by Piers Platt
“Ponytail,” he whispered. And my target is going bald.
He switched aim back to the right window, confirming that the guards and the man with the vaporizer were still in the same positions. Rath assumed the window was armored, so he selected Armor-Piercing: Explosively Formed Projectile in his neural interface, and saw the weapon report readiness. He lined up the crosshairs on the target’s silhouette, aiming for just below the center of his face. Rath exhaled normally, and then in the natural pause between his breaths, he pulled the trigger.
His round exploded as it impacted the window’s reinforced glass, and the immense pressure and heat of the explosion melted the tungsten alloy of the round into a super-heated jet of liquid plasma. The plasma penetrated the glass easily and, a micro-second later, punched through the far wall of the cabin, in the process searing a gaping hole through the target’s head.
The sensor array in front of the cabin shrilled an alarm a split second after Rath pulled the trigger – the shockwave of the rail rifle firing had kicked up a cloud of snow from the ground in front of the hide site, pinpointing his location on the array’s motion sensor. Rath swore loudly, and moved his point of aim over to the sensor array, selecting High Explosive for the next round and watching as the sensor array exploded in a cloud of debris, its warning alarm suddenly silenced.
The guard on the porch had dropped to the prone position and was firing his rifle roughly in Rath’s direction, though the range was extreme. Rath engaged him next, sending a regular kinetic energy round through the man’s silhouette – the round’s velocity would be more than enough to kill the man. Next, he zoomed back in on the kitchen window, but although he could see the target slumped across the table, no other thermal signatures were visible – the security guards had wisely cleared out of view. The woman appeared a second later, however, and Rath’s amplified hearing picked up her screams of alarm and dismay from the broken window. He ignored her and panned back, so that he could observe both the window and the front door simultaneously.
Rath watched the clock on his neural net interface and zoomed out to ensure that the guards had not exited the cabin through a window at the back of the house. After twenty seconds, the woman stopped screaming and moved out of the window frame. After a full minute of waiting, Rath decided that the other guards were not going to risk their lives now that their principal was dead. They had undoubtedly called for assistance, however.
Time to leave.
In planning the mission, Rath had determined that the nearest police station was an eleven-minute flight from the cabin, which meant he had just over ten minutes to execute his exfiltration. First, he fired three armor-piercing rounds through the parked air car’s engine block, and followed those with a fourth round set for Incendiary. The car caught fire readily, thick smoke billowing up and obscuring his position from the cabin’s windows. Next, he slotted the rifle into the remote base he had prepositioned in the hide site, and swapped in a fresh magazine of fifty rounds. Then he triggered the auto-fire protocol he had programmed into the weapon: for the next ten minutes, it would sporadically fire an assortment of rounds at random areas of the cabin, which would hopefully be enough to fool the security team into thinking he was still in his hide site, and discourage any would-be pursuers.
As the weapon fired its first round – High Explosive, by the sound of its impact on the cabin – Rath broke cover. He threw back the camouflage netting, pulled on his Forge pack, and set off through the woods at a sprint. The snow was deep and slowed him considerably, the cold air biting his lungs as he ran. Rath ran in silence, heading at an oblique angle to the cabin, retracing his steps by following familiar terrain features. The rail rifle’s shots punctuated his steps, and he counted the rounds as he went, pushing himself hard to cover distance as the weapon’s ammunition began to run low, and the inevitable police response team drew closer. He had timed himself on the movement out to the hide site, and was sure he could make it back to the river before the air cars arrived on scene, but it would be a close call, he knew. Everything depended on how quickly they could locate his tracks in the snow.
The ground suddenly sloped down ahead of him, and Rath was relieved to see the river ahead at the base of a gully. Escape over land would be impossible given the snow – his tracks were a dead giveaway – Rath had taken a small, high-speed electric kayak upriver to the closest point to the cabin, and planned to use the boat as his escape method, as well. As long as he could put himself far enough downriver, any police following his tracks would arrive at the river and have no clue as to his whereabouts. Rath slipped and slid down the slope, and was practically on top of the kayak when he stopped, aghast. The river had frozen over.
Rath stood next to the kayak for a moment, incredulous at his misfortune – he had not researched to see whether the river ever froze, but the bitter cold of the past three days must have been enough to start the process. Rath tested the ice with a foot: it appeared to be just a few inches thick, but it was thick enough that the kayak was firmly locked in place.
Not that breaking it free would do me any good at this point.
His artificially enhanced ears brought him the tell-tale whine of an air car engine several miles away, and Rath realized the rail rifle had stopped firing.
I’m out of time.
Rath took another step out onto the ice, and when it held, he set off downstream, slipping as he ran. The rail rifle was still streaming its visual feed to Rath’s heads-up display, and through it he saw that there were not one, but two air cars, in keeping with his rotten luck on the mission. They were armored police models, and Rath estimated they held at least six men each. They must have been in radio contact with the target’s security team, because the police did not waste time at the cabin, but instead remained airborne. The two cars split up, following circular search patterns until one located Rath’s hide site. Rath saw the cars converge and begin to follow his tracks through the snow, at which point he decided the weapon was no longer useful – it was just evidence they could collect to use against him – and he triggered its self-destruct mechanism. He made it another half mile down the riverbed before their noticeably louder engine noise indicated the police were closing in behind him.
One of the air cars fired a warning burst from its nose-mounted machine gun across Rath’s path, and the bullets shattered the ice, blasting open a gaping hole and exposing the water below. Rath slid to a stop several feet from the hole, raising his hands in defeat. He turned to face the hovering air cars, but as he looked up at them, he heard an ominous cracking sound. He glanced down: the thin ice below him was spider-webbed with fissures. Rath braced himself to jump, but the ice shattered before he could move, and with a cry of alarm, Rath tumbled through into the dark water below.
The water was bitterly cold, colder than anything Rath had experienced during Selection Phase, and it shocked the air out of his lungs and sent stabbing pains through his exposed skin. He struggled to the surface and took a gasping breath, and then the weight of his sodden cold weather gear and the Forge pack dragged him under. The river had a surprisingly swift current, and when Rath looked up, he realized that he had been swept underneath the sheet of ice on the far side of the hole he had fallen through. He was trapped beneath the ice, and being dragged several feet farther away from the hole with each passing second. Rath panicked for a second, fighting the current, and then he stopped, forcing himself to be calm.
Recover your pack, Candidate 621.
He activated his hemobots first, initiating the low oxygen procedure. His heart rate slowed to a crawl as the hemobots concentrated in his lungs, converting the building carbon dioxide back into oxygen. They could not keep up with his oxygen needs for long, he knew, but they would allow him to stay conscious for close to ten minutes, given minimal physical activity. Rath figured he needed about six.
Still tumbling in the current, Rath pulled the Forge off his back and opened it up. He realized he had no idea if it was capable of funct
ioning underwater, but when he activated it, it turned on readily and waited for his command. Rath had it build a hand drill with a wide-bore drill bit, and then added a hollow tube to the queue for when the drill was completed. The drill took just over two minutes, and then it started on the hollow tube. Rath grabbed the drill, looped the Forge’s strap around one arm, and kicked for the surface, hitting his head hard on the ice. His lungs burned, and the edges of his vision blurred, but Rath jabbed the drill into the underside of the ice, and then swung his feet up onto the ice downstream of his body. He kicked the toes of his boots in hard until he found enough of a purchase to hold himself in place, and then started drilling.
The hollow tube was finished just as the drill punched through, and Rath slotted it into the hole in the ice, and then placed his mouth over the tube, expelling air to clear the water out of the tube. He took a deep, shuddering breath through the makeshift snorkel, and another, until his hemobots sensed his blood was sufficiently oxygenated and resumed normal operation. Rath estimated he had traveled several hundred yards downstream from the hole in the ice, but certainly not far enough to be out of sight of the air cars. He had to assume that the police had not given up the search, and worst case, the sensors on their air cars might be able to see the heat his body was generating even through the ice.
If they don’t, they’ll definitely see the snorkel hole in a minute.
He couldn’t stay, and drilling his way through was out of the question. He decided to continue moving downstream under the ice. Rath took several deep breaths and tensed his legs, ready to drift again, but he stopped suddenly.
He sent another command to the Forge, and took three more deep breaths from the snorkel while he waited. The nanobots were finished with his request in under a minute. Rath took a cylinder of ice from the Forge’s tray, removed the snorkel, and then replaced it with the makeshift ice plug. It would freeze into place in minutes, and hopefully hide the snorkel hole from the police. Then he pushed off, letting the current snatch him away once more.
In his neural interface, he scrolled through the Forge’s recipe list, seeking inspiration. He was hesitant to use the snorkel many more times – he hoped the police had given him up for dead, but if they were thorough or lucky, they might still find the first drill-hole, and then they would locate him downstream easily by looking for other holes. The cold was also starting to become a real problem – Rath could feel his fingers losing dexterity, and a deep numbness was setting into his limbs.
He sent two more commands to the Forge, and waited as it assembled an air-tight body bag first, watching the ice speed past in the gloom above him. When the bag was done, Rath pulled himself inside it, zipping the top half closed around his head and torso, and shifting the Forge to his feet. The pack had already started on his second request, creating a continuous supply of raw potassium superoxide. As the nanobots assembled the compound’s molecules, they reacted instantly with the water, producing both oxygen and heat. The oxygen bubbles began filling the top of the body bag, and within another minute there was a pocket of air large enough for Rath to take a small breath. Gradually the heat from the reaction heated the water inside the bag as well, enough that Rath felt some feeling return to his limbs, though his shivering continued. Rath was blindly floating downstream in a body bag under several inches of ice, but he was alive.
All in all, probably not the worst way to travel.
15
It was fully dark when Rath reached the lake that the river emptied into. The lake’s fringes had iced over, but several yards out, the water was still clear, so Rath’s makeshift submarine merely bobbed to the surface when it cleared the last sheet of thin ice. Rath stopped the Forge’s chemical process and exited the bag, zipping it closed to trap the remaining air inside as a flotation device. There was no sign of the air cars, so Rath kicked for the shore, and after several false starts, managed to find ice thick enough to support his weight. He hauled himself out and ran to the nearby tree line. When he was several yards inside the trees, he pulled his spare set of clothing – thankfully still dry in their waterproof bag – out of the pack, and changed, teeth chattering. To be safe, he destroyed the body bag, drill, and snorkel, along with his wet, camouflaged clothing. Finally, he set off, eating a quick meal while on the move, skirting the lake and heading for the mining outpost where he had begun his journey days before.
Rath stepped out of the tree line at the edge of town and walked quickly toward a row of industrial buildings, heading for the high-speed rail hub – he would take a train back to the spaceport from there. He rounded the corner of one of the buildings and stopped: two air cars were parked along the street, with four policemen waiting beside them, hands on their holstered pistols.
Fuck, Rath thought. How did they—?
“Mind coming with us?” one asked Rath. He and another cop approached Rath cautiously.
Rath tried to keep his heartbeat under control. “Sure … what’s up?”
“We’d like a word with you,” the policeman said. He stopped a few feet from Rath, and slowly drew his pistol, but kept it pointed at the ground. “Put your pack down, please. Are you carrying any weapons?”
“No,” Rath told him. The second policeman searched his bag for a minute, finding only spare ration packs and clothes, and then patted Rath down, thoroughly and professionally. When he was satisfied, he stepped back.
“He’s clear. Sir, I’m going to handcuff you now for transport to the police station.”
Rath shrugged. “Okay,” he said. “Can you tell me what this is all about?”
The police ignored him. Rath assumed they would take him to the nearest city, but instead they drove across the mining town to a small police station – an isolated building surrounded by barbed wire, with a single office and a corridor that led to a set of holding cells. Rath allowed himself to be guided into the office, where he sat down across from a large, steel desk. One of the cops – a Lieutenant Foche, according to his rank insignia and nameplate – activated a recording device on his shoulder as he sat down in the chair across from Rath. Rath’s mind was racing.
“State your name and occupation,” Lieutenant Foche told him.
“William Mason, I’m a traveling parts manufacturer,” Rath replied, gesturing to the Forge on the chair behind him and willing his voice to stay even.
“What are you doing here in Ocolin?” the officer asked.
“Business, hopefully,” Rath replied. “I just landed a couple days ago; my company thought there would be some folks out here in the mining industry that needed on-demand parts for their equipment.”
“That’s an expensive printer,” the lieutenant said.
“Yes, it is,” Rath agreed. “Look, my boss will have my ass if he finds out I left it out in the woods, even for a few minutes – can we just keep that between us? Please?”
Foche ignored him. “What were you doing out in the woods?”
Rath shifted in his seat uncomfortably. “I had a little too much to drink earlier at the bar, and I lost a bet with a guy – he said he’d pick up my bar tab if I won, I said I would go for a swim in the lake if he did.”
Lieutenant Foche frowned at Rath. “You sure went a ways around the lake to follow through on that bet.”
Rath stayed quiet for a moment, and when it became clear Foche was expecting a response, he finally sighed. “Look – I went skinny dipping, that was the bet. I figured a little public nudity that far away wasn’t going to hurt anyone, but if there’s a fine, I’ll try to pay it. I don’t have much cash right now, though.”
“You seem to be pretty flush to me,” one of the other policemen, a sergeant, chipped in. “Got eye and ear implants and a military-grade 3D printer. Not many traveling salesmen walking around with that kind of tech.”
Rath turned to see his accuser. “The printer’s not mine, it’s the company’s.”
“And the implants?” Foche asked.
“I used to be a stockbroker,” Rath told him,
“living the high life. I got these back then. But I made a few bad trades, and … well, here I am.” Rath immediately regretted picking stockbroker as his previous profession – if the cops dug too deeply there, his complete ignorance on the industry would quickly surface. He decided to cover it with a redirection. “You guys can call my company to check it all out, if you want.” Rath took a business card out of his pocket and handed it across the desk. Foche looked at it, then gestured to the sergeant, who took it and stepped out of the office, closing the door. The room was dead silent as they waited.
After a minute, the door opened, but it was not the sergeant – it was an older man in a rather disheveled uniform. His unit insignia indicated that the man was a sheriff in the police auxiliary – a part-time volunteer, not fully-trained Interstellar Police, like the team that had picked him up. This is his office, Rath realized. Foche and his team must have been called in from one of the nearby city precincts to assist with the investigation around the cabin.
“Gentlemen,” the sheriff nodded a greeting to the other officers. “What’s going on in my neck of the woods that you needed to borrow my facilities? Figured it must be something big, I better get my butt out of bed.”
“We’ll catch you up in a few, Sheriff,” Foche told him, eyes fixed on Rath.
“Suit yourself,” the sheriff agreed, helping himself to a cup of coffee from a machine on the side table. The sergeant finished his phone call and walked back into the office.
“Checks out, sir.”
Rath breathed a silent sigh of relief, thankful that his monitoring team back at the Group had been ready to take the call and confirm his cover story. Foche just frowned, and sat thinking for several seconds.
“Alright, I’m going to be straight with you,” the lieutenant said. “I don’t believe you, company phone call or not. This dumb drunk routine just doesn’t hold water with me, not after the shit that just went down upriver from here. Legally, I can hold you for forty-eight hours without a formal charge, so you’re going to get comfortable here, and I’m going to finish collecting the evidence I need to nail your ass.”