She turned, expecting a pair of punks about to mug her, instead finding two tall men in black coats with sunglasses. She opened her mind to their surface thoughts.
Her image hovered in their minds, rotating above a holo terminal―a security vid from the Intera building.
That’s the one, kill her.
Shame, she’s kinda cute.
Five hundred grand is pretty hot, and I’ll take hot over cute.
They spoke over implanted comms, telepathy with cyberware instead of psionics. Her eyes widened as she grabbed for her sidearm.
Their hands twitched, but nothing happened.
Dark and without power, their weapons remained quiet. Dorian stood a few yards to their left in the middle of the road, his hand extended toward them.
She heard their confusion. What the fuck, these mags are new…
Kirsten’s E90 spat a bright blue beam of energy through the chest of the guy on the left as he gazed, astonished, at his inert weapon. The shot vaporized a four-inch wide patch of his coat and left a flame-lined tunnel a half-inch wide all the way through him. He gulped and shuddered, staring down as blood welled out of the hole and smothered the flames. He barely managed to look at his accomplice before his body fell backwards out of his ghost like a board, landing dead on the ground.
The other man threw his inoperable gun to the side and rushed at her. A pair of thirteen-inch blades slid out through the knuckles of both his hands as he charged in, roaring. She ducked the first stroke, leaping away as the blades on his right arm sparked into the corner of the building. Backpedaling, she raised her weapon, but he spun into a swipe with his left that gashed her across the forearm and knocked it out of her grip.
Kirsten gasped, clutching her arm in an attempt to slow the blood seeping through her fingers. Far too much adrenaline coursed through her for pain to take a foothold in her thoughts. He lunged at her with a wild side swing; she dove between two parked cars and scrambled on all fours into the road. Metal-on-metal rang behind her.
A shadow fell over her. She looked up at sun-streaked metal against the sky; blades at the end of a pair of outstretched arms as he came leaping over the car. With a shriek, she rolled on her back and raised her legs, kicking into him. Spittle misted her face as she knocked the wind from his lungs and arrested his killing dive. The razors swished past her face, close enough to feel the air they displaced. She turned her head to spare her nose as a thin line of crimson dribbled on her cheek from the blade that got her in the arm.
Shoving with both legs, she threw him onto the roof of the car. Before she could stand, he leapt in for a second try and she rolled under the vehicle with her face to the cold road. A sharp metal click came from where the blades scored the traction coating. He turned and bellowed, the glower on his face sending fear coursing through her. She had never seen a man so angry before; at least not one who still lived.
Hiding under a car where he could not fit afforded her enough protection to gather her thoughts. The crystal blue of Kirsten’s eyes faded to a brilliant white glow. Her attacker’s fury melted to fear a second before his thoughts scrambled. The mind blast she hurled into his cerebrum knocked his senses into a kaleidoscope of colors, fragrances, feelings, and sound.
She gathered herself to focus another blast, but he vanished amidst a blur of metallic green, the blaring of a horn, and the squealing of tires. Her eyes returned to normal as she whispered thanks to no one in particular for sparing her the experience of having to kill someone with a mind blast. After a few seconds of silence, a distant smash preceded the sound of many small objects falling onto the road.
Where her assailant had just been kneeling, a small green passenger car now sat tilted askew from the direction of the street. Wisps of smoke rose from its crumpled front end. Luminous green fluid leaked from its cryonic battery, forming a puddle on the ground that sent patches of frost crawling up the tires.
Dorian stood by the driver, wearing an apologetic grimace.
Kirsten dragged herself out from under the parked car. As soon as she put weight on her right arm, the pain of three cuts flared, sapping all strength from the limb. She bled as badly as if she had slashed her wrist; the feeling of it invading her consciousness made her shriek.
The driver of the green car looked back and forth from her to the pair of legs sticking up from a cluster of small street corner vending machines a few yards away.
“The damn car just swerved by itself, I swear I never saw you! Are you okay?”
The middle-aged man panicked at the crimson streaks on her pale hand, not seeing the wound hidden under the uniform. She gaped at him, in too much shock and pain to speak. Dorian put his hand on her shoulder. Both of the men spoke, but their words drowned in a haze of spinning until Dorian’s yell pierced her stupor.
“Kirsten, Stimpak!”
“Huh, what?” Her head turned left and right. “Dorian?”
The driver held her bloody hand. “No, Jimmy. Are you okay, miss?”
“Dammit, Kirsten, use a Stimpak.” Dorian shook her by the shoulder, shouting. “You are losing a lot of blood.”
“Holy shit, lady. Are you having a seizure?”
“I uhm…” She looked down at her belt. “…think I’ll be fine.”
Dorian stared, sucked in a breath, and squeezed the panic button on her forearm guard.
Reality solidified at long last. She took one of the red autoinjectors out of her belt case and pushed it into her skin until she heard the comforting hiss. A burst of coolness entered her arm; the slash marks filled with foamy blood for an instant, then shrank and drew closed as the nanobots sealed it. Twinges of pain ran up her arm like metal shards through her nerves as the veins mended. She winced, holding the limb tight to her chest until it passed.
Dorian whistled to get her attention. As soon as she looked at him, he pointed down at her E90 lying in the street.
“Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me, it was his car.”
The man blinked at her. “Are you sure you’re feeling alright, officer?”
“I’m okay, Jimmy.” She held a hand up at him. “Just stay in your car until the patrol units get here.”
She trotted over to her weapon, then toward the moaning figure that had, up until a moment ago, been trying to kill her. He lay sprawled in the road, amid the contents of a broken corner vendomat.
Tiptoeing around plastic-wrapped snack cakes, instant cheeseburgers, feminine products, and scattered auto-cooled soda cans, she dragged him into a seated position with the laser pistol almost up his nose. Blood smeared down his face from a crown of glass fragments embedded across his hairline. Kneeling on the road at the time of impact, he had taken the car’s grille right in the face. Lucky for him, the driver obeyed the speed limit.
“Okay, asshole…” Kirsten stood over him with the laser. “It’s time for us to have some quality time.”
ilence smothered the area as the shattered assassin fought to focus on Kirsten’s face, blinking through trails of blood that leaked into his eyes. His body twitched, unable to sit still. She pulled him farther into the street and dropped him flat on the ground. Planting a foot on either side of his chest, she squatted over him with a two-fisted grip on his shirt. Two pale stripes of skin peeked out through the slashed material of her sleeve as she jerked his head off the ground.
“Who sent you?”
He gurgled. “Your mother.”
She bounced his head off the road. “My mother didn’t work for Intera. Now, who ordered it?”
His smugness splintered into panic. “I didn’t say―”
“You don’t have to, numbnuts. All you have to do is think it and I know.” You can’t keep secrets from me. She injected her telepathic voice through the miasma of pain in his head. Did they even bother to tell you what you were being sent to kill?
He tried to squirm, his body too broken to move.
“Don’t fight it. Your idiot partner over there is already wondering why his hand
is going through the wall. For some reason I do not want to make a second ghost today. Even though you did try to kill me, the thought of putting up with your bitching for the next fifty years doesn’t thrill me. Now, who gave the order?”
He closed his eyes, shuddering. His fingers clenched into a fist as he tried to reach her with his claws once more, but managed only to get them an inch off the ground. At the movement of his arms, she slammed his head into the ground.
The random thoughts that danced through his head could not stop his brain’s instinctive reaction to consider the subject of a question.
Kirsten grabbed a fistful of his shirt, E90 almost up his nose. “Who’s Lucian Talbot?”
“You know this isn’t admissible, right?” Dorian asked from behind her.
“Who cares about admissible? The guy’s a Senior VP at Intera R&D. If anything happens to him, it’ll be Division 9 arranging an accident. Men like that don’t go to inquests.”
The assassin let his head fall, convinced he would be next on the hit list for talking. Pain brought convulsions as his boosted adrenals began to wear off one by one. She stood up, taking a step back and folding her arms. Just for spite, she melted his claws off with a few quick shots.
“I don’t suppose you know why you were sent to kill me? Someone has to be pretty desperate to put out a hit on a police officer.” Kirsten stared. “Damn, he doesn’t.”
“It’s related to Albert.” Dorian jogged up to her side. “His friend sang like a blue jay. The hit came through a fixer though, he didn’t have names.”
Sirens pierced the air ahead of a swarm of Division 1 patrol craft that descended upon the area. The ghost of the other assassin ran off. The spark of amusement that came with watching him think he had to avoid the police crashed into the somber realization that she had finally made a ghost. Given the circumstances, she did not feel quite as bad about it as she expected.
Cops are the least of his worries now. “I’m surprised the Harbingers aren’t after a guy that kills for money.”
No sooner did she grumble to Dorian than a fleeting shadow slid past the building. Dorian edged away from the distant spectral wail, glancing at her sideways.
“Was that just good timing or did they hear you?”
She shivered, mournful. “I don’t know…”
“Do yourself a favor, K…Never feel satisfaction when you kill someone.”
Kirsten gasped. “I couldn’t possibly―”
Two patrolmen approached, glancing down at the bloody heap of man. Kirsten glanced at the white letters on their chests, name and rank. Both were Patrol Officers, E1s.
“You okay, Agent?” Officer Edmond looked her over.
He seemed not the least bit afraid of her. She smiled and showed him her arm.
“Yeah, got a nick but I’m okay.”
Kirsten recounted the ambush. “…and then that motorist helped out quite by accident.”
Dorian groaned.
The officer noticed the blood and raised an eyebrow. “Got a MedVan on the way for shithead over there, you need it?”
She picked through the fabric. “I don’t think so, it’s closed up. Stimpak was enough.”
“Count your blessings this guy was cheap. If those were vibro claws you’d be replacing that hand.”
The wind got much colder. Fear brought a tremble at the thought of metal inside her body. She dreaded that more than death.
“Yeah… lucky.” She forced a smile.
At Dorian’s insistence, she stopped at the MedVan for an immune-booster, standard procedure for a cut from implanted blades. The medic declared her clear and she sat on the hood watching the Division 1 officers clean up the mess and tell the assassin about his upcoming all-expenses-paid trip to an asteroid mining colony as he stuck a medusa in the assassin’s M3 port. The little black cube would disrupt his NIU―the critical link between a living brain and all cyberware in the body, leaving him unable to use any implanted hardware until it was removed.
By the time the Division 1 team gave her the wave off, her ass was numb. She slid off the hood and stretched, attempting to rub a little warmth through the thin cloth. The cops checked her out, unconcerned with subtlety. For a moment, she felt like a real person, and basked in it.
Dorian’s voice floated over from the other side of the car. “You may want to check this out.” He waved her toward the apartment building.
“What?”
“You need to see this for yourself.”
“Dorian, how did you deal with it?”
“Deal with what?”
“People that look at us like we’re…”
A wry smile formed on his face. “Demons?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You know, in the entire force except for maybe Div 6, female personnel half as pretty as you are always complaining about unwanted attention. I have to say I find it amusing you complain about being left alone.”
“It’s harassment only if you don’t want it, and they don’t stop when you tell them to get lost.” She pondered and shrugged. “I guess if I got it all the time I’d be sick of it too, but when they trip over themselves to run, I wonder what’s wrong with me.”
He followed her to the elevator. “Nothing’s wrong with you. That’s your mother talking.”
She flashed a weak smile. “I was thinking about her. About the way she always told me I’d never amount to anything since I rejected God. I’m starting to think―”
“You think you can’t find love because some mortal-defined notion of a supreme being has his knickers in a twist over the fact you don’t believe in him? You said it yourself, Kirsten. It is pure arrogance to think a supreme being could be offended by the opinion of a single insignificant mortal.”
Kirsten’s eyebrows slid together. “Weren’t you defending religion the last time we had this conversation?”
He laughed. “I was defending a person’s right to define the world around them in terms they can deal with. I understand why people use it to make life, and what comes after it, into something they can digest.”
“But we’ve seen the other side,” Kirsten grumbled, punching the button. “We know there is no supreme intelligence.”
“Do we?” He gave a pensive look. “Let’s presume for a second there is one. Do you think it possible such a being is limited to the size, shape, and personality of a little old man in a robe? What if the white light is more than just light? Is it not feasible our minds just can’t comprehend what we’re seeing?”
“You just pulled a 180 on me.” She stepped out of the elevator on Albert’s floor. “You know, I think mankind just made it all up so they could control people. I’ve had hours-long conversations with dead clergy despondent at what awaited them on the other side because it didn’t fit the fairy tale they believed their entire life.”
Dorian chuckled. “A little old man in the clouds and a fat angel waiting to judge you in front of a gate; they are using poetic license. Besides you don’t know what waits on the other side of the silver light.”
“Neither do you.” She opened Albert’s door with her boot. “It’s more than poetic license when people kill each other over who’s got the better fable.” She ducked under the yellow tape.
“You can’t say for sure your mother would have killed you if you didn’t run away.”
“It was escalating.” Kirsten turned away to hide a tear. “I don’t know what she would have been capable of. She told me I was not even her daughter anymore. She said she wanted the monster out of her house; not that she wanted it out of her daughter. Ghosts came to beg me for help, and she blamed me for inviting the Devil’s playthings in the door. The night I ran―” she choked up.
“People that don’t understand have to explain what they see somehow.”
“Are you saying what she did to me was justified?” Her eyes threatened a deluge of tears as she turned to face him.
“No.” Dorian held his hands up. “Nothing could justify what she did
to a little child. All I am saying is I can see her motivation.”
Kirsten rambled, half crying. “Humans invented a god, demons, faeries, and magic to explain what they don’t understand. Then scientists come along and figure it out. Then the stupid people who cannot let go of their belief in bugaboos burn the scientists as heretics. When enough poor bastards in lab coats die, society begrudgingly accepts truth. Then, something else comes along to get called the devil’s work and the whole fucking mess happens again.”
“For twenty-two, you are so cynical.” Dorian exhaled. “Look, what I mean is by definition, no mere mortal can quantify what a supreme being is, wants, or does. The energy opposite to the Abyss, whatever the silver light is, may very well be something akin to a god. It may just be positive energy in a cloud, who can say? I’m not going to put that stake in the ground, and I don’t think you should either.” Dorian looked at her for a long moment, and then put his hand on her shoulder. “Look, Kirsten. You are angry with your mother, you feel alienated by your peers, and you are lonely. Do not let it devour you. You are a wonderful person; you just have to admit it to yourself.”
She sniffled, trying to rein back the tide of emotion that threatened to consume her. “Thanks.” Quiet for a moment, she wiped her nose and spoke to the floor. “So uhm, what was it you wanted to show me?”
Dorian went into the back. “I went poking around in here while you were dealing with the patrol officers. Check out the wardrobe in the bedroom.”
At the back of the bedroom, a plain, black cabinet hid behind hovering dust particles in the wavering shadows of grey drapes. Kirsten brushed her hand over the small, silver square at the center and a pair of doors slid open to reveal view of a stunningly boring sense of fashion. The man wore shoes until they disintegrated and all of his suits looked identical. She got down on her knees and rooted through some other bland junk on the bottom.
“I’m not seeing anything.”
Dorian smiled, pointing at the bottom. She sent the occasional clueless glance back at him between moments of searching, watching as he grew more and more frustrated with his own game. Just as he neared the point of giving up, she spotted a tiny loop of nylon peeking up from the back of the cabinet.
Division Zero Page 19