I bit my tongue before I said something stupid to ruin the effort.
“Hooker?” Indigo asked.
“I’m here.”
“Good.” His faceplate turned to me. “Riko? What’s up with your vitals?”
Yeah, yeah. “I’m pissed.”
“Un-piss, I need your focus,” he said, and then let it go. “Here’s the plan: we have two and a half hours left to get to the site and get our shit.” I refrained from pointing out that his sister had been filed under “shit”. I was in enough trouble for it already. “We stay low, we stay quiet. No noise.”
“What if they come at us again?” I asked.
“No noise,” he repeated. “Melee weapons first.”
“Balls.” As a word, it didn’t quite do my incredulity justice. “You want us to hand-to-hand these things?”
Indigo nodded. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. Use the EMP if it gets tough. Quick, clean, no shot to wake the dead.”
I winced. “Thanks for that. Now I’m picturing a wave of necros shuffling down the street.”
Hooker’s laugh was wan. “Maybe they just want our brains.”
“Shut up,” Carter snapped, shrugging like her skin was trying to crawl off. I sympathized. “I hate zombies.”
“Zombies are fiction,” Indigo cut in, his tone sharp. “This is a virus hacking hardware that doesn’t belong to it. Let’s get the hell out of here so the burn team can make it right.”
I preferred the zombie analogy to walking tech. Shuddering, I said nothing.
“We clear?” Indigo asked.
“Clear,” Carter said.
Hooker nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“Riko?”
“Why am I always singled out?” I groused. “I shitting heard you.”
“Because you’re a pain in the ass on a good day,” he replied, striding for the alley mouth. Hooker fell in behind him, the better to cover Digo if anything crawled out of the thermal dark, and Carter and I took the rear.
We all made an effort to keep quiet as we left the alley, sticking to the open street.
It was hell.
Under the thermal scanners, white shapes hunkered behind ghostly walls, huddled in knots. Most were still. Some shifted.
At least one darted suddenly from one point to another, causing my heart to lurch up into my throat, then splash down into the pit my stomach had turned into. Carter’s hand spread on my shoulder, a sure grip that still shook.
She’d seen it too.
Every hair on my arm, the back of my neck, stood on end.
I’d never heard of anything like this. Necros were supposed to be rare, converting those caught between hookups, not districts.
We all expected them to jump out. To perk up like dogs scenting raw meat. Any moment, they’d come roiling out from the structures housing them, and my imagination wasn’t doing me any favors.
“I hate you, Hooker,” I muttered.
He shrugged; I pretended it was an apology.
“Shut it,” Indigo said softly.
We managed quiet for another five minutes. Then Carter whispered, “Do you think any of them are just people hiding from the necros?”
We didn’t answer her. Not even Indigo.
Somehow, that thought was worse.
The farther we walked, the uglier the droning noise in my head got, until every step was emphasized by the throbbing ache behind my eyes. I could see fine, but my hearing was taking an audible beating again.
“Anyone hear that?” I muttered, shaking my head and raising one hand to tap against the side of the helmet.
They all froze. Then, Hooker’s shaking whisper. “No?”
Shit.
“What are you hearing?” Indigo asked me.
“A whine.” Again, I tapped my helmet. “Probably just some interference. Let’s keep going.”
“What interference?” Hooker glanced at me over his shoulder. “The power’s out.”
“But the bandwidth isn’t,” Carter noted.
I squeezed my eyes shut, dragging my armored forearm across the faceplate. It didn’t help. Despite the suit’s temperature regulation, I was perspiring hard enough to taste salt on my lips. “Thermals off,” I muttered. The faceplate visuals faded to empty streets and wisps of smoke, all the lines outlining the silhouettes of my team turning green again.
With all the white blobs gone, I could almost trick myself into breathing normally again. Almost. My back teeth ached with the strain.
A breeze scattered the smoky drift, clearing aspects of the street as we forged through. Eerie as it was already, seeing the distant halo of the city lights thrust into the sky only made it worse.
So close to normality. And yet so fucking far.
The smoke moved in the corner of my eye, skated at the edge of the helmet’s visibility range. Out of habit, I glanced left.
Fuck–
“Drop!” I shouted.
Merc or enforcer, everyone here knew that tone. We hit the pavement. A dull whump echoed us. I expected bullets; heard nothing but a whoosh of something sailing through the air and the distant clatter as it hit the building to my right. I was already rolling out of the way when someone – Carter, I think – opened fire. The Bolshovekia’s report runs slightly sharper than the Sauger 877’s.
In the orange flare of the muzzle flash, I caught the outline of two silhouettes, each wearing armor and darting back into the shadow.
All hell broke loose.
Another rapidfire hail of bullets, and whatever had taken root in my head detonated. Wave after wave of noise filled my aural synapses, blocked my ability to hear, even to see, as I staggered to my knees, swearing violently.
Hands gripped my shoulders. If their owner was talking to me, I didn’t hear it. I couldn’t hear it. Buzzing, ragged and nerve-shatteringly raw, filled my senses. My eyes crawled, my sinuses felt shoved full of static and pressure. If I opened my mouth, I didn’t know if it’d be my voice or the pressurized drone escaping.
The hands yanked me to my feet. “Get– ... –ko!”
I blinked hard. Darkness filled my vision.
Something cracked against my helmet, rocked my head back on my shoulders and I flailed for balance before another set of hands grabbed my shoulders. Orange flares spattered the darkness.
I wasn’t blind. I was just in the dark.
“Thermals,” I gasped.
The darkness transitioned to ghostly gray and I stared at Carter’s silhouette as she dragged me at a dead run. The heads-up traced her outline, thin and red, and put her vitals in the stratosphere.
I found my feet with effort, forcing the words through my aching jaw. “They don’t show.” My voice rasped. “They aren’t showing in thermals!”
Indigo turned, his gun pointed at us, but he waited until we’d managed to sprint past him before laying down enough cover fire to empty his clip. I heard it clink to the ground. “And they’re carrying monofilament nets.”
Carter let me go. “What the fuck happened?”
“You opened fire,” Indigo snarled, “and woke the goddamn host. Go!”
“Where?” Hooker asked, sounding more and more like a frightened rookie.
I shook myself hard, glancing from left to right and left again. “This way,” I shouted, and darted left through a sagging fence with rusted, broken metal sheaves.
“What’s that way?”
I didn’t know. I mean, I did, but I didn’t. Somehow, I just knew that darting left through a sagging fence with rusted, broken metal sheaves was the way to go.
Behind me, the necros turned into flies, darting wall to wall, trapped in their little honeycomb of tenements and flats. Some had found a way out. I imagined I could hear them gurgling, gasping; sniffing our trail, hot meat and sour sweat.
“Follow her,” he ordered. “Go, go, go!”
I ran down a narrow passage between two sad little tenements, ducking under low-hanging laundry lines strung between the two. Hooker’s rifle snagged in one, abandoned s
horts wrapped around it, and he wasted precious seconds untangling the barrel while Indigo whirled and laid down another line of cover fire.
I didn’t have to see them to know they were there every step of the way: necros. It seemed like thousands, but that was my imagination ruining my shit. If even ten of them came out with all the fuss, it was more than enough.
We could not handle ten, much less thirty, fifty, or however many there actually were.
And we sure as balls couldn’t handle them while a team of unknowns took potshots at us from the sides.
“Either necros are learning how to hunt as a team,” Hooker gasped, catching up to us, “or we’re being flanked by that second group.”
“I will pay,” I panted, “good fucking cred if they’re human.”
“Pay up,” Indigo said grimly. “Control, we’ve got the second team on us!”
Control flicked the feed on, but whatever calm she’d managed to scrape together had obviously frayed. “What’s your position?”
“Past oh, shit and two blocks into fucked,” he snarled. “We need support, lady!”
“We’re waiting–”
“I don’t care what you have to do, but you do it and you do it now.”
A brief pause. “We’ll do our best,” she said, and the line clicked off.
Not soon enough.
I ran. Bullets pinged off the brick and metal frames surrounding us, but I didn’t stop. None of us stopped. Indigo held the rear, and he didn’t ask me where I took them. I could imagine his features, hard planes locked down to petrified determination. This was not the point in which a runner lost his cool. This was the point that separated the chrome from the diamond steel.
I didn’t know which one I was right now – jumpy enough for chrome, pissed enough for diamond steel – but as I led the team through a maze of alleys, my heart pounding a bloody, ragged beat in my skull, I refused to end as a nameless statistic. I needed to zen it, and I needed to do it fucking now.
“There’s a team on the rooftops,” I said through stretched, bloodless lips. My feet pounded the asphalt, jarring every bone in my body. “Another flanking us. How do they know where we are?”
“And why aren’t the necros chasing them?” demanded Carter, with a righteous indignation that made me gasp out a laugh.
Indigo wasn’t amused. “I’ve tried every frequency, I can’t register them. How do you know where they are?”
He couldn’t? I didn’t look back at him; Hooker and Carter were in the way and I couldn’t see through his faceplate anyway. “Angle of the bullets,” I lied.
I didn’t know how I knew. I just did.
“Then what– Fuck!” A spatter of gunfire peppered the alley, and Carter went down on a ragged curse. The smell of blood – sharp, coppery, wet – filled my nose, even through the filters.
Fuck, shit, fucking spunkchucking fuck. “Move!”
“Carter!” Indigo slowed long enough to grab her arm and haul her to her feet. The Bolshovekia clattered to the asphalt.
The iron-rich fragrance of wounded flesh impaled itself into my senses.
My fingers clenched over my Sauger so hard, I saw the numbers spike under my personal visual display. I don’t think it was strong enough to bend a nanofactory diamond steel rifle, but my arm had surprised me before. Swallowing hard, I forced myself to raise my weapon, aim into the black above our heads, and lay down cover fire.
I heard nothing; no return fire, no movement.
Even the white shapes had faded, far enough in our dust that my sensors couldn’t pick them out anymore.
“You okay?” I managed, a semblance of together.
“Yeah.” Carter’s voice was tight with pain. She hobbled against Indigo’s shoulder. “Fuckers got me in a seam. Armor took the brunt.” But not all of it. The full-bodied fragrance of her blood made me want to puke.
That was a first.
“Riko, where the hell–”
I cut him off with a gesture to the right. “This way,” I said. “I have an idea.”
I didn’t give any of them time to argue.
They followed after a beat, and I didn’t run so fast that Carter couldn’t keep up – but I knew it was a struggle. She wasn’t dying, not yet. Not that it cleared her. If we didn’t bandage that wound up soon, her nanos might not have the juice to keep her on her feet. Gritting my teeth, I worked my way through narrow lanes and thin alleys, some so constricted that I spent the whole time coiled, overclocked and waiting for the hail of bullets I expected from above.
It came instead from behind.
Sparks pinged off the walls by my head, so close I could see the flecks of brick skate off my visor. The echo of automatic fire slammed wall to wall until it felt like my head was wrapped in a vise and only getting louder. Tighter.
Indigo grunted. “They can’t get a good angle.”
“Neither can I!” Hooker wasn’t great at holding it together, but at least he kept up. “They’re getting closer!”
What the shit. “Climb over me,” I ordered, and dropped to the ground.
“What–”
“Climb over me,” I shouted. Too loud, given necro senses, but I didn’t care. Indigo hesitated. Hooker was ahead of him and didn’t. I gritted my teeth as booted feet stepped hard on my shoulders and over. “Keep going,” I added, in case that wasn’t clear.
“You better…” Indigo’s voice hazed into background noise as another set of boots planted on my armored back. It wasn’t the weight. Carter was unsteady, but I was strong enough. It was the noise. Crackling, shimmering, strident. I banged my helmeted forehead against the asphalt, but it didn’t help. All it did was pop something in my nose.
I tasted my own blood.
This wasn’t the first time.
Blood in my mouth, pressure in my head. The flashback struck hard and fast, just like in Orchard’s lab. I spun in a mental vertigo, struggling to slog through shattered memories I couldn’t grasp.
There was no white tile here. Just asphalt and filth.
“Go,” I gasped, leaping to my feet. Hooker’s shoulders scraped against the wall as he sidled ahead, but I wasn’t as wide as he was. I had room to move, to pull the Adjudicator out of its holster and sight, straight-armed, down the alley.
Nothing moved in my thermal vision, but I knew they were there. I knew where they all were.
My skin prickled. There. As if I had a map of the area, I could see them. Sense them. I jerked my arm up, sighted once and pulled the trigger.
The echo of the shot cracked through the dark, the muzzle flash flaring white.
Something scraped. Clattered. A man-shaped blur hazed into a white silhouette as it fell from the roof. It smacked the asphalt in a tangled knot of splayed limbs, bounced off the ground with a sickening crunch and fell against the wall.
Ange may have had stealth tech, but theirs? Way better.
No more bullets came out of the alley behind me. “Thermals, off,” I said.
The ghostly shroud faded.
Black shapes solidified into view.
“Fuck!” I grabbed a hand splayed inches from my faceplate, held it fast and smashed my metal fist into my assailant’s elbow. The fact I carried the Adjudicator in it only added to the impact. Before he managed to wrench back, arm momentarily useless, I turned, slammed a straight-legged kick hard into his plated chest and left him colliding into the other guy on his heels. Assmunch. Choke on that.
“Go!” I shouted, just in case my team needed the reminder. If they said anything, I couldn’t hear it.
I was angry wasps and pain and blood thick in my throat. My vision flickered under the strain, but I didn’t stop. Didn’t dare slow. For whatever reason, the bodysuits on my tail didn’t open fire again.
Small smegging favors.
I holstered the Adjudicator and sprinted after my team, certain the bogeys would follow. They wanted something. They weren’t after the necros, that wouldn’t have put them on us. They wanted something we had. Knowle
dge? Our gear?
If they weren’t looking to shoot on sight, that made it unlikely they’d hacked Carter’s mines. Which meant something else had gone wrong.
Hands grasped at my rig and I wrenched away, lashing out another kick that didn’t connect with anything but brick. The jarring pain rippled up to my knee.
“Come on!” I snarled, almost blind with it.
“Oh, fuck,” Hooker squeaked, voice cracking on a raw note of terror. “Necros!” He stopped at the alley mouth.
“Everyone, back–”
I didn’t let Indigo finish that order. Barreling on them, I rammed my shoulder into Indigo’s back and forced him and Carter to collide with Hooker. We stumbled out of the maze, all of us gasping, two of us screaming.
Hooker.
Me.
The sound was unbearable now. Blood vessels ruptured in my eyes, something I didn’t know what to name ruptured in my awareness, and the world went red, then black.
23
“–ass to get up.”
I jolted into awareness on the heels of an order lined with ice, sharpened to a bloody edge. I was already lurching into movement, but as my vision cleared I stumbled, unsure of where I was going. What I was doing. My boots skidded on slick ground.
I tried to speak, but blood turned it into a mucus-thick gurgle. It took effort to clear my throat. “Malik?”
“Clock in.”
I shuddered, somehow gasped, “I’m here.” My helmet was gone, which made checking the faceplate worthless, but the display on my bracer told me I’d lost time. Four minutes, give or take.
Talk about losing my shit. Smoke and blood and the tang of decay filled my senses. My muscles ached, body thrumming with pure adrenaline, but I felt rooted. Hazy.
Everything but zen.
I could all but taste the seething fury on the line. “We are going to talk about this later. Get eyes on your team.”
I frowned, shaking my head. “Indigo?” I turned around.
Red. Black. Gleaming, textured, gorge-inducing.
I blinked, trying to clear my vision, but it wasn’t my disorientation painting the street.
I didn’t have the vocabulary to punctuate the carnage around me.
Limbs. Guts, intestines, chest cavities gutted and heads blown clean off where they weren’t a scattered mass of gobbets and brain. My EMP knife still hung loosely from my hand, blood dripping from the serrated edge, charge emptied.
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