“So we’ve got necros infesting the place, and a corporation on our ass. Sounds like a dream.”
Indigo looked up at the ceiling, his jaw tight with effort.
I knew what he was thinking. I knew, because if I were in his shoes, I’d have done the same damn thing.
But I wasn’t. “We have to keep on.”
“The hell we do.” He stood, one hand clamping around the furrows in his arm. “Anything we find, and gods know where we’d find it,” he added grimly, “isn’t going to be worth the losses.”
“It will be.”
“Riko.” He rounded on me. “This fuckup is not worth our lives.”
I hissed. “It’s not a fuckup.” I elbowed back against the wall, struggled to get to my feet – gave up when he swore fluently in a mix of street and his pidgin family blend. He stepped in to flatten one hand on my shoulder.
He only did that, brought in the bits of the language bastardized on the street, when he was really scared.
I don’t know why I didn’t knock him on his ass. Maybe because I recognized the gesture for what it was.
I sat, obeying the pressure he applied, but I gripped his wrist with my bloody hand. “I’m not walking away.”
“Riko.” Indigo’s laugh bit. “You aren’t fucking walking, are you?”
“I’m serious!” My voice rasped, harsh and grating, but I couldn’t let this go. I couldn’t live with it – wouldn’t be allowed to. “If I leave this hellhole without that info, my cred is shot for life. Do you get that? I. Will be. Fucked.” And then I would be dead.
I was good, but I wasn’t good enough to survive the kind of shitstorm that a bad fall from good cred could net a runner. Not alone.
And I didn’t kid myself. Until I had more to bargain with, I was totally alone.
He said nothing, staring mulishly at my gloved fingers leaving crimson streaks on his own wrist.
“Digo.” His name hissed between my teeth.
It was as close to a please as I ever got.
His grip eased on my shoulder. Muscle and tendon flexed beneath my fingers, but he didn’t pull away. When I turned, his gaze touched mine. Achingly tired, faded with pain and a fatigue that went deeper than tech and bone. “Is it worth that much to you?”
He wasn’t really asking me that.
Could I live with myself if the data proved what we both were afraid of? That I was at fault?
That this was my mess? Nanji’s mess?
I nodded, letting him go. “We have to keep on,” I said grimly. As good an answer as I had. “Whatever is going on here, Malik wants it and I’ll bet someone else will pay top cred to get it, too. Like them,” I added pointedly, tipping my head back toward the sealed doors. “You think they’ll pay us or just kill us?”
“What makes you think Malik will pay us?”
A fair point. And a logical one – a smidge of relief filtered in through the chaos. That was Indigo Koupra. Paranoid as shit.
“Simple,” I assured him, and this time, I didn’t let him stop me from dragging my sorry ass to my feet. “I’ll kill him if he doesn’t.”
“And me?”
No, I didn’t forget that he’d betrayed me to that same corporate toolshed he accused me of handing his sister to. But I’d be damned if I let him follow his sister to the grave. I put pressure on my leg, hissed in a breath when it flared, but it held my weight.
“It’s like this,” I finally told him. I eased my weight off the leg, then on. Every shot of pain, every twang of abused nerves, made it easier to get used to. I met his gaze over the incandescence of our lowered torches. “Right now, you need me to get your ass out of here alive. I need you to get my ass into that security system. It’s a match made in heaven.”
“Or a one-way road to hell.”
“Yeah, well.” I stripped off my useless gloves, dropping them to the floor. They landed with a damp splat. “If you wanted an easy payday, you should have listened to your momma and joined a whorehouse.”
His laugh surprised me. It wasn’t warm, not even amused, but it did something to ease the tension. Made the air breathable again. As the crack of sound faded away, he caught my shoulder again, his bloody grip tight.
It was a move that stole a little bit of my anger. Turned a little more of my fear into something stronger than nerves.
This time, it wasn’t hatred between us. Solidarity had finally snapped into place. Familiar, instinctual.
I didn’t know how long it’d last, but as long as it got us through this shitstorm, I’d take it. “I’d kill to have Boone down here,” I said ruefully.
“Yeah. Me too.” He didn’t push it any farther than that. Letting me go, he gestured down the hall. “Stay to the center, try not to trigger any of those doors.”
“You got it.”
I took the lead again, keeping as close to the middle of the hall as I could. I covered the left side, Digo covered the right, Saugers held at the ready. For almost ten minutes – endless, nausea-inducing long minutes – nothing else moved. I heard no outside sounds, saw no movement. If dead eyes watched us from the black windows, I couldn’t see them.
But I was positive they were there.
I jerked as something in my neural frequency cracked a warning, a single second before Indigo checked his arm plate and said tightly, “They broke the lock. Haul ass.”
The stomp of booted feet echoed from somewhere behind us.
I took off in a dead run, struggling and failing to stay in the center. Digo didn’t try. He sprinted like a man on his last legs. I didn’t stop, not even when the mechanical whoosh of two doors whirred open in our wake.
I picked up my pace, locking back groans of effort as it rocked my wounded leg. Indigo followed, but he said nothing, probably thinking the same thing I was: if the necros were attracted by noise, maybe they’d give us a miss and go right for the corporate boots pounding behind us.
It probably would have worked, too, if I didn’t round a corner to find myself swallowed by pitch black. My light picked out open floor but nothing else. The quality of the space changed – it felt open, wider. I stopped. Indigo collided into my back and I grunted a shushing warning before he could ask why we’d halted.
The shadows sucked the sound away, bandied it around like a toy before eating it completely.
Our lights crisscrossed into the black space. No walls on either side of us, but I picked out the faint outline of what looked like chairs. Tables. A kind of commons?
I hesitated.
Anything could be waiting in here. Necros, corpses, hell, munitions that could blow sky-high, rigged by survivors. Calling out would be a death warrant; staying silent could get us as dead, just as messily.
I lowered my weapon, highlighting stark gray flooring in front of my feet, and a streak of white tile angling left.
Gunfire erupted from the hall behind us. Lots of it. Guess our necro surprise party had done the job.
Indigo tapped my left shoulder. I turned left, took one step and hesitated again. My gaze slid right; the short hair on the back of my head prickled.
He prodded my shoulder.
I reached back, caught his arm and pulled him right.
“What–”
I squeezed in warning. I couldn’t explain. It wouldn’t make sense anyway. I had a gut feeling.
If we moved left, we were dead.
Although, as we walked as fast as we dared through the empty chamber – stepping around overturned chairs and scattered containers revealed by our laughably thin lights – I reasoned that we may just be dead a different way.
Necro rending. MetaCore bullets.
Whatever.
The echoes behind us gained in intensity.
My guts turned to a frozen knot of dread – no, of panic. Something felt wrong; getting more wrong by the second. Something bad was happening and I didn’t know what to call it. Where it was coming from. Paranoia jammed spikes of terror into my eye sockets and twisted, and I stopped dead as the fir
st tinny reverberations of bullets spattering the walls behind us sent shrill echoes through the room.
I sucked in a shuddering breath.
Ting. Metal skated across metal. Bounced once.
Indigo’s body crowded mine, his arm wrapped around my chest and hauled me hard to the right. We hit the floor as a column of orange flame turned the dark into a searing flare of eye-scalding light. Heat licked over us, too far away to cause damage but close enough to smell the same acrid stench of chemical-laden fire that had swallowed Falk.
Ting, ting. Ting!
“Move!”
We pushed off the floor with street-honed speed and instinct, tearing across the chamber as two more gouts of flame roiled up in our wake. In the blinding flash, I saw the remains of tables and chairs, discarded armor and bodies. Chains of them. Row upon row of corpses laid out along the right side – exactly where that pale path would have planted us.
The last grenade erupted too close to dodge, closer than I expected it to flare. The detonation stripped what was left of my night vision. The blast wave pummeled into our backs, sending me ass over elbows and shoving Indigo out to the middle of the open chamber.
I hit the ground, propelled so hard that my teeth bounced off the floor and my feet tried to rebound off my head. Things stretched, popped. Pain didn’t even rate against adrenaline. I rolled with it best as I could, collided ribs first into an overturned table, and grabbed at its edge as lights filled my straining vision.
Three, four, no... Fuck. Ghostly afterimages peppered my sight as I struggled to count them. Four? Six? More than two.
I heard no communication, but that probably meant they had the same kind of sound-dampening helmets we’d been using before we broke them. The grenade fires died, leaving glowing embers where flammable materials had taken in the heat.
Pop. Light bloomed, a blue nimbus struggling against the dark and fed by more glow rods. They hit the ground, thrown from the entrance. I peered around the table, hauled my Sauger up and sighted down the weapon – nice little cluster of corporate fuckheads they made.
Just in time for something in my skull to go snap.
A gasp wheezed to my right.
My finger froze on the trigger.
The wheeze turned into a rattle. Moist, pulpy.
Oxygen turned to ice in my lungs. Very slowly, I turned my head. Sweat slid down my temple; fear turned it clammy in my palm.
The corpses rippled.
Noise, fire, the blast impact. Enough to wake the dead.
Or the converted.
Something thick and... and wet popped inside my consciousness. Something I didn’t recognize, that didn’t live inside my head but left me reeling, feeling as if my skull had peeled back and exposed all my nerves.
Eradicate.
A directive. A warning. A need. It swallowed me whole.
Limbs trembled in that row of corpses, slack mouths gaping and heads flopping as silhouettes thrust upward from the bloody, gory swell. They didn’t stand; they erupted, flowed into position, and they took no time to calculate. As if they already knew exactly where the food stood, blobs of flesh peeled off the shuddering pile and turned to lethal hunters.
MetaCore fired first. Muzzle flash sparked like fireworks in the blue glow, and one necro’s legs were suddenly splayed awkwardly three feet behind its body as it skidded to the ground, smearing blackened blood in its wake.
Another darted past it, leaping at the fan of enforcers in sleek armor.
One came for me.
Eradicate.
I turned just in time, bracing my back against the fallen table and locking the trigger. The necro had been female, her slack face still wearing traces of lipstick and lurid blush. Her eyes flashed at me, ocular replacements dilating as my clip emptied in less than a second. It shredded her chest, forcing her to come in lopsided, one arm dragging. It didn’t stop her.
Over her shoulder, Indigo sprinted for a door at the far end of the chamber. S E C U gleamed in large white letters, the rest charred beyond recognition.
I set my jaw, rolling out from behind cover as she threw herself at me, once-manicured talons extended. She’d cared about her appearance while alive. Her nails were still bright red, though congealed remains swung from one hand like snot dried into a clinging web.
She caught herself gracelessly, lacking the wicked speed I’d seen in Nanji and some of the other necros. I dropped a kick to her shoulders that forced her face into the underside of the sideways table, then pounded the stock of my Sauger 877 into the back of her head. She screamed, ragged and breathless, fingers scrabbling at the floor, the table. Again and again, I hammered at her, until the chipset buried in the base of her skull tore out through her jaw, falling with a wet splat on the floor beside us.
She convulsed, then went still.
Gasping for breath, I looked up. MetaCore had knotted, and necros closed in with the single-minded determination of extermination.
Some had seen me.
Fuck.
I turned, dropping my gore-plastered Sauger, and sprinted for the security door.
Gunfire filled the chamber, sparks lit the ground beside me, but if they were firing at me or the necros between me and them – or if the necros themselves had any security upgrades; a terrifying prospect – I didn’t know. I ran with blood thick in my nose, my skull hammering. I raced across carnage-slick ground, skidding more than once, and caught myself on the door.
It wouldn’t open. The panel beside it hung open, circuits blackened.
I hammered on the door with my synthetic fist. Clang! “Indigo!”
I heard nothing on my feed.
That son of a bitch. If he wasn’t dead, I was going to kill him.
“Indigo!”
I reached behind me, pulling the CounterTech from the harness and plastered my back against the locked door. My hands shook – rage. Bitter, vicious. A necro wearing the black BDUs of security barreled down on me.
I sighted down my arm and pulled the trigger. Once, twice. A third time as he staggered. His skull collapsed.
He hit the floor. Twitched.
And dragged himself slowly across it.
Fuck me. A 9mm wasn’t enough to take out the base of his skull. I’d need precision sighting, and I wasn’t equipped for that kind of aim.
Surprise, more tech I didn’t have.
I dropped the useless firearm, turned and wedged my metal fingers into the seam of the door. “Open,” I told it, straining to override the bearings holding it in place.
It didn’t budge.
I widened my stance, sucked in a breath and pulled with everything I had. A woman screamed to my right, muffled but jagged; I didn’t look. I blocked out the necro dragging itself towards me, the gory scene behind me, and pulled.
I heard the servos in my arm spin. Felt my shoulder girdle snap taut, then strain. Pain lanced up my shoulder, into my back. The muscles around my scapula twanged, popped. White-hot agony dragged across my senses as the reinforcement in my biceps lengthened, hit max, and then detached from the muscle holding it together. I screamed. The filthy claws of a necro gouged into my thigh, dug in and held fast. Pain on pain.
The door opened an inch. It was enough.
All at once, the bearings broke, the lock gave, and the panel slid open. I fell inside, my left arm hanging useless and limp as I smeared the ground with my face.
The necro clawed at me. I kicked hard, my boot tore off his jaw with a sickening pop. He still advanced, nothing in his empty, milky eyes: no hatred, no fear. No pain.
Scrabbling for the .525 caliber pinned between me and the floor, I rolled, trying to shake off the necro’s grip; flesh gave before he did, and I shrieked as he fell off me, a hunk of my thigh in his bloody grip.
If I survived this, I was going to school Malik on what armor was cunting for. Bullets were one thing, but it didn’t hold for shit against whatever these necros had going for them. Mantis should’ve been better than this.
I s
truggled to sit up, abs cramping with the effort, and clocked the necro with the heavy gun. It reeled. Taking advantage of the second it gave me, I shot it pointblank. The recoil nearly popped my elbow inside out. The report tore through the chamber, bounced back on a riddled sea of echoed assault rifles.
In eerie, surreal echo of the first sec goon I’d killed down here, its head burst.
Finally. I got to see an exploding head.
Laughing seemed inappropriate. Hysteria, on the other hand, battered at my mental faculties like it didn’t give a damn.
I dragged myself upright, shaking off the limp, twitching body. It took effort – so much energy – but I staggered to the door. Slamming the hand holding the gun against the panel beside it shoved the doors closed again.
There was a click behind me.
I turned, Adjudicator barely up, and sighted between two familiar blue eyes.
Dark. Focused.
Tinted too far into gray to be nothing but shadow.
My linker was fighting nanoshock, and at the rate this shithole was going, he’d hit corruption before we got out.
What did they call this?
Oh, yeah. Déjà vu. That feeling like I’d done all this before.
Indigo froze, his Sauger pointed at me. My revolver pointed at him.
Stalemate.
I looked at the weapon, at the flashlight centered on my chest. Blood ran steadily down my leg, seeping into my boot. Putting weight on it squished. It also hurt like a motherfucker. My left arm hung limply, ignoring every effort to move.
I’d snapped something. Or everything.
“This would be a lot funnier if you had any Mexican in you.” My voice shook. Adrenaline. Pain. Nanoshock, too, maybe. I’d pushed them too far again; didn’t rest when I’d had the chance.
Ass. It’s like this place wanted me dead, and I was determined not to die according to script.
My arm dropped. The gun was too heavy for this kind of patience.
He stared at me. Hard. Then, jerking his chin at the door, he lowered his weapon and turned away. “They autolock,” he said. “Come in. You want to see this.”
I glanced at the doors. Looked back at his rigid, armored back as he vanished into another door at the end of the narrow room. A foyer, maybe. Some kind of waiting room.
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