’t have a runner shack that I know of, but who knows what that chopshop was doing?”
Too many what-ifs. I wrinkled my nose. “Thermals on,” I said, a low voice command.
This would be so much easier, and quieter, if I was actually wired into the armor, but I didn’t have the appropriate tech and that kind of long-term commitment to Mantis made my skin itch.
Obediently, the night vision faded, coloring the world in an eerie black, contrasted by ghostly outlines of the metal towers surrounding me. Glancing down at myself turned my silhouette a somewhat less ghostly white, but not the stark contrast I expected. Shielded and temp-controlled armor. Nice.
I turned my focus out over the ledge.
And nearly went ass-end over it. “Fuck me.” That wasn’t quiet. What little calm I’d scraped together filled in with ice-cold terror.
“What do you see?” Indigo demanded. “What’s going on?”
Where the hell to start?
22
White. Packs of it, blobs of it marked by the heads-up display and labeled as unidentified, some faded to a fainter shade of gray, some still stark against the black. The bigger the knot, the denser the silhouettes.
I backed away from the ledge. “They’re everywhere,” I whispered. “We’re surrounded, Digo. Go thermal, but brace yourself.”
“That’s impossible,” control said tightly, and for the first time, her calm cracked. “There’s no way there’s that many converted in one place.”
“Then what the fuck are you seeing on my feed?” My anger came out a harsh hiss. Pain throbbed in my forehead, right over where I suspected a blood vessel threatened to burst.
“I… It’s got to be some kind of...” Her voice trailed away, a masculine murmur filling the silence. As if she’d forgotten her mic was on, she yelled, “I don’t give two shits if he’s banging the CEO’s wife, get hi–” The feed cut off.
“Riko, get back here,” Indigo demanded, and I didn’t even bother with a quip. I obeyed.
When I scaled the ladder, landing beside Carter, I knew Indigo had followed my suggestion. There was a set to his shoulders, a watchful energy to him that was totally different than the usual run awareness I was familiar with.
He was spooked. Hard.
“You tell them yet?” I asked, open-feeding it.
He shook his head.
“Tell us what?” Carter asked, her voice dull.
I opened my mouth, but nothing that came to mind sounded gentle. I liked Carter. I didn’t want to see her crack any more than she already had.
But, damn it, I needed these people on their feet.
Indigo ripped the scab off without my help. “We are surrounded by necros,” he said quietly. “They’re in the buildings, not so much in the street as far as I can tell, but there’s at least thirty in my immediate field.”
Hooker moaned. The kid was a mess, huddled over his drawn-up knees, rifle forgotten beside him. He rocked back and forth, his helmet wobbling like an overlarge knob on a pike.
He’d watched things go to hell for the first time, I bet. Lost a buddy, lost his cool.
I glanced at Indigo.
His helmet tipped in Hooker’s direction. At least on this, we ran in synch.
I crossed the tiny alley, knelt, and rapped on his helmet with my knuckles. He jerked. “Earth to Hooker,” I said sharply. “You in there, kid?”
He shuddered, the sound he made not quite acknowledgment.
This time, I brought my fist down hard. Thud. The plating rattled.
His body unfolded, one foot catching me in the knee. “S-Stop!”
“I will when your balls drop,” I said, ignoring Indigo’s sigh behind me. He didn’t try to stop me, though. Hooker obviously hadn’t responded to sympathy, which made it my turn. I smacked his helmet again. “Look at Carter. She’s still standing. You going to let a chick’s nanosteel dick outshine the real deal?”
He shook his head. To clear it or to deny my jibe, I couldn’t tell, so I raised my hand to lay down another knock.
He threw his left fist up to block me. “Okay!” His voice sounded tragically young, but hey, at least I detected a note of determination. Finally. “Okay, I’m here. I’m focused. I... I just...”
This time, when my hand slipped beneath his guard, I laid my palm flat on his helmet. It wasn’t exactly touchy-feely, but come on. I wasn’t wired for tears and soft words of wisdom. “I get it,” was all I knew how to say.
Maybe it’d be enough. I’d operated on less.
When I rose, offering him that hand to help him up, he took it. I didn’t know if he’d hold together, but I had to believe he’d try. It was the only way we’d all get out alive.
Carter sucked in a deep breath and let it out on a long, drawn out, “Fu-u-uck.” That cleared, she added, “What now?”
“Now,” Indigo said, “we do our jobs.”
“Still?”
“Still.”
I rubbed my hand across the faint seam at my shoulder. It wasn’t aching; or if it was, I couldn’t tell beneath my throbbing headache. Everything just felt wrong.
Indigo’s faceplate rotated left to right, a slow, steady survey. “They’re not moving. Why?”
“Let me go knock on a door and ask one,” I said dryly.
Hooker cleared his throat. “Are they... Do they only hunt at night?”
I shook my head. “That wouldn’t make any sense.”
“They’re just scarier at night,” Indigo said, candid but calm. “Theory time. Are they dead?”
“You mean besides the obvious?” I pointed a thumb back the way I’d come. “I saw a few milling around in small pockets, but most were immobile. I don’t know that I’d count them out, though.”
Click. Carter replaced her clip, her words carefully even. “Maybe they’re hibernating.”
“Job’s done, nothing left to rend, power down?” My attempt at levity fell flat, even to me. We were all feeling it. Paranoid. Cornered. Were they hearing the crackle, too?
I didn’t dare ask, not as long as control was listening. I couldn’t risk them pulling the plug, especially now that I bet Malik had been called in.
My jaw shifted.
“Any sign of that second team?” Indigo asked me.
Again, I shook my head. “If they’re out there, they’re just white blots in a sea of them.”
“Then we move out.”
Given our choices – stay and wait to be picked off when those things finally realized we were here or go, finish the job, and get the hell out – I couldn’t agree more.
Carter visibly squared her shoulders. “Koupra. About the mine–”
“It’s okay, Carter.” He didn’t look at her, focusing on the Sauger he ran his hands over. “It wasn’t your fault. Can you change the sec on your setup?”
“Yeah. Already did.”
“Then we’re square. Hopefully it’ll confuse whoever triggered the last one.”
And that was Digo. All around nice guy.
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